A Soldier’s Story The Making of a Revolutionary New Afrikan Freedom Fighter- Kuwasi Balagoon

TRIBUTE TO KUWASI BALAGOON
Welcome and Freedom Fighter Libation
New Afrikan Youth: Sing “Righteous Soldiers”
Video— October 20, 1986 Interview of Kuwasi
Comments
Chokwe Lumumba, Chairman, New Afrikan People’s Organization
Judy Holmes, Resistance Law Office
Julio Rosado, Movement for National Liberation, Puerto Rico
Poetry
of the BLA
—
Readings from Soul of the BLA rj
Nkechi Taifa, Provisional Government, Republic of New Afrika
Prison. Notes £
DgvJd Gilbert, Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner £
Mutulu Shakur, New Afrikan Prisoner of War r
.,.–•'” Cultural Presentation C
“Love In Need of Love,” by Marc Carrie and Kokayi Patterson ”
Eulogy g
“The Making of a Revolutionary New Afrikan Soldier: r~
The Man, The Soldier, The Humanist” *—.
Ahmed Obafemi, New Afrikan People’s Organization I
* L
Commemoration from Auburn Prisoners
Remarks from Diane Weems Ligon, Kuwasi’s Sister \n of the New Afrikan Flag to Family
New Afrikan People’s Organization Anthem
“Come Together Black People”
Honor Guards in Absentia
Sekou Odinga Assata Shakur Mutulu Shakur
Nehanda Abiodun David Gilbert Judy Clark
Abdul Majid Bashir Hameed Silvia Baraldini
Marilyn Buck Chui Ferguson
[>.;« rrihnr/> wac nrpaniy^d hv the New Afrikan People’s Organization with the help of many comrades and friend.

Statement to New Afrikan Freedom Fighters Day, 1983
Revolutionary Greetings Brothers and Sisters:
On the 3rd Anniversary of New Afrikan Freedom Fighters Day i’d like to extend my feelings of
comradeship and optimism.
That the Government of the United States or any government has the right to control the lives of
New\ Afrikan People is absurd and has no basis in principled reason or justice or common decency.
Only New Afrikan people should govern New Afrikan people, in the manner that we collectively as a
people deem correct.
This being so and that on top of forcing us to live as a colonialized people, the government of the
United States has been and is practicing genocide against us, it is our right, duty and natural inclination
to defend ourselves and provide for the safety and well being of our people. As Marcus Garvev stated,
We cannot leave the fate of our people to chance.
The necessity of building a peoples army to carry out armed struggle and a mass movement to build
the infrastructure for the superceding society must be explained to the masses of our people. We must
organize this, our army and our total revolution along principled lines that will deliver us as a people to
land ample enough to support our population in order to obtain our self-determination. It is either
liberation and self-determination for us as a people or more colonial degradation and genocide. These
are the choices.
If we choose to live, we must carry on a revolutionary struggle to completion, guard against
corruption and liberalism in our ranks and be consistent in building not only the means of cutting
ourselves free of America but of securing our survival and self-determination by building the
superceding society to provide for the needs of our people. As a better organized, more politicized and
security conscious approach must be developed in building our army, a more grassroots basic approach
must be developed to deal not only with the political mobilization of the masses but the needs
surrounding our day to day survival. We must build a revolutionary political platform and a universal
network of survival programs, along with the army.
Imperialism must expand or die and even as the pigs escalate their military and political offensive,
they have lost their grip increasingly throughout this world, despite their wolf tickets because the
peoples of Cuba, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Libya, Angola, Tanzania, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua,
Grenada and other lands have put their heads and hearts together, to devise no nonsense methods to
drive the Americans out.
If we do the same, we will obtain the same results. In fact we will obtain greater results because our
liberation would mean a greater decline to imperialism than any of the previous people’s victors; and
reaction would be weakened to a corresponding extent.
There is no way for us as a people or any of us individually to correspond our conditions to those we
desire, we have NEVER known freedom—however we will know freedom. We will win.
Love, Power & Peace by Piece
Kuwasi Balagoo

Your honor poem :

your honor
since i’ve been convicted of murder
and have taken the time to digest
just what that means
after noting what it means to my family
and how it affects people who read the newspapers
and all
i see now, that i’ve made an awful mistake!
and didn’t approach this matter of a trial
in a respectful, deliberate or thoughtful manner
didn’t take advantage of the best legal advice
and based my actions on irrelevant matters
which i can see now in a much more sober mind
had nothing to do with this case
i must have been legally insane thinking about:
the twenty five murders of children in Atlanta since Wayne Williams capture
the recent murder of a man in boston by police
the two recent murders of two in Chicago by police
the shooting of the five year old little boy in suburban fialif
the lynchings in Alabama
the mob murder of a transit worker in Brooklyn
the murders of fourteen women in Boston
feeling that this is evidence of something
and that there must be a lesson in all this—i though murder was legal.
Kuwasi Balagoon
— Kuwasi Balagoon

“Anarchy Can’t Fight Alone”

By Kuwasi Balagoon

Of all ideologies, anarchy is the one that addresses liberty and equalitarian relations in a realistic and ultimate fashion. It is consistent with each individual having an opportunity to live a complete and total 1ife, With anarchy, the society as a whole not only maintains itself at an equal expense to all, but progresses in a creative process unhindered by any class, caste or party. This is because the goals of anarchy don’t include replacing one ruling class with another, neither in the guise of a fairer boss or as a party. This is key because this is what separates anarchist revolutionaries from Maoist, socialist and nationalist revolutionaries who from the onset do not embrace complete revolution. They cannot envision a truly free and equalitarian society and must to some extent embrace the socialization process that makes exploitation and oppression possible and prevalent in the first place.

When I first became a revolutionary and accepted the doctrine of nationalism as a response to genocide practiced by the United States government, I knew as I do now that the only way to end the evil practices of the US was to crush the government and the ruling class that shielded itself through that government was through protracted guerrilla warfare.

Armed with that knowledge, I set out the initial organizing of the Black Panther Party until the state’s escalation of the war against the Black people that was begun with the invasion of Africa to capture slaves made it clear to me that to survive and contribute I would have to go underground and literally fight.

Once captured for armed robbery, I had the opportunity to see the weakness of the movement and put the state’s offensive in perspective. First, the state rounded up all the organizers pointed out to it by agents who had infiltrated the party as soon as it had begun organizing in N.Y. It charged these people with conspiracy and demanded bails so high that the party turned away from its purposes of liberation of the black colony to fund raising. At that point, leadership was imported rather than developed locally and the situation deteriorated quickly and sharply. Those who were bailed out were those chosen by the leadership, regardless of the wishes of the rank and file or fellow prisoners of war, or regardless of the relatively low bail of at least one proven comrade.

Under their leadership, “political consequences” (attacks) against occupation forces ceased altogether. Only a Fraction of the money collected for the Purpose of bail went towards bail. The leaders began to live high off the hog while the rank and file sold papers, were filtered out leaving behind so many robots who wouldn’t challenge policy until those in jail publicly denounced the leadership.

How could a few jerks divert so much purpose and energy for so long? How could they neutralize the courage and intellect of the cadre? The answers to these questions are that the cadre accepted their leadership and accepted their command regardless of what their intellect had or had not made clear to them. The true democratic process which they were willing to die for, for the sake of their children, they would not claim for themselves.

These are the same reasons that the people’s Republic of China supported UNITA and the reactionary South African government in Angola; that the war continued in Southeast Asia after the Americans had done the bird; why the Soviet Union, the product of the first Socialist revolution is not providing the argument that it should and could through being a model

This is not to say that the people of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Zimbabwe or Cuba aren’t better off Because of the struggles they endured. It is to say that the only way to make a dictatorship of the proletariat Is to elevate everyone to being proletariat and deflate all the advantages of power that translate into the wills of a few dictating to the majority the possibility must be prevented of any individual or group of individuals being able to enforce their wills over any other individual’s private life Or to extract social consequences for behavior preferences or ideas.

Only an anarchist revolution has on its agenda to deal with these goals. This Would seem to galvanize the working class, déclassé intellectuals, colonized third world nations and some members of the petty bourgeois and alright bourgeoise. But this is not the case.

That China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Mozambique would build round a Marxist ideology to drive out invaders and rebuild feudal economies in the midst of western imperialisms designs and efforts to reinvade and recolonize is a point that can be argued in the light of the international situation it is one thing that they don’t back the will of the people as much as they chose allies in the East- West wars fought on the ground of the non-white  colonies. It is another thing that Anarchy ceases to inflame or take the lead in combating fascism and imperialism here in North America with the history of the Wobblies, the western federation of minors and other groups who have made their mark on history. It is a denial of our historic task, the betrayal of Anarchists who died resisting tyranny in the past, malingering in the face of horrible conditions. It is the theft of an option to the next generation and forfeiture of our own lives through faint hearts.

We permit people of other ideologies to define Anarchy rather than bring our views to the masses and provide models to show the contrary. We permit corporations to not only lay off workers and to threaten the balance of workers while cutting their salaries, but to poison the air and water to boot. We permit the police, Klan and Nazis to terrorize whatever sector of the population they wish without repaying them back in any kind. In short, by not engaging in mass organizing and delivering war to the oppressors we become Anarchists in name only.

Because Marxists and nationalists ain’t doing this to a large extent doesn’t make it any less a shame. Our inactivity creates a void that this police state with its reactionary press and definite goals are filling. The parts of people’s lives supposedly touched by mass organizing and revolutionary inspiration that sheds a light that encourages them to unveil a new day, instead are being manipulated by conditions of which apathy is no less a part than poisonous uncontested reactionary propaganda. To those who believe in a centralized party with a program for the masses this might mean whatever their subjective analysis permits. But to us who truly believe in the masses and believe that they should have their lives in their hands and know that freedom is a habit, this can only mean that we have far to go.

In the aftermath of the Overtown rebellion, the Cubam community conceded as lost souls by Castro came out clearly in support of the Black colony. And predictably the Ku Klux Klan, through an Honorary FBI agent Bill Wilkenson, made no bones about supporting the rights of businesses and the business of imperialism. Third World colonies throughout the United States face genocide and it is time for anarchists to join the oppressed combat against the oppressors. We must support in words and actions, self-determination, and self-defense for third world peoples.

It is beside the point whether Black, Puerto Rican, Native American and Chicano- Mexicano people endorse nationalism as a vehicle for self-determination or agree with anarchism as being the only road to self-determination. As revolutionaries we must support the will of the masses. It is not only racism but compliance with the enemy to stand outside of the social arena and permit America to continue to practice genocide against the third world captive colonies because although they resist, they don’t agree with us. If we truly know that Anarchy is the best way of life for all people, we must promote it, defend it and know that the people who are as smart as we are will accept it. To expect people-to accept this, while they are being wiped out as a nation without allies ready to put out on the line what they already have on the line is crazy.

Where we live and work, we must Not only escalate discussion and study Groups, we must also organize on the ground level. The landlords must be contested through rent strikes and rather than develop strategies to pay the rent, we should develop strategies to take the buildings. We must not only recognize the squatters movement for what it is, but support and embrace it. Set up communes in abandoned buildings, sell scrap cars and aluminum cans. Turn vacant lots into gardens. When our children grow out of clothes, we should have places where we can take them, clearly marked anarchist clothing exchanges and have no bones about looking for clothing there first. And of course we should relearn how to preserve food; we must learn construction and ways to take back our lives, help each other move and stay in shape.

Let’s keep the American and Canadian flags flying at half mast… I refuse to believe that Direct Action has been captured.