Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Corporate Media Obscures Muhammad Ali's Anti-Imperialism

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Corporate Media Obscures Muhammad Ali's Anti-Imperialism

Click here to access the 11:10m interview conducted by Paul Jay with the noted African-American intellectual Gerald Horne.

I have been sickened by the plethora of disinformation spread over corporate media for the past several days about the history and significance of the life of Muhammad Ali. In contrast to their fables he was a strong vocal opponent of US aggression in Vietnam to the point where he refused to be drafted. Because the boxer was so popular, our masters in the capitalist ruling class had considerable difficulty in punishing him. What they finally did was to denounce him as a traitor, shut down his boxing career for three and half years, when he was in his prime, and took away his passport so he couldn't box abroad.

Horne explains that this is an illustration of how our masters construct our memory and history for us.

This is part of the crafting of a "cuddly" Mohammad Ali that can be fed as pablum to the US populace, and reducing and shrinking of the militance of Mohammad Ali from an opponent of US imperialism and US interventionism worldwide.

See also this excellent resurrection of the true history of this remarkable boxer entitled "The Greatest - RIP" by Bernhard from Moon of Alabama.

Although many people who lived through this period know that this media coverage is a gross falsification of his life, most of these people fail to understand that all history published by mainstream sources is falsified this way to serve the interests of our masters.

Any revolutionary movement worth supporting is one that has as one of its top priorities a mission to present the truth about contemporary events and our history.