Fred Ho - Raw Extreme Manifesto: Change Your Body, Change Your Mind, Change the World While Spending Almost Nothing!

A fter fighting colorectal cancer for four years and finding no solutions to beating cancer through the mainstream medical establishment, only more and more frustration, dissatisfaction, and mistrust fueled by institutionalized arrogance, I started on a different path of extremism to beat cancer once and for all without sacrificing my dignity, my quality of life, or my entire life savings.

This war against cancer, the unmitigated brutality of that war, along with the profound transformations fighting cancer has unexpectedly gifted me with (including new treatment modalities, new personal and philosophical paradigms, and the creation of the new Fred Ho) are told in realtime, graphic detail in the book Diary of a Radical Cancer Warrior: Fighting Cancer and Capitalism at the Cellular Level. One of the unexpected discoveries in struggling to defeat cancer was changing to a raw food diet, and the attendant benefits and transformations of such a commitment to raw extremism, to myself, and potentially to society and to the planet.

These changes (as I am discovering every second, experiencing the results at my cellular level), at first, promised to be extremely daunting. Many of my favorite and comforting foods were cooked. Could I give them up? Could I resist the temptations that we are bombarded with, from mouthwatering advertisements, to the seductively displayed cornucopia of exciting cooked items in stores and restaurants while I walked on city streets, to the meals eaten by my friends while I socialized with them? Could I really do this without cheating and compromise? Could I sustain this for the rest of my life, however long that may be, should cancer ultimately be victorious, which, according to the allopathicians (mainstream medical establishment), could be very soon if I, in their opinion, foolishly pursued anything other than their protocols and prescriptions (which are basically a paradigm of cut-burn-poison)? Would going to raw food work, help me beat cancer, or would it be, as the allopathicians viewed it, a foolish pursuit (because it had no clinical trials, no data; in other words, the studies have not been funded!)? Would I gain anything from going raw?

All of these doubts and anxieties did not hold me back from plunging into raw extremism. For my entire life, I have never been a person paralyzed by indecisiveness. I believe this attribute of decisive action is part of my warrior being, which began at a very early stage of my life from my many battles and struggles against racism, since the days of early childhood, to domestic violence growing up, to my entire adult life fighting for revolutionary social change in American society, to being an avant-garde artist working on the very fringes of the music business and nonprofit arts industrial complex, to the war against cancer in the past four-plus years. Part of this book is the why and how of becoming an extremisthow to internalize a combat-steel attitude of no compromise! Without this fortitude and determination, it is inevitable that we will succumb to temptation, return to bad habits and attitudes, not make the changes we need to make, and never fully move forward upon a new pathway of health, healing, and self-transformationand create a new society.

I could not have gone raw extreme solely on my own, so I must thank my friend and comrade, Peter Lew, who cofounded the Raw Fight Club, a self-organized component of a revolutionary new project called the Scientific Soul Sessions (SSS) (www.scientificsoulsessions.com). Individual members of SSS interested in raw extremism formed the Raw Fight Club as a way to share information, to teach others the techniques of raw food making, to discuss and debate a range of topics including the U.S. medical system, the U.S. food industrial complex, capitalism, socialism, and our personal struggles. I drafted our Raw Fight Club rules, and we initially met weekly on Saturdays at my apartment and communally prepared and ate raw food dishes, sharing recipes and tips on the best ways to make the food, the benefits and changes wed experienced, and mutual rants and scathing condemnations of the system of industrialized food production and medicine that we all believe is more harmful than healthful. Several of our members have rid themselves of chronic maladies that the mainstream medical industry has no solutions for, only management methods that invariably rely upon pharmaceuticals. In the case of our sister Ceci, for example, who eighteen years ago was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and given no hope of ever walking again, here she is, in her mid-fifties, moving on her own two legs in her active life of organizing black urban farmers across the U.S.!

In this book, we make no pretenses of being nutritionists, doctors, or Wellness workers. We are humble people with a range of educational backgrounds from all walks of life. The common domi-nator we share is that none of us is affluent, and most could be described as living either below or close to the poverty level in American society (I myself, due to my more than four years of disability as a result of the ongoing cancer war, subsist upon Social Security assistance, which is a little over $700 a month).

This is why this book is special and rare: our attitude and practices and goals are extreme and we are boldly proud of this; we believe that because we are extremists, we actually have solutions and dare to share our experimental, avant-garde beliefs and practices without any concern for mainstream acceptance and compromise. Youll never find anything like what is here in any other book, and most likely never will, until the revolution is well on its way to ending industrialism, restoring commonality and self-sufficiency, and replacing the capitalist system with something that eliminates the profit motive and its relentless pursuit and replaces it with ecosocialism (some of whose features and expressions are advocated and implemented in the contents of this book).