Universities in the US of America used to be institutions for not just free speech, but revolutionary political speech. From the student movement that ended Vietnam War to the radical uprising (“Intifada” to use the translated term that is frightening militarist warmongers who are “grilling” university presidents today while their funded military is grilling children in Gaza) of civil rights movement across the country, to Black Panthers and freeing political prisoners movements to anti-nuclear war peacenik movements - American students have always been at the front of the struggle calling for end to militarist occupation and interventions into any and every country that the US imperialism has tried to harm. And the situation with Palestine will be no different.

Even while positing herself as a candidate beyond gender and race identifications, the way Shirley Chisholm managed to constantly draw national attention to problems of sexism and racism perplexed many.

Saswat Pattanayak's tribute to Amiri Baraka.

What is essential is to recognize what I.F. Stone used to say: that, all governments lie. All administrations resort to lies. That, international diplomacy is nothing but a systematization of lies. What is crucial is to acknowledge that individual freedom is always going to be limited so long as a state exists. That, it is not just the communist and overtly authoritarian regimes which manipulate individual rights to free speech and privacy, but the western liberal democracies have also always done so.

The biggest challenge for the OWS is to humbly acknowledge that it is a movement driven by a specific ideology which refuses the use of violence as a revolutionary tool, demands increased taxes for the rich, envisions student debt relief, opposes the Tea Party politicians, demands “direct democracy” as a political approach, and has raised over a half a million dollars within a couple of weeks to fund its campaign.

They killed the world leader who had relentlessly strived to unify Africa and to bring people of the colonized world together to raise their consciousness about the history of Eurocentrism and the living legacies of Colonialism.

As much as his poem reminding us that the revolution will not be televised is indeed truer than before, beloved late brother Gil Scott-Heron’s message that the revolution is going on at the same time is equally relevant a reminder. And the poet might have departed us, but the revolutionary is still alive in spirits…

Parsons’ commitment to the cause of international communism often embarrassed the United States administration. FBI confiscated her library comprising over 1,500 books and progressive works soon after her accidental death – thus preventing the country of having access to her radicalism.

The emotions of Frederick Douglass expressed well more than a century and half ago is still so relevant that it makes a mockery of the American capitalism which is being advanced by the likes of Barack Obama.