Thirty Years Since We Lost Grenada

This posting is late. It is nearly 3 months late. I don’t care. I still want to mark the 30 years since the attack on the Grenadian Revolution. That October in 1983, when the U.S. assessed its ability openly to attack a sovereign nation in the midst of a revolutionary process, with its own troops, helped lay the groundwork for current U.S. imperial adventures. The Grenada invasion tested the U.S. general public’s support of U.S. military action after their defeat in Vietnam. The U.S. public, and the U.S. media, passed brilliantly. We now live with open U.S military aggression as a way of life. The revolution in Grenada was a shining moment for the Caribbean, for the African revolution worldwide, for people’s revolution worldwide. The Grenadian Revolution was a popular revolution. We must study its strengths and its weaknesses, its organizational triumphs and its internal contradictions and continue to raise the name and the ideas of its martyred Prime Minister and leader of the New Jewel Movement, Maurice Bishop.

Below are four clips from a documentary from the era. It provides a glimpse of what kind of grassroots motion the revolution was attempting to make real, a version of direct democracy and socialist re-organization. Grenada was the sort of problem the U.S. cannot abide, the problem of a Good Example, exacerbated by the fact of being a primarily English-speaking African decent population with ties to U.S. Africans. This was the slowing of a revolutionary momentum in that era, and the reassertion of Reactionary politics and open imperialism. The Empire did indeed strike back. Nonetheless, the spirit of revolution lives, in part because of the great examples in our histories, like Grenada and the New Jewel movement.