Malcolm X: 'The oppressed are shaking off the shackles’

Malcolm X: 'The oppressed are shaking off the shackles’

First time in print: excerpt from 1964 Malcolm X speech in new
Pathfinder edition

Pathfinder Press has issuing a new, expanded edition of Malcolm X Talks
to Young People as well as the first-ever Spanish-language edition,
Malcolm X habla a la juventud. Printed below are excerpts of remarks
presented by Malcolm X during a program sponsored by the Oxford Union,
a student debating society at Oxford University in the United Kingdom
on Dec. 3, 1964. The piece quoted below appears in print for the first
time in the new edition.

The debate was televised to an audience of millions by the British
Broadcasting Corporation. The proposition under debate was "Extremism
in defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice
is no virtue," a statement made by Barry Goldwater in his 1964 speech
accepting the Republican Party nomination for president of the United
States.

Malcolm X was the fifth of six speakers, and the second of three who
defended the above proposition. The other two speaking for it were Eric
Abrahams, a student from Jamaica and president of the Oxford Union, and
Hugh MacDiarmid, a Scottish poet and member of the Communist Party.
Among the three opposing the proposition was Humphrey Berkeley, a
Conservative Party member of Parliament, who spoke directly before
Malcolm. There was no question period. The audience, which included
many students originally from Africa and Asia, greeted Malcolm’s
remarks with enthusiastic applause. The minutes of the meeting record
that in the vote held after the debate, the proposition defended by
Malcolm received 137 votes to 288 against.

Copyright © by Betty Shabazz and Pathfinder Press, reprinted by
permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.



*****

BY MALCOLM X
Mr. Chairman, tonight is the first night that I’ve ever had an
opportunity to be as near to conservatives as I am. [Laughter] And the
speaker who preceded me--First, I want to thank you for the invitation
to come here to the Oxford Union. The speaker who preceded me is one of
the best excuses that I know to prove our point concerning the
necessity, sometimes, of extremism in the defense of liberty, why it is
no vice, and why moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. I
don’t say that about him personally, but that type is the--[Laughter
and applause]
He’s right. X is not my real name. But if you study history, you’ll
find why no Black man in the Western Hemisphere knows his real name.
Some of his ancestors kidnapped our ancestors from Africa and took us
into the Western Hemisphere and sold us there, and our names were
stripped from us and so today we don’t know who we really are. I’m one
of those who admit it, and so I just put X up there to keep from
wearing his name.

And as far as this apartheid charge that he attributed to me is
concerned, evidently he has been misinformed. I don’t believe in any
form of apartheid. I don’t believe in any form of segregation. I don’t
believe in any form of racialism. But at the same time, I don’t endorse
a person as being right just because his skin is white. And ofttimes,
when you find people like this--I mean that type--[Laughter] when a man
whom they have been taught is below them has the nerve or firmness to
question some of their philosophy or some of their conclusions, usually
they put that label on us, a label that is only designed to project an
image which the public will find distasteful.

I am a Muslim. If there is something wrong with that, then I stand
condemned. My religion is Islam. I believe in Allah. I believe in
Muhammad as the apostle of Allah. I believe in brotherhood of all men,
but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who’s not ready to
practice brotherhood with our people. [Applause] I don’t believe in
brotherhood--I just take time to make these few things clear, because I
find that one of the tricks of the West--and I imagine my good friend,
or at least that type [Laughter] is from the West--one of the tricks of
the West is to use or create images.

They create images of a person who doesn’t go along with their views,
and they make certain that this image is distasteful, and that anything
that that person has to say from there on in is rejected. This is a
policy that has been practiced, pretty much, by the West. It perhaps
would have been practiced by others had they been in power, but during
recent centuries the West has been in power, they’ve created the
images, and they’ve used these images quite skillfully and quite
successfully. That’s why today we need a little extremism in order to
straighten a very nasty situation out. Or a very extremely nasty
situation out. [Laughter]

I think the only way one can really determine whether or not extremism
in defense of liberty is justified, is not to approach it as an
American or a European or an African or an Asian, but as a human being.
If we look upon it as different types, immediately we begin to think in
terms of extremism being good for one and bad for another, or bad for
one and good for another. But if we look upon it, if we look upon
ourselves as human beings, I doubt that anyone will deny that extremism
in defense of liberty, the liberty of any human being, is no vice.
Anytime anyone is enslaved or in any way deprived of his liberty, that
person, as a human being, as far as I’m concerned he is justified to
resort to whatever methods necessary to bring about his liberty again.
[Applause]

But most people usually think in terms of extremism as something that’s
relative, related to someone whom they know or something that they’ve
heard of. I don’t think they look upon extremism by itself or all
alone. They apply it to something. A good example, and one of the
reasons that it can’t be too well understood today: many people who
have been in positions of power in the past don’t realize that the
power--centers of power--are changing. When you’re in a position of
power for a long time, you get used to using your yardstick, and you
take it for granted that because you’ve forced your yardstick upon
others, that everyone is still using the same yardstick. So that your
definition of extremism usually applies to everyone.

But nowadays times are changing, and the center of power is changing.
People in the past who weren’t in a position to have a yardstick, or
use a yardstick of their own, are using their own yardstick now. And
you use one and they use another. In the past, when the oppressor had
one stick and the oppressed used that same stick, today the oppressed
are sort of shaking the shackles and getting yardsticks of their own.
So when they say extremism, they don’t mean what you do. And when you
say extremism, you don’t mean what they do. There’s entirely two
different meanings. And when this is understood, I think you can better
understand why those who are using methods of extremism are being
driven to them.

‘They turn the victim into the criminal’
A good example is the Congo.1 When the people who are in power want to
use--again, create an image to justify something that’s bad, they use
the press, and they’ll use the press to create a humanitarian image for
a devil, or a devil image for a humanitarian. They’ll take a person
who’s the victim of the crime and make it appear he’s the criminal, and
they’ll take the criminal and make it appear that he’s the victim of
the crime. And the Congo situation is one of the best examples that I
can cite right now to point this out. The Congo situation is a nasty
example of how a country, because it is in power, can take its press
and make the world accept something that’s absolutely criminal.

They take American-trained--they take pilots that they say are
American-trained--and this automatically lends respectability to them,
[Laughter] and then they will call them anti-Castro Cubans. And that’s
supposed to add to their respectability [Laughter] and eliminate the
fact that they’re dropping bombs on villages where they have no defense
whatsoever against such planes, blowing to bits Black women--Congolese
women, Congolese children, Congolese babies. This is extremism. But it
is never referred to as extremism, because it is endorsed by the West,
it’s financed by America, it’s made respectable by America, and that
kind of extremism is never labeled as extremism. Because it’s not
extremism in defense of liberty. And if it is extremism in defense of
liberty, as this talk has just pointed out, it’s extremism in defense
of liberty for the wrong type of people. [Applause]

I’m not advocating that kind of extremism. That’s cold-blooded murder.
But the press is used to make that cold-blooded murder appear as an act
of humanitarianism.

They take it one step farther and get a man named Tshombe, who is a
murderer. They refer to him as the premier or the prime minister of the
Congo to lend respectability to him. He’s actually the murderer of the
rightful prime minister of the Congo. [Applause] They never mention
that this man--I’m not for extremism in defense of that kind of liberty
or that kind of activity. They take this man, who’s a murderer. The
world recognizes him as a murderer. But they make him the prime
minister. He becomes a paid murderer, a paid killer, who is propped up
by American dollars. And to show the degree to which he is a paid
killer, the first thing he does is go to South Africa and hire more
killers and bring them into the Congo. They give them the glorious name
of mercenary, which means a hired killer; not someone that’s killing
for some kind of patriotism, or some kind of ideal, but a man who is a
paid killer, a hired killer. And one of the leaders of them is right
from this country here. And he’s glorified as a soldier of fortune,
when he’s shooting down little Black women and Black babies and Black
children.

I’m not for that kind of extremism. I’m for the kind of extremism that
those who are being destroyed by those bombs and destroyed by those
hired killers are able to put forth to thwart it. They will risk their
lives at any cost. They will sacrifice their lives at any cost against
that kind of criminal activity.

I’m for the kind of extremism that the freedom fighters in the
Stanleyville regime are able to display against these hired killers,
who are actually using some of my tax dollars, that I have to pay up in
the United States, to finance that operation over there. We’re not for
that kind of extremism.

And again, I think you must point out that the real criminal there is
the--or rather one of the [Malcolm laughs]--one of those who are very
much involved, as accessories to the crime, is the press. Not so much
your press, but the American press, which has tricked your press into
repeating what they have invented. [Laughter and applause]

But I was reading in one of the English papers this morning, I think
it’s a paper called the [Daily] Express. And it gave a very clear
account of the type of criminal activity that has been carried on by
the mercenaries that are being paid by United States tax dollars. And
it showed where they were killing Congolese, whether they were from the
central government or the Stanleyville government. It didn’t make any
difference to them, they just killed them. They had it fixed where
those who had been processed had to wear a white bandage around their
head. And any Congolese that they saw without that white bandage, they
killed him. This is clearly pointed out in the English papers. If they
had printed it last week, there would have been an outcry, and no one
would have allowed the Belgians and the United States, and the others
who are in cahoots with each other, to carry on the criminal activity
that they did in the Congo, which I doubt anybody in the world, not
even here at Oxford, will accept. Not even my friend. [Laughter]

Interjection: Point of [Inaudible].

Malcolm X: Yes?

Same person: I wonder what--exactly what sort of extremism you would
consider killing of missionaries to be? [From the audience: " Hear,
hear!" Applause.]

Malcolm X: I’d call it the type of extremism that was involved when
America dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and killed 80,000 people, or over
80,000 people, both men, women, children, everything. It was an act of
war. I’d call it the same kind of extremism that happened when England
dropped bombs on German cities, and Germans dropped bombs on English
cities. It was an act of war. And the Congo situation is war. And when
you call it war, then anybody that dies, they die a death that is
justified. But those who are--[Protests from audience: " For shame!" ]
But those who are in the Stanleyville regime, sir, are defending their
country. Those who are coming in, are invading their country, and some
of the refugees that were questioned on television in this city a
couple days ago pointed out that had the paratroopers not come in, they
doubted that they would have been molested. They weren’t being molested
until the paratroopers came in. [Applause]

I don’t encourage any acts of murder, nor do I glorify in anybody’s
death, but I do think that when the white public uses its press to
magnify the fact that there are the lives of white hostages at
stake--they don’t say " hostages," every paper says "white
hostages"--they give me the impression that they attach more importance
to a white hostage and a white death than they do the death of a human
being despite the color of his skin. [Applause]



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1 The Congo declared its independence from Belgium on June 30, 1960.
The prime minister of the newly independent government of the Congo was
Patrice Lumumba, who had led the liberation struggle there. Washington
and Brussels moved swiftly to prepare the overthrow of the Lumumba
government. In face of attacks by Belgian troops, units of mercenaries,
and the forces of the imperialist-backed secessionist regime of Moise
Tshombe in southern Katanga province, Lumumba took the fatal step of
requesting military help from the United Nations. In September 1960
Congolese army officer Joseph Mobutu, at the instigation of Washington
and Brussels, deposed Lumumba. Lumumba was later arrested and, as UN
forces looked on, handed over to Tshombe’s forces, who murdered the
Congolese leader in January 1961.
In 1964 Tshombe was installed as prime minister of the central
government in the Congo. Liberation-minded forces that looked to
Lumumba, based in the country’s eastern provinces, led a revolt.
Mercenaries and Belgian troops aided Tshombe in crushing the uprising,
as did Washington, which organized what the New York Times in 1966
called " an instant air force" of U.S. planes flown by U.S. pilots to
carry out bombing and strafing missions. The U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency also supplied pilots from the ranks of right-wing Cuban exiles
it had financed and trained to carry out terrorist operations against
the people and government of revolutionary Cuba.

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