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Whiteness & Aversive Racism

“It’s a White Man’s World” – Your Exclusive Daily Dose of Reality. Raw. Unedited. Uncomfortable.

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Illustration: Denis Wood Collage

Wrong of Green Collective

August 13, 2013

by Forrest Palmer

You know, when the industrial revolution began in the mid-nineteenth century, finding the first vestiges of non-renewable resources also brought along the rapid acceleration of drawing down on the future descendants of this Earth. Whenever the Western world describes Africa and its abundance of resources that have driven our Western lifestyles, they always describe it as a “curse”. The reason that they call it a “curse” is because these are the places where the worst instances of human rights atrocities, impoverishment, famine, economic plunder and all the other vagaries that are endemic of the horrific aspects of life in the global south happen in great abundance. This is a post for another day as to why this is, but I mention it in passing since this has been a point of beratement, wonder and ridicule by the Western world. In a relatively short time though, the Western world will learn that the resource curse won’t only be felt from the countries that provide us these resources, but also the ones who are the END USERS of these resources: US. NO ONE will escape this “curse”. Our bill just hasn’t come due yet.

Decolonizing Together | Moving Beyond a Politics of Solidarity Toward a Practice of Decolonization

briarpatch magazine

January 1, 2012

by Harsha Walia

Illustrations by Afuwa

 

Canada’s state and corporate wealth is largely based on subsidies gained from the theft of Indigenous lands and resources. Conquest in Canada was designed to ensure forced displacement of Indigenous peoples from their territories, the destruction of autonomy and self-determination in Indigenous self-governance and the assimilation of Indigenous peoples’ cultures and traditions. Given the devastating cultural, spiritual, economic, linguistic and political impacts of colonialism on Indigenous people in Canada, any serious attempt by non-natives at allying with Indigenous struggles must entail solidarity in the fight against colonization.

Non-natives must be able to position ourselves as active and integral participants in a decolonization movement for political liberation, social transformation, renewed cultural kinships and the development of an economic system that serves rather than threatens our collective life on this planet. Decolonization is as much a process as a goal. It requires a profound recentring on Indigenous worldviews. Syed Hussan, a Toronto-based activist, states: “Decolonization is a dramatic reimagining of relationships with land, people and the state. Much of this requires study. It requires conversation. It is a practice; it is an unlearning.”

Amnesty International, War Propaganda, and Human Rights Terrorism

AI

Dissident Voice

August 8, 2013

In Jaramana on the outskirts of Damascus on 7 August, 18 civilians were blown to bits. Among the dead were children. The Russian government condemned the crime against humanity. The crime was hardly even reported in the Western press, not to mention the silence of Western governments who are supplying the terrorists with arms. Perhaps the babies murdered in the attack were supporters of Bashar al-Assad and were therefore guilty.

Meanwhile in the “land of human rights”, Parisians sipped coffee reading France’s “journal sérieux” Le monde. The French daily published a story from an organization internationally recognized for its role in defending ‘human rights’: Amnesty International.

Urgent Appeal from The African Revolutionary Movement on Behalf of Dr. Ahmed Ibrahim

Dr.AhmedIbrahimLibya

Modern Ghana

Viva Libya!

The Nigerian Voice

Arm logo

URGENT APPEAL

August 2, 2013

By ARM

Two days ago, the US-NATO installed regime in Libya sentenced the respected academic and political philosopher, Dr Ahmed Ibrahim to death by firing squad.

Dr Ibrahim was once Secretary for Education, and is a Qaddafi loyalist. He has written extensively on the Jamahiriyan ideology or what is known as the Third Universal Theory. Ahmed Ibrahim is a staunch Pan-Africanist and a courageous freedom fighter who, rather than fleeing the Libyan Jamahiriya during the brutal and barbaric assault on his country, stood his ground in the heroic defense of Sirte alongside the revolutionary forces and people, and was later captured by an Al Qaeda linked militia. The western-backed terrorists of this militia tortured and taunted him while he was being held in one of the prisons that they control, and now, after a mock, illegal trial, they have sentenced him to death by firing squad.

The African Revolutionary Movement (ARM), an Afrocentric, Pan-African organization is calling on all genuine Pan-Africanist organizations and parties, as well as human rights activists, to openly and loudly condemn this gross violation of justice and human decency, and to demand the immediate release of Dr. Ahmed Ibrahim. Also, we must demand that the African Union take the initiative and necessary measures to secure his release. ARM will do what must be done to expose the reactionary and racist character of the Al Qaeda linked and Arab-supremacist cabal in Libya, which is propped up by the US/NATO thugs.

In unity and struggle,

Yahaya Ezemoo Ndu
Chairman,
African Revolutionary Movement (ARM)

Gerald A. Perreira
International Secretary,
African Revolutionary Movement (ARM)

ARM is an international, Pan-African revolutionary organization committed to the unification and total liberation of Africa and the scattered African nation. Our members are active throughout the African motherland and the African Diaspora. We come in the tradition of all those Africans, known and unknown, who dedicated their lives to the struggle for the redemption, upliftment and liberation of all Africans.

Our objectives are:

• To demolish all political, legal and economic structures/systems promoting and maintaining the exploitation of Africans, including capitalism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism, neo-liberalism and Zionism.

• To work toward ending white supremacy in all areas of human activity.

• To promote ideologies/philosophies indigenous to Africa, emerging out of our own African historical experience and cultures.

• To promote an Afrocentric worldview, with the implicit understanding that in order to bring about an African renaissance we must return to our source.

• To promote Black/African Liberation Theologies, recognizing that all monotheistic religions have their origin in Africa, and to finally wipe out the reactionary theologies thrust upon our people as part of the colonial agenda in Africa and throughout the Diaspora.

• To realize the call for reparations as a vital component of the necessary redress for centuries of genocide and exploitation of African people and the shameless plunder of African resources.

• To build revolutionary political and economic relationships between Africans in the Diaspora and the Motherland in order to improve the material conditions of Africans everywhere.

• To promote Black Power Economics, enhancing African people’s potential to create wealth for the advancement and dignity of our people, and in order to achieve true independence.

ARM

 

Book Excerpt: Fear of a Black Nation

Ottawa Citizen

July 28, 2013

By David Austin

Book Excerpt: Fear of a Black Nation

UPI TELEPHOTO | Photograph by: File photo , UPI Telephoto

Sometime in 1997 I encountered a person who helped to crystallize for me the significance of an event that had happened decades earlier in Montreal, and especially of what that event meant for Black politics in the city.

I was working as a youth worker in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce district of Montreal. One afternoon, when I was foraging for lunch in a local grocery store, an older woman I had never seen before approached me. With a look of dismay on her face she unexpectedly asked me, “Did you hear what happened to Stokely?” I was perplexed — I had no idea that she was referring to the Stokely. Sensing my confusion, she continued: “You know, Stokely Carmichael.” She told me she had just learned he had been diagnosed with cancer.

Question: Environmental Politics: What’s Left? Answer: Bourgeois Primitivism, That’s What

By DAVID CORREIA

“The cheap prices of commodities,” wrote Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto, “are the heavy artillery with which” the bourgeoisie batters down all borders. The rise of the bourgeoisie “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. It creates a world after its own image.”

Are Mainstream Environmental Groups Keeping Racism Alive?

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policymic

July 26, 2013

by Kat Stevens

Editor’s note: This story is part of PolicyMic’s Millennials Take On Climate Change series this week.

We are living in an age of world-wide energy and financial crises. In Westernized nations like the one I live in, poor rural communities are suffering now: small Appalachian communities ravaged by mountain-top removal mining, rural farms surrounded by frack wells. But what about the communities we don’t hear about?

The Empire’s New Clothes: The Naked Imperialism of Humanitarian Intervention

Black Agenda Report

June 18, 2013

by Ajamu Baraka

The U.S. imperial juggernaut attempts to bamboozle its home audience with the fiction that its war against Syria is a “humanitarian” venture. “The immediate priority for anti-war, anti-imperialist, human rights activists in the U.S. is to strip away the moral pretext of humanitarian intervention and expose its ugly, imperialist reality.”

 

Humanitarian intervention has nothing to do with humanitarian concern, and instead is a propaganda tool.”

 

Some critics from the left and the right characterized my recent article “Syria and the Sham of Humanitarian Intervention” as an unnecessarily harsh indictment of a policy that provides a necessary tool for the international community to protect human rights and save innocent lives.

“It’s a White Man’s World” – Your Exclusive Daily Dose of Reality. Raw. Unedited. Uncomfortable.

 

Rex-Tillerson

Above: Tom Russo (Vice President-GS Electronic Trading Goldman Sachs 1999-June 2013, Vice President-Global Execution Services at Merrill Lync June 2013 to present), Amy Brandt, Rex Tillerson (CEO of Exxon Mobil), Denise Benmosche, and Mark Angelson (Council on Foreign Relations, the Economic Club of New York, the Chicago Club and the Pilgrims (London and NYC). The Institute of International Education (IIE) held its 90th Anniversary Gala Dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and honored ExxonMobil Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson, Maestro Lorin Maazel and the Founders of the Iran Opportunities Fund. “IIE is involved in many different aspects of international educational exchange, from administering the flagship Fulbright program for the U.S. Department of State, to rescuing scholars in danger, to working with corporations and foundations to support global leadership by investing in human capital.” [Emphasis added.]Photo credit: Patrick McMullan, September 23, 2009 | Note: *The Iran “Opportunities” Fund operates under the auspices of the IIE.

by Forrest Palmer, WKOG Collective

July 22, 2013

For today’s proof that this is ‘a white man’s world’ before anything else and that it is to the detriment of all living creatures on Earth, I provide Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil. Exxon Mobil is the most profitable corporation on the planet with revenues of $44.9 billion in the 2012 fiscal year.  As a modern day version of Standard Oil, the company’s coffers begin to fill from the moment oil is drilled out of the ground to the end user filling up his or her gas tank every morning on the way to a job, the symbol of enslavement under the current capitalist system.  Although Rex Tillerson is reminiscent of John D. Rockefeller, the CEO of Standard Oil and at one time the richest man in the world, in sitting at the helm of such a profitable company, a more apt comparison may be of Captain Ahab on a perpetual quest for the white wale Moby Dick, which will lead to Ahab’s ultimate demise.  The white wale in this real life story is man’s conquering the physical Earth through the holy grail of infinite energy extraction that is only a dreamlike illusion and on the way to quickly turning into a nightmare for us all.  The same myopic search infused with madness of which Ahab was guilty is the life’s work of Tillerson and the men like him who are in the midst of leading us all down a path of inevitable destruction.

Stella Calloni: Disinformation Against Syria is Criminal

stellaStella Calloni, a member of the current leadership of the Union of Press Workers of Buenos Aires (UTPBA), is a highly respected correspondent in South America of the Mexican daily La Jornada and director of Challenge Magazine. She is also an author of numerous books including “The years of the Wolf: Operation Condor” (1999) and “Argentina, the crisis of resistance” (2002), among others.

Political Writings of Silvia Cattori 

June 11, 2012

by Stella Calloni

Originally published by Prensa Latina, June 9, 2012

Most mass media accuses the Syrian government for the crimes of more than 90 groups that have assassinated opponents. They are based in London or Paris – and pointed to by some observers sent by the United Nations, but none of them consulted the authorities of that country.

Nor did they echo of serious complaints registered about the crimes and massacres carried out by mercenaries who are the Special Forces of the great powers seeping across borders with Syria.

“This means they keep on torturing the audience that still remains for them, telling the eternal tale of bombings and massacres by the Syrian army on civilians” the Swiss investigative journalist, Silvia Cattori recently wrote – reporting among other cases, the non-existence of an alleged bombing by the Syrian government on March 23, 2012 that the press of the hegemonic powers described as “a deluge of fire in an incommunicado city.”