Humanitarian Intervention: The Human Rights Gift that Keeps on Giving to U.S. Imperialism

A new, people-centered human rights movement must be developed that rejects the fiction of non-political human rights and is not afraid to name white supremacist, capitalist/colonialist patriarchies as the interconnected enemies of global human dignity. A human rights movement that is anti-war, anti-imperialist, committed to systemic change and grounded in ethical standards that emanate from the experiences, knowledge and perspectives of peoples and not just governments. – Ajamu Baraka

A Voice from the Margins

Sept 4, 2013

by Ajamu Baraka

With the announcement by the Obama administration that it intends to launch an attack on Syria in response to the chemical attack alleged to have been carried out by the Syrian government, the U.S. Administration has again assumed for itself the role of global “gendarme,” policing, punishing, and as its’ drone warfare program demonstrates, even executing the natives of the global village at will. In its single-minded dedication to this global role, the Obama administration has also freed itself from the constraints of international law as the President shamelessly declared that he was “comfortable” operating outside of the global legal frameworks that the U.S. itself helped craft.

How is it that the administration can announce to the world its intentions to circumvent, and by doing so, subvert international prohibitions on war? By wrapping itself in the false flag of humanitarian concerns for the suffering masses in Syria. President Obama, the corporate and financial elite’s most effective propaganda weapon since Ronald Reagan, explains to the world that it is only the plight of people in Syria that drives the U.S. decision to attack the country.

No one asks the President to explain to the innocent human beings who are walking around today alive, but who will be the dead and maimed “collateral damage” of this pending attack, why their sacrifice is for the greater good of humanity. →

The “Arab Spring” and the Seduction of the Western Left

Hosni Mubarak has been released from prison, the Egyptian Army is back in charge – this time with the support of most Egyptians, who could no longer endure the chaos their elected Muslim Brotherhood government had inflicted on them. In Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies are in full military retreat – the government of Bashar al-Assad having convincingly won the battle for the hearts and minds of the Syrian people. William Hague and his fellow rogues have been left trashing around for some pretext to “go in” and save their sectarian terrorists. As I write, a suspiciously convenient incident, possibly involving chemical weapons, may do the trick. In Tunisia the Brotherhood regime faces popular revolt, and Libya has descended into utter chaos. Protests in Bahrain continue to be violently crushed by the U.S. puppet dictatorship. In short, the lives of ordinary people are immeasurably worse today than at the opening of the so called “Arab Spring,” in December 2010. All the talk of “revolution” has been exposed as the nonsense it always was.

Nowhere is this more the case than in Libya, where the Working Class has been stripped of all power and protection, and power put back in the hands of the Benghazi comprador class, which had held it during the reign of King Idris. This was no Revolution, but a Restoration – with a counter-revolutionary monarchical flag and the fire-power of Western imperialist armies to make the point clear to even the most wilfully obtuse.

The failure of anti-war movements to stop war is nothing new. There has never been a case of protest movements stopping a war. Even the Vietnam War, which eventually generated massive protests in the U.S., was not halted by these protests, but by the actual defeat of the U.S. war machine in the field. In 1912, the Socialist parties met in Basle, Switzerland, to promise that they would not support their governments if war were to begin. But, once the patriotic drums of WW1 began to beat, these promises were forgotten, and most Socialist leaders shamefully encouraged the Working Class youth of Europe out to the slaughter. For all this catalogue of failure, there has been a consistent and active anti-war movement, funded by the Left, in Europe and the U.S., all down the decades. In 2003, half a million people marched in Washington against the Iraq War. Almost a million people marched in London. In many ways, a dramatic success. Of course, the war was not stopped, but, it can be claimed that the imperialist propaganda machine was severely weakened by such massive display of public rejection. Next time, the imperialists were going to have to be a lot smarter, a lot more seductive – and they were. →