by Chris Hedges
“Human beings can be redeemed. Empires cannot.”
Malcolm X, unlike Martin Luther King Jr., did not believe America had a conscience. For him there
was no great tension between the lofty ideals of the nation—which he said were a sham—and the
failure to deliver justice to blacks. He, perhaps better than King, understood the inner workings of
empire. He had no hope that those who managed empire would ever get in touch with their better
selves to build a country free of exploitation and injustice. He argued that from the arrival of the first
slave ship to the appearance of our vast archipelago of prisons and our squalid, urban internal
colonies where the poor are trapped and abused, the American empire was unrelentingly hostile to
those
Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” This, Malcolm knew, would not change until
the empire was destroyed.
“It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some
blood to suck,” Malcolm said. “Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It
used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it
has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the
nations of the world free themselves, then capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes
weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.”
King was able to achieve a legal victory through the civil rights movement, portrayed in the new film
Selma. But he failed to bring about economic justice and thwart the rapacious appetite of the war
machine that he was acutely aware was responsible for empire’s abuse of the oppressed at home and
abroad. And 50 years after Malcolm X was
assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem by hit
men from the Nation of Islam, it is clear that he, not King, was right. We are the nation
Malcolm knew us to be.
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