Occupied Haiti: White Intervention with Black Face

Millennials Are Killing Capitalism 

Streamed live on October 29, 2023

 

The United Nations serves as an arm of Western Imperialism and U.S. foreign policy.

 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, right, meets with Kenya’s President William Ruto, left, Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, Pool)JASON DECROW

Millennials Are Killing Capitalism: “We will talk to Dr. Jemima Pierre about the UN Security Council approved so-called “intervention” in Haiti, resonances between the struggle of Palestinians with the struggle of Haitians today, the role of neo-colonial “independent” countries in the continued suppression of Haitian sovereignty, and understanding attacks on Haitian sovereignty and self-determination as another key anti-imperialist struggles for people in the West to take up in this moment of heightened imperial aggression. We will also talk about the political work of branding someone a “terrorist” or a “gang member” in the wake of the war on terror and the war on drugs.”

 

[Dr. Jemima Pierre is Professor of Global Race in the Institute of Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia and a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class at the University of Johannesburg. Dr. Pierre is also a member of Black Alliance for Peace and the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race.]

Zwelivelile Mandela’s Message to the Palestinian Resistance

Middle East Eye

October 16, 2023

“Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Zwelivelile Mandela, voiced his support for Palestinians and the leadership of the Palestinian resistance to MEE, saying that just as apartheid South African ‘is no more’, ‘the end of apartheid in occupied Palestine is inevitable'”. 

 

STATEMENT – The Gaza Resolution [October 28, 2023]

Progressive International

October 28, 2023

 

Palestine Through the Lens of Frantz Fanon [2015]

Middle East Monitor

October 19, 2015

by Nick Rodrigo 

Part 1: Why Fanon? The indispensability of thought and the urgency of action

Palestine is in the throes of revolt. It started with protests and demonstrations at the presence of Israeli “Temple Mount” activists (and their political benefactors) at the Noble Sanctuary of Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, the symbolic pillar of Palestinian spirituality and national redemption. The unrest then spread to other cities on both sides of the Green Line. From Nazareth to Nablus to Bethlehem, young Palestinians have taken to the streets to hurl stones and Molotov cocktails at an occupation which plunders their future and consigns their bodies to be broken on the wheels of a colonial machine. Individual acts of violence have also injected a sense of terror into the Israeli population, prompting a paranoid state to respond with unbridled brutality from its military, and unabated mob-driven lynching by its civilian population.

Unorganised, sporadic and youth-led, these Palestinian demonstrations and violent attacks do not appear to be tethered to any political party. The rejection of political factions as the incubator of rebellious actions by the “Children of Oslo” is perhaps the final indictment on the political malaise which has characterised Mahmoud Abbas’s tenure as Palestinian president; he has operated hand in glove with the Israelis, to protect a regime which safeguards the interests of his political class.

The Question of Palestine, as Edward Said framed it, has gone through numerous changes since 1948; through the Nakba of 1948 to the Sumud, which characterised the first intifada, to the compromise of Oslo and the current post-second intifada division and status quo. Throughout these phases, various normative discourses and institutions arose, which shifted the nature of the Palestinian national movement. However, the reality of Israeli colonialism has remained the same: violent, intransigent and unaccountable. In order to understand the current events in Palestine properly, it vital to look towards the writings of Martinican psychologist-cum-Algerian revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, whose divisive thoughts have contributed prodigiously to the field of postcolonial studies.

Rebel without a pause

1925 was a bumper year for Black revolutionaries. In the space of twelve months, Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba and Frantz Fanon were born. It was the latter’s lyrical polemics and psychoanalytic inquiries which presented vast swathes of humanity with the framework for picking apart the layers of oppression which typified their lives under the yoke of colonialism. In his short life, Fanon developed a philosophy which provided colonised peoples with the blueprint for breaking out of their stupor, to create a “new man” and a new form of resistance to domination and oppression. Added to his literary panache and intellectual intrigue, he was able to interweave his subjective experiences into his works. By the time of his untimely death at thirty-six, Fanon had first-hand experiences of colonial society in a variety of contexts; through his youth in the French colonial department of Martinique; to his service for “Mother France” on the battlefield against Nazi Germany; to his academic training in Frances metropoles; and to his works with Algerian revolutionaries in the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN).

Black Skin, White Masks

In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon developed a sociogenic and psychoanalytic explanation of the anti-black racism inherent within colonial societies, drawing on his objective experiences. In this seminal text, Fanon passes the Hegelian phenomenological master/slave dialect under a black lens. In Hegel’s dialect, the slave is in pursuit of recognition and, through fear of the master, develops sentience, acquiring independent thought and consciousness of his essentiality and master’s dependence on him. However, when the slave is black, Fanon notes that, “What [the master] wants from the slave is not recognition but work.” The result was for the black person to aspire for “values secreted by his masters.” Fanon stays with Hegel when he acknowledges that mutual recognition is not achieved at the end of this dialect, yet departs from him in denying that the black slave necessarily achieves any independent consciousness: “But the black man does not know the price of freedom because he has never fought for it.” Echoing the words of Malcolm X, he wrote, “No one can give you freedom, if you are a man, you take it.” This ongoing struggle for recognition and freedom informed Fanon’s work and life.

Revolutionary therapy and the process of disalienation

In 1953 Fanon moved from colonial France to Blida, Algeria, where he developed a revolutionary approach to psychoanalysis, developing occupational therapy remedies with Algeria’s native communities with a direct effort to draw Arab and Islamic idiosyncrasies into his work. Fanon published 15 papers on psychiatric approaches throughout his career, and many of the findings were intertwined with his philosophical conclusions in Black Skin, White Masks. At the centre of Fanon’s psychoanalysis and “sociogenic” inquiries was a pursuit of disalienation from the social death caused by colonialism. In Marx’s Capital, alienation from labour is scrutinised, and through this process he lays bare the opposite of humanity within a capitalist society; a society freed from capital, able to pursue its own praxis. Fanon examined the way in which the human society under colonialism is alienated from its own cultural creativity; from this he wanted to create a way of breaking out of the colonial replications of that which is colonised. For Fanon, the colonised must pursue this process of disalienation actively.

Concerning revolutionary violence and the pitfalls of neo-colonialism

During his time in Algeria, Fanon was approached by the FLN to provide healthcare and a sanctum for their fighters in his clinic. He subsequently threw his weight behind their cause, writing for their publication El Moujahed and representing them at conferences in sub-Saharan Africa, where he forged ties with Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba. With them he developed the idea of an African Legion, to liberate African nations from colonialism, as well as opening up a southern arms route from Sub-Saharan Africa to Algeria. Fanon saw that the conclusion of the Algerian struggle would serve as the pace-setter for the trajectory of the postcolonial movements and newly-liberated nations throughout Africa.

With the publication of A Dying Colonialism he had moved considerably from the concept of negritude, towards revolution as the prime negative in his de-colonial framework. By the colonised finding themselves through revolutionary struggle, whilst at the same time realising the role played by national demands and racial particularities, a new humanity can be forged.

In 1962, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia, and started work on The Wretched of the Earth, which was to be completed within months of his diagnosis but only published posthumously. Written with furious energy, the text is as much a timeless field manual for postcolonial movements as it is a piece of historical literature. It is his treatise on violence which has often been misconstrued, by supporters and detractors alike. Fanon does not valorise violence, as some contend, but rather acknowledges that colonialism is a project, which is, in and of itself, violence manifested. This violence has shaped the social constitution of the colonial subject. His land, resources and life have been seized by a state of violence, and within the framework laid before him, the only route out is violence. With prescience, Fanon writes that unless this violence is checked, it can turn inwards on the colonised, leading to tribalism and internecine conflict. Out from this a neo-colonial project will emerge, where elites from the revolutionary movements will barter their political capital with the old colonialists, for political power and capital, granting the latter rapacious access to resources and economic wealth.

Before he died in 1963, Fanon sent a parting letter to his friend Roger Taïeb in which he wrote the following: “We are nothing on this earth if we do not first and foremost serve a cause, the cause of the people, the cause of freedom and justice. I want you to know that even when the doctors had lost all hope, I was still thinking, in a fog granted, but thinking nonetheless, of the Algerian people, of the people of the Third World, and if I managed to hold on, it was because of them.”

Israel’s occupation as a neo-colonial project

What Fanon implored us to do was to view the struggle of the oppressed as a struggle to create a new mode of being, a new form of humanity. Within the revolutionary struggles of the masses, he insisted, lie the seeds of a new humanity. The ongoing resistance in Palestine today is not a new phenomenon, but is rather the latest episode in a decades’ long struggle for freedom and what Hegel and Fanon both agree on, recognition. Not recognition to live within shrivelled little cantons and drip-fed subsistence, but recognition as a human being in the holistic sense of the term. The stone throwing, the stabbings and the bombings are a reaction to a colonial regime which denies this recognition.

Over the course of these essays, Fanon’s key works, as outlined briefly above, will be utilised to examine the Palestinian national movement since it broke away from the paternalist hold of the Arab world and began, in earnest, to seek recognition. Navigating this history, with one eye firmly on Fanon’s work, it will conclude with where the movement is today; largely rudderless, but still yearning. Through this process, it is hoped that the reader will not only think and empathise with the Palestinians, but also, in respect of Fanon’s work, act on these feelings in the spirit of a collective humanity.

 

[Nick Rodrigo is a research associate at the Afro-Middle East Centre in Johannesburg; his writing has appeared in Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.]

Statement Issued by the Palestinian Forces [Oct 28, 2023]

Resistance News Network

October 28, 2023

Statement issued by the Palestinian forces: Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement), Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command:

The five Palestinian powers held a leadership meeting, in Beirut, today, Saturday, October 28, 2023, to discuss the course of with the zionist enemy and its brutal aggression against the Gaza Strip.

In their statement, the five powers saluted the martyrs of our Palestinian people and our steadfast and proud people in the Gaza Strip who are facing an organized campaign of extermination, stressing that they are the people of pride, dignity and steadfastness and that they are the people of victory who are loyal to their cause and their homeland, and [the Palestinian forces] pledged to them to continue on the path of resistance until victory is achieved over the zionist enemy.

The attendees affirmed the following:

• This heroic epic is the battle of the entire Palestinian people, which they are waging in defense of their land, their sanctities, their existence, and their right to freedom, against a barbaric enemy that does not spare any of our people from its crimes. It targets hospitals, mosques, churches, universities, and ambulances, and cuts off electricity, water, fuel, the Internet, and cellular communications for our besieged people.

• Adhering to national unity is a main pillar in confronting the zionist war of genocide against our people, as well as rejecting the enemy’s attempts to divide our people or monopolize any part of it. We stress unifying efforts and closing ranks in this fateful battle.

• We call on the masses of our Arab and Islamic nation and the free people of the world to continue their movements to stop the American-zionist aggression, open the border crossings, bring in humanitarian aid and fuel, and remove the wounded from the Gaza Strip.

• We salute the resistance forces in our nation, especially in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran, and we affirm that our Palestinian people are not alone in this battle.

• We hold the United States of America fully responsible for the war of genocide against our people as it chose to support, escalate, and participate in the war of genocide against our people, which requires a strong response from the Arab and Islamic countries as well as countries friendly to our people to stop this ongoing massacre of our Palestinian people.

• We demand the opening of the Rafah crossing and the entry of aid, humanitarian needs, fuel, and medical and relief teams to our people without delay, allowing the wounded to be transported to Egypt and the Arab and Islamic countries, without interference from the occupation or any of the aggression countries.

• We call on the masses of our people throughout occupied Palestine to escalate all forms of resistance and struggle against the zionist enemy, targeting its soldiers and settlers, and strengthening popular initiatives of struggle in the face of settler attacks and the encroachment of enemy forces.

• The enemy’s cutting of all access to Gaza, besieging it, and cutting off communications and the Internet completely is a cover for a major crime of genocide that the enemy does not want witnesses to, and we stress breaking this siege with an “official and popular” Arab position.

• We adhere to the right of our people to resist, and its confidence in the victory of our people in this battle, as we fight this battle in defense of our land, our people, and our sanctities, and for the sake of liberation, return, self-determination, and the establishment of the Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

Glory to the martyrs.
Healing for the wounded.
Freedom for the prisoners.
Victory to our people and their valiant resistance.

Saturday, October 28, 2023

+++

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine:
—
The duty of the nation and supporters of Palestine is to escalate the struggle against the forces of aggression.

The primary duty of all forces supporting the right of the Palestinian people and opposing the genocidal war against them is to intensify their struggle against the countries involved in the aggression and war against our people. This comes in light of escalating genocidal crimes and the cutting off of all communications with Gaza in an attempt to hide the massive and egregious crimes committed by the enemy against unarmed women, children, and the elderly.

It is inconceivable, after the fall of about 8,000 martyrs, tens of thousands injured, and the displacement of one and a half million Palestinians in Gaza, along with daily genocidal crimes, that the international and Arab response would be at this level. The UN General Assembly’s statements have been weak, the European Union’s stance is hostile and supports the continuation of genocide, and the positions of the United States and Britain are fully involved in the criminal war against our people.

This aggressive alliance will not be dismantled by timid positions or half-hearted stances, but requires an escalation of serious revolutionary action against all these forces, primarily the United States and the other forces of the aggression alliance. Their embassies and bases remain active and present in Arab countries and around the world, untouched by even the minimum amount of protest.

The Front expresses its deep appreciation for every act of solidarity. Still, the scale of zionist crimes against our people requires much more. The magnitude of the massacre and genocidal war should shake the world and mobilize all Arab, friendly forces, and supporters of freedom worldwide.

The Front calls for escalating the struggle and focusing on the embassies of the countries of the aggression alliance and its supporters, considering America as the spearhead of this aggression. They should realize the consequences of their actions and their clear complicity in the killing our children and in the massacres and genocidal war against our people.

Providing justifications and excuses to lower the level of revolutionary and solidarity action to symbolic and formal levels is a stab in the back of Palestine and its people, and will comfort the aggression alliance to give it space to continue crimes against our people. The Front reaffirms its previous call for a mass flood towards the embassies, interests, and bases of the aggression forces and a greater role for solidarity parties and forces in escalating the struggle against the alliance of enemies worldwide.

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Central Media Department
October 28, 2023

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.

 

Palestine, a History of the Resistance – Interview with Journalist Marwa Osman in Lebanon

Journalist Vanessa Beeley, Syria

October 23, 2023

 

Osman is a University Lecturer at the Lebanese International University and Maaref University.

 

“Western Supremacy will eventually create a global resistance movement.” – Marwa Osman

 

 

[Marwa Osman is a mother of three. She holds PhD in Management on the “Effect of Intergenerational Differences on Workplace Productivity in Lebanon” from the Doctoral School of the Lebanese University, and two master’s degree on “The Effect of politics on the Foreign Direct Investment in Lebanon” from the Lebanese University, and on “Applying Knowledge Management in a Media Institution” from the Lebanese University. She is also a member of the Blue Peace Media Network for trans-boundary water management in the Middle East. Osman is a University Lecturer at the Lebanese International University and Maaref University. She hosts and produces the political show The MidEaStream. She is a writer and her comments on issues of West Asia on several international and regional media outlets are published by various outlets.]

The Global South is Pro-Palestinian

Middle Nation

October 11, 2023

 

 

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:

 

Western framing of Hamas vs Israel is Deliberate as Means of Delegitimizing Palestinian Resistance

Press TV

Oct 18, 2023

 

Demonstrators rally during a ‘Stand with Palestine’ march in solidarity with Gaza, in Dublin, Ireland, October 14, 2023 [Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters]

“Vanessa Beeley says the West’s depiction of the war as a Hamas-led aggression against Israel is a strategy to delegitimize resistance, influence public opinion, and bolster Israel’s position in the conflict.

The Syrian government has declared three days of mourning for the Zionist bombing of the Baptist Hospital in central Gaza.”