Good afternoon and power to the people!

Thank you all for joining us here at this United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) conference , Decolonization and the Fight Against Imperialism.

This is my fifth UNAC conference, the first was in 2012. Shortly afterward I joined the Administrative Committee of UNAC and have had the honor of working with comrades in this organization, and with people like yourselves.

What do we say at UNAC? We say, “Stop the wars at home and abroad.” We have spent this weekend talking about that war, a war waged by capitalists, racists, imperialists, usually all the same, against humanity.

These people are the modern day descendants from those who did the very same things on this continent. Here in Minnesota, in Mankato, Minnesota, the largest public execution in US history took place when 38 Lakota men were hanged on December 26, 1862. They were killed for resisting, resisting the genocide against their people in the so called Lakota War. We can look outside the window here and see the Mississippi River, which begins here and flows down to the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi River was one of the largest means of transit in the domestic, internal slave trade, as human beings were sold along this route in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana and sold in slavery markets along that route. Everything we talked about this weekend have their beginnings in these stories, stolen land, stolen human beings, wars against humanity.

More recently, it was here in Minnesota in 2020 that a man named George Floyd was murdered by police. His killing set off mobilizations across the country and around the world, but we all remember what we were taught in science class. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And lo and behold, suddenly there were what are euphemistically called public safety centers and police training centers which began to pop up across the country. But the right term is cop cities. And yes the word is plural and there was a great workshop on this topic yesterday.

I don’t want to preach to the choir but there are some things I want to remind you of. In looking at the program and talking with you all it is clear that we know that we are in a battle for survival. That’s not hyperbole. One down side of conferences is that it isn’t possible to see everything and I’m sorry I had a conflict with my own workshop and missed the panel on Climate Change, Climate Justice, and War. The capitalists,........

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