The following presentation was made by Chairman Omali Yeshitela in St. Petersburg, Florida on December 19, 2004 at a weekly meeting of the African People’s Socialist Party.
I want to talk a little bit about Santa Claus. How many people know of Santa Claus in here? Well, there’s a history to Santa Claus and we want to say some things about that history.
I was recently in Holland. One of the places I went to in Holland was Amsterdam. This was on November 4.
In Amsterdam, they have this parade about Santa Claus. The little cherubic, chubby, unhealthy white guy — well, now he’s even become brown and black — who you take your children to go and visit has his origin, his immediate origin, in Sinter Klaas.
Sinter Klaas is the Dutch name for Santa Claus, and he is the patron saint of shipping. There’s a Catholic in the room who knows what I’m talking about when I say “patron saint” of shipping.
According to the Dutch, Sinter Klaas is this wonderful guy who comes along, and traveling with Sinter Klaas is an African whose name is Zwarte Piet — “Black Pete.”
Sinter Klaas travels throughout the Netherlands, throughout Holland, and Piet is the helper. He works for Sinter Klaas and he gives away gifts to the good children and he puts the bad children in a sack and takes them to Spain.
So while I was in Amsterdam, the Sinter Klaas parade was happening, and I didn’t know it was happening. When we first got there we were walking through a mall and I saw a little white child in an outfit with a little cape on and with something like soot on her face.
So I thought, “Okay, this is November. Maybe in November they do something like Halloween in Holland.”
I wasn’t thinking about the Sinter Klaas and Zwarte Piet thing until we began walking from the train station to the place where we were going to be staying, and the person who was walking with us says, “The Sinter Klaas parade is going to be happening right here. Do you want to see it?”
So, I say, “Yes. Let’s see the parade.”
So, here we are standing here watching this parade, this incredible thing that was mind-boggling. First of all, you see all these white people with something like shoe polish all over their faces. They’re in black face like minstrels!
I couldn’t believe it. I’m taking pictures, and they saw nothing wrong with it. They posed for me. They wore fake dreadlocks or fake afros, and they did imitations of what they think you dance like. [Video footage can be found on the internet at www.asiuhuru.org]
The mayor of central Amsterdam happened to be walking through, and somebody said, “That’s the mayor!” So the mayor and I got involved in this spontaneous debate on the streets.
Now the mayor assured me that I just didn’t understand because outsiders just don’t understand. But I’m not an outsider.
Now, all of this is in quite civilized Holland. All the liberals like Holland because you can go there and in the cafes you can smoke hashish, and you can go to the red light district where there are near nude women advertising themselves for sale behind glass windows.
I tell you, it’s interesting because Black Pete takes the children and sticks them in sacks and he takes them to Spain. Do you know why he would take them to Spain? Because Spain was occupied by the so-called Moors who were Africans.
There’s a whole bunch of stuff mixed up in there, because Black Pete also gives away spices to the good people — which is what they tell us the colonialists were looking for when they crossed the ocean. Isn’t that right?
Now Spain also, at one juncture, dominated Holland. Did you know that? So that’s part of the connection. But I want to say some more things about that.
The ideas of any society based on class are dictated by the ruling class
There is a basis for this whole Santa Claus thing, and we live in societies and countries with traditions and institutions that we don’t understand. In fact, people get born into situations which give them the impression that the situations have always been like that.
But you can understand the ideas and institutions in a society based on the kind of society it is; the kind of social system it is; the kinds of relations of production that exist within it.
What I mean when I say relations of production is the kinds of relationships that exist in society for the purpose of that society acquiring what it needs for its development in the form of food, clothing and shelter. The ideas in any society spring from that reality.
There are people who actually believe that it is ideas that create reality, but in the real world, it is reality that gives rise to certain ideas. There is a juncture in time where we come to certain conclusions, and these conclusions, these ideas, can be important to changing this reality. But the origin of these ideas is this social reality itself.
There are no ideas born outside of the context of that societal reality, and as we live in societies that are dominated by class, ideas have class character and class content. And in any society, the ruling class — the class that has the political and economic power — is also the class that has the intellectual power and is the source from which all the ideas or most of the ideas in that society spring.
So, when you look at Christmas as it is practiced in general, throughout the U.S. and throughout Europe and those places that are influenced by Europe, this is what you’re looking at.
For example, a couple of years ago in December, I found myself in what they call South Africa. It was shocking to see Christmas trees and Christmas lights all over the place similar to what you would find here.
But of course, there’s something else about South Africa too, isn’t there? The ones that structured the ideological system of oppression there were who? The Dutch. From the same place that we’re talking about in the Netherlands. And when I say the ideological system of oppression, I’m talking about the whole Apartheid, segregation, etc.
Now, the whole capitalist system that most thinking people in this country hold up and say is wonderful — that Bush and the general white population in this country are prepared to kill to defend and extend around the world — this whole system that has brought wealth to the white world in general has its origin in slavery and brigandage. That is to say, it has its origin in the theft of the resources of other peoples around the world.
White wealth has its origin in theft of oppressed peoples’ resources
Karl Marx, who at one juncture was held in high esteem by certain people who call themselves “revolutionaries,” particularly throughout Europe and North America, referred to this phenomenon as primitive accumulation of capital.
In explaining how capitalist production got started, he said that in order for there to be capitalist production there must be capitalist accumulation. But, in order for there to be capitalist accumulation there must also be capitalist production.
So we can only get out of this weird cycle by assuming that there must have been an accumulation of capital that came before the capitalist production, and this accumulation of capital he referred to as primitive accumulation.
He talked about this being born out of turning Africa into a warren for the hunting of black skins. He referred to the internment of the Indians in North America and throughout the Americas, the so called New World, into the mines and how they were bringing up silver and gold that went to Europe.
Of course, there were the British attacks in 1841 and 1842 on China that turned China into a nation of junkies.* They called it the Opium Wars wherein they forced China to become a nation of junkies.
There’s the situation where France held Vietnam for 199 years and got most of the stolen resources from Vietnam in the form of drug resources.
This is the origin, or the start up money, that the whole capitalist system was born of. It was slavery. The key component was slavery. Not just the tremendous amount of resources gained when you can work somebody for free. That was just one aspect of it.
But the key thing was what they called the slave trade. That is to say, the trade of Africans throughout the world that created colonies throughout the world. Most of the so-called countries that we know of in the western hemisphere came about as a consequence of the slave trade.
When you look at Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica, when you look at Argentina and all of those places, the colonies were organized around the slave trade. And it’s the slave trade that created, for the first time in history, a world economy that was a precondition for the rise of capitalism.
So it was the fact that Africans were being traded as slaves all around the world that created, for the first time, a single economy that dominated the whole world, and out of this, the whole capitalist system was born.
The Santa Claus story is an ideological explanation for why white people have everything and everyone else is poor
But can a society say that the reason we have all this wealth as white people — Indians are damn near decimated, Africans don’t have nothing and everybody else is starving — is because we stole everything we’ve got?
The society can never condemn itself. It will never say it’s all because we stole it.
And you have all these defenders of imperialism and capitalism who refuse to say it, even as they know the reality.
They know I didn’t pop up here in America under a collard green leaf. There was a process that brought me here and they know it was slavery.
They know that this land is the land of indigenous people. They know that the Indians were massacred and the land stolen, but they will deny a relationship between this and their wealth, between their wealth and my poverty. They will deny that relationship.
“So when you hear George Bush say, “They hate us because we are good,” he is, in his own way, telling the story of Santa Claus because what is offered by the Christmas story is an explanation for why all the wealth and value that they didn’t work for is in the white world.”
They cannot say, “The reason that you are poor is because we stole everything you’ve got. We worked your family like beasts, and because you had to do all the work, it meant that our children could go to school and become this and that. They could become inventors, and they could steal your inventions as well.
“Because you had to do all of that, we were free to build universities and do all these other things. Because of what you did, we took the resources we made from you, and we put them into factories. We put them into schools, and this value that we stole from you then is now concentrated in IBM and Dell and all these other resources.”
They can’t say that to you. So what they do instead is they come up with various explanations, philosophical explanations, which become the underpinning of the society.
Some of these philosophies are very serious. You know, heavy weight philosophers like Kant and other forces like that. They teach some of these philosophical explanations in universities, but some of them are more subtle than that, and Santa Claus is one of them.
What is Santa Claus? He is the jolly, cherubic white guy who lives in the North Pole where it’s too cold to work. He has no Africans, no Indians, no Mexicans, no Asians or anything like that with him, but he has these little dwarves.
These dwarves, all of whom are white, right? They produce all of these resources. And then he has these flying reindeer and what have you, and they just take off and fly all over the world. And everybody who is good gets something from them, and if you ain’t got nothing it’s because you ain’t good.
So when you hear George Bush say, “They hate us because we are good,” he is, in his own way, telling the story of Santa Claus because what is offered by the Christmas story is an explanation for why all the wealth and value that they didn’t work for is in the white world.
They didn’t work for it. Nobody worked for it. It wasn’t because there were people working in plantations in Brazil, or in Congo where they cut off the hands of the people who refused to bring in the rubber for them. It didn’t come from that!
It was some magic shorties and this cherubic white guy who, with the reindeer, flies around and gives all this stuff. That’s where it came from “because we’re good.” This is the explanation.
Now, you may know that the first Africans brought to the Americas as captives in 1619 were brought by the Dutch. And if they were brought by the Dutch, there is a great likelihood that the ship they were brought on — and they were on The Good Ship Jesus, by the way — was blessed by the patron saint Sinter Klaas.
So in other words, Africans from this country were a gift to the white folks from Santa Claus. That is the kind of reality that we are dealing with.
Now ideas play a role in even trapping people in their slavery. Ideas play a profound role. These ideas are born out of this kind of social system and they are there to reinforce the enslavement of a people.
It convinces the white people that this is the reason they have everything, and every white person you know, even your liberals that work at your popular community radio stations that you listen to all the time, will defend to the death the relationships that exist in this country.
They will tell you that they didn’t do it to you because you’re black. They did it to you because you are a worker. What’s the difference in that? That’s redundant. They will argue with you around this country because it is a means by which they defend this relationship that they have.
So, that is in Holland, and in Holland, the power of the ideas is shown in that there were Africans that were there who brought their children to see this thing.
Come to Holland, kick Santa Claus off his horse and show him the real Black Pete!
Anyway, if we have anything to do with it, it’s not going to last much longer because I was just in Paris at a meeting of the European region of an African organization, and these Africans say they want to engage in some struggle. We told them that we think one of the most important struggles that we can engage in is to make an international call to Africans around the world to come to Amsterdam next year and kick Santa Claus off the horse and introduce Holland to the real Black Pete!
Let him know that we’re mad as hell and we want everything that he took from us back! We told them that we would come there and lead it.
We need to have an international call to Africans from around the world to come and engage in civil disobedience to say that from this day on, you will not do what you just did. If you want to have a white Pete, do it. But you are not going to do this any more. And so that’s what our objective is.
Someone asked, “Can’t you keep it a secret?” But if we keep it a secret no one will know about it, especially the people who need to get there.
“But if we announce it, they’ll close the borders.”
We said, “That’s alright, let Holland close the borders. Let Holland say to the world that we want to keep Black people from coming to Holland to deal with Zwarte Piet. Let the world then have an opportunity to look at what Holland calls fun every year, at the expense of African people. And if Holland can live with it then we can… for a little bit.”
Europe has movement to make capitalism more gentle to white workers while violently raping everyone else
Capitalism was born off of a grotesquely bestial, profoundly oppressive theft of all of our resources and off of terrible things done to the peoples around the world.
Out of the things that they stole from us, you saw emerging in Europe what they called the Industrial Revolution, and for the first time, white people were free from serfdom and from being stuck on the land in a feudal situation.
Now they were going into the factories. In fact, the ruling class began to kick them off the land and force them into situations where they would have to enter the capitalist society in order to exist. They called it the Land Enclosure Acts and things like that.
So you had these white folks working in the factories. Sometimes children and women were being maimed in the factories. They had no rules or anything like that and they were working under terrible conditions.
So in the 19th century, a movement was born among intellectuals in Europe in opposition to this capitalism, as it was expressing itself there. Not to what it was doing to us in the Congo. Not to what it was doing to the people in China or anywhere else, but how it was affecting white children and women and workers there.
So they came to the conclusion that they had to convince the ruling class to moderate this capitalism. Make capitalism kind and gentle. And one of the intellectuals involved in this movement was a man named Charles Dickens.
Are you familiar with Dickens? Dickens was the guy who wrote the book upon which this thing, which you will see over and over again on television during Christmas time, is based, called “A Christmas Carol.”
“A Christmas Carol” is the story of the prototypical capitalist who is a man called Scrooge. Now, Scrooge doesn’t like Christmas. People come to Scrooge and say “Merry Christmas,” and he’s the one who says, “bah, humbug.”
He’s a relatively ruthless capitalist. He works his nephew, Bob Cratchet, and there’s a crippled guy, Tiny Tim, who might also be a relative and Scrooge is just horrible to everybody. And these intellectuals are trying to get these capitalists to treat the workers better.
So, they use Scrooge and have him go to sleep, and he must have eaten something terrible because after he goes to sleep, he wakes up and gets these visits from these ghosts, right?
There’s Christmas Past, Present and Future, and as a consequence of this Scrooge is a changed person. He likes Tiny Tim. Bob Cratchet gets the day off, and I think he actually goes home with him to eat. But the thing is that it was part of this struggle to get them to moderate capitalism.
They struggled that Christmas now become this thing where you give, where you are nice to people, etc. Dickens wasn’t the only one, but he was part of a general movement to win the capitalists to be nice to people.
And so that’s the basis, that’s the origin of things like “A Christmas Carol” and what you’re going to be watching on TV maybe tonight when you leave here. That’s the origin of it and you need to know it.
We must construct contending philosophy to oppose oppressive social system
People who are oppressed have to construct philosophical systems in opposition to the social system that keeps them oppressed. And that’s why we say you bring us Sinter Klaas and we’re coming to kick his butt.
We have another philosophy in contention with the philosophy that they just put forth, and ours says that when Sinter Klaas shows up, we want everything in the bag because everything in it belongs to us. And we want to go to the secret location where they are supposed to be producing because it belongs to us, you understand?
We have to create our own contending philosophy that is opposed to slavery; that is opposed to colonialism; that is opposed to oppression and that stands for the liberation of African people and human beings on this planet and the eradication of workers and bosses and slaves.
Uhuru!
*Here Chairman Omali refers to the Opium Wars in China. The first began in 1839 when Britain attacked several Chinese cities because China had attempted to stop the British from smuggling opium into its borders. In 1842, China was forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing at gunpoint which, among other things, exempted British nationals from Chinese law in China and forced China to pay more than 20 million dollars to British imperialists. Britain again formally attacked China in 1856 after which China was forced to sign another treaty that legalized the import of opium.
