To End Crucifixion

Posted on January 28, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

The first time I heard of crucifixion outside of a biblical context I was watching the film Spartacus, released in 1960 that starred Kirk Douglas. I was in high school in the 1970s when I first saw the film on television.

Crucifixion was one of the most excruciating and barbaric of all forms of execution. The person on the cross, slowly and agonizingly, died from suffocation as their rib cage was forced upwards. They could not fully breathe and eventually they died.

No moment in the film Spartacus brought me more tears than the fight scene when the slaves “Spartacus” (Douglas) and “Antoninus” (played by Tony Curtis) were forced by Roman authorities to fight each other to the death.

Spartacus and Antoninus, who loved each other like brothers, were determined to kill one another in order to spare the other the agony of crucifixion. Spartacus eventually kills Antoninus. In grief, Spartacus yells at his tormentors, “He’ll come back. He’ll come back; and he’ll be millions.”

That scene gave me the sense that when the best people die, they will somehow be reincarnated and other people of goodwill will join them. That belief, however, has never brought me much comfort.

MAGA supporters are not likely to understand my interpretation of the themes in the film Spartacus. They follow orders, not facts. They don’t think of people on the Left, or people of peace as anything other than unrealistic and subhuman. They don’t think compromise with people with whom they disagree is anything other than a show of weakness.

MAGA adherents of all races and ethnicities believe in White male supremacy in a world that gets browner by the day. While U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers round up every undocumented brown worker they can find, Felon 47 wants to annex countries inhabited primarily by people classifiable as white.

White male supremacy only functions when people believe in the stereotype of the “Great White Father” who is considered the only one fit to lead and to appoint others to important positions. This is part of the reason why a lot of voters voted against their own interests and against their own people.

Felon 47 supporters always claim to be Christians. I do not entirely trust the Christianity formulated in the Western World because the people who formulated it cannot even so much as admit that there is virtually no such thing as a person classifiable as “white” that was/is native to any location in the Middle East or North and Eastern Africa.

A sandy blond-haired, white-complexioned, blue-eyed Yeshu’a has always been a lie. So, when you engage with MAGA supporters (and many anti-MAGA folks) you are engaging with people where generations of their families have prescribed to the lie for centuries. Felon 47 stepped into a centuries old illusion, proclaimed himself to be sent by God, then went around autographing Bibles.

I can count on one hand the Christian ministers I respect; most of them are women. They inspire. They pray. They analyze. They talk about justice. They talk to you like you have a brain; and they do so without the big egos and the expectance of deference I have encountered from a few too many clergymen.

At the end of all discussions and analyses, Yeshu’a’s life still ends the same way. No matter how good he was, he was still executed by crucifixion which was the Roman Empire’s method of execution for paupers and other petty criminals.

No matter how popular an itinerant preacher Yeshu’a was, church fathers and the Roman government considered him a threat to their power; and they used every lie, every smear campaign against him until many of his own followers turned against him and called for him to be put to death.

I do wonder when we, particularly those of us in the Western World, will get sick of that perpetual narrative where someone has to die in order to free us?

Must the good man or the good woman always be the sacrifice? Or, have we absorbed a skewed Western Christian Worldview for so long that we cannot even imagine any form of salvation, deliverance or peace without someone being killed?

Is some form of crucifixion inevitable or merely a twisted human habit where we refuse to think our way out and fight our way out of problems we cannot completely face so that we require a martyr to prove we were, at least, thinking in the right manner? That kind of thinking should not ease our consciences.

Maybe I’m a fool, but I still think that if we learned anything—even from an edited and modified form of Christianity—it ought to be that goodness and mercy and fair play may get someone jailed or killed, but it should not have to be that way.

Church services are often filled with sermons that make Yeshu’a seem more like a spirit than a flesh and blood man who once walked the earth. And if it is true that he died for our sins, exactly when do we accept that the point of his crucifixion was for us to do more than just acknowledge the awful habits of human history where we persecute or allow good men and women to continue to be persecuted?

Felon 47 and his underlings corrupt every precedent set by Yeshu’a. They resemble the Roman government and its sycophants while they embrace the Nihilistic principles of a 19th century Russian Party that used terrorism and assassination as part of their reform.

MAGA supporters and Felon 47 let people be detained or die in order to stave off the inevitability of the collapse of the White Western World. But will we, who know Felon 47 is wrong, fight to stop the deaths, persecutions, and detentions of people who only want to work and feed their families?

Will we ever admit that the story of Yeshu’a’s crucifixion means that we are charged with ending the blood-letting, the needless assaults, the threats? Will we ever be brave enough to end needless persecutions; or will we watch these modern-day crucifixions as if we were watching the fight between Spartacus and Antoninus thinking that it is only a movie. So, no one actually died.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

Tony Curtis (left) ; Kirk Douglas (right) in the film SPARTICUS, 1960. Alamy Stock Photo

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Pawns and Queens: Analogies For a New Era

Posted on January 21, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

We historians often find data in some file in an obscure archive, in letters written by someone’s grandmother, in photos, newspaper clippings, legal records. Our discipline demands that we dig, analyze, rethink and revise, constantly. I liken our work to studying the function of each piece in a Chess game. We get different perspectives about the same set of circumstances depending on which Chess piece we examine.

I was a mediocre Chess player. I had a few friends who played like champions. So, I often just watched them play. I remain, however, fascinated by the game’s objectives and, specifically, the roles of Pawns and Queens.

Pawns are the most numerous pieces in Chess; they are the foot soldiers. Each player has eight Pawns. A Pawn can move one or two squares forward if that move is its first move. After the first move, a Pawn can only move one square forward unless the square is blocked by some other piece. A Pawn can capture or attack another piece, however, by moving diagonally to the left or right.

The Pawn is the only piece in a Chess game that can change ranks. Depending on the skill of a Chess player, a Pawn can become a Bishop, a Rook or a Queen. In spite of a Pawn’s ability to advance to a higher rank, it is still considered the lowest ranking piece in the game. It is only worth one point.

The objective of the game is to capture your opponent’s King where that King has no way out, which means Checkmate. While the King is considered the most important piece in the game, it is the Queen that is considered the most powerful piece.

Queens are the only pieces that can move across the board in any manner as long as they are not successfully blocked by other pieces. If you lose, it is highly likely that you lost because your opponent’s Queen checkmated your King. Chess players feel much more confident when they have successfully captured or blocked her.

You can still win the game without capturing the Queen, but you have to be extremely strategic and precise to do so. You can also win without making good moves with your Pawns, but it is highly unlikely.

Chess is now over 1,500 years old. While there is some skepticism about its precise origins, many Chess historians believe that the Indian board game called “Chaturanga” was the earliest predecessor of Chess. There were many other versions that followed, but are too numerous to mention here.

In early versions of Chess, there was a piece called “Vizier” or “Advisor” for centuries. In the 1500s, in the era of great and powerful Queens in Europe, like Spain’s Isabella and England’s Elizabeth, “Viziers” or “Advisors” were redesigned and renamed “Queens.” You can learn an awful lot of world history just by examining Chess.

So here’s the deal: There is no such thing as a Chess game where Queens/Women Heads of State/Women in general are not powerful and flexible while the Kings/Men Heads of State/Men in general are highly important but who have or exercise fewer tactical moves.

There is also no such thing as a Chess game where Pawns/Foot Soldiers/Laborers are not essential to success, even while they are considered less important.

Apply any and all of the above to what you see happening in the United States and the world right now. I refuse to tell you how to analyze and interpret this history because there are so many interpretations and analogies that can be extrapolated from this board game.

All I will say is that nothing is going to change or be corrected without the skill of devoted Pawns, and the power and daring of Queens.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

Shutterstock photo of a Pawn and a Queen on a Chessboard.

Revisit the French Resistance—The Maquis

Posted on January 6, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

In this current political climate in the United States, there is something that every member of the Left/Resistance needs to remember: People that only respect violence and who cheer violence will typically have to be dealt with violently. They don’t respond to reason or kindness or common sense. You will not write them away or blog them away. Calling them names won’t work either.

You’re going to have to accept that they are monsters. You don’t reason with monsters anymore than you reason with poisonous snakes. This is what you need to remember about MAGA supporters and those nuts that stormed the capital on January 6, 2021.

I am not going to teach a full history lesson in this blog. Yet, it would help you to review the French Revolution (1789-1799) where crops failed and the economy tanked while the nobility and the clergy paid almost no taxes as commoners bore the brunt of taxation and starvation while Louis XVI kept spending on himself.

You also would do well to study France’s Maquis (“the underbrush”) which was its underground guerilla movement that fought against the Nazis during World War II. In some instances they were successful; in others they were not. Yet, you better recognize that American insularity and that feeling we tend to embrace that says, “We will be okay as long as we protest and go through the courts,” will not necessarily save us.

In the next four years we may have no other choice but to get our hands dirty. Even worse, our obsession with the internet, and the attention we receive from it, may eventually work against us. Some strategies do not need publicity. We need more face-to-face private conversations whenever possible.

So, here’s a few good articles about the Maquis, including its African and Afro-Muslim participants, and the current research historians are still working on.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

Overview of the French Resistance

France to Rename Streets after African WW2 Heroes

In the Footsteps of African Resistance Fighters

Addi Bâ Mamadou, called
“The Black Terrorist”
by the Nazis

No Contradictions

Posted on January 5, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

When I started to hear negative commentary about Kamala Harris’ racial and ethnic background, I started reevaluating how “White Supremacy” works again.

Many people are completely unaware that when the Greek explorer Herodotus named the continent “Αἰθιοπία” (romanized as “Aithiopía”), his definition included the continents of Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Herodotus’ term literally means “Land of Burnt Faces.”

Those kinds of cross-cultural connections and collaborations do not help white supremacy to flourish which is why you rarely hear anything about them. The objective of white supremacy is to make certain that peoples of color look to white folk, and white men specifically, for acceptance, guidance, deliverance, and redemption, but not to each other. Sexism works exactly the same way. A man, not a woman, may rule you and grant you favor in some screwed up patriarchal world as sexists imagine it.

African-American scholar W. E. B. DuBois’ heir apparent Vijay Prashad noted that many Indian men arrived in the USA in the late 18th and 19th centuries, married Black American women and disappeared from most histories. Suraj Yengde, both in his books and in his portrayal of himself in Ava DuVernay’s masterpiece film “ORIGIN,” noted that we must find reconnections with each other. His research on Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar is fascinating.

Ambedkar was a Dalit, or as he was once called, an “Untouchable.” He wrote India’s constitution. He earned two doctorate degrees and when he came to the United States he wanted to meet his fellow American untouchables. So, he visited Harlem where the Black folks lived. (FYI: Martin Luther King, Jr. was introduced as a fellow “untouchable” when he visited India.)

This is exactly what Shyamala Gopolan-Harris did when she left India to go to school in the United States. She gravitated toward communities where she was less likely to be mistreated. So, she headed to Berkeley, California which was a hotbed of activism—there were Civil Rights protests, anti-Vietnam protests, the Free Speech Movement and the work of the Black Panther Party in nearby Oakland was the world that her daughter Kamala Harris grew up in.

I bring this up because we know so little about our early histories and connections. I don’t bring this up with any foolish idea that everyone is going to suddenly start singing “Kumbaya” and start getting along all the time. Yet, we know more about what Prashad accurately identified as white power structures that, during the late 20th century, deliberately created the myth that “Southeast Asians” were a model minority, a minority he emphasized that was designed as a weapon against Black Americans.

Felon 47 and his minions have lined up a small cadre of Southeast Asians to serve in his administration to do two things: 1) make the administration look less racist than it is and, 2) to also entice India, which now has a larger population than China, that its population is seen somehow as superior. South Africa did damned near the same thing during apartheid.

When Black Americans visited South Africa during its apartheid era, Black American visitors were given passes written in Afrikaans that translated into English as “Honorary White Person.”

Now, the fact that I personally know at least seven Southeast Asians who identify quite accurately as “Black,” does not matter. The fact that so many folks on the continents of Africa and Southeast Asia have near identical DNA doesn’t matter either. When I read the book “A Passage to India,” I noted that an Indian character in the book was described as a “little Black man.” It was the first time I ever saw such a description of anyone outside of a specifically African or African American context. My point, however, is much simpler.

We Black Americans can continue to roll our eyes at the brown guy wearing the turban at the local gas station and vice-versa OR we can recognize and identify our participation in upholding white supremacy while its foot remains situated on both our necks. Before you bother to tell me about the guy at the gas station that you don’t like, remember that he is an employee and all you are is someone pumping gas. White supremacy makes all of us its pawns.

If you are honest, you also remember that moment when you got bad service at a Black-owned business and thought to yourself that you got bad service because the business was Black-owned. The fact that there are, were, and will be folks who simply are not good at customer service regardless of their race or ethnicity or nationality did not enter your mind. That kind of thinking is white supremacy in action too.

Kamala Harris knows this better than anyone. She knows who she is and she didn’t need anyone to tell her who she is. The fact that anyone dared define her speaks not only to their arrogance, but also to their presumptions that they actually have such a right to do so.

She was perceived by some folks as a contradiction and by some folks as having split loyalties. The only thing that actually requires split loyalties is white supremacy. It cannot thrive or survive without its clear contradictions. Let me write that again—It cannot survive or thrive without its clear contradictions. It functions with the assistance of the people who it is designed to either oppress and/or control and/or regulate. Repeat that until you get it. So, no contradictions.

Dr. Suraj Yengde (as “himself”), Dr. Gaurav J. Pathania (as “Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar”) and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (as “Isabel Wilkerson”) in Ava DuVernay’s film “ORIGIN.”

Barbara Lee, Her Terms

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

I was nearing 12 years old when Barbara Lee’s mentor Shirley Chisholm ran for president. The young Barbara Lee was in college then and a single mother when she worked on Chisholm’s campaign. Kamala Harris was nearing 8 years old.

Shirley Chisholm knew that as a Black woman with roots in the West Indies that she was not likely to win the nomination for president from the Democratic Party.

Yet, Chisholm knew that if we Black Democrats stuck together we could put some real teeth in the Democratic Party platform that ultimately nominated George McGovern, who lost.

Black Congressmen like Walter Fauntroy and Ronald Dellums cut back room deals and ultimately sold Shirley Chisholm out in order to win and/or maintain favor with white men who ran the Democratic Party. Do not bother to be surprised.

When Black American men have access to white men with power, they rarely give up that access in order to stand with any Black woman…and ALL Black women know this by instinct and from experience.

Chisholm ultimately forgave Dellums’ betrayal; and then Dellums gave Barbara Lee an internship in his office which she parlayed into a successful congressional run for Dellums’ old district which was once California’s 9th, now the 12th District.

Much later, I remembered Congresswoman Lee as being the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) that voted against giving then-president George W. Bush the right to invade Iraq shortly after this country endured the tragedy of 9/11.

Lee knew, like most folks with any degree of sense, that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the terrorists that struck the Twin Towers on 9/11.

One of the ugliest confrontations I ever had with my then-Congressman John Lewis occurred not long after he, along with the rest of the CBC, voted to grant Bush the power to invade Iraq. I called Lewis a traitor to his face and accused him of violating every principle Martin Luther King, Jr. ever taught him.

“You didn’t even bother to ask for a vote on this!,” I said. I love/d the late John Lewis, but he and the rest of the CBC, were dead wrong for abdicating their duties as representatives in order to grant a sitting president the right to invade another country. The next time I saw him, we hugged. He was feeble. Soon after that last hug, he was gone.

I remember that Congresswoman Barbara Lee had to have extra security because she did not vote in favor of such an invasion in a climate where Americans wanted to feel like we were going after our real enemies.

Instead, Lee used her conscience and common sense, knowing full well that she would be re-elected to her district no matter how she voted. Just imagine if our representatives had enough of a spine to hold on to their principles and to the knowledge that their constituents are in their corner?

Back when Lee took this stand, I was working part-time at my alma mater Agnes Scott College. As the nation was bracing for the possibility of sending US Troops to Iraq, the Agnes Scott College community was having regular talks about the potential for war.

When a faculty member worried that we were heading to war and that there was nothing we could do, I just couldn’t stand that phrase “there’s nothing we can do.”

I said, “You can send a letter of support to California Congresswoman Barbara Lee.”

I have never regretted that suggestion.

Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

Category Archives: International History