PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

denis brutus passes, a reflection
by vincent / blast furnace radio Monday, Jan. 18, 2010 at 10:45 AM
vincenteirene@gmail.com

http://www.phillyimc.org/en/dennis-brutus-passes a reflection about the death of denis brutus

http://www.phillyimc.org/en/dennis-brutus-passes


http://www.phillyimc.org/en/dennis-brutus-passes


Dennis Brutus passes


by Vincent Eirene | 01.18.2010

A powerful elder has left us with the passing of visionary poet and runner Dennis Vincent Brutus. After decades of work in South Africa including leading the effort to expel the country from the Olympic games in 1970, he won asylum status in the United States just in time to shepherd the rise of the anti-aparthied student movement. He went on to be an international leader in the movement against corporate globalization, the Jubilee movement for debt relief, and the call for swift action to slow climate change. He passed on December 26, 2009.
Dennis Brutus (Prague 2000).jpg
Dennis Brutus (Prague 2000)

During the Cold War, people around the world lived with a fear that simply could not be expressed in words. In response to the inevitable and the unthinkable, a great many of us relinquished our status as spectators, sometimes spending years in jail for creative acts of civil disobedience. At one point, nuclear resistance meant that I spent a year in jail for crossing the line at Pantex, the country's only nuclear bomb factory, located in Amarillo, Texas. At the time, this facility was producing five nuclear weapons a day. Our nonviolent campaign against Carnegie Mellon University's military contracting was in high gear, with a group of us bypassing traditional organizations to hit the streets with our cries for sanity and peace. One day I received a call from Denis Brutus, a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who asked to meet me. At the time, all I knew of him was that he was from South Africa. After settling in at a local espresso cafe he shared with me this story about his early days of activism.

In the early 1960s, Dennis was among a group of athletes campaigning to have South Africa thrown out of the Olympics for its apartheid policies and laws. By 1963 his political activity caught up with him and he was placed under arrest. When the arresting officer told him to stay put and went off to summon help, inspiration struck: after all, Dennis was one of the fastest runners in Africa. It was while fleeing on foot that returning soldiers spotted him and shot him in the back. In front of the Anglo-American Corporation headquarters, Dennis nearly died while waiting for a "blacks only" ambulance. Subsequently, he spent eighteen months in jail on Robbens Island before being deported. The man in the next cell was Nelson Mandela.

The day that we met, Dennis matter-of-factly told me that he could not return home. I sat there for a long time, unable to speak. He then pumped me for information on my anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons activism, my work against CMU's military contracting, and my work with the homeless. From then on, he came to our non-violent direct actions against the school for its military contracting, and many times he was the only professor in attendance. Dennis was always very encouraging -- a quality sorely missing from the activist community.

In 1989 the unimaginable happened: the Berlin Wall came down. Over the years, over 200 people were shot attempting to cross it -- the Cold War had its symbol and reality. But on that day in 1989, the race to hell was finally over, with people taking sledge hammers to the results of our hard hearts, our system of greed, and our willingness
to destroy the world over political and philosophical differences. Less than a year later another seemingly indestructible barrier fell -- apartheid in South Africa. When I saw Dennis at a local celebration he still seemed sad, still had the posture of a man without a home. But I could also sense the relief that over twenty years of exile were over. On that day, he stood a bit taller.

I would not see Dennis again until I went to Atlanta in the summer of 1996. That year, parts of the city with low-income housing, poor people, and various social services were removed to provide lodgings, trendy shops, and cafes for those attending the Olympics. With the arrival of the Olympic flag, five thousand protesters assembled to draw public attention to the costs of hosting the Games. During the week long anti-Olympic conference Dennis was a key speaker, talking about how sports had the power to challenge the powers that be, and how the Olympics were not to be used as a weapon against the disfranchised. Dennis was not surprised to see me, and greeted me as if welcoming home an old friend.

Eventually, Dennis as able to return to Johannesburg to teach and spent his last years traveling as an activist focused on fighting globalization and the corporations that would not allow his home to rise out of shanty poverty. He and others also started the Jubilee movement. Taking its cue from the biblical year of release that freed those enslaved for debts, they worked to get World Bank countries to forgive the debts of the developing world instead of forcing free market reforms (such as relaxing labor and environmental laws) that as often as not damage the people they are meant to help. These activities got Dennis branded an "ultra-leftist" by his comrades in the ANC.

It was the summer before Dennis died that I ran into him at the Pittsburgh International Airport. We sat and talked. He seemed much, much older. We spoke about the upcoming G20 Summit in Pittsburgh and the call for swift action for the environment.

Last November, on his birthday, he shared an open letter to members of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference predicting the compromises that will deeply affect the future of South Africa. His final public words railed against corporate globalization and the banks and countries that enable them. These words were spoken from his hospital bed -- the words of someone who deserved to retire, to rest and spend his last days writing his memoirs. Instead, this South African athlete ran until he could run more.

notowar.com

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Regretably, I must note...
by Mac Crary Tuesday, Jun. 21, 2011 at 10:12 AM
Chinatown, WA http://civilstories.wordpress.com Chinatown

poorpig.jpg, image/jpeg, 252x284

While I regret the death of Mr. Brutus, whose name come up between me and my mother Nancy during her visit to Seattle recently, Eirene doesn't mention that Brutus participated in circulating libels about me with the help of Eirene that resulted in the rape of my deaf girlfriend, and a lifetime of suffering, homelessness and acts of atrocious police hate crime visited upon me. When Brutus and Eirene saw fit they not only sided with militarists but brought Reagan and Martin Sheen down on the heads of me and my loved one. What could they plead as their excuse? We are both deaf and have never lived above the poverty line. Eirene suffers from an extreme example of the Jesse Jackson Condition, which is to cut down like a dog anything that encroaches on your holy microphone. They brutally tortured me and got my girlfriend raped. For nothing would they stop. Lie after lie after cowardly, cowardly, cowardly lie.

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