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Haiti as Empire’s Laboratory

As the United States and its allies push renewed foreign intervention, the uses and abuses of the first Black republic as a testing ground of imperialism offer stark warnings. Haiti still struggles to be free.

NACLA 

August 30, 2023

By Jemima Pierre

 

 

In December 2019, President Donald Trump signed into law H.R.2116, also known as the Global Fragility Act (GFA). Although this act was developed by the conservative United States Institute of Peace, it was introduced to Congress by Democratic Representative Eliot L. Engel, then chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and cosponsored by a bipartisan group of representatives, including, significantly, Democrat Karen Bass. The GFA presents new strategies for deploying U.S. hard and soft power in a changing world. It focuses U.S. foreign policy on the idea that there are so-called “fragile states,” countries prone to instability, extremism, conflict, and extreme poverty, which are presumably threats to U.S. security.

Though not explicitly stated, analysts argue that the GFA is intended to prevent unnecessary and increasingly ineffective U.S. military interventions abroad. The stated goal is for the United States to invest in “its ability to prevent and mitigate violent conflict” by funding projects that mandate “an interagency approach among the key players, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Departments of State, Defense, and the Treasury” amid collaboration with “international allies and partners.”

In April 2022, the Biden-Harris administration affirmed its commitment to the GFA by outlining a strategy for its implementation. As detailed in the strategy’s prologue, the U.S. government’s new foreign policy approach depends on “willing partners to address common challenges, [and] share costs.” “Ultimately,” the document continues, “no U.S. or international intervention will be successful without the buy-in and mutual ownership of trusted regional, national and local partners.” The Biden administration has also stressed that the GFA will use the United Nations and “other multilateral organizations” to carry out its missions. The prologue outlines a 10-year plan for the GFA that, according to the U.S. Institute of Peace, will “allow for the integration and sequencing of U.S. diplomatic, development, and military-related efforts.” Among five trial countries for GFA implementation, Haiti is the first target.

Hailed by development experts as “landmark” legislation and, as Foreign Policy reported, a “potential game-changer in the world of U.S. foreign aid,” the act seems to offer a reset of U.S. foreign policy in ways that shift tactics while maintaining the objectives and strategies of U.S. global domination. The act and its prologue clearly articulate that the main goals are to advance “U.S. national security and interests” and to “manage rival powers,” presumably Russia and China. In this sense, especially for governments and societies in the Western Hemisphere, the GFA can be seen as a revamping of the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 U.S. foreign policy position that established the entire region as its recognized sphere of influence, shaping U.S. imperialism. The GFA deploys cunning language—tackling the “drivers” of violence, promoting stability in “conflict-prone regions,” supporting “locally-driven political solutions”—that hides the legislation’s real intent: to rebrand U.S. imperialism.

In their deliberations on the Global Fragilities Act, U.S. officials labeled Haiti as one of the world’s most “fragile” states. Yet this supposed fragility has been caused by more than a century of U.S. interference and a consistent push to deny Haitian sovereignty. Throughout a long history and complex—though blatant—imperialism, Haiti has been and continues to be the main laboratory for U.S. imperial machinations in the region and throughout the world. It is no surprise, therefore, that Haiti is the first object in the United States’ latest rearticulation of a policy for maintaining global hegemony.

In fact, a review of the actions of the United States and the so-called “international community” in Haiti from 2004 to the present demonstrates how Haiti has served as the testing ground—the laboratory—for much of what is encapsulated in the Global Fragilities Act. The GFA, in other words, is not so much a new policy as it is a formal expression of de facto U.S. policy toward Haiti and Haitian people over the past two decades. Without recognizing these uses and abuses of Haiti, the site of the longest and most brutal neocolonial experiment in the modern world, we cannot fully understand the workings of U.S. (and Western) hegemony. And if we cannot understand U.S. hegemony, then we cannot defeat it. And Haiti will never be free.

Sovereignty Again Denied

Since 2004, Haiti has been under renewed foreign occupation and lacks sovereignty. This is not hyperbole. Take, for example, a series of events and actions following the July 7, 2021 assassination of Haiti’s arguably illegitimate but still sitting president, Jovenel Moïse. The day after the assassination, Helen La Lime, head of the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH), declared that interim prime minister Claude Joseph would lead the Haitian government until elections were scheduled. Because of Joseph’s interim status, however, the line of succession was unclear. Days before his killing, Moïse had named neurosurgeon and political ally Ariel Henry as prime minister to replace Joseph, but he had not yet been sworn in.

A few days after Moïse’s assassination, the Biden administration sent a delegation to Haiti to meet with both Joseph and Henry, as well as with Joseph Lambert, who had been chosen by Haiti’s 10 remaining senators—the only elected officials in the country at the time—to stand in as president pending new elections. Despite these competing claims to power, Washington chose a side. The U.S. delegation sidelined Lambert, convinced Joseph and Henry to come to an agreement over Haiti’s governance, and urged Joseph to stand down.

A week later, on July 17, BINUH and the Core Group—an organization of mostly Western foreign powers dictating politics in Haiti—issued a statement. They called for the formation of a “consensual and inclusive government,” directing Henry, as the designated prime minister named by Moïse, “to continue the mission entrusted to him.” Two days later, on July 19, Joseph announced he would step aside, allowing Henry to assume the mantle of prime minister on July 20. The “new”—and completely unelected—government and cabinet was composed mostly of members of the Haitian Tèt Kale Party (PHTK), the neo-Duvalierist political party of Moïse and his predecessor Michel Martelly. In the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake, the PHTK, with Martelly at the helm, was put in place by the United States and other Western powers without the support of the Haitian masses.

After the U.S. Embassy, the Core Group, and the Organization of American States (OAS) released similar statements applauding the formation of a new “consensus” government, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken affirmed support for the unelected leaders. “The United States welcomes efforts by Haiti’s political leadership to come together in choosing an interim prime minister and a unity cabinet,” he said in a statement. In effect, Haiti’s true power brokers—or what I have called the “white rulers of Haiti”—determined the Haitian government’s replacement through a press release.

Meanwhile, the international community ’s decision-making process completely left out Haiti’s civil society organizations, which had been meeting since early 2021 to find a way to resolve the country’s political crisis as Moïse, already ruling by decree, was poised to overstay his constitutional mandate. These groups adamantly rejected the foreign-imposed interim government and have criticized the international community’s actions as blatantly colonial.

Who and what are the entities making decisions for Haiti and the Haitian people, and how did they claim such prominent roles in controlling Haitian politics? Haitians are not members of the BINUH, OAS, or Core Group. But also central is the question of the country’s sovereignty—or lack thereof. Haiti has been under foreign military and political control for almost 20 years. But this is not the first time, of course, that Haiti has been under occupation.

Legacies of Foreign Control and Occupation

In the summer of 1915, U.S. Marines landed in Port-au-Prince and initiated a 19-year period of military rule that sought to snuff the sovereignty of the modern world’s first Black republic. During this first occupation, as I have written elsewhere with Peter James Hudson, “the US rewrote the Haitian constitution and installed a puppet president [who signed treaties that turned over control of the Haitian state’s finances to the U.S. government], imposed press censorship and martial law, and brought Jim Crow policies and forced labor to the island.” In line with its racist view that Black people do not have the capacity for civilization or self-government, Washington rationalized that it was necessary to teach Haitians the arts of self-government—a view that continues today.

But the most pronounced labor of the U.S. Marines was counterinsurgency. They waged a “pacification” campaign throughout the countryside to suppress a peasant uprising against the occupation, using aerial bombardment techniques for the first time. Dropping bombs from planes onto Haitian villages, the pacification campaigns left more than 15,000 dead and countless others maimed. Those who survived and continued to resist were tortured and forced into labor camps.

The United States finally left the country in 1934 after massive grassroots protests by the Haitian people. But one of the most consequential results was the establishment and training during the occupation of a local police force, the Gendarmerie d’Haïti. For years, this police force and its successors were used to terrorize the Haitian people, a legacy that continues today.

In the years after the 1915-1934 occupation, the United States continued to intervene politically and economically in Haitian affairs. The most notorious of these engagements was the U.S. support for the brutal dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. In the first democratic elections after the fall of the Duvalier regime, the United States unsuccessfully tried to prevent the ascension of the popular candidate, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. However, nine months after his January 1991 election, Aristide was deposed in a CIA-bankrolled coup d’état. The coup was not consolidated, though, because of continuous resistance from the Haitian people. By 1994, U.S. president Bill Clinton’s administration was forced to bring Aristide back to Haiti after three years in exile—with more than 20,000 U.S. troops in tow. Aristide was now a hostage to U.S. neoliberal policy. The troops remained until 2000.

Haiti officially lost its nominal sovereignty again in late February 2004. The Western governments, as well as the powerful Haitian elite, never supported the Aristide government, presumably because of its “populist and anti-market economy” positions, as former U.S. ambassador Janet Sanderson later alluded in a leaked 2008 diplomatic cable calling for continued foreign intervention. Thus, when Aristide won a second term in the 2000 elections, just months after his Fanmi Lavalas party gained control of a majority of seats in the parliament, the U.S. and its Western partners worked to discredit the administration. The French ambassador to Haiti at the time, Thierry Burkhard, later admitted that France was concerned about Aristide demanding financial restitution for the immoral indemnity—or what The New York Times has called “The Ransome”—that Haiti was forced to pay for its independence.

The plans for the 2004 intervention and occupation were hatched the previous year at a meeting in Canada dubbed the “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti.” Aristide had been back in power for two years. Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien and his Liberal Party government organized a two-day conference from January 31 to February 1, 2003 at Meech Lake, a government resort near Ottawa, that brought together top officials from the United States, European Union, and OAS to decide the future of Haiti’s governance. There were no representatives from Haiti in attendance. Canadian journalist Michel Vastel, who got wind of this secret meeting, reported that the discussion in Ottawa included the possible removal of Aristide with a potential Western-led trusteeship over Haiti.

On February 29, 2004, President Aristide was deposed, bundled onto a flight by U.S. Marines, and flown to the Central African Republic. Almost immediately, U.S. President George W. Bush sent 200 U.S. troops to Port-au-Prince to “help stabilize the country.” By the evening of Aristide’s expulsion, 2,000 U.S., French, and Canadian soldiers were on the ground.

In the meantime, at the behest of permanent members the United States and France, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) unanimously passed a resolution that authorized “the immediate deployment of a Multinational Interim Force for a period of three months to help to secure and stabilize the capital, Port-au-Prince, and elsewhere in the country.” In other words, the UN voted to send a “peacekeeping” mission to Haiti. Significantly, Resolution 1529 was passed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which, unlike a Chapter VI resolution, authorizes UN forces to take military action through land, air, and sea without requiring the consent of the parties in conflict. That is, the resolution empowered the multinational force to “take all necessary measures to fulfill its mandate.”

The UN mission to Haiti raises four important points. First, Haiti was the only country not engulfed in civil war to receive a Chapter VII UN military deployment. There were certainly local protests during the passage of the resolution, but these were of Haitians demonstrating against the removal of their democratically elected president. The situation in Haiti, in other words, could not be considered a civil war, in the normal sense of the word, that merited a Chapter VII deployment (if such deployment can ever be merited). Rather, through the deployment, the same characters who initiated and consolidated the coup suppressed a people’s protest.

Second, key players in backing and aiding Aristide’s removal were also permanent members of the UNSC, the only body with the power to deploy a multinational “peacekeeping” mission. From the Ottawa Initiative, it was clear that the United States, France, and Canada had conspired to remove Aristide and destroy the Haitian state. Third, and relatedly, to justify the foreign intervention and subsequent occupation, the United States and France concocted a narrative that Aristide had abdicated the presidency. Indeed, UN security documents and resolutions about Haiti during this time, as well as Western media reports, pointed to Aristide’s presumed “resignation” as the reason for the deployment of UN military forces.

On March 1, 2004, the morning after Aristide’s ouster, Democracy Now! broadcasted a remarkable live program during which U.S. congresswoman and chairperson of the Congressional Black Caucus, Maxine Waters, called in to say that she had spoken to President Aristide. “He said that he was kidnapped,” Waters reported. “He said that he was forced to leave Haiti?…?that the American Embassy sent the diplomats?…?and they ordered him to leave.” In the weeks following, Aristide spoke to Democracy Now! about the kidnapping. “When you have militaries coming from abroad surrounding your house, taking control of the airport, surrounding the national palace, being in the streets, and [they] take you from your house to put you in the plane,” he said, “?…?it was using force to take an elected president out of his country.”

Fourth, and perhaps most egregiously, the UNSC claimed that the so-called interim government set up in the wake of Aristide’s ouster had asked for the stabilization force. But that government was illegitimate. In his 2012 book Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, Jeb Sprague recounts that in the early morning after the Aristides were escorted to the airport, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, James Foley, picked up Haitian Supreme Court Justice Boniface Alexandre and took him to the “prime minister’s office for consultations in preparation for his ascension to power.” Haiti’s prime minister, Yvon Neptune, later reported that he did not have a say—nor did he participate, as dictated by Haitian law—in the swearing-in of Haiti’s U.S.-installed interim president. Alexandre’s first act as interim president was, on the order of the U.S. ambassador, to submit an official request to the UNSC for multinational military forces to restore law and order. The UNSC immediately authorized the deployment.

Taken together, these realities demonstrate how the entire UN deployment and occupation—based on a coup d’état sponsored by two permanent members of the UNSC, claims that the president had resigned, and the illegal swearing-in of an illegitimate head of state—were fraudulent. At the same time, protests from the Haitian people were dismissed by Western governments and media as “gang violence” and the action of “bandits.” Such characterizations not only tapped into age-old racist stereotypes of Haitians as always already violent, but also gave more pretext for the Chapter VII deployment. To add insult to injury, most of the UN resolutions referred to securing Haiti’s “sovereignty,” as if this sovereignty could coexist with foreign political control and military occupation.

The illegal 2004 coup d’état was both perpetrated and cleaned up with UN sanction. On June 1, 2004, the UN officially took over from U.S. forces and set up the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) under the guise of establishing peace and security. A multibillion-dollar operation, MINUSTAH had, at any given time, between 6,000 and 13,000 troops and police stationed in Haiti alongside thousands of bureaucrats, technical staff, and civilian personnel. In a horrific parallel to the first U.S. occupation of Haiti, MINUSTAH soldiers committed numerous acts of violence against the Haitian people, including shootings and rapes. MINUSTAH soldiers were also responsible for bringing cholera into the country, a disease that officially killed as many as 30,000 and infected almost a million people.

A protest commenorates the 100th anniversary of the U.S. occupation of Haiti and the launch of the people’s tribunal, Port-au-Prince, July 2015. (MARK SCHULLER)

But what most solidified this occupation was the creation and operationalization of the Core Group. An international coalition of self-proclaimed and non-Black “friends” of Haiti, the Core Group was established as part of the 2004 UN resolution that brought foreign soldiers and technocrats to the country. While the group’s membership has fluctuated since its initial formation, it currently has nine members: Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the United States, European Union, OAS, and United Nations Organization. Significantly, the group has never had a Haitian representative. The Core Group’s stated goal is to oversee Haiti’s governance through the coordination of the various branches and elements of the United Nations mission in Haiti. But in practice, the Core Group represents an insidious example of (neo) colonialism driven by white supremacy.

Imperial Punishment

While there was a formal drawdown of the MINUSTAH mission in 2017, the UN has remained in Haiti through a set of new offices, culminating in the establishment of the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) in 2019. Despite protests in Haiti against ongoing UN presence, the UNSC continues to renew BINUH’s mandate each year. The latest renewal was on July 14, 2023. BINUH has had an outsized, public role in Haitian internal political affairs and is often the mouthpiece of the Core Group.

The overwhelming power of the Core Group is blatantly public. At a special session on Haiti at the UNSC on April 26, 2023, the newly appointed head of BINUH, María Isabel Salvador of Ecuador, took the lead in presenting Haiti in typical racist terms— as a basket case of unthinking and violent gangs. Unelected and unaccountable to the Haitian people, the Core Group is the arbiter of colonial direct rule of Haiti.

Western imperialism in Haiti is a hierarchical structure established through the power of the United States, which then outsources colonial control of Haiti to others. In a confidential 2008 diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, then U.S. ambassador Sanderson called MINUSTAH “a remarkable product and symbol of hemispheric cooperation in a country with little going for it.” She continued: “There is no feasible substitute for this UN presence. It is a financial and regional security bargain for the [U.S. government]?…?We must work to preserve MINUSTAH by continuing to partner with it at all levels?…?That partnering will also help counter perceptions in Latin contributing countries that Haitians see their presence in Haiti as unwanted.”

Brazil, for example, home to the largest Black population outside of Africa, oversaw the military wing of the occupation since its inception. The nominally leftist administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva spent more than $750 million to fund this operation. As I have written elsewhere, Haiti was Brazil’s “imperial ground zero.” But there was also buy-in from other marginalized governments from the Caribbean and Latin America. At one point, MINUSTAH’s leadership included a representative from Trinidad and Tobago and an African American attorney and diplomat. And this leadership was accompanied by a multinational military force made up of troops from several South American, Caribbean, and African countries, including Argentina, Colombia, Grenada, Bolivia, Benin, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Cameroon, Niger, and Mali.

In addition to Brazil, other neighboring countries’ neocolonial governments have been similarly recruited by the United States to aid in its undermining of Haitian sovereignty. The Dominican Republic, for instance, funded and housed the ragtag paramilitary troops that terrorized Haiti from 2000 to 2004. More recently, in the fall of 2022, Mexico joined the United States last year in advocating before the UNSC for renewed foreign military intervention in Haiti. Washington has urged Canada to take the lead, and in June 2023, Ottawa announced plans to coordinate international security assistance to Haiti, including police training, from the Dominican Republic.

Since Moïse’s 2021 assassination, Haitians have protested foreign support for the illegitimate and corrupt de facto government, rising inflation and fuel prices, illegal weapons dumping, and a dizzying rise in violence. In response, the United States and its allies have continued to push for foreign military intervention in the country. In January 2023, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) supported the call for a foreign force. In July, U.S. Secretary of State Blinken, Vice President Kamala Harris, and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries convinced the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to reverse its initial course affirming Haitian sovereignty to now call for intervention. At the time of writing, the United States was poised to introduce a UNSC resolution after Kenya expressed willingness to lead a multinational armed mission. It must be noted that it is Haiti’s Core Group-installed Prime Minister Henry who, along with the UN office in Haiti, is insisting on this violent solution to the crisis in the country—a crisis they themselves helped to create.

The Haitian community’s continued protests against foreign troops and Western meddling are a testament to their unwavering courage.

The denial of Haitian sovereignty seems to be, as Sprague has described, “a synchronized effort by cooperating states and institutions bolstered by a global elite’s consensus against popular democracy.” The Global Fragilities Act, then, not only lays out a plan that has already been implemented in Haiti over the last 20 years, but also directly emerges out of U.S. experiences in the Haitian (neo)colonial laboratory. We need to recognize Haiti’s critical place as a testing ground for U.S. and Western imperialism.

But Haiti is also the site of one of the longest struggles in the world for both Black liberation and anticolonial independence. This explains the U.S. empire’s constant reactionary onslaught against the people of Haiti, punishing their repeated attempts at sovereignty with decades of instability designed to secure and expand U.S. hegemony. For two centuries, imperial counterinsurgency against Haiti has aimed to terminate the most ambitious revolutionary experiment in the modern world. The tactics deployed to attack Haitian sovereignty have been consistent and persistent. We ignore how these tactics may be used on the rest of the region at our peril.

 

[Jemima Pierre is Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at UCLA and a research associate at the Center for the Study of Race, Gender and Class at the University of Johannesburg. She is the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race and numerous academic and public articles about Haiti.]

STATEMENT – The Gaza Resolution [October 28, 2023]

Progressive International

October 28, 2023

 

 

Popular movements, parties, and unions across the world issue a pledge to stand for Palestinian liberation and sever ties of complicity with the State of Israel.

We, the undersigned:

(1) Grieve the lives claimed in the renewed cycle of violence, brutality, and destruction unleashed by the ongoing occupation of Palestine;

(2) Consider that the Zionist project is colonial in nature, built on stolen land, and sustained by the systematic exclusion, exploitation, and extermination of the Palestinian people;

(3) Recognize Zionism’s use as a weapon of Western imperialism and the Israeli state as an instrument to suppress sovereignty and unity in the Arab world — and advance violent reaction far beyond it;

(4) Consider that the Zionist regime has demonstrated its genocidal nature both in intent and in effect;

(5) Understand that the fascist violence against the Palestinian people today foreshadows the violence of Western imperialism towards all the world’s workers and oppressed peoples tomorrow because this is the historical tendency of capitalism in decay;

(6) Acknowledge that the Palestinian people face a national struggle, a class struggle, and a feminist struggle; affirm that the national struggle must be won for the other struggles to advance; and reject the weaponization of “colonial feminism” to obscure the primary contradictions of colonialism and imperialism and distract from the patriarchal and sexual violence inherent in them;

(7) Recognize that as a colonial project and imperial outpost, the Israeli state stands against the tendency of history to advance toward liberation, and that the liberation of the Palestinian people will therefore represent not only a severe blow to imperialism everywhere but also a progressive leap for all humanity;

(8) Reject the false equivalence of colonizer and colonized, recognize that the violence of the oppressed is a response to the original condition of their oppression, and uphold the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to resist, enshrined in UN Resolution 2625, as “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means”;

(9) Denounce the disinformation being spread by the Israeli state and advanced by imperialist powers and their allies, which dehumanizes the Palestinian people, fuels the genocidal war against them, and whitewashes the crimes of their oppressors;

(10) Condemn the silence or equivocation of the non-governmental organizations and movements that weaponize human rights to transform our individual and collective entitlements to assistance, protection, dignity, and solidarity into an arsenal aimed at adversaries of the imperial order;

(11) Support the self-determination and sovereignty of front-line states and regional anti-systemic movements, whose democratic aspirations are constrained both by Israeli military aggression and US pressures to normalize relations with the Israeli state;

(12) Hear the urgent calls for solidarity from the Palestinian people, who demand, in the short-term:

  • an immediate end to the genocide,
  • the immediate delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza and the restoration of water, food, fuel and medical supplies to its people,
  • a military embargo against the Israeli state,
  • an investigation into the crimes against humanity perpetrated by representatives of the Israeli regime and their accomplices around the world,
  • the removal of Palestinian political parties from the US Treasury’s OFAC terrorism sanctions program,
  • the release of all political prisoners, and
  • determined political action at all levels to advance these goals;

(13) Recognize that these immediate aims remain insufficient and commit to supporting the long-standing aspirations of the Palestinian people by:

  • dismantling the mechanisms of corporate, institutional, and state complicity that sustain the Israeli apartheid state and its military machine, including through strikes and direct actions targeting the producers and suppliers of weapons, digital services, informational services, and related products;
  • upholding the truth and combatting the spread of lies and disinformation advanced by the Zionist regime and its imperialist backers, including by exposing their crimes against humanity and advancing popular education on the long struggle for Palestine’s national liberation;
  • advancing the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle around the world, including by taking on Western militarism on all continents;

(14) Knowing that our collective struggles for liberation converge in Palestine, commit to responding to these calls for solidarity; consent for our actions to be measured against the seriousness of their aspirations; and vow to choke the arteries of complicity that sustain the Zionist oppression of the Palestinian people militarily, financially, technologically, and culturally.

Signatories:

National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa – NUMSA (South Africa) • Palestinian Youth Movement (International) • Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan – MKSS (India) • DiEM25 (Europe) • The Red Nation (International) • Potere al Popolo (Italy) • Women’s International Democratic Federation – WIDF (International) • Black Alliance for Peace (United States) • DSA International Committee (United States) • Black Lives Matter UK (United Kingdom) • Communard Union (Venezuela) • Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (South Africa) • Telar: Territorios Latinoamericanos en Resistencia (International) • Movimento de Pequenos Agricultores – MPA (Brazil) • Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem Teto – MTST (Brazil) • Ukamau (Chile) • Frente Popular Darío Santillán (Argentina) • Congreso de los Pueblos (Colombia) • Palestine Action US (United States) • Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (Pakistan) • Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network (International) • Mtandao wa Vikundi vya Wakulima Tanzania – MVIWATA (Tanzania) • Women’s Democratic Front (Pakistan) • Palestinian Feminist Collective (International) • Communist Party of Kenya (Kenya) • Kuwaiti Progressive Movement (Kuwait) • WAELE Africa (International) • Coalition for Revolution – CORE (Nigeria) • Madaar Sorkh (Iran) • Borotba (Ukraine) • Danesh va Mardom (Iran) • House of Latin America (Iran) • Solidarity Iran (Iran) • Izquierda Libertaria (Chile) • Unión Sindical Obrera de la Industria del Petróleo – USO (Colombia) • Akcja Socjalistyczna (Poland) • El Maizal Commune (Venezuela) • Vencedores de Carorita Commune (Venezuela) • El Movimiento Democratico de Mujeres (Spain) • The International People’s Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism (International) • Instituto Simón Bolívar (Venezuela)  • Cage (United Kingdom).

+++

Nosotros, los abajo firmantes

(1) Lamentamos las vidas segadas en el renovado ciclo de violencia, brutalidad y destrucción desatado por la actual ocupación de Palestina;

(2) Consideramos que el proyecto sionista es de naturaleza colonial, está construido sobre tierras robadas y se sustenta en la exclusión, explotación y exterminio sistemáticos del pueblo palestino;

(3) Reconocemos la utilización del sionismo como arma del imperialismo occidental y del Estado israelí como instrumento para suprimir la soberanía y la unidad en el mundo árabe, y fomentar la reacción violenta más allá de éste;

(4) Consideramos que el régimen sionista ha demostrado su naturaleza genocida tanto en intención como en efecto;

(5) Comprendemos que la violencia fascista ejercida hoy contra el pueblo palestino es un presagio de la violencia que el imperialismo occidental ejercerá mañana contra todos los trabajadores y pueblos oprimidos del mundo, porque ésta es la tendencia histórica del capitalismo en decadencia;

(6) Reconocemos que el pueblo palestino se enfrenta a una lucha nacional, a una lucha de clases y a una lucha feminista; afirmamos que la lucha nacional debe ganarse para que avancen las demás luchas; y rechazamos la militarización del “feminismo colonial” para ocultar las contradicciones primarias del colonialismo y el imperialismo y distraer la atención de la violencia patriarcal y sexual inherente a ellos;

(7) Reconocemos que, como proyecto colonial y avanzada imperial, el Estado israelí se opone a la tendencia de la historia a avanzar hacia la liberación, y que la liberación del pueblo palestino representará, por tanto, no sólo un duro golpe al imperialismo en todas partes, sino también un salto progresivo para toda la humanidad;

(8) Rechazamos la falsa equivalencia entre colonizador y colonizado, reconocemos que la violencia de los oprimidos es una respuesta a la condición original de su opresión, y defendemos el derecho inalienable del pueblo palestino a resistir, consagrado en la Resolución 2625 de la ONU, como “la legitimidad de la lucha de los pueblos por la independencia, la integridad territorial, la unidad nacional y la liberación de la dominación colonial, el apartheid y la ocupación extranjera por todos los medios disponibles”;

(9) Denunciamos la desinformación difundida por el Estado israelí y promovida por sus partidarios en la dirección política y los medios de comunicación imperialistas, que deshumaniza al pueblo palestino, alimenta la guerra genocida contra él y blanquea los crímenes de sus opresores;

(10) Condenamos el silencio o el equívoco de las organizaciones y movimientos no gubernamentales que instrumentalizan los derechos humanos para transformar nuestros derechos individuales y colectivos a la asistencia, la protección, la dignidad y la solidaridad en un arsenal dirigido contra los adversarios del orden imperial;

(11) Apoyamos la autodeterminación y la soberanía de los Estados en primera línea y de los movimientos regionales antisistémicos, cuyas aspiraciones democráticas se ven limitadas tanto por la agresión militar israelí como por las presiones de los Estados Unidos para normalizar las relaciones con el Estado israelí;

(12) Escuchamos los urgentes llamados a la solidaridad del pueblo palestino, que exige, a corto plazo:

  • el fin inmediato del genocidio
  • la entrega inmediata de ayuda humanitaria a Gaza y el restablecimiento del suministro de agua, alimentos, combustible y medicamentos a su población,
  • un embargo militar contra el estado israelí,
  • una investigación de los crímenes contra la humanidad perpetrados por los representantes del régimen israelí y sus cómplices en todo el mundo,
  • la retirada de los partidos políticos palestinos del programa de sanciones por terrorismo de la OFAC del Tesoro de los Estados Unidos,
  • la liberación de todos los presos políticos, y
  • una acción política decidida a todos los niveles para avanzar hacia estos objetivos;

(13) Reconocemos que estos objetivos inmediatos siguen siendo insuficientes y nos comprometemos a apoyar las aspiraciones a largo plazo del pueblo palestino mediante

  • el desmantelamiento de los mecanismos de complicidad empresarial, institucional y estatal que sostienen el Estado de apartheid israelí y su maquinaria militar, incluso mediante huelgas y acciones directas dirigidas contra los productores y proveedores de armas, servicios digitales, servicios de información y productos relacionados;
  • la defensa de la verdad y la lucha contra la difusión de mentiras y la desinformación promovidas por el régimen sionista y sus patrocinadores imperialistas, entre otras cosas denunciando sus crímenes contra la humanidad y promoviendo la educación popular sobre la larga lucha por la liberación nacional de Palestina;
  • el fomento de la lucha antiimperialista y anticolonialista en todo el mundo, incluso enfrentándonos al militarismo occidental en todos los continentes;

(14) Conscientes de que nuestras luchas colectivas por la liberación convergen en Palestina, comprometernos a responder a estos llamados de solidaridad; consentir que nuestras acciones se midan con la seriedad de sus aspiraciones; y comprometernos a sofocar las redes de complicidad que sostienen militar, financiera, tecnológica y culturalmente la opresión sionista del pueblo palestino.

Firmantes:

Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores Metalúrgicos de Sudáfrica – NUMSA (Sudáfrica) • Movimiento de la Juventud Palestina (Internacional) • Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (India) • DiEM25 (Europa), The Red Nation (Internacional) • Potere al Popolo (Italia) • DSA International Committee (Estados Unidos) • Federación Democrática Internacional de Mujeres (Internacional) • Telar: Territorios Latinoamericanos en Resistencia (Internacional) • Movimento de Pequenos Agricultores – MPA (Brasil) • Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem Teto – MTST (Brasil) • Ukamau (Chile) • Frente Popular Darío Santillán (Argentina) • Congreso de los Pueblos (Colombia) • Alianza Negra por la Paz (Estados Unidos) • Black Lives Matter UK (Reino Unido) • Unión Comunera (Venezuela) • Partido Socialista Revolutionario de los Trabajadores (Sudáfrica) • Palestine Action US (Estados Unidos) • Partido Haqooq-e-Khalq (Pakistán) • Red de Solidaridad con los Presos Palestinos Samidoun (Internacional) • Frente Democrático de Mujeres (Pakistán) • Colectivo Feminista Palestino (Internacional) • Partido Comunista de Kenia (Kenia) • Codepink (Estados Unidos) • Mathare Social Justice Center (Kenia) • Movimiento Progresista Kuwaití (Kuwait) • WAELE Africa (Internacional) • Coalición para la Revolución – CORE (Nigeria) • Madaar Sorkh (Irán) • Borotba (Ucrania) • Akcja Socjalistyczna (Polonia) • Danesh va Mardom (Irán) • Casa de América Latina (Irán) • Solidaridad Irán (Irán) • Comuna el Maizal (Venezuela) • Comuna Vencedores de Carorita (Venezuela) • El Movimiento Democratico de Mujeres (España) • Izquierda Libertaria (Chile) • Unión Sindical Obrera de la Industria del Petróleo – USO (Colombia) • The International People’s Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism (Internacional) • Instituto Simón Bolívar (Venezuela) • Cage (Reino Unido).

 

Zionism: An Arm of US Imperialism

October 28, 2023

By Hiroyuki Hamada

 

Lift the blockade. End Israeli apartheid. Support the struggle for liberation. 

 

 

Among the dissident communities, there is a deep seated belief that the root of all issues should be traced back to a theory which roughly amounts to “Jews conspiring to dominate the world”.  This sort of ideology comes in many forms and manifests in many ways. Traditionally it is closely associated with various fascist ideologies. Zionism has merged with the US imperialism. But it should be clearly noted that the Zionist Israel can’t survive without financial and military support of the US empire.

Ultimately, the theory obscures the fact that the capitalist social formation structurally locks people into caste-like social order in which people are deprived of their social relations based on their interests, while being conditioned to follow the imperatives of the ruling class. The idea prevents actual revolutionary momentums (the struggle against the class system and theft of collective powers by the minority) to take effects by negating implementations of actual measures aimed at overcoming the current social formation.  It reduces the problem into a vague abstract concept which can’t be tackled in reality.  Those who embrace this sort of ideology often laughs at people’s struggles saying that you are just pawns of the larger scheme by the evil whatever.

I see this dynamic in the light of recent development in Palestine.  The difficulty of overcoming the social formation resides in the fact that the social relations are manipulated and controlled for the interests of the ruling class. In Palestine this manifests in blatant abuse of humanity and extreme violence.  Routine kidnapping of children, illegal detention with tortures, destruction of houses/farmland, no freedom of movement, routine assassinations, routine military assaults, and embargoes. For people who lives in the society, this presents real life and death issues. They are cornered into impossible situations to break free. Half the population of Gaza are children. They grow up in the prison cage without any hope, seeing their houses destroyed and family members killed. Would it be a surprise to see an armed struggle?  What is the role of those westerners who desire a better social formation?  It can’t be laughing at those who struggle saying that you are just pawns of the empire, is it?  Or allowing only acceptable form of non- violent dissent—how can the west which demonized and killed MLK as soon as he spoke about imperialism decide how to struggle? Palestinians need determined support in obtaining their undeniable rights to be. The westerners aren’t in positions to dictate how they struggle, but westerners can stop the imperial domination.

 

This certainly doesn’t mean that we should engage in corporate backed identity politics. The problem should be seen as a structural one backed by capitalist social institutions. The aim is to change the structure and to allow people to dictate social institutions. The aim must not be an isolated tokenism within the imperial structure at the expense of the other oppressed people.  In the case of Palestine, it is clear that the Palestinians are under severe repression, but it is also clear that the people in Israel are forced to play a monster under Zionist/imperialist rule. The support they get from the US would stop immediately if it tries to peacefully coexist with neighboring countries while allowing all people to prioritize their own interests in harmony with the land. The imperial manipulations must stop.

It is crucial to see the presence of the imperial formation, however, it is also crucial to see the actual dynamics and struggles which take impossible measures, limited resources and long term plans in overcoming the situation. We don’t live in a blue print of an ideology. We live in a material reality which has been distorted to fit the imperial framework. Without seeing reality for what it is, we can not go forward with actual results.

In Palestine, how could we expect constructive results when we are among dissidents who believe Jews are dominating the world?  That surely encourage anti-semitism—a driving force of Israel.  It narrowly defines the issue as Israel vs, Palestinians. It allows the US to come in as a neutral mediator of some sort in constructing a “solution” which do not benefit the people in the region, or it continues to allow Israel to do what the US desires while the actual situation hidden in the false premise.

Zionism must be denounced wholeheartedly, and it must be done within the context of the anti-imperial struggle in which Muslims, Jews and the rest of the people can unite.

 

The Global South is Pro-Palestinian

Middle Nation

October 11, 2023

“The Arab world is with the Palestinians. Africa is with the Palestinians. Latin America is with the Palestinians. Asia is

 

 

Message to the Israeli People

Message to the Israeli People

Middle Nation

October 14, 2023

 

“If you find this controversial, it is because you have never heard the conversation being had by most of the planet about the West, and don’t realize how ludicrous Western exceptionalism sounds to the rest of us.”

-Shahid Bolsen on the inferiority of Western values, Group identity must be shared beliefs, July 23, 2023

 

Who is Shahid Bolsen? Bolen responds to controversial allegations:

 

Leila Khaled’s Key Note at the International Dilemmas of Humanity Conference

SABC News, Africa

Oct 14, 2023

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, NUMSA is hosting the third International Dilemmas of Humanity conference in Johannesburg. The Dilemmas of Humanity process began in 2004 when popular organizations and movements from all over the world came together to confront the crisis of humanity caused by capitalism with concrete alternatives and solutions. Palestinian activist Leila Khaled delivers the key note address.

The Black Panther Party On Palestine

The Hampton Institute 

May 19, 2021

By Greg Thomas

The following article by Greg Thomas, the curator of “George Jackson in the Sun of Palestine,” was published in Ittijah, a new Arabic-language publication by Palestinian youth issued by Nabd, the Palestinian Youth Forum.  Dr. Greg Thomas is Associate Professor of Black Studies & English Literature at Tufts University, who crafted the exhibition, displayed first at the Abu Jihad Museum in occupied Palestine and then in Oakland and in several other US locations. The exhibition “includes drawings, woodcuts, political posters and other art tied to Jackson’s life and the Palestinian and U.S. prisoners’ movements, letters of solidarity between Palestinian and American prisoners, letters from Jackson and coverage of his life and death, photos of Palestinian art from the Apartheid Wall, and other artifacts tying the movements together.” It is named for Black Panther and Soledad Brother George Jackson, murdered in 1971 in a claimed “escape attempt;” poetry by the Palestinian leader and poet, Samih al-Qasim, including “Enemy of the Sun” and “I Defy,” was found in his cell after his death. (Handwritten copies of the poems where originally misattributed to Jackson, in what Thomas refers to as a “magical mistake” born of “radical kinship” between liberation movements.)

Download the original Arabic issue of Ittijah here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1Wg2eU7ijQhQnR1anBvNmUtdkk/view

The leader of the Black Panther Party (BPP), Huey P. Newton once wrote, “Israel was created by Western imperialism and is maintained by Western firepower.”  He likewise said that ‘America’ must die so that the world can live.  Neither Zionism nor “Americanism” would escape the wrath of these anti-colonialist/anti-racist/anti-imperialist Black Panthers, an organization founded in 1966 as the “Black Panther Party for Self-Defense” in Oakland, California.

Relatedly, by 1967, when the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began to transform itself from a liberal civil rights organization into a radical Black nationalist organization that would rename itself the Student National Coordinating Committee, it also took a bold position in support of Palestine.  The text of SNCC’s statement was co-drafted by Stokely Carmichael, who would go on to make history as a revolutionary icon of “Black Power” and Pan-African movements for liberation.  But SNCC paid for this position dearly.  Its economic patronage by white liberalism in general and white ‘Jewish’ liberalism in particular came to a screeching halt.  Historically, like all Black people who refuse to support “Jewish” Euro-imperialism, it would be represented as a band of ungrateful savages – “anti-Semitic” and “racist in reverse,” in other words – insofar as it would refused to put white and “Jewish” interests before its own Black nationalist and internationalist interests in North America and the world at large.

Nonetheless, it was a number of ex-SNCC radicals who published Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance in 1970 — after they had formed Drum & Spear Press in Washington D.C., and after that book project co-edited by Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb had been rejected by a dozen other publishing houses.  This was the same collection of poems seized from the cell of George Jackson (Black Panther Field Marshal), after his assassination by San Quentin prison guards on August 21, 1971: “Enemy of the Sun” by Samih al-Qasim was even mysteriously published in the Black Panther newspaper under “Comrade George’s” name in a magical “mistake” that would cement a certain Black/Palestinian connection for decades to come.

Condemning Zionist imperialism and white colonial liberalism led to no crisis for the Black Panther Party, for it was revolutionary rather than a reformist organization from its inception.  The party issued at least three official statements on Palestine and the “Middle East” in 1970, 1974, and 1980, besides anonymous Black Panther articles promoting Palestinian liberation as well as assorted PLO editorials in The Black Panther Intercommunal New Service, a periodical with a global circulation of several hundred thousand copies weekly in its run from April 25, 1967 to September 1980.

The first official BPP statement in 1970 by proclaimed, “We support the Palestinian’s just struggle for liberation one hundred percent.  We will go on doing this, and we would like for all of the progressive people of the world to join in our ranks in order to make a world in which all people can live.”  The Panthers made a point to mention that they were “in daily contact with the PLO,” provocatively, via the office that they had opened in Algiers as an “international section” of the party.  This statement was made at a press conference in 1970 and republished in 1972 as a part of To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton.

What’s more, the BPP Minister of Defense put a sharp spin on the Zionist rhetoric of “the right to exist,” mocking its arrogance with a Black revolutionary flair:  “The Jewish people have a right to exist so long as they solely exist to down the reactionary expansionist Israeli government.”

A second statement was issued by Newton in 1974.  It would not budge from the BPP’s automatic support for Palestine.  Yet the push here was now for an Israeli retreat to 1967 borders, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, for a pan-Arab populism that would move toward a “people’s republic of the Middle East.”  This was mostly a rhetorical critique of U.S. puppet regimes in the Arab world, which is to say, their comprador betrayal of Palestine:  Elaine Brown reports that the masses of the party favored a position of complete Palestinian decolonization in any and every case.

A third official BPP statement followed Huey Newton’s trip to Lebanon in 1980.  It is a virtual conversational profile of Yasser Arafat as well.  The PLO Chairman vilified in the West was presented as an icon of peace with anti-imperialist justice in strict contrast to Menachem Begin.  In minute detail, the Panther newspaper recalls Newton’s visit to a Palestinian school, the Red Crescent Society Hospital, and the Palestine Martyrs Works Society (SAMED), suggesting a significant parallel between these PLO programs in Beirut and the “survival pending revolution” programs of the Black Panther Party in North America.  This written portrait of two revolutionary leaders and organizations in contact again conjures up some striking images found elsewhere:  Huey greeting Arafat ecstatically in an airport somewhere and Huey smiling in front of a refugee camp in Lebanon with his arms around two armed Palestinian youth.

The afterlife of the Black Panther Party is noteworthy to be sure.  Elaine Brown would proudly recap its history of Palestinian solidarity in 2015, while Kathleen Cleaver remembered in the same year that Fateh helped them construct their office (or “embassy-without-a-state”) in Algeria.  Safiya Bukhari would continue to recite Palestinian poetry in tribute to “fallen comrades,” long after George Jackson became Samih al-Qasim and Samih al-Qasim became George Jackson thanks to the party’s newspaper.  Lastly, Dhoruba Bin Wahad would be denied entry into Palestine in 2009 and briefly detained by the Israelis in Jordan.  He was en route to a conference on political prisoners and representing the “Jericho Movement to Free Political Prisoners in the U.S.”   And it is difficult to find a more radical or brilliant critic of Zionism, Negrophobia and Islamophobia in the Western Hemisphere today.

Moreover, before Stokely Carmichael moved back to Guinea and changed his name to become Kwame Ture, he was for a time affiliated with the Black Panthers as its “honorary prime minster.”  Despite their subsequent differences, he arguably became the greatest Black giant of anti-Zionism himself.  He described Palestine as “the tip of Africa” and said that he had “two dreams” (which were revolutionary, anti-Apartheid dreams in fact):  “I dream, number one, of having coffee with my wife in South Africa;  and number two, of having mint tea in Palestine.”  This means that the legacy of his as well as SNCC’s historic solidarity with Palestine can be seen as intertwined with the legacy of the Black Panthers, not to mention Malcolm X.

Indeed, when Huey P. Newton referred to the Black Panther Party as the “heirs of Malcolm X,” he could have been talking about their shared anti-Zionist stance against white racism empire.  In 1964, Malcolm made his Hajj and epic political tour of the Afro-Arab world.  He spent two days in Gaza (5-6 September), where he prayed at a local mosque, gave a press conference at the parliament building, met Harun Hashim Rashad (as May Alhassen informs us), and visited several Palestinian refugee camps.  Soon he met the first Chairman of the PLO Chairman, Ahmed Shukeiri, in Cairo – after the second Arab League Summit in Alexandria — and published his blistering polemic against “Zionist Logic” in The Egyptian Gazette (17 September 1964):  “The modern 20th century weapon of neo-imperialism is “dollarism,” he wrote:  “The Zionists have mastered the science of dollarism….  The ever-scheming European imperialists wisely placed Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world, infiltrate and sow the seed of dissension among African leaders and also divide the Africans against the Asians.”  Here Malcolm (or, now, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz) prefigures Fayez Sayegh’s powerful booklet, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965);  and he eerily portends Benjamin Netanyahu’s wretched tour of Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia in 2016.  The 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party (for Self-Defense) is thus a great time to remember the whole genealogy of a Black revolutionary tradition of opposition to Zionism and all forms of Western racism, colonialism and imperialism, perhaps especially in this special place that produced Black Panther/Fahd al-Aswad formations of own.

Links

 

[Dr. Greg Thomas is Associate Professor of Black Studies & English Literature at Tufts University.]

WATCH: Concerning Violence

Black Rooted

Nine Scenes From the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense

Black Rooted review, 2018: “Göran Hugo Olsson’s Concerning Violence is the first major film to grapple with the work of the influential Martinican author and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon since Isaac Julien’s biographical documentary Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1995). Whereas the earlier film took a holistic, if esoteric, approach to appraising Fanon’s life and ideas (including his upbringing in Martinique, education in France and work in Algeria), the punchy Concerning Violence focuses on a specific sliver: the opening chapter of Fanon’s classic text The Wretched of the Earth (1961), in which the author posits the act of one nation colonising another as a form of pure, subjugating violence. Fanon also discusses violence – in the context of uprising and rebellion – as a means of liberation and physical, spiritual catharsis for the oppressed.

When Fanon’s book was initially published in France, it was banned almost immediately by the authorities, who saw it as a recklessly incendiary glorification of violence. This negative view was only burnished by the book’s preface, written by Fanon supporter Jean-Paul Sartre, which wholeheartedly endorsed the thesis of violence as a cleansing act and, according to Fanon biographer David Macey, overshadowed the actual work. However, as the academic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains in the brief, informative contextual preface that begins Olsson’s film, such a reading fails to appreciate Fanon’s nuance; specifically, it neglects to address his anguish – rooted in the realities of his experiences in French-ruled Algeria – at the cyclical, decidedly non-glamorous tragedy of the very poorest people being reduced, and subjected, to violence.

Concerning Violence, then, represents a welcome attempt to reframe and interrogate an influential but highly contested historical text. As in his previous film, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011), Swedish director Olsson has raided the TV news archives of his home country and emerged with a fount of grainy, absorbing footage, presumably hitherto forgotten. He structures the material into nine chapters of varying length (the film’s subtitle is Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense), and each focuses on a specific struggle for liberation in one of a number of African countries, including Angola, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso; the footage dates from the mid-1960s up to the late 1980s.

Though at first glance Concerning Violence may seem almost utilitarian in its stark, unfussy formalism, Olsson puts his personal stamp on Fanon’s work. Complementary passages from the text are narrated over the images by singer and activist Lauryn Hill, whose delivery – throaty and languid, but also somehow urgent and incantatory – seems designed to evoke the alacrity of the book’s writing: Fanon was terminally ill with leukemia when he set to work, and he composed and dictated it to his wife Josie in a remarkable ten-week spell.

For a further rhetorical, stylishly pedagogical flourish, much of the text is simultaneously imposed on screen in a white serif font. At this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Olsson mentioned that this device was inspired by the music video for Prince’s state-of-the-nation anthem Sign o’ the Times (1987). Also notable is Neo Muyanga’s subtle score of roiling, percussive jazz, augmented by peals of muted trumpet that ring out like warning clarions. This forceful stylistic unity, added to the binding agent of Fanon’s torrentially persuasive and poetic language, ensures that Concerning Violence resounds as a far more cohesive statement than The Black Power Mixtape.

Olsson and his editing team structure Concerning Violence so that the archival passages comment on each other even as they are in dialogue with Fanon’s text. Consider two back-to-back segments near the start. With Fanon’s words, delivered by Hill (“For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists”), ringing in our ears, the film picks up with a black journalist, newly released from a five-year jail spell in Rhodesia. He speaks calmly of his realisation that, from slavery to colonialism, and up to the institutionalised racism and state-sanctioned torture in the country that would become Zimbabwe, the “black man is at the bottom of everything”; torture, he says, made him “feel indifferent”.

This disturbing, layered film is mercifully free of pat attempts to bring things up to date: chronologically speaking, it concludes in 1987. Yet there’s no doubt that its final passage – in which Europe is described as “literally the creation of the third world”, and America as a “monstrous” colonial power – is intended to give the viewer plenty to process with regard to contemporary nations still suffering the pronounced after-effects of colonisation. In many cases, Fanon’s astringent words seem as relevant today as ever.”

 

Remembering Luciana Bohne. The Terrorism of Moral Indignation

Rest in peace Luciana Bohne. A retired academic, Luciana’s long life was almost a synthesis of the turbulence of the 20th century. She lived under three systems: fascism, socialism, and capitalism. She had known war, been a refuge and displaced person, an immigrant, and a failed aspirant to bourgeois respectability. [Independent Journalist Corner: A Conversation with Luciana Bohne, Black Agenda Report, March 21, 2018]. Prior to retirement, Luciana was a co-founder of Film Criticism, a journal of cinema studies, and taught at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. Luciana was a fierce anti-imperialist, a brilliant Marxist, and a wonderful mentor to many.

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AUGUST 11, 2017, CounterPunch
The Terrorism of Moral Indignation
BY LUCIANA BOHNE

To be sure, the whole of Western culture is complicit, but what astounds is the complicity of what defines itself as left.  Notably, the complicity of those among the left’s comfortable and intellectual “tendencies,” usually called “liberals.”  But in general, a whole language has vanished from the Western left’s vocabulary: class struggle, international solidarity, peace among peoples, social justice, exploitation, poverty. They are so illiterate in left theory and experience that the call the ruling class’s booth on their faces, “the deep state.”  This today in the West is an amalgam (rather than a conscious political program) of a loose and dangerous left.  It dreams, if it dreams at all, of a revolution without struggle. The answer to that pietism is force.  Whole nations wiped off the face of the earth.

We now, on this loose left, trade in our critical faculties at the theatre of propaganda.  In return, the propaganda pounds, batters, and sequesters our emotions so that we end up identifying with the narrative of power. The narrative insists that the West has the Holy Grail. It insists that it has a messianic mission to improve the world by sharing the Grail’s liberal values. The old conceit of liberal humanism, thus, returns to occupy our psyche, and it’s the same liberal humanism that in the 19th century enslaved the “lesser breeds” of the planet. Once again, we pick up the “white man’s burden” and his “civilizing mission” to lift up darkling  “junior Brothers” from “savagery” and “barbarism” into our magnificent, magnanimous, culturally superior self-image. Massacres, famines, epidemics, and genocides follow.

Who galvanizes the left today against imperialism as Fidel Castro did with his uncompromising demand at the United Nations General Assembly in 1966 that “the exploitation of poor countries by rich countries must stop”? “We hear a lot of talk about human rights,” he said in the 1970s, as Jimmy Carter’s White House launched the rhetoric of human rights, “but we have to talk about the rights of humanity.”

“The rights of humanity,” who remembers them? Chief among them the right to sovereignty, perhaps? The right to foreign non-interference? To living free of threats, sanctions, partition, dismemberment, balkanization, invasion, and occupation? To solving one’s own problems in one’s own country? To choosing one’s economic system? To refusing to become a protectorate of the Big Bully on the Potomac?

What happens when the “rights of humanity” are trampled? Since 1999, with Bill Clinton’s unauthorized war for secession of Kosovo from Yugoslavia (reduced to Serbia and Montenegro by then), unopposed and even cheered by progressive segments of the loose left,

“Like a cyclone, imperialism spins across the globe; militarism crushes people and sucks the blood like a vampire.”

These are not the words of a contemporary leftist. These are the words of German socialist Karl Liebnecht, co-founder with Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacus League and the Communist Party of Germany, both murdered by the German social democrat state in 1919.  He was referring to WW I, which, alone among the social democrats in the parliament of 1914, he stood up to oppose.

We now, on the loose left, rally to the call of “human rights,” which are invariably being abused outside our national borders. You’d think we lived in the Promised Land, so convinced are we of the responsibility to protect “less fortunate” human beings abroad, who together with the injury of our sanctions and bombs have to endure the insult of our condescension.

We now, on the loose left, cannot see beyond the imbecility of our arrogance that we lack most of the rights said to be “human” by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights right here at home. A report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) summarizes the inability of our society to protect its most vulnerable members, which measure alone judges the vibrancy of a democracy:

“Many US laws and practices, particularly in the areas of criminal and juvenile justice, immigration, and national security, violate internationally recognized human rights. Often, those least able to defend their rights in court or through the political process—members of racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, children, the poor, and prisoners—are the people most likely to suffer abuses.”

Our masters, who incarcerate at home 2.37 million people, the largest prison population in the world, “caused in part by mandatory minimum sentencing and excessively long sentences” (HRW) and detain twelve million people per year in county jails, raise our moral indignation against cherry-picked crusades for human rights abroad. They use this manufactured indignation as a license to attack and terrorize whole nations.

In Afghanistan, in 2001, we bombed to liberate women; we are still there, but we hear no more of the sorrow and the pity of women’s plight.  In Iraq, in 2003, we invaded to liberate Iraqis from the “dictator” Saddam Hussein, and one to two million Iraqis were liberated from their lives, millions more from their home and their country. Fallujah alone accuses—left more chemically poisoned than Hiroshima. In Syria, we claim to fight “to democratize” the country and at the same time the Isis cutthroats, but it took the legitimate Russian intervention to prevent a caliphate of cutthroats from ruling in Damascus.

In Yemen,

“In March [2015], a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states began a military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. The US provided intelligence, logistical support, and personnel to the Saudi Arabian center planning airstrikes and coordinating activities, making US forces potentially jointly responsible for laws-of-war violations by coalition forces.” (HRW)

Most on the loose left ignored Obama’s crimes, among which the war in Yemen may rank as the most cynical, heartless, and inhuman. It even classifies as biological warfare, because bombing water treatment plants then leaving people to die of cholera epidemics cannot be called anything else. Meningitis cases are breaking out. Two UN aid flights to Sanaa are authorized to leave from Saudi Arabia every day for famine relief. Saudi Arabia is refusing fuel. No reason given, reports The Independent on 5 August. Saudi Arabia blockades the Yemen’s airspace. Yemen’s agony continues. No stirrings on the left.

So, too, they ignored Obama’s drone attacks on Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. So, too, they ignored this:

“The US restored full military assistance to Egypt in April [2015], despite a worsening human rights environment, lifting restrictions in place since the military takeover by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in 2013. Egypt resumed its position as the second-largest recipient of US military assistance, worth $1.3 billion annually, after Israel. In June, the US lifted its hold on military assistance to the Bahraini military despite an absence of meaningful reform, which was the original requirement for resuming the aid.” (HRW)

And this:

“In September [2015], Obama waived provisions of the Child Soldiers Prevention Act to allow four countries—the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan—to continue to receive US military assistance, despite their continued use of child soldiers.” (HRW)

And this:

“Hundreds of thousands of children work on US farms. US law exempts child farmworkers from the minimum age and maximum hour requirements that protect other working children. Child farmworkers often work long hours and risk pesticide exposure, heat illness, and injuries. In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency banned children under 18 from handling pesticides. Children who work on tobacco farms frequently suffer vomiting, headaches, and other symptoms consistent with acute nicotine poisoning.” (HRW)

The loose left now calls that grotesque excrescence in the White House a fascist, as if Trump had replaced an administration of enlightened humanitarians. They are calling for virtual presidenticide so that the rule of that enlightened international “vampire,” the Democratic Party, can be restored. But let me tell you: he’s only the last of the “fascists” in a long line since 1945. The loose left just hasn’t noticed because the loose left has no concept of class struggle. It has, therefore, no critical equipment to include imperialism—the war of the class of international imperialist on the class of colonial or semi-colonial peoples—in the catalogue of the crimes of fascism.

Our planners are not stupid. They know how to maintain their minority’s primacy by waging class war.  They not only exercise it on the “proletariat” at home but also across the map of the world.  In 1948, George Kennan, the architect of the policy of containment, which launched the Cold War, recommended inequality in international relations—that’s war by the imperialist class at the center against whole national peoples at the peripheries. Imperialism, therefore, is just another form of class war.

“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction.”  (Memo by George Kennan, Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff. Written February 28, 1948, Declassified June 17, 1974)

By “we,” Kennan does not mean the 99% of Americans. He means the 1%. The foreign policy he recommends is class-vested and is kept secret, for practical reasons, from the rest of us for two decades. That’s because the resources to support this policy protecting the elite has to be extracted from the rest of us, and counted in losses to social welfare and progress. Class is a relation of power, in which one class determines the direction of the whole of society. This is one example.

Fascism has many faces, but the most constant is that of the supremacist delusion that the West is the carrier of “universal values” and that, as exclusive interpreter and custodian of these values, the West is obligated to act as watchdog of democracy and human rights throughout the globe.  In his inaugural address of January 1997, Bill Clinton assumed for the United States the planetary leadership of this humanitarian imperative:

“America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation. . . . May God strengthen our hands for the good work ahead, and always, always bless our America.”

This is not universalism; this is ethnocentric hubris. This is the terrifying message of one nation “uber alles.” This is totalitarian dogma. This is a profession of democratic faith without the slightest credibility because it does not aim at democratizing international relations but at subjecting them to the discipline and image of the “indispensible nation.” This, in one word, is imperialism–fascism in action. Karl Liebnecht saw it clearly, one-hundred years ago:

“In capitalist history, invasion and class struggle are not opposites, as the official legend would have us believe, but one is the means and the expression of the other.”

Why can the loose left today not see it that way? Why does it abstract the concept of imperialism from the conduct of the Western political order, thus mutilating the totality of reality, especially the reality reserved to the peoples of colonial origins now being reinvaded, partitioned, looted, left to chaos? Why do they see a defense of “human rights” where others, especially the victims, see subjugation, neocolonialism, and imperialism? What blinds the moral vision of the left to the point of reserving the fascist brand to the crude jester, Trump, but denying it to the slick charmer Obama of the Drone-Kill-List, destroyer of Lybia and Syria, architect of regime change in Ukraine, advocate of war with Russia, harasser of China, enabler of Israel in its assault on Gaza, global spymaster, deporter-in-chief, most successful weapons salesman since 1945, including to that obscene abuser of human rights, autocratic Saudi Arabia?  This uneven distribution of the fascist brand insures that the next president will be another “fascist,” but more polished, “educated,” grinning confidently with sharp teeth from a shark’s mouth. Trump’s mouth pouts; the image does not inspire confidence.

It’s not that the evidence of the devastation by the “cyclone” or the “vampire sucking the blood” is lacking. Since Clinton assigned to the United States an “indispensible” role in the world, it has bloated its defense budget, embarked with allies and vassals on a war against a tactic (“terrorism”), covering up the war of re-colonization (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Chad), organized and led coups (Haiti, Honduras, Ukraine, Egypt, Venezuela), mounted “color revolutions” in the former republics of Eastern Europe, dispatched NATO to encircle Russia with aggressive missiles, threatened on a systematic basis North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran in violation of the UN Charter, bloodied the planet with countless uncounted corpses and blighted it with hordes of desperate refugees, blockaded and sanctioned whole countries at will, and virtually scrapped the edifice of  international law–which it had itself erected as a monument to liberal democracy after WW II– while claiming to be acting in defense of universal values. The country that imposed the strictest protectionist policies in the world in the 19th century now recognizes no borders, no national sovereignty, no limits to its expansion.

What is to be done?

End imperialism. As long as imperialism and imperialist centers exist, so long there will be wars.  The politics of indignation; the campaigns for human rights do not oppose imperialism; they facilitate it.  One has to be either stupid or complicit if he cannot see that the US supports two states with the most egregious records of violations of human rights—Saudi Arabia and Israel—while demonizing the socially progressive government of Venezuela as a “dictatorship.”  One has to be either stupid or complicit to call for the removal of President Assad from Syria for being undemocratic, while installing a neo-fascist regime in Ukraine. One has to be either stupid or complicit to believe Iran is the sponsor of terror when all indications point to Saudi Arabia. And then there is Russia. There we risk thermonuclear war—the loss not just of human rights but the loss of life on the planet. We shall become death. That’s what we’re playing with when we consent to distributing human rights across the world to the sound of the crescendo of exploding bombs.

To begin the opposition to war and imperialism, we must start, at a minimum, with a demand to return to the cardinal principle in the Charter of the United Nations for the prevention of aggressive war by respecting the sovereignty of nations. No nation should claim “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) if all nations are equal before international law. That responsibility rests with the UN Security Council, in the interest of peace among nations, which alone has the monopoly on authorizing war. We must, therefore, refuse to empower Western state terrorism through the melodrama and emotionalism of moral indignation. We must remember that Hitler invaded countries on the pretext of defense of “human rights” of German minorities. We must remember, too, that the Charter’s defense of sovereignty was written in response to Hitler’s violation of “human rights” in the name of “human rights.” That his policy broke the peace among nations and set the world on fire. That the whole trauma ended with two mushroom clouds in the sky.

To begin a serious opposition to imperialism and war, we must re-create a sound left—a principled left– and denounce those agents of the fake left who contribute to the escalation of Western military aggression under the banner of “human rights” or any other liberal claptrap such as identity politics, which pleads for “respect” from the state instead of claiming class power, or the power to contrast the state’s foreign and domestic policies:

“These pseudo-left figures and organizations function as what amount to specialized NGOs, acting, much like the National Endowment for Democracy and its constituent elements, as political fronts and facilitators for the CIA and US imperialism.”

A sound left must re-discover, behind the lies and distortions written by its enemies, the theories, the practices, the language, the history, the science, and the errors (most important) of the left’s once living cultures and societies—a left that changed the world.  This left must extend the hand of friendship to systems of states that continue to survive in a hostile capitalist world with a socialist perspective. We live in an age of counter-revolutionary reaction in the West. Soon, we’ll forget that we are human and that we can make our own history. Shouldn’t we re-educate ourselves to a conscious, informed, organized, purposeful left or shall we let Hitler have the last word and a posthumous victory? “The problem of how the future . . . can be secured,” he wrote in Mein Kampf about Germany,  “is the problem of how Marxism can be exterminated.”

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Luciana Bohne, Why We Persist:

“We are “like-minded,” in general, but we don’t know everything. So, the idea is to grow in knowledge, to correct mistakes in theory and practice by learning from each other. We are not trying to change the minds of the willfully ignorant or those set in their views, happily brainwashed. We are trying to strengthen each other, grow intellectually and factually. We’re not into conversion. I don’t want to convert the fascist, the anti-Soviet, the liberal-stupid. I don’t have any of those among my friends. No Trots, no nazis, no MSM liberal parrots. We don’t have a party–but we have each other. We also work to fight propaganda and disinformation by the MSM. The fight for truth is the frontline now. Much of what I said in 2003 before audiences at Edinboro about Iraq BEFORE the invasion was the truth: no WMDs. I’m proud of that. Truth is the first front in the battle for people’s consciousness, but truth requires knowledge and research. And that’s what we do, not only on our own time but together. We share what we know. So knowledge grows. Strength grows. Our truth is informed.” [With thanks to Ketana Saxon for sharing.]

WATCH: Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood: The Imperial Paradox: Ideologies of Empire [2008]

WATCH: Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood: The Imperial Paradox: Ideologies of Empire [2008]

Published April 11, 2013

“This Globalisation Lecture entitled “The Imperial Paradox: Ideologies of Empire” was given by Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood, Professor Emerita of Political Science at York University (Toronto, Canada) on 29 October 2008 at SOAS, University of London.

Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood is the author of many major books on the history of political thought and the history of capitalism. Her most recent works include: Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (2008); Empire of Capital (2005); and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (2002)” [Source]

 

 

[“Ellen Meiksins Wood was born in New York City in 1942. Her parents were Latvian Jews and active Bundists, who had left their home in dramatic circumstances in the late 1930s. After her parents’ divorce and the end of the war, she went to Germany with her mother, who, on assignment from the Jewish Labor Committee in New York, was working with displaced persons. Her earliest experiences were thus coloured by both the leftist commitments of her family and the Left’s response to the tragedies wrought by fascism and the war.”][Source: A Political Marxist: Ellen Meiksins Wood, 1942-2016]