LOS ANGELES, CA - Students from Occidental College invited the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League (RAIL) to show the video "The FBI's War on Black America" and give a brief presentation on the Black Panther Party. The film showing was a success, introducing over a dozen students to the history of the Black Panther Party and the FBI's campaign of violence against Black nationalists. The students also learned more about RAIL, its political agitation, and its Serve the People programs.

During the lengthy and active discussion which followed the film, several students earnestly debated the merits of multi-culturalism as a strategy for change. Multi-culturalism is the latest variant of a theory which says that bad ideas (e.g. racism) are responsible for oppression. So to end oppression, people need to throw away their bad ideas, use politically correct language, etc. But oppression is a fact of material reality. For example, the oppression of Black people in the u.$. is the legacy of 400 years of slavery and the colonial conditions which persist in the Black nation to this day. Respecting Black culture [and which culture is that? Frederick Douglass or Booker T. Washington?] will not, by itself, change the material conditions of Black oppression. As the Black Panthers said, "A slave in a daishiki is still a slave."

One student commented, "But if that's true, then everything we're doing here [at a university heavily influenced by multi-culturalism] is a waste of time!" Indeed, that's why political agitation and study are so important - history has shown that some strategies are better than others, and some strategies are complete failures. Choosing the correct strategy is a matter of life death: To repeat past mistakes is a "waste of time."

"The FBI's War on Black America" is one of many films which RAIL and the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM) show regularly in order to build public opinion against u.$. imperialism.

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