Walter Rodney, born in Guyana on 22nd of march in 1942, Pan-African, Marxist intellectual who was assassinated by the Guyanese government in 1980 at 38 years old.
Rodney attended the University College of the West Indies in 1960 and was awarded a first class honors degree in History in 1963. He later earned a PhD in African History in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England, at the age of 24.
Rodney traveled extensively and became well-known as an activist, scholar, and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1966-67 and 1969-1974, and in 1968 at his alma mater University of the West Indies.
On October 15th, 1968, the government of Jamaica declared Rodney a "persona non grata" and banned him from the country. Following his dismissal by the University of the West Indies, students and poor people in West Kingston protested, leading to the "Rodney Riots", which caused six deaths and millions of dollars in damages.
In 1972, Rodney published "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa". Historian Melissa Turner describes the work this way: "A brutal critique of long-standing and persistent exploitation of Africa by Western powers, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a powerful, popular, and controversial work in which Rodney argued that the early period of African contact with Europe, including the slave trade, sowed the seeds for continued African economic underdevelopment and had dramatically negative social and political consequences as well. He argued that, while the roots of Africa’s ailments rested with intentional underdevelopment and exploitation under European capitalist and colonial systems, the only way for true liberation to take place was for Africans to become cognizant of their own complicity in this exploitation and to take back the power they gave up to the exploiters."
On June 13th, 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, Guyana via a bomb given to him by Gregory Smith, a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force, one month after returning Zimbabwe. In 2015, a "Commission of Inquiry" in Guyana that the country's then president, Linden Forbes Burnham, was complicit in his murder.
"If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be through revolutionary means."
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Walter Rodney
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Zionism is antimesitism and I have a just now concrete example. Some dude in a Calvin and Hobbes group on Facebook posted a cute picture of him in tiger suit and his kid dressed as Calvin with a 'happy Purim' and immediately lurked his profile for zionism and he had bad security and is openly anti zionist and its not great to lurk Jewish profiles when they post on Facebook to see if they support a genocide or not. Needing to lurk a profile cause Judaism post is not a thing I wanna do, now I kinda have to.
You absolutely do not have to do this. Like i get the itch, but that itch is racism. If someone's just casually talking about being Jewish digging in to them to find their opinions on Zionism is anti-Semitic and not okay. Jewish people don't need to tell you what their views are on Israeli politics. Judiasm is not Zionism, Judiasm is not Israeli identity, and when you're conflating them in a context that has nothing to do with the genocide in Palestine or with Zionism you're doing an antisemitism.
Shit's fucked right now, but we do not want to go the direction of assuming random people are fascists and genocidaires just because they happen to be Jewish.