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Last Updated: 01/21/2005
The Rockbridge Report is produced
under the supervision of the Dept. of Journalism and Mass Communications
at Washington and Lee University. |
Guest speaker blasts Bush, accuses U.S. of terrorism By Jeremiah McWilliams If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, he would be a bitter foe of the Bush administration and its policies in the campaign against terrorism. So says Angela Davis, who drew more than 300 people to Lee Chapel on Sunday night for her speech in honor of Dr. King. But it was clear from the beginning that George W. Bush would be the main subject of her remarks – to the delight of the crowd. “The Bush government is more reactionary than any I have seen in my life,” she said. “It never ceases to surprise me that the man who claims to be our president has utter contempt for the democratic process.” “Precisely those forces that presume to make the world safe for freedom and democracy are spreading war and torture and racism and capitalist exploitation around the globe,” she said. Bush’s “project to bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East is a thinly-veiled plan to make the region safe for transnational corporations – oil politics are involved,” she said. “But even now, there is resistance.” The language of resistance comes easily to Davis. She first hit the national spotlight in 1969, when she was fired from a teaching position in UCLA’s philosophy department after admitting to being a member of the Communist Party. “I didn’t think it was such a big deal [when authorities asked whether she was a communist], so I said yes,” Davis recalled Sunday. But the exposure was nothing compared to what would come next. On Aug. 7, 1970, a shootout at a California courthouse left four people dead. The suspect, Jonathan Jackson, had used guns registered in Davis’ name in an attempt to free his older brother, George Jackson. The elder Jackson was serving the ninth year of a burglary sentence and had also been charged with the murder of a prison guard. Davis had previously protested on behalf of George Jackson and had worked to overturn his sentence, and the shooting immediately made her a suspect. She went underground for two months to evade a national manhunt, eventually reemerging to stand trial on murder charges. She spent 16 months in prison but was acquitted in 1972. While in prison, she told writers from The Guardian that, “the only true path to liberation for black people is the one that leads toward a complete and total overthrow of the capitalist class” in the United States. Davis has come a long way – from helping to lead the Black Panthers and holding a spot on the FBI’s most-wanted list to reaching academic bestseller lists for her books on race and gender. She now is a tenured professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz and can command $15,000 speaking fees, as she did from Washington and Lee on Sunday night. (The event was sponsored by 13 organizations and University departments, including the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the campus chapter of Onyx.) Three decades after her incarceration, Davis admits that times have changed somewhat, but she says she hasn’t changed her mind about the necessity of scrapping capitalism. “The vocabulary has changed,” she said, “but I’d like to think that I’m no less revolutionary today than I was back then.” The vocabulary of her Sunday speech was strident. Davis accused the Bush administration of perpetrating torture and attacked Bush for attempting to elevate Alberto Gonzales to Attorney General. “Who other than Bush would have dared to nominate for Attorney General…the man whose duties [as White House council] consisted, among other things, of developing justifications for the torture of detainees at Guantanamo,” Davis asked. The United States government is guilty of “global war and torture abroad, and increasing repression of immigrants and political activists within U.S. borders,” she said. “But how much more death and destruction and pain will be generated by the project of supposedly safeguarding the United States?” “The Bush government represents its global project as an offensive against terrorism, but…this offensive has generated practices of state terrorism in comparison to which its targets pale,” she said. When later asked about her views on oppression under the communist governments of China and North Korea, Davis said, “there are problems there – there are atrocities. But I think right now the role of the U.S. in perpetrating war against people’s human rights is so much more central.” So on Sunday night, Davis was focused on what seems for her to be the key problem – the political ascendancy of George W. Bush. Davis told the crowd that she had seen a “rising tide of opposition” in Europe against the president. There is a “unanimous condemnation of the conservatism represented by Bush,” she said. “The anti-war sentiment is complimented by the almost-unanimous opposition to the death penalty. The dismantling of the welfare state is what people are witnessing and struggling against.” Davis’ critique on Sunday went well beyond the White House. She also lamented what she views as the short attention spans of the news media and average Americans. “Why does the recent news about the conviction of [Army Spc.] Charles Graner, the first Abu Ghraib defendant, feel like old news?” she continued. “Where is the outrage? We have been encouraged to forget about these gross violations of human rights, but that doesn’t mean the world has forgotten.” Davis urged the audience to consider what she called “post-9/11 xenophobia and jingoism” – words she says she deliberately uses instead of “patriotism” – and said, “our collective grief was taken from us, and exploited and used against us.” George W. Bush’s strategies “are precisely designed to persuade us that we are powerless…and we have to persuade ourselves that we’re not powerless,” she said. Doug Allen, a junior at Washington and Lee, said after the speech that it delivered what the campus needed. “You have a lot of tough Republican talk here, so it’s refreshing to hear tough liberal talk,” he said. “I kind of hope it offends someone [or makes] someone want to write an article and maybe generate some discussion.” “Going through our experiences at W & L, it’s good to hear from someone who’s been through the struggle…and paved the way.”
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AUDIO FROM THE DAVIS SPEECH: |