The revolution has failed. Fascism has temporarily succeeded under the guise of reform. The only way we can destroy it is to refuse to compromise with the enemy state and its ruling class.
George Jackson, born on this day in 1941, was the revolutionary author of "Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson" and co-founder of the Marxist-Leninist Black Guerilla Family.
In 1970, Jackson was charged, along with two other Soledad Brothers, with the murder of prison guard John Vincent Mills in the aftermath of a prison fight. The same year, he published "Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson", a combination of autobiography and manifesto addressed to a black American audience. The book became a bestseller and earned Jackson personal fame.
Jackson was killed during an attempted prison escape on August 21st, 1971. Quoting communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, Jackson freed twenty-six prisoners and took hostages at gunpoint. Jackson and five other men were killed.
Fay Stender, George Jackson's former lawyer, was shot and paralyzed for her alleged betrayal of Jackson by Black Guerilla Family member Edward Glenn Brooks. Brooks entered her home, tied up her family, and forced Stender to say "I, Fay Stender, admit I betrayed George Jackson and the prison movement when they needed me most" before shooting her several times. Left paralyzed and in chronic pain, Stender testified against Brooks and committed suicide a year later.
"Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution."
George Jackson
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Going to articulate something that bothers me about a fairly obscure topic:
The topic of Vinland and Markland and Viking colonization of North America is obviously interesting, and it's obviously fun to think about alternate history scenarios where these projects survived and the trade exchange between Eurasia and the Americas started centuries earlier. But I'm annoyed that seemingly everyone who tries to come up with an alternate history for Vinland has unthinkingly white supremacist assumptions about how that would logically go. You always see like a map of North America with Vinland dominating it as the major state, or like a scenario with the modern states of the US and Canada but with Vinland in Newfoundland and Maine or something. No one actually gets what would be the logical and more interesting outcome of a surviving Vinland colonization project- it would kill any larger European colonization of the Americas before it was even an idea. A surviving Vinland and Markland would be two small, culturally Nordic states in Newfoundland or Nova Scotia or wherever, probably with ethnically-mixed populations, while the Americas would be divided between large Native American states with no other substantial European presence. Starting the trade exchanges with the Americas hundreds of years earlier, before European states were developed enough to expand and colonize beyond Europe, would mean that the Native Americans get earlier exposure to Eurasian technology (most importantly metallurgy), diseases, and domesticated animals, with no threat of a large wave of colonizers to overtake them. No one seems to want to write that history, and they don't seem able to imagine it.
it's extremely difficult to imagine the format and priority that could allow such a thing to occur, so anyone with a more robust knowledge just rejects the plausibility, leaving only the racists transposing an ahistorical white supremacy centuries earlier.
The earlier introduction of diseases as you mentioned would have been a big deal too, as the First Nations could have bounced back a bit more with extra time.
I think it would be also interesting (not automatically good) as they've discussed on "We're Not So Different" if there had been a Chinese colonial project on the West Coast, because had they not stopped making their large ships and focused inwards, the Chinese could have certainly reached the West coast of North America and Central America.
So imagine you've got the unique Vinland up in the Northeast and Chinese settlements down as far as what we call California now, by the time Anglos try to colonise the Eastern side of North America, with the First Nations having access to all of those things mentioned like weapons, horses, disease etc. Plus various political alliances and treaties.
Chinese colonists in California initially harvest Redwoods and export finished wood products to the home country - but eventually they discover gold and there's a rush across the Pacific to get to the Rocky Mountains. On the way the ships need to be resupplied, so indigenous islanders across Oceania build up economies supplying and repairing the Chinese ships, driving their own development as well in what historians dub "The Silk Waterway." Hawaii is united by a single ruler hundreds of years early, generating wealth as it is the last stop for ships California-bound and the first stop for ships China-bound. Several of these island nations become Chinese tributaries, but due to distance total conquest is impractical for all but the closest.
Because of the preindustrial technology level and the greater distance, the Chinese-descended colonists diverge from mainland Chinese culture quickly and radically, their descendants forming a de facto and eventually de jure new state in modern-day California. They are also much less well-supplied from home, and so they can't exert the level of technological and military dominance that historical European colonial projects did, and are forced by their material conditions to take on a more diplomatic posture towards North American tribes. Trade carries with it ideas and perspectives, and soon Chinese ideas about how to organize a state spread southeast.
These ideas reach as far as the Mayans, but the group who is most influenced by them are the ascendant Aztecs, who conquer their empire and make most of the societies in Central and South America into tributaries. At around this time, the Spanish are turning their eye to South America, but the Aztecs - now manufacturing their own guns and cannons based on Chinese designs - put up a much more convincing fight against the Conquistadors.
It doesn't always break in favor of the indigenous people, but the massive conquests by the British and Spanish empires don't occur nearly to the extent that they did historically, in large part thanks to indigenous leaders on both continents being more well-armed, and soon enough modern states that are fully American-born emerge and challenge the colonial powers. By the twentieth century, the map of the Americas looks much different than it does now, with a lot of smaller countries of mixed ancestry all throughout.
Yeah that's the vibes I've got. The more players over time, the more tech and disease immunity they have. There's still probably various and new bad things at times but it's got to shake out better in a bunch of areas.
The vikings would absolutely intermarry with anyone who was interested and half of Europe would end up with some amount of indigenous ancestry by 1492.
The good timeline