Literally tens of Americans were shocked this week to discover that the United States military likes to kill people. Unsettling news, yes, particularly for those of us who had assumed in good faith that one million Iraqis had accidentally slipped on a banana peel one morning and fallen into a pile of mislaid cruise missiles, but before we leap to all sorts of unsightly conclusions, calling Our Boys "mass-murderers" just because they happen to enjoy the occasional mass-murder, let's remember that in the fog of war with the eggs and the omelettes and the War Is Hell, who can say what's right and wrong, what's good and evil, who's an unarmed pregnant woman and who's a ticking time bomb threatening to produce future foreigners? Our troops have a job to do, after all - defending our country from those countries who would defend their country from our country - and if we hounded and nit-picked them after every little massacre, gang rape or atrocity, they'd hardly get any killing done at all.

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Kazembe Balagun speaks on the debates over gender, race, and sexuality. By promoting an intertextual dialogue between Malcolm X and James Baldwin, Kazembe will foreground the queer influences in both men's analysis of racial oppression.

April 7th, 7:30PM @ the SHAPE community center (3903 Almeda, Houston, TX).

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Kazembe Balagun is a writer/cultural historian whose work has been featured in Left Turn, PopMatters, and Working USA. He writes for the NYC Indypendent, and is an instructor at the Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School. He is also a veteran of the Student Liberation Action Movement, a radical student movement that shook the entire CUNY system. He is working on "Queering the X" and a history of black communist organizer Bill Epton.

Hosted by Fight Imperialism, Rethink and Experiment (The FIRE Collective).

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We are posting the following because we believe it is deeply important to develop a summation of the Student Liberation Action Movement, an attempt to build a radical student movement in New York City. On April 8th, the Radical Study Group at the  University of Houston will be hosting two speakers from SLAM, Kazembe Balagun and Lenina Nadal, to present their summation of those experiences.

By SLAM Herstory Project
Interviews by Suzy Subways

In March 1995, 20,000 students from City University of New York (CUNY) were attacked by police after surrounding city hall to protest a draconian tuition increase. This protest, organized by the CUNY Coalition Against the Cuts, marked an upsurge in student movement activity that continued into 1996, when the group transformed into the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM), a multiracial radical organization. Before disbanding in 2004, SLAM established chapters at CUNY colleges in all five boroughs of the city. This roundtable focuses on the chapter at Hunter College in Manhattan and explores SLAM’s legacy of building a left culture in New York City and across the country.

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"When the music stops where are we gonna go? When the lights go on and we’re heading out the door? When the music stops what are we gonna say? The same old things that were said yesterday?"-The (International) Noise Conspiracy, The Cross of My Calling

by Eric Ribellarsi

                Very few albums have moved me as much as The (International) Noise Conspiracy's most recent album, "The Cross of My Calling." This is an album which is uncompromisingly revolutionary, while there is also an awareness of the political terrain  and an attempt to speak to the specific needs of our moment in this album that I find really stands out (which has been especially rare in the realm of punk which has at times had tendencies toward politics in a vacuum).

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This is nice. Andrew Sullivan has a suggestion to exempt those wanna-be terrorists, the Hutarees, from the fold of the faithful.

Surely we can all assent to the notion that a Christian militia of the type now accused of planning domestic terrorism is not Christian. This is why I call them Christianist. Anyone planning to murder innocents by way of IEDs cannot plausibly call himself or herself a follower of Jesus of Nazareth.

Good thing he threw in that specific bit about IEDs, or I'd have to mention all the innocents slaughtered in Christ's name since, oh, the Dark Ages. They are spared by a technological technicality!

But OK, if we're going to redefine Christians, let's go all the way.

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Special thanks to Ernesto Aguilar for developing these new fliers!

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