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“Genocide” is a word made up of the root word “geno,” meaning gene or genetic, and the suffix “cide,” meaning to kill, resulting in a word meaning to kill off the genes, genetic structure or substance, of a people, i.e., to remove from reproductive existence, to exterminate a people, to extirpate them, to kill them off forever. The indigenous people of Tasmania and Australia and the Arawaks are prime examples of genocide. In the same way, our genocide is an intricate part of the European’s vision, for genocide is simply the procedural framework through which they operate to win war. And war, for them, is to completely destroy another people. If this people cannot be immediately annihilated, then they must be made to internalize a subordinate status until they can be. To this definition we must add the fact that such mass destruction, by default, assures the obliteration of that group’s cultural base because to destroy a people’s sense of self through erasing or seriously distorting their story beyond their recognition (historicide) causes them to unwittingly and willingly allow their own genocide. With time and an ancestral disconnect, the fear that makes genocide possible ensures that people will actively assist in the implementation and perpetuation of their own destruction. Europeans are fully cognizant that their racial insecurities have firmly placed them on the global offensive. They have no hesitation in taking whatever steps are required to make them, in their bloodied minds and bloodless eyes, supreme gods in this reality. When all the above holds true, genocide must be defined in the context of war. War is inherent in any attempt to erase a people or race from historical memory. When you start to dabble in the real numbers of the Hellacaust, the Great Suffering, the Maafa, you are able to see that it is the systematic removal of people of color from the planet, not just an enslavement or conquering. When we realize that they are doing this to us, and not us to us (even though we may in some capacity unwittingly or knowingly assist), things will dramatically change. In order for us to correctly engage European culture, we must see our relationship with them in the context of war. As long as Afrikans in the heart of Babylon are portrayed and see themselves as a few individuals rightfully captured by foreign enlighteners and taken from a family that did not want them in the first place, there will be no cause for alarm. In our reconceptualization of genocide along Afrikan lines, we must also consider three other factors. First, their United Nations’ definition of genocide includes “forcibly transferring the children of [one] group to another.” Second is the exponential impact of historical and immediate genocide in the context of the ongoing genocidal war against Afrikan people. In other words, when a young Afrikan male or female who has not yet procreated is murdered, he or she is not the only one murdered. Every individual that person was ever to produce through the end of the line of his or her generations is murdered. In the long run this is a hidden genocidal accelerant because this intergenerational genocide does not show up in the immediate statistics. Here, genocide is not even detected or defined as genocide because those who are murdered are never born. Third, by definition, what happened to european Jews does not qualify as a holocaust because it was internal. It was an act among Europeans, not between Europeans and other people. It was not one people trying to kill off another people. Genocide and suicide are two different things. European Jews are Europeans. What happened between the Germans and european Jews during europe’s second major spike in its ongoing war against the world (otherwise known as World War II) was not one people trying to decimate another, except in the minds of misguided Europeans who want to claim that this european ethnic group somehow makes a distinct racial group within the european nation because of the religion they claim is theirs. The historicide parenthetically mentioned above is also an act of one or more people against another people. Historicide accompanies genocide and is the process of killing a people’s memory of self. And, to kill a people’s story is to obliterate their past, their origins, originality and worth, even their very existence (contributions) in meaningful terms. Or, equally destructive, historicide serves to reduce a people’s record to relative obscurity in comparison to other peoples’ social and cultural litany. Killing a people’s history involves removing or renaming/reoriginating (attributing them to an alternative or alien origin) virtually all material and intangible evidence of their existence as independently thinking, self-empowered, dutiful people who contributed to the development of the human potential. Their past is erased. Historicide is the successful (at least temporarily) negation of everything positive that a people accomplished to the point where all that they did is credited to others or deemed inferior mental, physical or spiritual efforts. This denial of a people’s value also involves degrading their uniquely functioning methods for living into acts of inferiority relative to others’ techniques/technology, even while both accomplished the same ends. For example, the Afrikan’s oral tradition has been ignominiously subordinated to the western and eastern’s written ones, even though Afrikans had numerous forms of literature and their oral tradition required a vastly more in-depth thinking ability and memory. Through historicide, a people become nameless. They are made to feel that they have made no meaningful contribution to human society and civilization, that they have no worth outside of grafting themselves onto others’ accomplishments and cultures. In the end, because they believe their people have never had worth, they do not, and do not want to, see themselves as a people. Achieving individual recognition and validation within a “superior” cultural construct, and being able to claim its history as their own, becomes their highest aspiration. Another concept mentioned above which bears explanation is Maafa. This Swahili term was presented to us by one of our most honored Afrikan centered warriors Marimba Ani. The Maafa refers to the entirety of the effort Europeans (and other aliens) have put into trying to destroy the Afrikan continent, Afrikan culture and Afrikan people. Even though its inception predates the systematic invasion of Afrika by Europeans by about 840 years when Arabs began their enslavement of Afrikans for themselves and exportation to China and other points in Asia, the european nation is our focus because they expended by far the greatest amount of energy aimed at bringing about our physical, mental and spiritual destruction. Ourstorically speaking, the Maafa is a massive, protracted “crime” against our humanity. In fact, to even use the word crime as descriptive of it is a gross understatement, severely minimizing the pain and devastation it has brought to Afrikan people. Holocaust is not even sufficient enough of a word. Be that as it may, the Maafa includes the unprovoked wars of invasion and clandestine instigations to capture and subdue the Afrikan continent, the violent dispersion of Afrikan peoples across all the other continents, except one, the missionary efforts to remove us from our spirit, the consciously arrogant undermining of Afrikan cultural activities and sensibilities, the colonization of Afrikan political systems, the balkanization of formerly peaceable ethnic groups and mass theft of Afrikan resources, the confiscation of Afrikan lands and relegation of Afrikans to infertile soil, the global dehumanization of Afrikans, and the brutalization, rape, torture and murder of hundreds of millions of Afrikans and all the ascendants those murdered individuals would have produced. It is important to note that most Afrikan centered warriors recognize that the Maafa is a genocide in progress. It did not stop with the official end of our enslavement in the western hemisphere (noting that the enslavement of Afrikans on the Continent by Arabs continues to date) or the termination of colonization on the Continent through revolutionary warfare (noting that an advanced state of neocolonization still plagues virtually every Afrikan state). The continued efforts of the european nation to terrorize Afrikans into nonexistence and the ongoing psychological effects of our past enslavement (referred to by various terms such as psychic trauma, post-traumatic slavery syndrome, cultural misorientation, mentacide, kwk.), as well as the ongoing ruination of the Motherland under a heartless alien and alienating, paternalistic, capitalistic imperialism, are clear indicators that this has been and continues to be one, indivisible “Great Destruction.” We must also emphatically note, however, that this definition is not to imply that this atrocity is near completion. On the contrary, it is to provide the broadest picture and give a clear understanding of what happened, and is happening, so that conscious Afrikan people will understand the magnitude of what we have committed ourselves to reverse and, in the process, the traditions and sanity to which we fully intend to return.”
Mwalimu K. Bomani Baruti
IWA: A Warriors Character
