Communism in America: Black Hammer City.

[Music]
trying to hang on to the land as an african-american land asset that is dedicated to preserving african-american owned land a people with no land is a people with no future no leverage point no equity this is an equity issue and we found that one of the most effective ways to address the trauma is to help our folks understand that our relationship to land goes back thousands of years before land-based oppression so there is certainly a returning generation of farmers who are excited to reclaim the proud legacy of our grandparents and great grandparents as stewards of the land the problem is that there isn't enough training there is not enough capital and there's not enough land there's not enough capital and there's not enough land the susu healing collective's mission is community reciprocity for the healing affirming and liberation of black indigenous people of color ultimately what we're talking about is land access ultimately what we're talking about is land access the way forward is this project with anti-colonial liberation but we know that deliveries from all colonized people so we need those funds to keep coming in we appreciate the love and support but keep it coming keep the donations coming and if you're a carmax christian join black panthers you can get in on all this head i'm just living in a river and on your own freaking this is something you should have access to we see food and housing as birth rights and not as commodities and so we believe that you shouldn't have to fight for access to things that you need to survive big part of our program is to create a space where people of color can have access to food that is free what's happening to me my heart is beating like a rabbits or a wolf [Music] everything is whirling everything seems strange distant confusing i hate you i hate this whole town and everybody in it i don't listen to my parents you get off my back i hate my dad i hate this whole lousy country no i don't i know who you are and i'm gonna tell the world you're a communist that's right eddie we are communists it's really beautiful to put a black lives matter sign on your lawn but it's even more powerful to let bypac lead to give us the space to have the sovereignty and the agency to make the decisions that we know are going to have a significant impact on our communities we're not really going to address the issues or or the topics of food access and racial justice without at least exploring rematriation efforts or being able to turn the land back over native people trusting in black people and native people to be able to make decisions to lead organizations hey white guy are you ready to do reparations specifically on me and my organization the only way you can wash the blood off your hands is through following the leadership of african indigenous and colonized people and paying reparations for all that's been stolen in your name it's me ghazi the commander in chief of the black camera organization land back i heard you had some not so nice things to say about me i heard you had so nice things to say about my hammers okay so apparently what is the black hammer i don't know what this is is this some like black israelite [ __ ] or what is this yes uh everyone's talking about black hammer we have got over 100 million impressions around the world even more than that it's it's crazy but that's what it means to be the vanguard ain't nobody talking about the rest of them i'm not even going to say their names it's talking about you you're the one the chosen the one at the top the one with the belt and the trophy you feel me he has no idea that we're using him yes it's only a matter of time before the youth call excuse me before the youth of america will be in our clutches this uh american imperialist economic system is crumbling by the day and y'all know to stock up now and stock up fast we are not american if you are a a person on this land that we call turtle island you are not american you are either a colonized person or a colonizer we are the masses colonized people are the true proletariat of the world and we must unite on their anti-colonial struggle and move on forward towards liberation and it will happen because the conditions of today the conditions of this colony are crumbling and they're crumbling quicker than anybody could have imagined we don't even have to do any heavy lifting anymore we just have to make sure we are organizing our people you should be building and maintaining those bug out bags we've talked about as well as ensuring that you're constantly in a state of preparedness as the world gets wilder and more uncertain we must grow more disciplined more principled and more prepared it's what we have to do to ensure victory and achieve our liberation that's right eddie we are communists but you'll never tell [Music] our political education is what we do at every black camera meeting because we continually fortify and steal ourselves to become better revolutionaries we don't not do this work and artistically we do it with science and study that's what makes us the vanguard that's what makes us the revolutionaries that are going to overturn this contradiction of colonialism we have a common goal and that is to defeat colonialism and to defeat the colonizer stop stop you don't understand you're communists it's all part of the cognitive plot chay level sign up for a single session of the boot camp and get a view of the experience and work it takes in order to disunite with your people's worldwide acts of genocide and terror mao level at 199 dollars minimum sign up for the entire eight week boot camp and get fully certified as someone who is united under colonized leadership bro is this literally a multi-level marketing scheme created off of uh white guilt they just think that like delusional liberals are just gonna be like yeah i think this is the only way this is the way that i can do it so let them chat chat chat but they the haters they've been chatting a lot about our land who is our greatest comrade mother earth they've been hating on her they've been saying that we can't live on her we can't build on her we can't thrive on her oh lord all the horrific lies they are saying to slander on our mother earth but why would we expect anything less from colonizers who have polluted mother earth fracked mother earth destroyed mother earth and killed so many of her favorite children us colonized people around the world have they gotten a single person i need i need to know they bought 200 acres with the donations shut the [ __ ] up build hammer city they have raised 64 000 so far dude they're calling us out they they saying we can't do this and we can't do that we can't farm we're not going to feed ourselves we're going to freeze to death how we're going to keep ourselves warm in the mountains don't you all already know it takes a good book to burn on some nice wood and best believe we have plenty of copies to keep us warm all season long this is scary dude at first i was gonna laugh and joke about this but like i'm kind of scared they said anne frank is a colonizer bro this is not gonna end well dude we gotta prove these colonizers wrong we gotta show them they don't know nothing about us and they don't know nothing about our mother earth we have to introduce the people to their state apparatus to their power and it is in black hammer that the masses of poor working-class colonized people will find their power and we're gonna do it we are building y'all a home dome it's a big structure that can house dozens of people that's going to have a library in it it's going to have dorms in it it's going to have kitchens in it it's going to have a dance flow i dare i'll be i'mma be doing that don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me and a homegrown [ __ ] yes yes that's where we gonna live and it's gonna be nice and heated through the winter and you know what else we're building since they say we can't build a farm since they say we can't make food from the land we about to build an underground food forest liberating land building power announcing a state they want to build hammer city like a commune thanks to all of you black hammer has successfully liberated 200 acres of land to build our city for colonized people only a good luck crowdfunding segregation dude as soon as an organization like this is just like we're building a [ __ ] commune you know hit the hit the [ __ ] parachute okay y'all know every everyone's talking about it we are building hammer city in the mountains of colorado we got 200 acres of land with beautiful soil beautiful rivers amazing weather amazing plants and animals and we are fundraising for this project we don't need to import we don't need to take the earth can provide everything that we need now and throughout the entire winter we will be warm we will be taken care of and we will be safe there will be a terrace planting area where comrades and children will learn how to be in harmony with the earth and take care of plant life something that we've been so far removed and disconnected from like i said this will be the center of our city where we get to communicate with each other and dream of the future the science and technology committee alongside the campaigns committee and the economic development committee is building working to build these wallopini structures for us in hammer city right now we're looking at things like solar angles the slope of the land the ventilation systems the water collection systems all of that we know we can do it and that's power we are dead serious about the liberation of our people and we take this project dead serious because we know it's the difference between our people starving on this land and living to fight for liberation and living to free our people and living to free the animals and living to free this earth so we're dead serious and i'm gonna tell you something else this earth loves black hammer because she knows that we are fighting for her i can't tell you how many times in my chapter we pulled up to outreach when it was pouring rain and it stops rain just long enough for us to pass out masks and food to the people and then as we're leaving it'll start raining again it's time to go to war hammers we gotta go to war we gotta go to war with doubt we gotta go to war with depression we gotta go to war with self-hate we gotta go to the war of ideas the greatest war once you win the war of ideas you've won our wars and the way we go to that war hammers is by building we've got to build this summer we're going to be building this summer and we're going to build fast we are going to have the home zone and the food forest done for our people by the end of this summer and we will show them videos and pictures and i'm gonna hold up the basket of produce and i'm gonna laugh in that camera and say how you like me now cracker how you laughing now cracker and i'm gonna say my people this bounty is for you of service to you our beautiful poor and working-class colonized people we are a service to you we love you you are great you are powerful watch us work for you and without further ado i would like to introduce to you something else we just built our choir [Applause] [Music] don't give me the colony with a shell of thrill but just give me a revolution my life it can hold i'd rather have freedom than silver and gold [Music] 2016 bernie sanders presidential campaign i had just graduated from college in 2014 and i was starting out my career i was wondering should i get more education should i go to grad school or should i just start my career not get more education i was paying for my own rent i was paying for my own car insurance paying for car repairs i was living in an area that was not very safe one morning i woke up drove my car to work and realized that something was seriously wrong when i took my car to get repaired turned out somebody had tried to steal my catalytic converter i started really caring about crime in my area i started thinking more in political terms i started watching more content on the internet about politics although they weren't the most refined sources i started watching shows like the jimmy dore show i started caring more about progressive ideas and politics i did not come from a progressive family i did not come from a left-wing family i remember during bernie sanders campaign i would hear from the right-wing side of my family but he's a socialist i would say yeah he's a democratic socialist so he cares about democracy this is a good thing i didn't have this negative connotation with socialism that they did i thought that socialism was good i heard about socialist programs around the world that were positive you know instead of paying a lot of money to go to graduate school in other countries some people didn't have to pay that much to go to graduate school this was something i could really get behind with bernie sanders campaign and i just graduated from university not too long ago and i knew that was really expensive you know and that was expensive for all the students that i graduated with there were many reasons for me to get behind bernie sanders campaign in his 2016 presidential run and again in 2020 i was in the detroit area i went to the detroit rally in october of 2019 saw jack white perform it was very moving speech from bernie sanders and i could feel this error in the room surrounded by people who cared about bernie sanders campaign who cared about progressive values progressive ideals it wasn't lost on me at that time that bernie sanders was calling for a revolution it's pretty obvious in all of his campaigns and all of his information on the internet a lot of it talks about revolution pretty openly when i was interested in bernie sanders going into his 2016 presidential campaign i wasn't fully understanding the implications of using that term revolution i thought of it more of a theatrical revolution something that wasn't going to result in the deaths of millions of people like the revolutions that have happened in the past i wasn't thinking of it of it in an historical framework and i wasn't thinking that this might be the price that we could pay if there actually were a revolution today now in the years between his 2016 run for president and his 2020 run for president i learned a lot about revolutions around the world i read a book called tombstone this is about the great chinese famine and this to me most of all taught me that ideology really matters ideology can kill millions of people politics really matters who is in power is of crucial importance to the life and death of the citizens of a country when bernie sanders decided that he would drop out of the race i was really heartbroken ideologically i felt a kinship toward bernie sanders i felt that of all the candidates he was going to be the one that would lead to the most change that socially politically economically there would be change in the country if he were elected after bernie sanders decided that he was going to drop out of the race i think supporters of bernie sanders have had to come to the realization that the next presidential election he probably will just be too old to run and that this is the start of the end of his political career however people still pay attention to what bernie sanders says i think he was the source of this momentum in younger people to care about politics to get involved before that i think when obama was in office people of my generation didn't really care about politics or didn't think that they could have any impact on politics that things would just continue as they've always been bernie sanders really did change the political arena in america before him nobody really talked about universal health care in the united states seriously nobody took free college for all seriously as something that could actually happen in the united states people still really respect bernie sanders people still look at his content online people look to him for opinions about current conflicts so he has a youtube channel and among many many topics that he uploads videos about i have seen him upload videos about this recent trend this fervor toward the african-american community wanting to get back to the land he's uploaded a few videos talking about this issue interviews of black farmers interviews from people who have decided that the way for black people to feel empowered in the united states of america is to get back to farming so if you watch these videos you'll see that bernie sanders is endorsing these groups which are very fundamentally pro-socialist they have an ideology that's based on ideas about collectivization ideas about land being a birthright that food is a birthright that we shouldn't have to work for food we shouldn't have to work for land that these things should come with being a human being additionally these organizations believe that the food grown on their land should be grown by black people and that it should only be given to black families they use this argument that because some communities are food insecure that they should be providing some food now a sad statistic from one of these videos was that they were only able to give vegetable baskets to 29 families this isn't the totality of their food it's just a small amount of vegetables that they're able to give to black families and most people are not vegan most people are not vegetarian so this is only supplementing what is probably also purchased at the grocery store and is still feeding into this same society this same marketplace that they are really against they believe that human beings shouldn't have to buy food that this is something that should just come from the land and that this is for black people this is for people of color this is for native people that native people don't have to buy food that food should just come from the land and they're entitled to it now these are the groups that bernie sanders endorses but there are some other groups that bernie sanders has yet to endorse a group like black hammer black hammer is more overtly communist they are pro maoist they don't have this soft image of socialism this friendly image that some of these other groups have where it's about growing land to bring people together that instead this is a more radical organization that they're going to take over the land that they deserve the land they're going to make this land only for colonized people for people of color and they're going to do it under the ideology of marxism of communism of maoist communism has anybody in black hammer read this book tombstone this is a lengthy condemnation of the ideology that led to the deaths of over 36 million people it may seem like the most simple thing in the world for human beings to live on the land to dig up some dirt plant seeds pour some water get sunlight and grow food to live off the land that this is what it really means to be a human being uh the other day the city that i live in we're handing out seedlings residents who live here could bring the seedlings back to their homes back to their apartment buildings and plant them i spent all day getting my hands dirty digging through dirt with my hands i didn't really have proper tools for this and i planted seedlings maybe i will get a pound of tomatoes from this really once you do the work of planting of growing some food you get to see how little you get from the plants that you grow how difficult it is to cultivate the land how difficult it is to really understand how to grow food you'll encounter some failures you'll find that there's some mildew on your plants that has ruined the crop have you heard of the jonestown massacre this is an example of a very socialist man jim jones who started a cult and they moved to south america and it ended in disaster in jonestown they farmed their own food they were living on a commune they lived under this ideology of communism that if we can all work together nobody has to live in a capitalist society that we can all live in harmony it didn't work because of the kind of authoritarian communist government all kinds of agricultural practices were put into place in china that left people starving to death people literally murdering their own children and eating their own children people were only allowed to grow food on communal farms people weren't allowed to grow plants in their own backyard and when the crops failed because of the terrible practices that were being used at the time because of close cropping because of digging meters into the ground and planting seeds there were all these ideas about farming that were implemented at this time the crops failed people didn't have any food people were resorting to eating bugs people were resorting to eating tree bark or even clay which literally had no nutritional value some of these groups discussed food scarcity in the united states but i really think nobody in the united states over the past 50 years has had to deal with the kind of food scarcity that was seen in communist china and in other communist regimes around the world now i actually am in favor of people having the experience of growing their own food because i think it gives you a kind of understanding of what it takes to grow food what it takes for the food that you are able to buy from the grocery store to get there you start to understand on a massive scale how it is that you can go to the grocery store and buy fruits and vegetables at all times the year whereas if you grow your own food you only get a harvest once a year there's a good reason why universities have departments for agricultural studies because even though it seems like the most natural thing for human beings to plant seeds and grow their own food it's actually not as simple as it seems many issues totally out of the control of the farmer can result in crop failure so in this way i think it's important to learn about how crops are grown but also it makes it even more of a tragedy that in these years in china the deaths of millions of people weren't caused by drought they were caused by these ideological problems the way communism works it's not just these figureheads in the government it's everybody in the country is a member of this communist party so therefore everybody was involved everybody was culpable everybody had to prove how communist they were to survive and even if they did prove that they were so communist they could still die as a result of either famine or a result of torture as a result of being struggled in front of everyone in their town part of what attracts young people to bernie sanders is that he seems radical he seems revolutionary compared to somebody like joe biden or somebody like hillary clinton who seemed to be more of the standard seem to be more of the same what we've gotten in the democratic party in the past 20 or 30 years but this same revolutionary current can be dangerous and it can lead young people and i think old people alike into a movement into a kind of revolution that they don't really understand where it comes from and the roots of this revolution the roots of this ideology i mean after reading this book it's unbelievable to me that mao zedong is coming back into fashion that people are saying they want to be a part of an organization that is maoist that is communist how can they ignore the failures of maoism this was the worst famine of all time in this book you'll read terrible terrible stories about how the famine affected a whole generation of people multiple generations of people and led to not only famine and starvation for millions of people but it led to a lowering in birth rate i've lived in china and i didn't even see this kind of fervor for mao zedong from any of the chinese people i think they are aware of this history and they don't want to repeat it even though they live in a communist country they still have all of the trappings of capitalism they have a market economy they have a stock market they're aware of this history of the failure of communes in the country and how it led to mass starvation how it didn't work how it was a complete disaster communism is not an answer to food insecurity in the united states if anything it will lead to more food insecurity and maybe outright starvation people might see this black hammer group as a joke but i'm going to take it seriously because i see a trend happening in the western world that people are embracing communism that they see it not as a joke but it's become a part of memes that people share online some people see it as a joke but others like this group black hammer they take it deathly seriously they take it as something that they're going to risk their lives for this ideology and if i learned anything from tombstone it's that you'll never be communist enough it doesn't matter how much you believe in the ideology they will still find ways to backstab you communists will still find ways to prove that you are not communist enough all the kind of corruption that we hear about in the american government was just as bad in the communist government in china so i think that's part of the attraction of bernie sanders that we think getting somebody who is revolutionary will change some of this terrible corruption in the government but in reality if you examine bernie sanders if you look at some of his past he actually was in favor of communist dictatorships he was at least sympathetic to russian communism he was at least sympathetic to communism in cuba he was also sympathetic to communism in venezuela given the option of donald trump or bernie sanders i still think i would vote for bernie sanders however i do think that bernie sanders has ignited this spark in the united states that although maybe you could find it in some academic circles of people who were so left-wing that they were pro-communists before i think this has taken it onto the public sphere i think that more more and more people are becoming sympathetic to communism let me ask you if you were bernie sanders what do you have to gain we've both seen the videos on bernie sanders channel that's promoting this cause and there's so much that's just kind of weird and disturbing about them but like what does he have to gain you know i really think it's part of this you can never be left-wing enough even if you have the support of the black community it needs to be the more radical side of the black community it needs to be the people who want to start farms who want to farm food that's planted by black people to give to other black people and this is seen as heroism this is seen as a positive thing it's not really about equality it's about rematriation that's one of the terms that they use repatriation it's about being the most woke candidate possible bernie sanders campaign was exciting because it seemed like this was the future that this was what was going to motivate the next generation to care about politics but i ask you is this where we're headed imitating communist china in the 1950s and 60s is this the future of the united states of america are black communists going to take over all the farmland is this where we're headed this is just the beginning 200 acres of land and how much of the world that we need to liberate exactly we definitely are working hard hard hard to make sure all our projects are coming into fruition but we know that the liberation of all colonoscopies will come easy and then they go come cheap the land appears on industry and let's get to it