In addition to all the encomiums, praises, tributes paid to Muhammad Ali during and following the Muslim hour of prayer on Friday in Louisville, Kentucky, I add the following.
I grew up in the Caribbean, T&T, in the 1970's and early 1980's. This was a nightmare time for me. We did not have wars and massive social upheaval where I lived, but it did exist close by–in Latin America, and further afield, in Africa, South East Asia, the Middle East. It was the Nixon to Reagan era. Large genocidal wars were happening in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador. The forests, entire villages, were being bombed, machine-gunned to bits. Millions were slaughtered.
I knew what was causing it. Urban paramilitary groups, peasant armies, guerrillas, freedom fighters were going at each other with Soviet and US/NATO weapons of mass destruction. Two huge imperialist blocs were fighting each other, not in the Russia or Washington, but right here in our back yard. Armed to the hilt with nuclear weapons, they dared not confront each other frontally: the "black' and "yellow" and "brown" peoples of the world were pawns, sacrificial lambs in their giant game of death.
These wars were gospelled, smoothened over, excused by those hot gospellers of power in the Soviet Union and the NATO block countries: Pravda and BBC, the Voice of America; ABC, NBC, and later CNN which arose in the 1980's. Even in the Caribbean, as is the case currently, it seemed that the CIA, war instigator, assassinator, arms trader, the trainer of death squads, had its offices in the back rooms of the mainstream media. The truth of this genocide was sealed tight: conglomerate media co-operated tacitly with CIA intrigues and the general genocide, by touting the slogans and rationalisations of the imperialist media. It refused, refuses, to print letters exposing these imperialist Hot Wars. It went along with the tyranny that these were Cold Wars; forsoever as the victims of genocide were just natives, it was Cold War!
Then came Muhammad Ali. He refused to go to Vietnam, kill. He refused to kill "yellow" people. Yellow people had done him nothing. Surely he had seen the scenes of napalm, white phosphorous, B2 bombing, bouncing over forests, exterminating everything, forest, padi field, mud, buffalo, village, yellow man, woman and child in its path. No one around me knew about Ho Chi Minh; they knew about the aggressors, the terminators, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon. Even today, after the aggressors got, as Ali would say, 'whupped', their names are inscribed on the minds of Caribbean peoples. The corporate media has a lot to answer for. Ho Chi who?
Ali said: "My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud, for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger. They never lynched me. They never put no dogs on me. They didn't rob me of my nice knowledge, raped and killed my mother and father. What am I going to do? Shoot them for what? How am I going to shoot them? Them little poor little black people, babies and children, women? How am I going to shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail."
"Poor hungry people in the mud." This encapsulates the image of those who suffered the genocidal impact of global imperialism in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Vietnam. For whom no redress, reparation has been paid. Not a single Soviet or US/NATO leader taken before any criminal court for war crimes. In fact, after the 1980's, this genocidal imperialist impact has enlarged: in the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa. Right before our very eyes; and we accept it, because the conglomerate media paints the devil as a saint.
Except that Ali felt for these victims, identified with them. He was to America what Ho Chi Minh was to the Vietnamese people. He was Ho Chi Minh. Ali won the heavyweight title thrice, three heavyweight titles. So did Ho Chi Minh: from 1930-1970, he beat the French colonialists, then the American imperialists, then the French re-colonisers, victory after victory after victory, punching them out of his country.
Ali claimed that he was the greatest. He never finished the sentence. The greatest what? Boxer, activist, poet? Sports Illustrated called him the greatest sportsman of the 20th Century. Not so fast. More than that. He was the great American of the 20th Century. He stood up and showed that ordinary Americans, the file and fold of everyday working peoples of the USA, are not just replicas of their genocidal leaders, senates, congresses, politburos, KGB and CIA prototypes. He humanised his fellow citizens. Showed that they were, and would continue to be, victims of global imperialism. They are, and would not cease to be, in the same bag, basket, box. In the same boat as the people of the mud, padi fields, mud huts, villages, flourbag pants and sapat, slippers warriors.
Wayne Kublalsingh
Via email