The Ebb And Flow Of Freedom: Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica in the Age of Bourgeois Revolution

By Zach Medeiros

The power of the Haitian Revolution reverberated across the planet, but the revolution made its most profound and lasting impacts on the neighboring slave societies of the Atlantic world. In the nearby colonies of British Jamaica and Spanish Cuba, enslaved people, free people of color, and white settlers were forced to adjust-materially and ideologically-to an unprecedented, explosive event that upended life as they knew it. In Cuba, the colonial government and the planter class sought to "emulate Saint-Domingue and contain Haiti," doubling-down on slavery to supplant the former as the economic jewel of the colonized Caribbean while working to ensure the latter would not be duplicated. In Jamaica, which was home to the largest concentration of enslaved people in the region outside of Saint-Domingue, the revolution helped facilitate the slow crawl of British abolitionism, despite the sturdiness of the Jamaican slave regime. In both cases, free and enslaved people of color seized upon the new possibilities cracked open by the unmaking of Saint-Domingue and forging of Haiti. Far off imperial governments, colonial administrators, ruling elites, slaves, poor whites, and free people of color jostled for political space, sometimes in conjunction with one another, sometimes in bloody competition, all grappling with the coexistence of a resurgent slave power along with its antithesis.

Just as the victory of the revolution in Haiti did not translate into full-fledged freedom for the Haitian people, it did not produce linear, straightforward results in Cuba and Jamaica. This paper will show that despite geographical proximity and certain similarities common to any colonial, slaveholding society in the Atlantic, the impacts of the Haitian Revolution on Cuba and Jamaica were drastically different, entrenching slavery in the former while speeding its demise in the latter. Human agency and structural imperatives heightened these differences as the revolutionary masses in Haiti moved towards independence, ensuring that all three countries would chart distinct but linked paths throughout the 19 th century.

Saint-Domingue on the Eve of Revolution

The wealth Saint-Domingue produced was matched only by the savagery inflicted on the people who produced it. Shortly after Europeans arrived in the Caribbean in the late 15th century, disease and the brutal working conditions they brought with them killed most of the Indigenous population of Hispaniola, ground zero for the colonization of the Americas. To make up for this labor shortage, the Spanish and Portuguese, and later their French and British rivals, began to import large numbers of enslaved Africans to the region. [1]

At first, the number of slaves were limited; only 15 percent of Hispaniola's population was enslaved at the end of the eighteenth century. The ongoing decimation of Indigenous peoples, the influx of pirates, and conventional colonial expansion ensured the growth of plantations and European settlements, which in turn meant a growing demand for workers. [2]Although many of them would be taken elsewhere, given the often loose boundaries of the colonized Atlantic world, modern studies show indicate that between 850,000 to a million slaves were taken to Saint-Domingue from its foundation as an illegal settlement to the abolition of slavery in 1793. Some 685,000 of those people were brought to the colony in the eighteenth century alone. [3]

The brutal nature of the work imposed by their masters, particularly sugar harvesting and refinement, meant that the mortality rates were extraordinarily high, and replacement labor was always needed. 5-6 percent of slaves on the colony died each year, while the birthrate was only 3 percent. Nearly half of all slave children died on some plantations. [4] For the masters, it was simply cheaper to kill slaves off and find new ones. The cool language of economic rationality, with all its tables, charts, and figures often masks the universe of horrors that capitalist development requires. Over 70 years ago, C.L.R James described the terrors inflicted on enslaved Africans bound for the Americas and trapped on Saint-Domingue, and his haunting prose has scarcely been surpassed since. [5] In many ways, Saint-Domingue was a fitting microcosm for all of modern Western civilization: an island of unimaginable wealth, floating on a sea of skulls.

By the eve of the revolution, Saint-Domingue had been transformed from something of a backwater for buccaneers to the world's richest and most profitable slave colony. By 1789, it was the world's largest producer of sugar and coffee; its plantations produced twice as much as all of the other French colonies put together; and its trade accounted for more than a third of France's foreign trade. [6] The French state, and more importantly, the colonial elite and French bourgeoise, grew fat on the suffering of black slaves. Much like India would be for the British in later centuries, Saint-Domingue was the jewel in the crown of the French Empire. To nearly all white eyes, it stood tall as the epitome of what colonialism and slavery could achieve in terms of material prosperity and a seemingly untroubled racial hierarchy, where nearly half a million slaves could be ruled by a handful of white settlers and free people of color. In nearby colonies like Cuba and Jamaica, colonial officials and planters looked on with a mixture of envy and awe.

But as James once observed, "economic prosperity is no guarantee of social stability. That rests on the constantly shifting equilibrium of the classes...with every stride in production the colony was marching to its doom."[7] This production was only possible through the hyper-exploitation of hundreds of thousands of people concentrated on a small landmass, deprived of nearly every aspect of life that makes human existence bearable. Despite the totalitarian aspirations of their overseers, they had established a distinct and powerful culture of their own, and understood that the whites had far more to lose than they did. Driven by the mass leadership of countless enslaved women and men, Saint-Domingue was poised to explode into a new existence as Haiti, and when it did, the shockwaves would reach far outside the plantations of Hispaniola.

Emulating Saint Domingue, Containing Haiti: Cuba and the Haitian Revolution

Prior to the last decades of the eighteenth century, Cuba was more a society with slaves than a slave society. [8] According to the sociologist Arthur L. Stinchcombe, a slave society is "a society in which very many of the familial, social, political, and economic relations are shaped by the extensive and intensive deprivation of slaves of all sorts of rights to decide for themselves" and whose "pervasive purpose in many kinds of social relations between more and less powerful people is to keep the others (slaves) from deciding or being able to decide." [9] In other words, a slave society is not one where slavery merely exists, but where slavery is essential. For Stinchcombe, the degree to which any slave society can be classified as such depends on 1) "the degree to which an island was a sugar island," 2) "the degree of internal social and political organization of the planters," and 3) "political place of the planters in an island government and of the island government in the empire." [10] In other words, slave societies are at their strongest when sugar is booming, when the planter elite is unified and organized as a class, and when planters enjoy relative autonomy from metropolitan interference. [11]

While some 60,000 African men and women had been brought to the island as slaves from its founding as a Spanish colony in 1511 to the middle of the eighteenth century[12], Cuba could not be described as a slave society until the eve of the Haitian Revolution. Most importantly, Cuba lacked the economic qualifications. Far from being a major source of sugar and other export crops intimately tied to slavery, much of Cuban agriculture was geared towards internal consumption, and in the mid-eighteenth century, only four sugar mills had more than a hundred slaves. Many enslaved people worked in towns and cities or on small farms on urban outskirts, while most of those in the countryside worked in "relatively small concentrations (by Caribbean and later Cuban standards)" on modest tobacco or sugar farms, or sizable cattle ranches with a majority of "free" laborers. [13]

International and domestic developments in the latter half of the 1700s helped set the stage for a true slave society in Cuba. While Cuba was more racially diverse than past scholars have thought, thanks to extensive links between the island and British slave traders, the British occupation of Havana in the Seven Years' War accelerated and intensified pre-war trends. During the eleven-month long occupation, the British authorities monopolized the slave trade even more severely than the Spanish had, as the military governor conspired with the Havana cabildo for their mutual enrichment. Cuban slave imports increased slightly during the occupation, but the most lasting impacts came with the reassertion of Spanish control. By the time Spain retook Havana, the events of the war had helped fuel the modernization drive within the Spanish empire-with Cuban planters playing a leading role.[14]

The economic boon for the planter class was immediate, with the export of sugar in the five years after British intervention averaging more than 2,000 tons a year, compared with a mere 300 tons in the 1750s. [15] The independence of the United States, and the subsequent passage of a limited free trade agreement between the US and Cuba, provided another opportunity for Cuban planters seeking commercial expansion. [16] Pedro Rodriguez, Conde de Campomanes, noted jurist and economist, and later president of the Council of Castile, as well as other influential reformist voices within Spain and across the Spanish world, argued that the future of the Spanish empire depended on a large degree on trade liberalization and the development of tropical commodities, which would necessitate the mass import of enslaved workers. Campomanes "gave Cuba pride of place" in this vision of a more lucrative Spanish colonial project, "arguing that by cultivating large-scale tobacco and sugar industries, Cuba would be capable of competing with the most prosperous French islands." [17]

Mainland Spaniards had their influence over colonial debates, but it was the members of the developing Cuban planter class that proved the main and most effective advocates for the expansion of slavery in Cuba. In 1780, barely a decade out from the uprising in Saint-Domingue, Havana's planters petitioned the king to open up the slave trade, in order to maximize Cuba's economic potential and give Spain an advantage over France and England. To compete with Saint-Domingue, the blood-soaked jewel of the French colonial empire and the envy of its imperial rivals, the Cuban ruling class had to drastically transform Cuba, making it into a true slave society.

The trajectory of the wealthy creole lawyer and planter Francisco Arango y Parreno was emblematic of this process of transformation. After traveling to Madrid in 1787, he became the apoderado (empowered representative) of the Havana city council, and called on the king and his ministers to implement "an absolutely unrestricted slave trade-" a call which they heeded, already convinced by the changing commercial landscape and the pressures exerted by earlier reformist elites in Spain and the colonies. While the Crown's decree of February 28, 1789 was initially valid for only two years, subject to further review, it quickly boosted the legal slave trade in Havana, and signified Spain's commitment to sugar and slavery in Cuba and other Spanish colonies in the Americas, as well as the rising power of the Cuban planter class. The Crown's subsequent efforts to regulate the behavior of slaves and masters, and relatively temper the power of the latter over the former, floundered on the rock of planter resistance, and in 1794 Madrid suspended the execution of those laws. [18] Even as the enslaved masses of Saint-Domingue prepared to rise up against their own masters, Cuba was acclimating to its new role as a bastion of the Slave Power.

Arango's influence did not end there. In the days following the outbreak of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, Arango was in Madrid preparing for the Council of State's final vote on the extension of the open slave trade. When news of the uprising reached the capital, he quickly composed an essay on the roots of the revolt (as he saw them) and their implications for Cuba and Spain's rulers, which he was able to put into the hands of the Council. In his influential treatise, Arango argued that the rebellion of the slaves was a logical side effect of the rebelliousness of their French masters, but that the superiority of the Cuban-Spanish system meant that there was no risk of the conflagration spreading. [19] Critically, Arango made the case for an unparalleled opportunity, writing " it is necessary to view [Saint-Domingue] not only with compassion but also from a political perspective and…announce to the best of kings the opportunity and means by which to give our agriculture on the islands the advantage and preponderance over the French." [20]

In the opening salvo of an unprecedented slave revolution, opportunism dominated the immediate response of the Cuban elite to the misfortune of their French counterparts. Though this would shift as the revolution spread and deepened, the initial reaction of the Cubans and the Spanish state was that of vultures, ready to swoop in and pick the bones clean rather than maintain class solidarity with their fellow slaveowners. While this approach ultimately benefited the slaves of Saint Domingue, who could take advantage of the divisions among the masters, it did not bode well for the tens of thousands of African women and women who would suffer under a resurgent and emboldened Cuban slave regime.

A thwarted uprising in 1812 illustrates the lingering aftereffects of the Haitian revolution in Cuba. Documented in over 6,000 pages of court testimony, the Aponte Rebellion-named for its alleged ringleader, the free moreno (black) artisan José Antonio Aponte-is significant here not so much because of its achievements, which were limited to a few torched plantations and dead colonists, but for its symbolic power: for black Cubans and white Cubans. Shortly after Aponte was arrested on March 19, the authorities' interrogations led them to his home. Inside, they found an item several of the arrested conspirators had described: a book of drawings, containing maps of streets and garrisons throughout Cuba, illustrations of black soldiers defeating whites, images of George Washington, Aponte and his father, and King Carlos III, portraits of black kings from Abyssinia, and most shockingly of all, portraits of the Haitian revolutionary leaders Henri Christophe, Toussaint Louverture, Jean François, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, all of which Aponte produced or replicated himself. Officials later discovered that Aponte regularly showed this book to fellow free black militiamen and others during meetings at his home.[21]

While some of the defendants in the trial claimed ignorance about the meaning of the images, either to themselves or Aponte, and Aponte himself frequently gave innocent explanations for them, the importance of revolutionary and African iconography to free and enslaved people of color in this period (not to mention the exigencies of testifying under threat of more torture and likely execution) puts their words in a different light. [22]

More importantly, the fact that Aponte apparently took the time and energy to replicate images of Haitian revolutionaries, likely knowing full well the repercussions if they were ever discovered, and regularly showed them to his friends and comrades, is telling. At this time, rumors of Henri Christophe as a liberating monarch and anti-slavery bogeyman were rampant across Cuba, as well as other colonies like Puerto Rico. Many slaves and planters alike believed that the king and other Haitian revolutionaries planned to not only inspire revolt through example, but through material and organizational aid.[23] One of the leaders involved in the Aponte rebellion actually claimed to be the famed (but quite dead) Haitian rebel Jean-Francois, known to Spanish speakers as Juan Francisco. However, Christophe's relatively conservative foreign policy, which severely constricted Haitian intervention in foreign slave regimes, suggests that rebels and the authorities alike exaggerated the role the Haitians truly played for their own purposes. [24]

Regardless of where Aponte first saw those drawings, such a stark tribute to the Haitian revolution should not be downplayed. For Aponte, and perhaps for many of the people he shared them with, these images served as a powerful reminder that only a short distance away, slaves and free blacks had led a successful revolution, toppling not only their masters, but multiple white armies, and abolishing slavery once and for all in the process. Even for a free black Cuban like him, this must have been tremendously important. For white Cubans, who had so quickly embraced a reenergized slave system and adopted the mantle of the leading counterrevolutionaries in the Caribbean, the fact that a free black man in the middle of Havana not only had these images in his possession, but actively used them to inspire slaves and free people of color to revolt, must have been terrifying. Even in the heart of regional Slave Power, all was not well. Although Aponte and the other supposed plotters were executed by the state and turned into a public example, the ghosts of Toussaint, Dessalines, and Juan Francisco-indeed, the living specter of Haiti itself-continued to haunt 19th century Cuba.

Jamaica and the Haitian Revolution

Unlike Cuba, the British colony of Jamaica was a longstanding slave society on the cusp of the Haitian revolution. In fact, it had a great deal in common with Saint-Domingue, the only European colony more profitable than Jamaica in the late eighteenth century. [25] Like Saint-Domingue, sugar dominated the Jamaican economy. As Julius Scott noted, by 1740, the planters had contained the elite factionalism and black rebelliousness of earlier years enough to attract more white settlers, clear and cultivate new land for plantations across the island, and purchase hundreds of thousands of African women and men to work it. [26] Following Stinchcombe's model, the Jamaican planter class was politically unified, sugar was ascendant, and metropolitan control over day-to-day colonial affairs was not stringent at this time. As with Saint-Domingue, the labor demands of the burgeoning new sugar economy meant that the "demographic balance between black and white Jamaicans shifted decisively in favor of the African population." This shift was so decisive that "by the eve of the American Revolution almost ninety-four percent of the population of the island was of African ancestry." [27] The demographic tensions inherent in this situation facilitated a sense of defensiveness among the planters, which would come to a head with the beginning of the revolution in Saint-Domingue.

Free trade policies inadvertently encouraged these tensions in Jamaica. While white settlers were perturbed by the growing numbers of French, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese seamen, merchants, and commercial agents that began to arrive after Jamaica opened its first free ports in 1766, the threat posed by black and brown foreigners was even greater. In 1782, for example, Jamaica's Grand Jury of the Quarter Sessions called on the legislature to compel foreign Blacks to carry "tickets to be produced on demand, or, better, that 'they should have a label round their necks describing who and what they are.'" [28] In the eighteenth century Caribbean borders and other boundaries were often more fiction than fact, and in Jamaica as much as its neighbors, the colonial authorities could not easily abide large numbers of mobile "masterless" people, particularly of unknown origin, and particularly in uncertain times.

When word of the revolution arrived in Jamaica, less than two weeks after the start of the uprising (and probably sooner for the island's black majority, whose networks of illicit communication often outpaced those of the more "literate" settler society, in Jamaica as elsewhere across the region), whites reacted with much less confidence than in Cuba. Governor Effingham wrote to the British Secretary of State about the "Terrible Insurrection of the Negroes" in Saint-Domingue, which compelled French emissaries to plead for assistance from the Jamaica Assembly. William Dinley, a surgeon trying to secure passage back to England, wrote to a Bristol merchant of "rebellion…in some of the French Settlements," and how "the Negroes had killed a great many white people." Given the conspicuous absence of sustained or detailed references to the revolution in public media at the time, Julius Scott argues that "there appears have been an effort on the part of Jamaican whites to suppress discussion" of events in Saint-Domingue. Even as the government prepared open defensive measures to prevent the spread of the rebellion, whites in Jamaica seem to have agreed on a "conspiracy of silence." [29]

Jamaican slaves did not share their reticence. While it is difficult to locate the direct voices of enslaved people, unmediated by elite or white interpreters, there is significant indirect documentation of how enslaved black men and women responded to events in Saint-Domingue. Writing on September 18th, 1791, the commander of the British garrison on the island observed that "many slaves here are very inquisitive and intelligent, and are immediately informed of every kind of news that arrives. I do not hear of their having shewn any signs of revolt, though they have composed songs of the negroes having made a rebellion at Hispaniola with their usual chorus to it." Two months later, the situation had evidently not improved, since the same commander wrote "[The slaves are] so different a people from what they once were … I am convinced the Ideas of Liberty have sunk so deep in the minds of all Negroes that whenever the greatest precautions are not taken they will rise." [30] Other authorities made similar reports. In Kingston, "slaves were said to be 'perfectly acquainted with every thing that has been doing at Hispaniola,'" while parish magistrates in Clarendon arrested several "head Negroes of some of the Plantations" for speaking "very unreservedly" about the rebellion. The prisoners also confessed their hope that a sister uprising would soon happen in Jamaica.[31] For enslaved Jamaicans, the revolution in San Domingue was a harbinger of hope, even when it was by no means clear that it wouldn't be crushed like so many other acts of slave resistance had been and would be in the future.

In Britain, the ruling class and their representatives in the press responded to news out of Saint Domingue with a mixture of mild concern and scarcely concealed glee. In a report published in The Times of London on October 28, 1791, the paper blamed the uprising on the reckless pursuit of racial equality by the French National Assembly, with all the timeless blind arrogance of white racism. Pointedly, the author(s) allege that "it is most certain that the inhabitants [of Saint-Domingue] will invite some foreign power to come and take possession of them" if the rebellion grows more serious. That power, in the unbiased opinion of The Times, should be Britain. In the meantime The report goes on to chastise the more excitable British capitalists who, falling prey to "the apprehensions which timid minds are apt to entertain where there is only the appearance of danger," caused some disturbances on the stock market.[32] Speaking as a leading voice of British imperialism and capital, the Times took a stance not unlike that of the Cuban elite in the early days of the revolution: mild concern, subsumed under excitement at the chance to snatch victory from the jaws of someone else's defeat. Although the report makes a passing reference to the declaration of martial law in Jamaica, the overwhelming sense of confidence is common among many European observers in the first weeks and months of the revolution. They could see something was coming, but they mistook a hurricane for a squall.

Back in Jamaica, white settlers could not enjoy this spirit of entrepreneurial complacency. Shortly after the revolution began, French planters began to flee to Jamaica, bringing their slaves with them. Other slaves from Saint-Domingue came to the island after liberating themselves in the chaos. White Jamaicans reacted harshly to these so-called "French Negroes," who they feared would contaminate their own with rebellious ideas, particularly republican. Governors Effingham and Williamson ordered that authorities do everything in their power to prevent communication between slaves from Saint-Domingue and English slaves, while a royal proclamation issued in December 1791 prohibited "free people of color and free negroes" from settling in Jamaica unless two whites could testify on their behalf.[33] The Jamaican Assembly attempted to track the names, whereabouts and permits of all French-speaking blacks and mulattoes in the colony, and passed a law in 1792 setting strict guidelines on the purchase or hiring of any foreign slaves brought to Jamaica after the rebellion in Saint-Domingue began. These restrictions were regularly violated by slaveowners and employers, not to mention slaves themselves. [34] On the island's north side, historically a hotbed of insurrection, whites established inter-parish safety committees and raised the local militias for the first time in nine years. Numerous reports confirmed that slaves in the area were well-informed about what was happening in Saint-Domingue, thanks in part to foreign small traders and sailors who traveled to Jamaica.[35] In the late 18 th century Jamaica, like much of the Atlantic world, rumors and other forms of information traveled fast and furious, especially among slaves, and masters could do little to stop it.

The feverish early responses of British Jamaica to the Haitian revolution contrast sharply with later events. After the National Convention abolished slavery in 1794, the French began to see emancipation as a tool of imperialist maneuver, with Jamaica as a main target of French expansionism. French ministers of the navy and other state officials urged attacks on Jamaica in the late 1790s, and the French commissioner Phillipe Roume plotted with the mixed-race general Martial Besse and the noted Jewish abolitionist merchant Isaac Sasportas to invade the British colony and abolish slavery there once and for all. [36] Unfortunately, Toussaint Louverture didn't share their priorities. Striking a secret agreement with the British general Maitland, Louverture promised not to attack Jamaica or encourage rebellion there, in exchange for an end to the British blockade of Saint-Domingue.

Furthermore, Louverture requested that British slave traders import more African workers to Saint-Domingue to make up for wartime losses, and encouraged other forms of trade. [37] In the ever-shifting Age of Revolution, politics made for even stranger bedfellows than normal. The white elite in Jamaica may have hated the revolution, but they and the metropolitan British could break bread with someone like Louverture, as long as their interests were assured. Negotiations between Haitians and the British in Jamaica did not end with Louverture's secret deal. More radical than Louverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines nevertheless continued his predecessor's diplomacy with the British in the spring of 1804. Though Jamaican governor George Nugent and his envoy were unable to secure British dominance over Haitian trade or a military base on the island, Dessalines's stringent defense of Haiti's sovereignty did not prevent him from promising non-intervention in Jamaican affairs. [38] While the elite bargained behind the scenes, the people had other ideas. In his 1807 History of Jamaica, Robert Renny writes that the following song was frequently heard in the streets of 1799 Kingston: " One, two, tree, All de same; Black, white, brown, All de same: All de same." [39]

More so than in Cuba, where the colonial ruling class enjoyed more autonomy from Madrid and exerted a greater impact on imperial policy, the impact of the Haitian revolution on Jamaica can be best understood as a process of negotiation. Despite their position as the premier global slave traders and their staunch opposition to republicanism, the British could see the writing on the wall, and decided that détente with Haiti, however unsteady, was the wisest course of action. To this end, they struck bargains with the Haitian government; these agreements did not give Britain the level of control over Haitian affairs that they desired, but they did ensure that Jamaica and other Caribbean colonies would be safe. At the same time, Haiti continued to act as a source of inspiration and refuge for self-emancipating Jamaican slaves, who often made the short journey by boat to take advantage of Haitian free-soil asylum policies. In the Jamaican slave imagination, Haiti stood tall as an ideological and physical source of salvation, however complicated Haitian politics could be. Slavery in Jamaica would not be abolished until 1834, spurred on by post-Haitian slave uprisings and the incremental developments of British parliamentary politics, but the possibilities that the Haitian revolution created could not be easily controlled.

Conclusion

The Haitian revolution was an international milestone. For the first time in history, slaves had led a successful revolution, one which produced the world's first black republic and abolished slavery years before most countries did. The symbolic and material weight of this act, which shook the global order, cannot be underestimated. It inspired fear, hatred, and hope in equal measure, among whites and people of color, free and enslaved people alike.

In Cuba, which had only recently begun to transform itself into a true slave society, the outbreak of the revolution provided a clear and unparalleled chance for the colony to supplant Saint-Domingue as the wealthiest in the world. Indeed, the destruction of much of Saint-Domingue's plantation economy, the disruption of legal and illegal trade, and the sheer loss of human life in the colony meant that the Cuban planters were ideally positioned to realize their dreams. Paradoxically, then, the victory of the slave uprising in Haiti meant the retrenchment of slavery a stone's throw away in Cuba. Cuban slavery would not be abolished until the royal decree of 1886.

In Jamaica, which had been a slave society far longer than Cuba and contained nearly as many slaves as Saint-Domingue, white society's initial response to the revolution was much more fearful. While the British ruling classes in the metropole did not share their trepidation, the Jamaican planters were much closer to the front lines, and vast demographic disparities engendered a sense of insecurity for them white Cubans couldn't understand. As the revolution progressed, and it became clear that Toussaint L'Ouverture and to a lesser degree Dessalines were figures the British could compromise with, political, social, and economic exigencies would push white Jamaicans into a stable status quo with the Haitians. In another seeming paradox, the world's leading slave trader would be the first European power to come to terms with Haiti. Slavery in Jamaica would eventually be abolished in 1834, a fact that was due as much to fears of another mass slave rebellion and the declining economic benefits of the system as it was the Damascene conversion of the British Empire.

In Cuba and Jamaica as in Haiti, history was made through collective and individual human agency but shaped by structural factors. The paths Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica took during and after the revolution were marked not by a steady march forward, but movement in fits and starts, in several directions at once. Freedom and slavery, bondage and emancipation, could and did exist simultaneously. There was no firm division between an essential Slavery and Freedom, whatever the rhetoric of abolitionists and slavers or the strictures of legal codes. Freedom was, in most cases, better understood as a practical set of possibilities, or a spectrum instead of a hard category. Slaves could be more or less enslaved under different conditions, while "free" people could be more or less free. [40] In the world of the Haitian revolution, slaves, free people of color, and whites discovered a new range of possibilities, made feasible by the collective leadership of the enslaved Haitian masses.

These possibilities would often prove contradictory in practice. In Cuba, the counterrevolution established a firmer foothold, but the revolution continued to inspire insurrectionary plots like the Aponte Rebellion. Beneath the surface of a resurgent slave power, dreams of another Haiti stirred. In Jamaica, the British and the colonial planters would come to terms with the Haiti government, and the threat of further slave revolts would help propel the slow process towards abolition. But the end of slavery hardly translated into freedom or democracy for the black Jamaican majority, as the imposition of direct rule from Westminster later in the nineteenth century showed. Stage-managed abolition did not bring true liberty.

In the end, the Haitian revolution rippled outwards in ways that only seem obvious with the benefit of hindsight. Even the most astute observers, regardless of race, could not hope to fully grasp the ramifications at the time, since no one can truly understand a revolution in the midst of it. For some in Cuba and Jamaica, the fall of Saint-Domingue and the rise of Haiti was an apocalypse. For others, it meant freedom was on the horizon. For still more, it was a new opportunity to be navigated and exploited as best as they could. The story of the Haitian revolution's impact is the story of all of those experiences, the story of how an unprecedented event produced unpredictable results.

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Notes

[1] Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 ), 15-17.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Dubois, 39-40.

[4] Ibid.

[5] C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989), 6-15.

[6] Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London/New York: Verso, 2018), 6.

[7] James, 55.

[8] Ada Ferrer , Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 17.

[9] Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3.

[10] Ibid, 130.

[11] Mimi Sheller, Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2000), 31.

[12] Ferrer, 18.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Elena A. Schneider, ""La Dominación Inglesa": Eleven Months of British Rule." In The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 163 -216.

[15] Ferrer, 19.

[16] Ibid, 21.

[17] Ibid, 22.

[18] Ferrer, 25-28.

[19] Ferrer, 33-34.

[20] Arango, "Representacion heca a Su Majestad con motive de la sublevacion de escavlos, " quoted in Ferrer, 34-35.

[21] Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle Against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 4-6.

[22] Unknown, "Aponte's Rebellion, Cuba, 1812," in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, edited and translated by David Geggus (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014), 189-190.

[23] Childs, 162-165.

[24] Phillipe Girard, "Did Dessalines Plant to Export the Revolution," in The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy, edited by Julia Gaffield (Charlottesville/London: University of Virginia Press, 2016 ), 147-148.

[25] Sheller, 42.

[26] Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London/New York: Verso, 2018), 4.

[27] Scott, 5.

[28] Scott, 48-49.

[29] Scott, 142-143.

[30] Unknown, "Jamaican Slaves, 1791," in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, edited and translated by David Geggus (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014), 185-186.

[31] Scott, 144.

[32] The London Times , "Danger and Opportunity: The British Press, 1791," in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, edited and translated by David Geggus (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014), 190-192.

[33] Scott, 144-145.

[34] Scott, 145-146.

[35] Scott, 151-153.

[36] Girard, 142-143.

[37] Girard, 146 and Dubois, 223.

[38] Julia Gaffield. "Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World." The William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2012): 595-598. Girard, 145.

[39] Robert Renny, "Jamaican Song, 1799," in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, edited and translated by David Geggus (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014), 188.

[40] Sheller, 43-44.

Disaster in Zimbabwe: Cyclone Idai, Climate Change, and Capitalism's Assault on the Global South

By Mafa Kwanisai Mafa

About a month ago Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique were devastated by a tropical cyclone which has been described as one of the worst disasters ever to strike the southern hemisphere. Approximately 2.6 million people were affected in the three countries. Cyclone Idai hit the Mozambican port city of Beira with winds up to 170km/ph., it then proceeded into inland Zimbabwe and Malawi, flattening buildings and took more than 1000 people and others unaccounted for across the countries. Torrential rainfall washed away road networks in Zimbabwe. The United Nations called it possibly the worst ever weather-related disaster to hit the southern hemisphere.

Western capitalists are largely at blame for climatic changes that cause natural and environmental disasters. Poverty, which is a result of the diabolic and pernicious economic sanctions, as well as a natural byproduct of global capitalism, has resulted in poor and weak structures which do not withstand the heavy winds and storms.

The economic prescriptions of the IMF and World Bank has forced countries like Zimbabwe to reduce their budgets on social services as governments are forced to impress and attract investors in line with the neoliberal path. Things like sanitation, emergency services, and disease-outbreak prevention are poorly resourced and often times lead to unnecessary loss of life. From the statistics of past natural disasters in poor counties like Haiti, and impoverished cities like New Orleans, these factors lead to high death tolls compared to well-resourced sectors in the western world. The Civil Protection Unit of Zimbabwe had developed the National Flood Plan Management framework; however, because of depleted resources caused by IMF and World-Bank intervention, was not fully implemented. Very little of the nation's budget is allocated for disaster management, as determined by the needs of capitalism's pursuit of profit.

The Donald Trump Administration and EU have extended their sanctions on Zimbabwe despite its reforms and capitulation to neoliberal dictates in the form of austerity measures. This means that Zimbabwe must brace for further economic turmoil because of the renewal of sanctions. To further exacerbate the situation, Zimbabwe is facing drought and trying to recover from the gory effects of tropical cyclone Idai, which has killed many and displaced thousands. The entire infrastructure of Zimbabwe is now in ruin. If Zimbabwe was not under sanctions, its response to Cyclone Idai could have been much better. Destruction could have been avoided; lives could have been saved. Like every nation under US sanctions, Zimbabwe is experiencing failing healthcare, dwindling government coffers, failed service delivery, and food and basics shortages. In a similar situation, Iran took the US to the International Court of Justice in October 2018 and the ICJ ruled that the US must stop restricting medical and basic supplies to Iran. What is the impact of the ICJ ruling on Zimbabwe's medical system?

Tropical cyclone Idai brings vital lessons: it's a stark reminder of the deadly effects of greenhouse effect. A hotter world means more damaging cyclones because they draw their energy from the oceans. The hotter the ocean, the more powerful and devastating the cyclones have become. Hotter oceans and melting ice caps also mean a rise in ocean levels, which means cyclones spin faster, do more damage, and have more energy to get into the interior. The governments that have the power and resources to effect change, like the US, are failing to take climate change seriously. Governments who would like to effect change remain impotent due to global capitalism's demands. It is a threat to humanity and its environment.

The Global Connection

The inequalities within the poor global south are caused by the capitalist economic systems of the rich North. The legacy of colonialism and apartheid still manifest in most of the African and third world countries, and this has adversely hampered human and economic development. The poor and the working class in these countries are suffering the most from climate change and must push for climate justice. The global North are the biggest culprits in environmental degradation and carbon emissions; thus, are responsible for creating an environment ripe for natural disasters.

The rich countries have technology of early warning systems and disaster management and preparedness. It is only the poor countries like Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Mozambique who bear the brunt of the effects of natural disasters, with the biggest number of casualties. Western capitalism must give poor nations debt relief and allow them to chart their economic path using their own natural resources, which in many cases exist in abundance. Zimbabwe at independence adopted the Rhodesian debt whose money was used kill the black people in their quest for freedom and self-determination. South Africa also adopted the Apartheid debt which it is still paying up to this day - a debt whose money was used to oppress butcher them with impunity.

With so many resources at their disposal, countries throughout the global south would be able to redistribute their wealth equally for putting up flood defenses, social services, and investing in appropriate technology. Humanitarian assistance has been a curse to African development - a trojan horse used to push through capitalist austerity. African countries have the capacity to stand on their own if they are allowed to chart their independent path. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), which is assessing the damage on food crops, estimates that about 200,000 Zimbabweans will need urgent food aid for the next three months. Most of the food aid which is provided on humanitarian grounds is genetically modified and poses a serious health risk to the local people.

The US military is contemplating sending rescue teams to Mozambique; however, this is not trusted since they are butchering people all over the world in unprovoked wars. Most countries are suffering and millions dying through the US's direct or proxy wars and economic sanctions. Mozambique is wary and considering denying them entry into their country, despite desperate times.

Because of the rapacious nature of the capitalist economic system, which has no regard for nature or human life, we are now confronted with an environmental crisis that threatens to undermine the basis of civilization and survival of human species. There is now a global consensus that the emission of greenhouse gases is caused by use of fossil fuels which global capitalism has relied upon as the main source of energy supply. Global temperatures are precariously rising.

China is now the biggest player in the global capitalist economy and it has overtaken the US as the biggest carbon emission emitter. China and US combined account for 40% of the global emissions of carbon dioxide worldwide. If the levels of emission do not subside, the world will experience more extreme floods, droughts and storms, disappearance of the Arctic ice cap, dramatic cuts in food yields, and the drying out of the Amazon rainforest. Notwithstanding all the looming catastrophe world gas and coal production is surging.

Capitalism is the Cause

The root cause of the climate change is capitalism, an economic system that thrives on exploitation of human beings and the natural environment. The world, if it is to survive, needs an alternative system that values social equity, justice, and environmental sustainability. Humanity and the natural environment are under threat because of the capitalist system, which is based on private ownership of the means of production. Overproduction and waste are endemic. The crisis of humankind requires putting an end to capitalism. Capitalism is only concerned about profit.

The great danger today, with the way in which these environmentalist topics are being addressed, is that they are being used with a short-term political objectives in mind. Many researchers and scientists are reaching a conclusion that there is a tendency towards climate warming. More organisations and political parties are being formed on the pretext of fighting against global warming without any practical result. There is a deliberate diversion away from the real polluters by asking citizens to be responsible and make them understand that they must take care by throwing plastic materials into different waste bins and that they should stop buying cotton buds from supermarkets because they are terrible source of pollution. A systemic issue is being individualized, in true capitalist fashion. And it is a smokescreen.

Capitalists pollute billions of tonnes of oil into the China Sea, while a citizen throws three cotton buds into the wrong bin. Are we really going to save this planet through these everyday actions? It is a claptrap. While many politicians, world leaders, and big corporations speak about the future effects of climate change, poor and impoverished nations are already struggling to battle the consequences of rising global temperatures. They speak as if it's a future problem, but its already here and happening throughout the global south. It's only a matter of time before it hits the north.

The world's poor are not causing the problem, but they bear the brunt of climate change. They are suffering from drought and suffer in worsening storms because they cannot afford to build houses that can withstand storms or escape to higher ground. Governments encourage citizens to do "one green action a day" but ordinary citizens are not the root cause of climate change. Extreme weather disasters are becoming more prevalent around the world, be it Zimbabwe or elsewhere. Capitalism is the culprit. Let's save our environment and nature from global capitalism.

An Anti-Imperialist Analysis of the 2011 Destruction of Libya

By Valerie Reynoso

The origins of the UN concept of "Responsibility to Protect" (RTP) was initially articulated by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who presented his annual report to the UN General Assembly in September 1999, urging Member States to collaborate in abiding by Charter principles and engaging in defense of human rights. In his 2000 Millennium Report, he stated "if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica, to a gross and systematic violation of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?" A year later, the Canadian government filed a report, "The Responsibility to Protect," through the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. The RTP concept, which is partially derived from Francis Deng's concept of "State sovereignty as a responsibility," reassures that sovereignty is not only a matter of protection from external forces, but also emphasizes that nations ensure the welfare of their own populations, internally. Hence, as it goes, the prime responsibility for the protection of "the people" lies mainly with the State. In terms of geopolitics, according to the United Nations, "residual responsibility" also rests on the international community of states; and this clause may be "activated when a particular state is clearly either unwilling or unable to fulfill its responsibility to protect or is itself the actual perpetrator of crimes or atrocities." [1]

Clinton and Kosovo

Interestingly, the formation of the RTP concept has anti-imperialist roots, particularly in the crisis in Kosovo at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. The NATO military intervention in Kosovo, which was accused by many of being a violation of the prohibition of the use of force, as well as the heinous acts committed in the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s, resulted in the international community carefully discussing means to implement protections against human-rights violations. Despite NATO being an international organization, its actions in Kosovo were still perceived as violating Kosovar sovereignty and the "well bring" of Kosovar people. [2]

The NATO military intervention in Yugoslavia, which began on March 24th, 1999, lasted seventy-eight days and set a precedent by becoming the first occasion in which NATO decided to militarily intervene in a sovereign country without prior approval from the UN Security Council. The involvement of nineteen countries, led by the US, was spearheaded by the Clinton administration with the stated intention of "preventing a humanitarian disaster" and establishing a framework for Kosovo, which was the southern part of Yugoslavia under the Milosevic government. Despite these intentions, NATO's bombings of the Balkans caused more harm than good as these violations of international law resulted in the destruction of 25,000 homes, 300 miles of roads, and an estimate of 400 railways, etc. At least 5,000 people were killed in the bombings, with 12,500 more having been injured. The area was contaminated with depleted uranium, an internationally-outlawed chemical that is still to this day producing high rates of childhood cancer defects throughout the Balkans. [3] The accusation that NATO and its allies committed human rights violations was later confirmed and thus became a motivating factor in the creation of the RTP declaration, which sought to avoid such unilateral interventions in the future.

Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Libya

In 1969, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi led a military coup against King Idris in Libya. The coup overthrew the King and resulted in the establishment of the Jamahiriya government, which lasted nearly five decades. The results of the coup were far-reaching: it eliminated the Libyan monarchy, formed a new republic, set the foundation for an accelerated approach to Pan-Africanism, and established key alliances with the Soviet Union, Egypt, and Syria.

Under Gaddafi's rule, Libyan living standards consistently increased. Healthcare was universalized and available to all; the average life expectancy rose from 55 years in 1969 to 70 years in 2011; the average literacy rate peaked 91 percent, making it one of the highest literacy rates in Africa. Libya attained the highest Human Development Index score in 2010 within the entire African continent, demonstrating it had a high level of development in the country, as well as a comparatively low rate of malnourishment at 5 percent.

Libya also established one of the lowest poverty rates, which fell below 10 percent, not only Africa, but in the world. Libya was producing approximately 2 million barrels of oil per day under Gaddafi's leadership. Libya was also a champion of internationalism and sent military assistance to several countries and causes, including Ethiopia, Uganda, Grenada, and Nelson Mandela's Umkhonto we Sizwe. As an important gesture in establishing regional brotherhood, Gaddafi formally apologized for Arab enslavement of Africans in 2010, while he was chair of the African Union.

This all changed in 2011, when NATO decided to yet again militarily intervene in a sovereign country, ala Kosovo. Although, this time, the reasons were less clear. Internal uprisings against the Libyan Jamahiriya had commenced in 2011. In the West, these were quickly reported as "democratic revolts" against an "oppressive government with extreme poverty" - propaganda that has been accused of being rooted in orientalism and the financial interests of Western nations. These reports were followed with sensationalist personal attacks against Gaddafi, one of which claimed that he mass-distributed Viagra pills to his soldiers. Western media was flooded with anti-Gaddafi reports and imagery, calls for "assisting" the people of Libya, and cries for military intervention. Intervention ensued under the guise of RTP, a UN notion that encompassed a political dedication and obligation to struggle against and terminate the most severe forms of violence and persecution, as well as to diminish the gap between member states' pre-existing obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law and the realities of marginalized groups on the brink of genocide, war crimes, subject to ethnic cleansing and other human rights violations. This principle has recently been applied in the 2011 conflict in Libya, where this concept was used, with reference to UN-resolution 1973, to accept the usage of military force in which Libyan counterrevolutionary groups sought to overthrow Gaddafi.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton played a key role in helping align Western and Arab powers against the Gaddafi administration. Clinton had formally requested that the Arab states intervene in Libya and on March 12th, 2011. The Arab League, which was composed of 22 nations, satisfied this request by voting to ask for UN approval of a military no-fly zone over Libya. On March 13th, 2011, Clinton attended a meeting in Paris with foreign ministers from the Group of Eight countries, where she spoke with the Interim leader of Libya's Transitional National Council, Mahmoud Jibril, for the first time. She also privately met with diplomats from the Persian Gulf in order to determine how willing Arab powers would be to send warplanes to potentially enforce a no-fly zone. Former US President Obama had a conversation on the phone with Clinton by March 15th, 2011, which resulted in Obama siding with Clinton's advocacy for US intervention in Libya. On March 17th, 2011, UN-resolution 1973 was approved of with 10 votes, no objections and 5 abstentions, permitting the usage of all necessary measures with the exception of an occupation force, to protect Libyan citizens, enforce the arms embargo and a no-fly zone, and to reinforce the sanctions regime. In this resolution, the UN Security Council authorized intervention in Libya with "all necessary means," which is UN code for authorization of military force (Warrick, Joby).

The Imperialist Attack on Libya

On March 19th, 2011, at 5:45pm, exactly three hours before the official foreign intervention of Libya, four French Rafale jet fighters annihilated a column of tanks that were headed towards the city of Benghazi. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy had wanted to launch a symbolic first strike, which was ideologically supported by Washington and increased French popular support for Sarkozy. Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini played key roles in the provision of air bases as staging grounds for attacks. Numerous Arab states such as Qatar, Jordan, and the UAE also supplied warplanes and pilots to the imperialist project in order to demonstrate Arab support for military action against Libya (Warrick, Joby).

In reference to a NATO airstrike that was aimed at Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli that killed 3 journalists, Gaddafi said, "I tell the cowardly crusaders (NATO)-I live in a place where you can't get to and kill me, I live in the hearts of millions" (Hadid, Diaa). This NATO-lead intervention retracted Gaddafi's troops from Benghazi and also resulted in the brutal murder of Gaddafi, who was killed in cold blood by Western-backed proxies. According to some of the proxies present during his murder, his final words to his murderers were, "What did I do to you?" (Beaumont, Peter). Likewise, these Western-backed rebels were unable to sell oil nor tap into Gaddafi's overseas bank accounts and by July 2011, were lacking funds for weapons, food, and other supplies. Clinton succeeded in persuading former President Obama to grant full diplomatic recognition to the rebels, which allowed these Western proxies access to billions of dollars from Gaddafi's frozen accounts. Clinton also managed to convince 30 other Western and Arab governments to make the same commitment during a meeting on July 15, 2011, in Istanbul. Tripoli officially collapsed in August 2011 (Warrick, Joby).

The usage of UN resolution-1973 and "Responsibility to Protect" in the Libyan conflict of 2011 was imperialist in that it was used to eradicate a government that had actually improved living conditions in Libya. This intervention served Western-capitalist interests as opposed to being for the sake of humanitarianism, which is ironic given the rampant human rights abuses, bombings, destruction, pillaging, violation of Libyan sovereignty, deaths and rapes that occurred during and after the NATO-led intervention of Libya, including the savage assassination of the nation's former leader Gaddafi, which has even concerned human rights officials from Amnesty International and the UN. Imperialist interventions cannot be justified under guise of humanitarianism when this colonial project in itself and in how it is implemented is a violation of all human rights. These UN laws, which were implemented via consideration of Western propaganda fabricated against Gaddafi, had no actual basis of evidence. This is a contradiction, especially when taking into account its origins in the period of the NATO bombing of Kosovo, which the "Responsibility to Protect" was used to condemn.

The Aftermath

According to US government documents leaked by Wikileaks, the French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron met with the leaders of the new government of Libya under the National Transitional Council (NTC) in September 2011 in Tripoli. Sarkozy and Cameron allegedly wanted to encourage the NTC leaders to reward French and British early support for the coup against the Gaddafi administration, through contracts that would favor French and British energy companies that aspired to play a key role in the Libyan oil industry. It was also reported that the government of France was executing a program of private and public diplomacy in hopes of persuading the NTC to reserve up to 35% of Libyan oil related industry for French firms, specifically the French energy company TOTAL (WikiLeaks, "FRANCE, UK, ET AL, JOCKEYING IN LIBYA/OIL"). Given all this, it is evident that Western powers had aligned in order to enforce an imperialist order on Libya and capitalize off of its resources via an interim government that satisfies their interests.

In modern-day Libya, Libyans fleeing catastrophe in their home country regularly cross the Libyan border to enter Europe and the Libyan coastguard has taken severe measures in handling this migration crisis. As a result, many of these migrants have been held captive, enslaved and sold for as little as $400 to do arduous work with lethal effects on their bodies and well-being. Survivors of the Libyan slave trade provided detail at the United Nations on their traumatic experiences. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) stated that the slave trade in Libya has become so normalized that traffickings of humans for purchase even happen publicly (Warrick, Joby).

Ultimately, the issues that currently plague Libya cannot be discussed without taking into account the dire impact that NATO, France, the UK, the US, Italy, and other Western-aligned powers had in the 2011 intervention and bloody ousting of Gaddafi. This foreign-backed coup, acted out for the sole purpose of fueling western capitalism, was carried forward on a precedent set in Kosovo many years earlier. Other such coups and interventions have continued under this guise of humanitarianism - UN concepts and regulations that should not be utilized for imperialist measures, especially when said actions ironically violate the international laws and human rights they claim to follow.

Notes

[1] United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, "Responsibility to Protect."

[2] Ibid.

[3] TeleSUR , US, NATO Lie to Justify Genocide and Destruction in Yugoslavia

Bibliography

Beaumont, Peter. Gaddafi's Last Words as He Begged for Mercy: 'What Did I Do to You?' . The Guardian, 22 Oct. 2011.

"FRANCE, UK, ET AL, JOCKEYING IN LIBYA/OIL." Hillary Clinton Email Archive, WikiLeaks.

Hadid, Diaa. Gaddafi Taunt: I'm 'in a Place Where You Can't Get Me'. Associated Press, 14 May 2011.

"Responsibility to Protect." United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect , United Nations.

Travail, Jus. Libya: Regime Change Disguised as a People's Revolution. TeleSUR, 22 May 2017.

US, NATO Lie to Justify Genocide and Destruction in Yugoslavia . TeleSUR, 23 Mar. 2016.

Warrick, Joby.

Hillary's War: How Conviction Replaced Skepticism in Libya Intervention

. The Washington Post, 30 Oct. 2011.

Evaluating Venezuela as a Socialist in the US

By Colin Jenkins

In all of the talk about Venezuela, many are missing the real conversation that should be had. Naturally, after being subjected to sensationalist and heavily-biased media reports, most Americans frame the situation in terms of “dictatorship,” “humanitarian crisis,” and “U.S. intervention.” This is expected. Modern U.S. media always has been, and always will be, a mouthpiece of the Pentagon. It has helped to falsely justify every illegal war and intervention the U.S. has embarked on over the past half century. And part of its duty is to delegitimize socialism wherever it appears. Again, expected.

The U.S. left (not liberals & Democrats, the real left) has higher standards. However, despite this, the conversation in leftist circles often gets reduced to the typical “authoritarian vs. libertarian” duality when talking about Venezuelan socialism, to the point where the same superficial media biases are reproduced. Context and nuance are desperately needed. Thus, the primary question we should be asking is this: If you’re a country trying to implement socialism within a global capitalist system, how do you accomplish this?

A vast majority of Venezuelans have supported the Bolivarian Revolution (Venezuela’s socialist movement) for the good part of two decades because they know of the ravages that come with capitalism/imperialism. Socialism has a confirmed pattern of legitimacy within the country. The people want it. So, how does the Venezuelan government proceed with implementing it? How does it deal with imperialism? How should it handle internal dissent? Old wealth? The lingering capitalist class? How does it deal with embargos? Blockades? Restrictions and obstructions from global banking? Foreign influence (U.S. and global capital) and funding of opposing political parties?

What the Bolivarian Revolution has undertaken for the past two decades (with significant support from the masses) has been a delicate and, often times, near impossible task. Any socialist project that is subjected to the powerful forces of global capital is. Heavy hands are needed at times. But who should carry out this heavy-handedness? Who are its targets? How extreme does it need to be? And how can it be balanced enough to provide defensive measures without alienating supporters?

Too much heavy-handedness and you risk losing support and giving ammo to global capital and its propaganda organs worldwide. Not enough heavy-handedness and you risk internal and external sabotage from powerful interests. There are real-life factors that don’t allow us to reduce this to a false dichotomy of authoritarian or liberatory.

This is the discussion we should be having. Not only for Venezuela, but for all socialist movements that currently exist and will inevitably be born in the coming years.

Boricuas Seek Support for Protecting Indigenous Sites: Threats to Bateyes in Jayuya highlight need for community vigilance

By Liliana Taboas Cruz

On the morning of Friday 18th of January 2019, a call on social media was made by visiting Boricua archaeologist Dr. Isabel Rivera-Collazo asking for urgent help in protecting an archaeological site in Jayuya. The site, known as Bateyes Sonadero and Muntaner, is located in the Barrio Jauca in Jayuya. According to records at the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture (ICP), is known to contain a batey (Caribbean ceremonial plaza and ball court, outlined with stones which include monoliths), remnants of a village, ceramics, and lithic material. Archeologist who reported the land movements on site, Adalberto Alvarado, told local press "Ese yacimiento era de uno de los yacimientos que tenia menos impacto en el pueblo" (This archaeological site was one of the less impacted sites in the area.). Alvarado had been inspecting the known batey sites following hurricane Maria. The owner of the property used heavy machinery to clear land for agricultural purposes. In Puerto Rico, land removal requires permits to protect archaeological sites. The owner did not have proper permits to comply with the 112 law. Though the ongoing threat had been reported earlier in the week through formal channels, it wasn't until that Friday morning that the owner forced the archaeologists off the property and started the land removal despite warnings of the illegality of his actions. It was at this point that the social media call was made by Dr. Isabel Rivera-Collazo, who pleaded with the Institute of Culture and the general public to intercede.

The call was answered by many native Puerto Rican and indigenous activists. Personal visits were made by a local Boricua archaeology students to the ICP office in Old San Juan, who informed that archaeologist Dr. Carlos Perez, head of the archaeology office at the ICP, would visit the Jayuya site that Friday evening. Since then the ICP representatives have assured that the destruction has been delayed, though claiming the severity of the removal was still unclear. Their investigation is ongoing.

In Jayuya, local indigenous elder and activist Margarita Kukuya informs that the damage to the site has been extensive and "devastating," describing a scene where batey stones are pushed into a nearby river, while others piled up and broken with debris from the land clearing. This particular site had been the subject of study in 2007 by Dr. Yasha N. Rodriguez Melendez as part of her doctoral thesis. She wrote, "Bateys are endangered and their study becomes increasingly difficult as fewer of them remain." Yasha described bateys as "a permanent structure that has become part of the landscape and visibly identifies a space as different from the rest." These statements only reinforce what indigenous communities have tirelessly expressed. These sites, having immense cultural value and significance, need to be protected and should remain undisturbed.

Indigenous activists have used this opportunity to highlight the need for community vigilance of archaeological sites which have immense historic, social, cultural, and spiritual value to Boricua People, Caribbean Indigenous Peoples, and as Global Patrimony. The need for further education to generate more public awareness and pride in these important historical sites is critical to their preservation. For Caribbean Indigenous Peoples these sites represent the presence of their ancestors and connection to their traditional lands and should remain undisturbed. For archaeologists, the invaluable information contained in these places are completely destroyed with any disturbance and represent a loss of cultural and historic knowledge for the people of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and the world. For local Boricua, as well as those in the diaspora, these sites are meant to be cared for and protected for future generations.

Indigenous Puerto Ricans do not belong to any federally-recognized tribe, they remain as part of the hundreds of non-recognized tribes and indigenous peoples in the United States, despite the US adopting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, which, among many others, includes the right of self-determination. Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico are currently facing one the of worst political, economic, and humanitarian crises in modern times, dealing with a colonial government, an imposed control board, the whims of the federal government, and a debt negotiation where they have no say. The austerity measures being imposed to pay for the debt (parts of which are already being declared illegal) directly affect healthcare, education, natural resources, energy production, pensions, and security. These issues took a turn for the worse after hurricane Maria hit the island in September 2017, causing the death of over 3,000 people and the exodus of hundreds of thousands in a single year.

Caribbean Indigenous Peoples and all living in Puerto Rico deserve better than this. This call is for URGENT support and assistance to those organizing to protect their sacred sites and cultural patrimony, as well as highlight the need for education that includes indigenous perspectives, methodologies, and philosophies that generate the social consciousness needed to protect these sites as a united community.

Let the ICP know you support indigenous participation and perspectives when it comes to access, protection, and management of sacred sites, as well as to demand the strict application of Puerto Rico's laws that protect archaeological sites so that they may be respectfully enjoyed and studied by future generations. The Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena can be reached by calling (787) 724-0700.

Let your local representative know you support a just recovery for Puerto Rico, reject the undemocratic federal control board created by PROMESA, and support a full audit of the debt of Puerto Rico, a US colony.

If you wish to support the indigenous coalition, Pueblo Indigena Taino Unido, created to address these issues, please contact vigilantesboricuas@gmail.com for further information.

Lili, Jibaro-Boricua/Taino

Cupey, Boriquen

I humbly present these words to all those willing to receive them. Seguimos.

Between Developing and Defending the Cuban Revolution

By Joshua Lew McDermott

Recently, I picked up Leon Trotsky's forgotten classic "Their Morals and Ours: Marxist vs. Liberal Views on Morality." The pamphlet offers a scathing critique of what today is known as the "horseshoe theory," wherein the far left and far right are considered morally identical from the standpoint of liberalism, because both employ radical (and sometimes) violent tactics. This viewpoint will be familiar to anyone who has watched the corporate media decry anti-fascist activists as indecipherable from the neo-Nazis they combat.

The crux of Trotsky's argument, which is astoundingly relevant today, is not only that liberals are embarrassingly inconsistent and hypocritical when it comes to passing moral judgments (the lack of outrage from moral crusaders on Yemen's genocide, Hillary Clinton's destruction of Libya, and many other instances of imperial aggression has long been deafening), but the fact that liberals derive their morality from an ahistorical universalist ideal means that liberal morality inherently serves the rich and powerful. Adherence to abstract and eternal moral laws such as "thou shalt not steal" or "always obey the laws of the land" leads to a remarkably reactionary system of ethics. For example, is it immoral for a starving man to steal a loaf of a bread from a bakery owned by a wealthy business owner? In liberal societies, in which property is the ultimate sacred cow and morality is not contingent upon material/historical context, the answer is "yes." Never mind the relevant economic and legal structures which enabled the business owner to become wealthy and led the other man to starvation.

What's more, Trotsky also grapples with the notion of "the ends justify the means" morality, a sentiment which was doubtlessly tested by Communist regimes throughout the 20th century, sometimes to indefensible ends. Yet, the cynical exploitation of sincere revolutionary upheavals by authoritarian figures does mean that there is a divine law which proves that means can never be justified by ends, as pragmatist John Dewey pointed out in his relatively agreeable response to Trotsky's piece. Again, the true determent of morality for any activist who sincerely cares for other humans being must be based upon a sober calculation of real-world facts and contexts and driven by a sincere desire to create a fair world for all people. As Che Guevara famously said, "At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love."

I do not bring up this moral debate to comment on morality as such or to arbitrate in the often absurd, abstract, and counterproductive clashes within the leftist social media sphere between what's become known as "tankies" and "ultraleftists," but because I found the deficiencies of liberal moral outrage especially cogent and consequential while on a recent educational trip to Havana in July 2018 which I took with a small organization known as La Luchita (run by a lovely and well-meaning husband and wife couple) tailored towards building networks between grassroots American and Cuban organizers and activists.

In an interesting dynamic, the American group, of which there was maybe fifteen of us, largely consisted of vaguely progressive activists, mostly in their late-twenties, who were nonetheless highly critical, or even outright dismissive, of Cuba's socialist project. For one week, we met with a cross-section of Cuban activists, from civil-society activists to students to university professors, all with legitimate critiques and praises of the Cuban revolutionary experiment. As one would expect, almost none of our hosts viewed "the Revolution" (as it is referred to on the island) in simple black-and-white terms, though some were more apologetic than others. The same cannot be said for many of the Americans, who were quick to confirm any anti-revolution bias by latching onto any critiques offered by the Cubans, but slow to acknowledge any triumphs of the revolution. The Americans were, as far as I could tell, not conscious that their knee-jerk responses to the most laudable aspects of the revolution (when finding out that wealthy persons were forced to give up any extra homes they owned in order to provide housing to the poor, some of the Americans audibly gawked) were highly reactionary, a condition indicative of so many American progressives. This blindness is symptomatic of gaining a "progressive" education sans any sort of class-analysis, a condition which defines so many well-meaning activists here. This is a symptom of hailing from an imperial heartland wherein questions of class are largely considered irrelevant, where billionaires such as Elon Musk and Oprah Winfrey are even considered radical by some. This selective blindness is the result of not of an absence of ideology, but the product of living deep beneath an invisible ideological shroud: for my colleagues, it seemed, anything good in Cuba was the result of some nebulous category vaguely defined as "Cuban culture" and anything bad in Cuba was due to socialism. For example, on nights out socializing in the city, the beauty of the fact that people from all professions (one night we went out to a jazz club with a group of Cubans comprised of a dentist, a professor, students, a cigar-factory worker, and a janitor) and races intermingled to an extent unimaginable in the U.S. seemed largely to be lost on my American counterparts. "That's just how Cuba is," I imagine they assumed, not realizing the huge strides made for the poor and Afro-Cubans since the fall of the Batista regime.

As a Chinese colleague of mine who travels to Cuba regularly once pointed out to me, Cuban society does not rest on a cult of personality, as in China, nor is it defined by social engineering and violent state control: police presence was almost non-existent within the city. At risk of romanticizing a country with many serious problems, I felt a deep authenticity and cohesiveness in Cuban society I have not experienced in any other country. The difference between Havana or Mexico City or Freetown, Sierra Leone, or any major American city could not have been starker.

I experienced the absolute strangeness of walking across a major city at 1am while seeing children and families enjoying the public parks free from fear, of knowing that every person I saw had full access to one of the world's best healthcare systems and the right to basic human necessities such as housing and employment, still makes my head spin. Where was the oppressive state presence I had heard so much about? The crime-filled streets? I felt I had caught just a small glimpse, for the first time in my life, of the potential harmony that we, as human beings, could achieve in society. What stood out to me most, perhaps, was the prevalence of dignity. Yes, Cuba has tremendous poverty. But the poverty is different than that in the U.S., where social isolation and a lack of access to even the most basic goods abounds despite our unfathomable wealth.

When I raised these insights with my fellow American travelers, the response was not surprising, nor altogether wrong: "you can't tell someone else to be grateful for what they have if you have more than them," one American told me when I expressed concern that the thawing of Cuban-American relations would hasten the-already-quickening erosion of Cuban social welfare. Many of the Cubans we met were under the impression that this would mean more, not less, prosperity for all islanders: to build upon Steinbeck's famous "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" sentiment: it seemed that many of even the poorest pro-American Cubans assumed (in large part due to American cultural influence that the government has long tried to keep out of Cuba) that they themselves would be the casino and resort owners once capitalism comes back to the island (this was often spoken of as an inevitably). Imagine the surprise of some of my Cuban friends, then, when I told them of growing up in America without health insurance, of experiencing homelessness and abject poverty. As any international traveler can attest, American cultural products, such as Hollywood films, have been remarkably successful at one thing: convincing many of the world's poor that poverty does not exist in the U.S.

Regardless, my American traveling companion was right: as an American who benefits greatly from being a citizen of the world's imperial center (take for example, the ease with which I can attain a visa for travel) with just a few relatives from Cuba and little experience on the island myself, I am in no position to tell Cubans they ought to be grateful for living under a government which has, undoubtedly, at times weaponized the threat of imperialism to silence legitimate dissent. Like many other members of my generation and as a young adult recovering from a childhood in Mormonism, there is little I dislike more than living subject to a governance structure which cannot allow for deviation. But, context and material facts do matter if we, as socialists and activists wanting to change the world, are to give any sort of fair appraisal of the Cuban Revolution. The liberal, postmodern project which reduces all legitimate political activism to thoughts and actions based solely upon one's own life experiences and identity categories is antithetical to social solidarity and all forms of class-politics and anti-imperialism. Case-in-point: after informing another American colleague that I was, in fact, a communist, she replied: "I believe subscribing to any sort of label or ideology destroys the political imagination." I don't doubt her sincerity, but neither do I doubt that her aversion to an actively radical ideology was inherently ideological. It is precisely this sort of nebulous belief in the moral superiority of the (nonexistent) apolitical which explains why so many well-meaning liberals can call a revolution which eliminated illiteracy and homelessness in a generation "monstrous," just because some wealthy people lost their second homes.

Regardless, it's important that all freedom-loving people acknowledge the right of Cubans to self-determination, whatever that means for Cubans. Yet, it's also important that anyone who puts stock on truth and morality acknowledges the great successes the revolution has entailed for inhabitants not only of the island, but for the poor all throughout the world, including especially Africa, where Cuban soldiers helped fend off apartheid and Cuban doctors continue to save countless lives. Socialists, in particular, have a political and moral obligation to denounce the U.S. embargo and calls for regime change.

As for appraising what the revolution can teach non-Cuban socialists about how to fight for a better world going forward, the crux of the matter was illustrated for me in a debate over a single word. One of the Cuban activists, an anarchist, asked me: should Cubans be "defending" or "developing" the Cuban Revolution? To defend the Revolution, he told me, assumes that the revolution was a specific historic event that occurred in 1959 and is now complete. According to him, this imagining of the Revolution entails stagnation, nostalgia, authoritarianism. Instead, he argued, Cubans must develop the revolution; this means emphasizing the need for evolution, growth, self-reflection. For him, an end to Cuba's socialist economy (in its present form) would be a step in the right direction as it would mean an easing of state control and an allowance for the sort of dissent necessary for evolution.

For a communist activist I met, however, if one is not defending the revolution, one is working with the project of American imperialism to defeat it. "The revolution has this much room to maneuver," he told me, squinting through an imperceptible slit between his thumb and index finger. This does not mean that this individual was uncritical of the Communist Party; on the contrary, he offered some of the most insightful critiques of the Cuban system. Nor does this mean that the anarchist comrade was not aware of the threat of U.S. economic imperialism. But to act like it will be good for Cuba to simply throw open its borders and government to unchecked American influence, as many American liberals attest, is not only naive but ideological par-excellence: an end of the Cuban socialist project will no doubt mean suffering for the average Cuban.

In other words, the Cuban revolution is not black-or-white. The Cuban government has long been stuck between a rock and hard place. We have an intellectual and moral responsibility to note that if the Cuban socialist government does, in fact, fall, it is more than likely that the millions of Cubans that the revolution lifted out of poverty, taught to read, offered education and healthcare, will face dire consequences in that brave new world of authoritarian neoliberalism that has always defined counterrevolutionary regimes in Latin America, from Pinochet to the newly elected president of Brazil.

Socialists in the 21st century have an obligation to acknowledge the successes of the revolution and to reject the off-hand moral denunciation that liberals are so quick to heap upon any political organization which dares to buck the conventions of the capitalist ruling system. Is Cuban Socialism perfect? No. No system made by humans will ever be and workers should always be free to critique and develop existing socialist projects. But resistance to capitalist exploitation, to poverty, to imperialism, cannot exist if we hold ourselves to an absurd, abstract, and inconsistent moral standard designed to protect the status quo. Revolution is not easy nor morally straightforward. But Cuba has lifted millions from abject poverty and offered its people and people throughout the world dignity and true sovereignty. For this, it deserves our praise, solidarity, and defense, as do all Cuban people, whether they believe in developing or defending revolution. Ultimately, what the Cubans decide to do about their revolution is up to them, but all socialists have an obligation to defend the island and its revolutionary government from outside aggression.

"A Free Palestine from the River to the Sea": The Nine Dirty Words You Can't Say (on TV or Anywhere Else)

By Bryant William Sculos

No Justice, No Peace

It is not uncommon for a mainstream media commentator to be fired for a bigoted or violent comment on air-or off air. As far as I know, there was never a person specifically fired for advocating non-violence and the equal treatment of a group of people. I'm sure untold thousands have never been hired in the first place because of these views-but that's not the same as having those kinds of views being known and then later fired for articulating them for the hundredth if not thousandth time. That was until November 29, 2018, when CNN fired paid commentator (and Temple University Full Professor) Marc Lamont Hill for articulating a nuanced position of peace and justice through non-violence in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Hill called for the equal freedom and dignity of the Palestinian people, a people long violently oppressed and attacked by a colonizing power.

These facts are not in question. What is in question is whether Hill, at the end of the invited speech delivered at the United Nations to commemorate the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, also invoked a dog whistle for the extermination of Jews and the eradication of Israel. Despite the complete inconsistency of this interpretation with the previous twenty minutes of Hill's speech (and everything he has probably ever said and done), this was hardly enough to prevent the far-right wing media circus and pro-Israel/Zionist lobby, which dominates the U.S. media landscape and the whole of the two major political parties and their pundits, from unleashing on Hill. Within hours, it was widely believed that Hill was a virulent anti-Semite. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Hill has repeatedly stated and explained in multiple statements since.

A rigorous and righteous critique of Zionism is not identical to a hatred or even criticism of Jews or Jewishness. There is plenty of evidence and argumentation from Jews themselves that unquestioning support for Israel itself does a disservice to the Jewish tradition and Jews worldwide, as well as those in Israel. This argument was made most recently by Cornel West in his defense of Marc Lamont Hill.

The words in question are "a free Palestine from the river to the sea"-the latter four ostensibly being the genocidal dog whistle, a phrasing used by the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas (both organizations have been previously criticized by Hill for their use of violence in various contexts). If Hill's detractors had displayed any knowledge of anything about his politics, activism, or even the previous 99.9% of the U.N. speech, their outrage would be less disingenuous. If his detractors could show why his final statement, interpreted as a call for mass violence, was in any way consistent with any part of the rest of the speech or Hill's political or intellectual perspectives, they could be taken seriously, at least on a superficial level. This simply is not the case.

Furthermore, I contend, it was not the last four words that people had a problem with; it was the first three: a free Palestine. A free Palestine for a free Palestinian people. Free and equal Palestinian people. This is the true source of the grievances, which led to Hill being fired from CNN-and since, Hill has been targeted by Temple University for possible censure and/or firing, despite the fact that Hill has an endowed chair and the ostensible protection of tenure (to say nothing for comprehensive free speech rights, which since Temple is a public university, are fully guaranteed by the oft-referenced and little-read U.S. Constitution).

While it is unlikely that Hill will be fired or forced out, the relatively recent cases of George Ciccariello-Maher (formerly) at Drexel University and Steven Salaita (formerly) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign show that there are no guarantees for public critics of white supremacy, global capitalism, U.S. imperialism, and Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid. The most critical topics in need of vociferous dissent are the ones being most aggressively censored.

I'm less specifically worried about Prof. Hill losing one of his side jobs than I am about the multitude of others who share and express his views who will never be given a job, either on cable news or in academia. The chilling effects-especially for early-career scholars, teachers, and journalists, who are the most vulnerable to sanction-are palpable and devastating, the results of which will surely harm millions if not billions around the world, not least of all the Palestinian people.

Apples, Bananas, and the Last Human Voice

The tragedy of Prof. Marc Lamont Hill's firing from CNN is worse for its broader implications. Hill was the only consistently leftist voice on cable news - yes, ALL of cable news. He has been a long-time critic of police violence, structural racism, U.S. imperialism, and economic injustices in the U.S. and around the world. He has accepted both the label socialist and Marxist at times, and his arguments on TV and in his books are broadly consistent with those traditions-though they rarely involve the jargon typically associated with those traditions. He chooses his words carefully, but his meanings are rarely unclear. He has stood for working people, the poor, the oppressed, the colonized, the degraded, and the murdered.

He was the only cable commentator to oppose Hillary Clinton from the left. He was browbeaten by other CNN commentators and analysts. His appearances weirdly were fewer and further in-between. Hill refused to change his position on U.S. imperialism, and if one is a critic of U.S. imperialism, one cannot go on TV and call for people to vote for her. Putting aside debates about lesser-evilism and its dangerous pitfalls, going on TV to advocate for an imperialist would have ingratiated Hill with CNN and his Democratic Party consultant colleagues. More people have complied than haven't. He refused.

CNN has always been a network that turns war, death, murder, and injustice into spectator sports for profit. It has always been a network more comfortable paying neo-fascists, bigots, and regressive morons than it is with paying thoughtful left critics. CNN claims to be a "facts first" network. They run ads equating bananas with falsehood and apples with truth. Some are clever; most are not. Marketing criticisms aside, CNN continues to disgrace and debase itself with this decision. As I write this, Rick Santorum, a man who believes that gay and transgender people are inherently mentally-ill and criminals, that climate change is a hoax, that women should not have reproductive rights, and that none of us deserve affordable quality healthcare, is still employed at CNN, appearing regularly on its prime-time shows. But Marc Lamont Hill called for violence (in a speech about non-violence)? He must be purged! Talk about being fucking bananas.

It was already a tragedy nearing its end that there was merely one regular left voice on cable news. With the firing of Marc Lamont Hill, the process of recessing all the truly radical critics from regular appearances on mainstream airwaves is complete. While young people tend to get their news and information from "non-traditional" media, where there are thankfully far more left voices, what happens in the mainstream media, which is still consumed by the majority of Americans, still matters a great deal.

CNN didn't make this choice out of principle. Hill's appearances were seemingly increasingly irregular as he refused to play into the dominant narratives that hyper-focused on President Trump, so it was easy calculus for them. Avoid any semblance of anti-Israel (and by some perverse twist of illogic, anti-American) sentiment and fire Marc Lamont Hill. They did it for PR reasons. They did it for profit. I'm sure they are satisfied with their decision.

Though perhaps they should rethink that: Fox News' host, and rat sphincter wearing human skin, Sean Hannity, was giddy discussing Hill's firing-and of course took several moments to connect an egregiously mischaracterized version of Hill's comments to the entire "insanity" of CNN and its unprofessional anchors who are "too opinionated." The irony was lost on him completely, and the meaning of Hannity's and Fox News' celebration of Hill's firing was likely lost on CNN as well.

Sorry, Not Sorry

With all of that said, despite his righteous and radical declaration of freedom, equality, peace, and justice for the Palestinian people, Marc Lamont Hill penned an apology for The Inquirer. He apologized not for standing with the Palestinian people. He apologized not for opposing Israeli-Zionist settler colonialism. He apologized not for suggesting that the violence of the colonized was not equivalent to the violence of the colonizer. Instead, he apologized for triggering the misinterpretations of his comments that led to the outrage and subsequent firing.

There is one crucial flaw in this apology however, beyond it being completely unnecessary and equally understandable for all those familiar with Marc Lamont Hill. He has a profoundly generous and magnanimous reputation. The problem with the apology is that it is articulated with a factual inaccuracy baked into Hill's words (a factual inaccuracy he is no doubt aware of): the outrage that led to his firing and the now-informal inquiry by the Board of Trustees at Temple was not a good faith misinterpretation. It was not accidental. It was not a "natural" reaction to his supposedly genocidal words at the U.N. The misinterpretation was intentional from the start, and the outrage was exaggerated for political purposes. The people attacking Marc Lamont Hill-including CNN-are not rightly offended by a scholar and activist's "poor choice of words." His choice of words was perfectly fine. The outrage that Hill's words spawned were because of their normative content; because of whom they were delivered to defend and support: the Palestinian people-as well as the entity they were deployed to criticize: the Israeli state.

Any genuine offense that was created by Hill's words were undoubtedly not from Hill's words themselves, but rather from the feigned offense of others intentionally mischaracterizing Hill's words for political effect. His most recent book Nobody is a testament to his scholar-activist credentials and deeply felt compassion and care for the oppressed and exploited in the world. No one-nobody-could read the actual words in that book and genuinely think that this author would ever defend the extermination of a people (not even cops). There are undoubtedly millions of people who could intentionally misread what he wrote, and he has no need to apologize for those intentional misinterpretations any more than he should have apologized for the intentional misconstruing of his comments on Israel and a free Palestinian people.

By apologizing as he did, while certainly representative of Hill's humility and selflessness and certainly clarifying for those on the left who may not have heard the original speech, I fear some of this ill-motivated criticism may have been unintentionally legitimized. The accusations of anti-Semitism were not offered in good faith in any way and treating them as good-faith misinterpretations threatens to offer a glean of honesty that neo-fascist Zionism will continue to abuse. Marc Lamont Hill shouldn't be blamed for this possible outgrowth of his apology; he was responding to an existential threat to his ability to make a living-and perhaps some perceived genuine misinterpretation that I simply refuse to believe exists.

For Palestinians, Not Palestine

This is just one contribution to an ongoing and undoubtedly continuing discussion about the Palestinian people's right to exist as living beings with dignity, respect, and equaliberty, but it is important to emphasize here that there should be no defense of nationalism implied, interfered, or articulated. While anti-colonial nationalism is preferable to imperial bourgeois nationalism, it is a political dead end nonetheless. In the context of Israel-Palestine, while the discursive move of asserting the right of the Palestinian people to be citizens of a democratic nation-state is assuredly a positive and productive move insofar as it challenges US and Israeli capitalist imperial power, the liberation of the Palestinian people (and the working class people of Israel, many of whom do not support the far-Right Likud Party or the heinous war crimes of the Israeli state) will only be accomplished with aggressively solidaristic internationalism. Demanding political, economic, cultural, and social equality and freedom within all relevant political structures that affect the lives of Palestinians is not inconsistent with a ruthless critique of the modern state system and all of its attendant injustices.

This speaks to the final tragedy of the firing and ongoing assault of Marc Lamont Hill. It was precisely for his passionate, thoughtful, informed words of solidarity and support for the freedom of all people, especially the Palestinians, that he is being punished. While we must match his act(s) of solidarity with the Palestinians with our own words and deeds of solidarity with him and against his detractors, I don't think it is too bold of me to suggest that Marc would want us to put doubly more energy into supporting the cause of peace with justice and freedom for all peoples, which his own passionate support of has precipitated this absurd circumstance.

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is the Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and, beginning in January 2019, will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Worcester State University teaching in a variety of areas of global politics. Bryant is also an occasional adjunct professor in political theory at Florida International University. He is a member of Socialist Alternative-CWI in the U.S. and regular contributor to The Hampton Institute, New Politics, Public Seminar, and Class, Race and Corporate Power - where he also serves as Politics of Culture section editor.

"The Ability to Define Phenomena": A Historiography of U.S. Empire in the Middle East

By Derek Ide

In November 1938, during the midst of the Japanese occupation of China, Mao Tse-tsung proclaimed what eventually became a lightning rod for revolutionaries around the world: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."[1] Over three decades later, in June 1971, Huey Newton declared: "power is, first of all, the ability to define phenomena, and secondly the ability to make these phenomena act in a desired manner." [2] Although Newton had earlier drawn significant inspiration from Mao and the Chinese Revolution, these definitions could not be further apart. However, if one accepts that in the last instance coercive force is what determines power relations, but in intermediary periods of struggle power is defining phenomena and having an impact on the direction in which these phenomena move, then perhaps the chasm between the two definitions is not so wide.

This essay intends to explore academic engagement with the role that the United States has played in the Middle East, particularly the Arab world. I have delineated four distinct "camps" in the historiography: euphemism-as-elision, empire-as-celebration, imperial-as-lens, and the anti-imperialist camps. These four conceptual categories are predicated upon two variables: the manner the authors address (or, conversely, refuse to address) U.S. empire and imperialism and who they either explicitly or implicitly target as their audience. I defend the use of the word "camps," with all of its martial connotations, as opposed to other more moderating words like "traditions," because I contend those involved in these questions are not simply individuals who exist purely as part of a larger academic community where power ceases to exist and intellectual exchange is the sole modus operandi. Instead, they are, a la Newton, engaged in decisive battles over how to define phenomena (in this case U.S. empire) and struggle to make that phenomena act in a desired manner (via the audience they are attempting to influence).

As such, what follows is not a purely chronological historiography that traces the development of "U.S. in the Middle East" literature over the decades. Other scholars have completed this task exceptionally well. [3] Nor is it a comprehensive list of the most recent scholarship regarding the region. Rather, this essay explores the various relationships academics have to U.S. empire in the Middle East. Given that imperialism is a global phenomenon, however, it would be impossible to completely ignore the theoretical and historiographical contributions that have been made by scholars of imperialism who study areas outside of the Middle East. The essay will begin by defining imperialism. It will then provide a brief overview of the European forms of imperial knowledge production that the U.S. borrowed from in the aftermath of World War II. Finally, it will analyze the four delineated above.

U.S. Imperialism in the 20th century

A problem that arises in the study of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East is the mistaken assumption that imperialism functions exactly the same in all historical eras. Many academics continue to cling to the European imperialism of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, which were necessarily territorial empires. Julie Greene, in her work The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal, challenges the notion that the creation of the Panama Canal was "unconnected to imperialism" in order to provoke a "broader rethinking of America's 'new empire' in the aftermath of 1898." [4] She argues that the essence of this project involved the construction of a "global infrastructure" that required state intervention on an international level. This new global infrastructure laid the groundwork for an American empire that eschewed formal territorial control in favor of economic and commercial control, supplemented by regular doses of military intervention.

By laying out the logic of non-territorial empire in this way, academics are catching up to the kinds of analyses articulated by Arab political actors themselves as early as the 1950s and 1960s. For example, the Arab Nationalist Movement, a forerunner to George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, articulated their opposition to imperialism in the 1950s:

When we say imperialism… we mean direct imperialism such as the one imposed on South Arabia. We mean by it imperialism hiding behind treaties as in the case of Libya and some other Arab countries in the Maghreb. We mean by it masked imperialism embodied in alliances such as the Baghdad Pact and the Eisenhower project. And last but not least, we mean economic imperialism obviously represented in the monopoly exercised by the oil companies over our natural resources. Liberation means to be free from the shackles of foreign exploitation no matter what shape or form it takes. [5]

As the late Samir Amin argued, the "state of permanent war" in the Middle East is a cornerstone of Washington's project of global hegemony. As Amin explains, the "war of 1967, planned in agreement with Washington in 1965, pursued several goals: to start the collapse of the populist nationalist regimes, to break their alliance with the Soviet Union, to force them to reposition itself on the American trail, to open new grounds for Zionist colonization." Permanent war allows the United States to enervate the Arab world and denies the possibility of "a rich and powerful modernized" Arab bloc that could "call in question the guaranteed access of the Western countries to the plundering of its oil resources, necessary for the continuation of waste associated with capitalist accumulation." [6] Although Amin was writing in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, the interventions of 2011 onwards, notably in Libya and Syria, are a direction continuation of this policy.[7]

Political scientist Michael Parenti, who has written extensively on U.S. empire, provided a succinct working definition of imperialism in the 1990s: "The process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people." [8] As seen from this definition, territorial acquisition is simply one variable of imperialism. The insertion of "dominant politico-economic interests" as a qualifier is important in this definition and complicates the idea of "national interests," which so many writers in the euphemism-as-elision category rely upon.

A significantly more thorough definition of empire comes from Richard Drayton. Although he writes specifically about the historiography of British imperialism, his critiques can be broadened to include the literature addressing U.S. imperialism. Drayton argues that the "cultural turn" represented an "ascent of idealism" that was "remarkably compatible with the neo-liberal moment." [9] The literature became preoccupied with how the colonized were perceived by the colonizers or developed a "focus on subjectivity" and agency, where "how people in Africa, Asia, or Latin America thought about things, displaced examination of practical and material experience. Historians appeared to be more bothered by 'epistemic violence' than the real thing." [10] Drayton makes a clarion call for historians to be clear about the reality of imperialism, arguing that it is "a useful category through which we may make sense of a phenomenon which recurs in world history wherever a power gap allows one society to become predatory towards others." Indeed, Drayton's conception of imperialism is worth quoting in full:

Imperialism, in all its contexts, is a regime through which external entities derive maximum gain from the labour and resources within a territory. A foreign power, with or without formal colonization, although always with local collaborators, secures a protected and privileged sphere for its economic actors. There the relationship of labour to capital is manipulated via the suppression of taxes, wages, social or environmental protections, by forms of coercion which drive labour towards that direction of employment and limit its legal or practical ability to resist the regime, and from which tribute, commodities and profit may be freely expatriated. The social rent paid by capital is minimized, as both the costs of social reproduction (childhood, ill health, aging) are borne from the wages of labour and the costs of infrastructure through which the external actor derives extraordinary benefit - roads, deepwater harbours, airports, electricity networks, local policing and repression - are funded mainly out of taxation of the wages and consumption of the squeezed wages of labour… Violence is a constant and necessary corollary of such an order, needed to install, defend, discipline and replace local collaborators… But Imperialism always comes wearing the mask of community, promising that its form of domination is in the universal interest. To such a claim historians and their colleagues in the social sciences lend active help. [11]

Drayton's definition, emphasizing the material sinews of empire, points the historian to material forces underlying imperialism. This perspective includes both the processes of extraction, as well as its points of vulnerabilities. These functional definitions of imperialism inform the analysis of the historiographical traditions below.

Early knowledge production of the Middle East

Early American knowledge production about the Middle East is largely indebted to the British. Direct inter-imperialist collaboration was a routine occurrence, with American officials studying European colonial administrations to derive lessons about intelligence gathering, counterinsurgency, developing efficient models of colonial life, etc. As Karine Walther has pointed out in the context of the Philippines, "American military officers engaged in 'colonial tourism' in Egypt, India, Java, Borneo, and Malaysia."[12] This reliance upon British knowledge production about former colonial possessions did not disappear immediately at the end of World War II. It would take many years for the U.S. to develop adequate institutions of knowledge about its newly acquired spheres of influence. One indication of how deeply U.S. officials and academics relied upon British knowledge production about the Middle East could be seen in 1945, when the State Department had no alternative but to recommend only that the British be asked to invite position papers from both sides on the Palestine question. [13] Another example can be seen as late as 1951 from an annotated bibliography compiled by the American Council of Learned Societies about the Near East. The bibliography listed a total of fifteen books on the modern history of Egypt, three of which were written directly by British colonial officials. Nearly all of the anthropological works cited were completed by British and French researchers.[14]

American knowledge production about the Middle East during the first part of the twentieth century relied heavily upon American missionaries in the region, such as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The kind of knowledge produced about the region during this period was often racist and Orientalist, but allowed for the framing of "imperial expansion in the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention." [15] These ideas existed within a broader "hierarchy of heathenism" where American missionaries ranked cultures according to their receptiveness to the Christian imperial civilizing mission.[16] A second source came from Orientalist scholars in academic institutions, many of them who studied the ancient world and not the modern Middle East in any meaningful way. During World War I, a group of specialists came together to serve in Woodrow Wilson's think-tank called "The Inquiry." [17] This "team of experts" played a vital role in the Paris Peace Conference, and represented one of the first times that the former territories of the Ottoman Empire registered on the American radar. As such, the Inquiry represented an "early attempt by Washington to develop contemporary expertise on foreign areas."[18] Exemplifying the close missionary-state relationship, ABCFM members like James Barton submitted reports for the Inquiry arguing that "Islam was the central problem of Turkish rule and the spread of Christianity was the ultimate solution."[19] In the interwar period, Osamah Khalil posits that missionary universities like the American University in Cairo (AUC) and the American University in Beirut acted as "sheet anchors" that not only produced knowledge about the region but were also instrumental in acting as a bulwark against communist ideas in the Arab world.[20]

During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services and the Army Specialized Training Program acted as "precursors of university-based area studies programs."[21] In 1947, the British government created the Interdepartmental Commission of Enquiry on Oriental, Slavonic, East European and African Studies in Britain (also known as the Scarbrough commission). As Zachary Lockman notes:

…this body had been appointed by the British government to investigate how that country's teaching and research resources on various regions might be sustained and developed; the commission's report, issued that same year, recommended additional funding for universities to strengthen their capacities in this area… the meeting seems to have contributed to the determination of the [American Council of Learned Societies] and the Rockefeller Foundation to at long last get things moving in Near Eastern studies. [22]

President of the Social Science Research Council and first dean of Harvard's School of Public Administration, E. Pendleton Herring, openly called for a "national symphony" of "governmental, business, and academic elites."[23] The Korean War convinced U.S. policy makers of the dire need for area based studies programs. At the time the University of Michigan declared it was "ready to serve in the National Emergency." [24] This "national symphony" quickly developed into a broader national security state, with one of its integral functions being the production of knowledge about the Middle East. Given the increasingly vital role Arab oil to the U.S. economy, it was unacceptable for imperial planners that U.S. knowledge production about the region was so weak. Around 1950, Zachary Lockman suggests there were no more than half a dozen members of the American Political Science Association with a working knowledge of Arabic, Persian, or Turkish.[25] Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies was established in 1954 with William L. Langer, of OSS and CIA fame, serving as director. That center was created "after consultation with the State Department, the CIA, U.S. Army Intelligence, Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon) and of New York (later Mobil) and Aramco." [26]

The Iraqi coup of 1958, which largely caught U.S. officials off guard, helped convince planners of the need for advanced language training. $61 million was quickly designated for Title VI language programs. [27] For Middle East Studies, the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958 was particularly important. Private corporations like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations provided massive funding for area studies, viewing their interests as part and parcel of U.S. state expansion into other parts of the globe. In 1961 the Carnegie Corporation funded a program, run by Princeton, to train candidates at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies (MECAS) in Lebanon. As Lockman explains, the Center was originally established "by the British Foreign Office at that location in 1947 to teach Arabic to its staff" and many "Lebanese often called it the 'spy school' because a substantial number of its graduates were reputed to work for British or other intelligence agencies." [28] Thus, from the outset of the Cold War academic institutions became directly bound to the U.S. state and its imperial apparatus. However, as Melani McAlister notes, for "various bureaucratic and intellectual reasons, however, Middle East studies in the U.S. did not become fully institutionalized until 1967, when the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) was founded." [29] But even MESA, early in its existence, launched an effort to solicit donations from a broad range of corporations, including oil companies and military contractors. [30]

The euphemism-as-elision camp

This category of literature situates U.S. actions in the Middle East within a series of euphemisms in order to elide the question of empire entirely. "Foreign relations," "diplomatic history," "international relations," "counterinsurgency," and "U.S. assistance" are some of the rhetorical devices employed to conceal the nature of U.S. action in the Middle East. Such rhetoric is meant to dissuade scholars from adopting imperialism as either a lens of analysis or challenging it as an actually existing entity. These authors also tend to write with an imperial audience in mind, including diplomats, policy makers, and other academics implicated in imperial policy-making.

At Columbia University's Bureau for Applied Social Research (BASR), responsible for evaluating U.S. propaganda in Western Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, "euphemism-as-elision" became a kind of official doctrine. In 1950, BASR's Paul Lazarsfeld and Charles Glock explained: "While it is inappropriate to talk about an American empire, it is entirely in place to discuss the large and growing sphere of American influence."[31] One BASR sociologist, Siegfried Kracauer, in his "Appeals to the Near and Middle East," argued that the "Arabs might prove sensitive to Communist intolerance if they get the impression that it is a variant of their own fanaticism."[32] Quintessential Cold War American historians like Walter Laqueur, in his Nationalism and Communism in the Middle East (1956), perpetuated such arguments, drawing direct comparisons between the legacy of Islam and the potential flourishing of communism in the Islamic world: "The exhilarating feeling of mission, of purpose, of being engaged in a collective adventure to accelerate the historically inevitable victory of the true faith over the evil infidels are common to classical Islam and to Communism."[33] Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s knowledge production about the Arab world necessarily travelled through imperial circuits while simultaneously denying U.S. empire as an existing phenomenon.

The trend of knowledge production intended to service empire without acknowledging its existence continued throughout the neoliberal decades (mid-1970s onward). These texts now had enough distance to begin producing knowledge on prior chronological eras. One representative text in this tradition is Phillip Baram's The Department of State in the Middle East, 1919-1945, which argued that the United States strategy in the interwar and World War II era was fourfold: 1) enervate the old European powers 2) do not openly engage with the Zionists 3) isolate the Soviets and 4) "encourage individual Arab states to be free, sovereign, and pro-American." [34] David Painter analyzed U.S. oil policy in the first decade of the Cold War, suggesting that the U.S. state developed a symbiotic relationship with the oil companies where the former combatted Third World nationalism while the latter ran quotidian extraction operations. He concluded by suggesting, despite ARAMCO occasionally presenting diplomatic difficulties for the U.S., that this business-government partnership was the most appropriate set-up for the Middle East in the early Cold War era. [35]

As Douglas Little notes, the "nature of Russia's intentions in the Middle East during the late 1940s and the appropriateness of America's response have sparked much scholarly controversy." [36] Whereas scholars like Bruce Kuniholm argued in 1980 that American military aid and diplomatic bravado fended off the Soviets, other scholars like Melvyn Leffler posited twelve years later that American officials exaggerated the Russian threat during the Truman years. [37] One cannot help but notice the timing of each monograph, with the former at the height of Soviet involvement in Afghanistan and the latter after the Soviet collapse. Scholars like Peter Hahn suggest that while London sought to maintain informal empire in the Middle East, U.S. aspirations were "anticolonial" in nature and meant to contain the Soviets. [38] One prominent scholar, Barry Rubin, suggested U.S. policy towards Iran was "paved with good intentions."[39] The question of U.S. imperialism does not arise at all.

In Egypt, early US contacts with the Nasser government appeared promising, and U.S. scholars have debated what soured relations. Barry Rubin argues it was Nasser's commitment to pan-Arab nationalism, while others blame variously the British, the Soviet Union, or Israel. [40] Something of a consensus had emerged in the 1980s that the Eisenhower administration had overestimated "American economic leverage in Egypt" and underestimated "Nasser's willingness to seek help from the Soviet bloc." [41] Even Douglas Little, who has the widest grasp of the literature discussing the U.S. role in the Middle East, often employs euphemisms that suggest the U.S. was a "stabilizer" in the region. [42] Little further suggests that Kennedy used "personal diplomacy" and American wheat to channel Nasserism into "constructive channels" while encouraging more conservative government to institute reforms. [43]

Little explains that every administration after Lyndon Johnson employed his "three pillars approach" (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran) in order to "promote regional stability," "preserve Western access to Mideast oil," and "protect American interests."[44] Likewise, Little posits that the U.S. intervention in Lebanon in 1958 after the July 14 coup in Iraq was representative of "Ike's ability to restore law and order in Beirut without becoming mired down" in religious strife. [45] Utilizing the language of "national interests" and "law and order" in relationship to U.S. empire is a questionable technique that both conceals the nature of imperialism and discourages the basic question: cui bono? As his career progressed, Little inched closer to employing the word "empire," first in his text American Orientalism (2008), when he casually mentions "America's national security empire" once without any explication. [46] Even his use of "orientalism" is subject to many of the critiques that Melani McAlister levels against using orientalism as a framework in the U.S. context. [47] By 2014, however, Little had identified America's "Informal Empire in the Middle East" in an article for America in the World: The Historiography of US Foreign Relations since 1941 .[48] This kind of imperial knowledge production has instrumental value to U.S. imperial power and continues to represent a significant trend in academic fields like diplomatic history.[49]

A particularly pernicious development in recent years has been to appropriate and distort the concept of "agency" to obfuscate imperial reality completely. Perhaps the most infamous example of this kind of charlatanry is Roham Alvandi's Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah (2014). Alvandi's text seeks to challenge the well-established view, accepted more or less globally, that the Shah of Iran was simply a client state of the United States. Alvandi contends that the "American proxy" model accurately characterizes the US-Iran relationship of the 1950s, but that the early 1970s represented a brief period where the Shah was an "active agent of history who often abetted and manipulated the superpowers in the pursuit" of regional interests. [50] As with all post-modern academic phrases of dubious design and intent, Alvandi easily employs the "agency" brush to paint the Shah of Iran as something other than a client of US empire. The logic rests on tenuous grounds, notably on the fact that no "partner" can so seamlessly be reduced again to a "client" in a span of a few years, with the shifting of a few individuals in government. Furthermore, Alvandi's suggestion that the Shah took some small-scale prerogatives on his own hardly qualifies as a negation of client-state status.[51] While Kissinger and Nixon may have maintained a more personable relationship with the shah, Iran received nothing on either the scale or scope of the secret memorandum signed by the U.S. and Israel in 1975. [52] As such, his grandiose claims about the Shah's partner status are hardly warranted. Undoubtedly 1979 was a major blow to US imperial prerogatives. The shah's illusions aside, the empire lost a client state, not an imperial partner.

Although the various intellectuals and historians surveyed above have distinct specializations, varied and divergent opinions, and often times express serious disagreement both with each other and their predecessors, two consistencies bind them together: 1) they reject the idea of U.S. empire as an actually existing phenomenon and 2) they write with an imperial audience in mind (those capable of having some influence on imperial policy). As such, whether missionaries cementing American ideological hegemony, BASR sociologists employing Orientalist tropes, or historians analyzing policy while simultaneously denying empire, a vast tradition of knowledge production about the Arab world exists and continues to flourish that is directly bound to U.S. imperial power. By employing euphemism-as-elision, these historians both sanitize the past and project a sense of innocuousness onto policy during the present, stripping the U.S. of its imperialist content.

The empire-as-celebration camp

A more recent phenomenon, particularly after 9/11 and the emergence of the "War on Terror," has been the growth of a literature that explicitly celebrates and encourages U.S. empire. One of the defining features of this literature is that it forcefully asserts the reality of imperialism, positing it as the most auspicious path for the future instead of critiquing U.S. empire as a pernicious force. The distinction between this camp and the euphemism-as-elision camp is not just its emphasis on embracing the notion of empire, but also its audience. Whereas academics who deny the existence of empire service it by cleansing the past and appealing to the ostensibly noble or at least pragmatic intentions of policy makers, the "empire-as-celebration" camp maintains two different audiences. First, like their euphemism-as-elision counterparts, they seek to influence policy. Second, they seek to disperse the idea of the benevolence of U.S. empire amongst the U.S. population more generally. Their choice to publish in popular presses is one way they seek to have a wider impact than highly specialized academic monographs with high-price tags would normally allow. Although this camp may end up as a flash-in-the-pan, they have received a wide audience and it does a disservice to exclude them from the historiography of empire in the Middle East.

Three key figures in this emergence of "empire-as-celebration" camp at the turn of the twenty-first century were Max Boot, Robert Kaplan, and Niall Ferguson. Max Boot's Savage Wars of Peace (2002) is a chronologically broad analysis of U.S. economic and military intervention from 1800 to the early 2000s. Borrowing from Kipling, Boot argues that the U.S. has regularly engaged in small "savage wars of peace" intended to "suppress rebellions and guerilla warfare in all parts of the world." [53] These wars are, according to Boot, "imperial wars" that also require "chronicling the political course of American empire."[54] Robert Kaplan's Imperial Grunts (2006) is a much more contemporary account that describes the author's "odyssey through the barracks and outposts of American Empire."[55] Imperialism, according to Kaplan, is "but a form of isolationism, in which the demand for absolute, undefiled security at home leads one to conquer the world, and in the process to become subject to all the world's anxieties."[56] It is a muddy definition, one that hardly means anything or elucidates the actual motor forces of imperialism, but this kind of definition also lends itself to a sort of celebratory cause. Kaplan asserts that this definition of empire implies that those carrying it out are often in "half denial." Unlike the conscript armies of World War II, there now exists a "professional military that, true to other imperial forces throughout history, enjoyed the soldiering life for its own sake." [57] Truer to reality than many of the euphemism-as-elision camp, Kaplan argues that "the very opposition to imperial influence constitutes proof of its existence." [58] Afghanistan and Iraq form two of the core objects of imperial policy for Kaplan.

Niall Ferguson makes what is perhaps the most important intervention in this literature. The Oxford and Hoover Institution research fellow has earned himself a spot on Time's 100 most influential people list. While it is true that his scholarship is rife with errors, particularly with regard to the Middle East,[59] academics that dismiss his work do so at their own peril. Leaving the realm of popular engagement to the most reactionary and overtly imperialist scholars, even when they are objectively wrong about simple facts, entails sacrificing the possibility of engaging with a wider audience outside of the confines of the ivory tower. Ferguson's 2004 work Colossus posits a fourfold thesis: 1) the U.S. has always been empire, functionally if not self-consciously; 2) a self-conscious American imperialism might well be preferable to the available alternatives, but 3) financial, human, and cultural constraints make such self-consciousness highly unlikely, and 4) therefore the American empire will remain a somewhat dysfunctional entity.[60] Ferguson implores an American audience to embrace their imperialist role, and adopt a self-conscious and long-term form of empire building. To deal with the "manpower deficit" required to maintain a massive military presence overseas, particularly in the Middle East, Ferguson puts forward a solution: "If one adds together the illegal immigrants, the jobless and the convicts, there is surely ample raw material for a larger American army." [61] Simply because academics dismiss the empire-as-celebration camp does not render them politically impotent, as Niall Ferguson's advisory role to John "100 Years in Iraq" McCain in 2008 exemplifies.

The "imperial-as-lens" camp

The "imperial-as-lens" camp is also a relatively recent phenomenon, but one that has thus far remained a largely academic exercise. One of the most ardent proponents of this tradition is Paul Kramer, who in 2011 penned an important piece titled "Power and Connection: Imperial history of the United States and the World." In it, he argues forcefully for the "imperial-as-lens" analysis, arguing that older generations of both Marxists and Foucauldian scholars have employed either "structural" or "all-saturating" accounts of power, respectively. [62] This "thinning of empire" to only include its "exceptionally repressive" attributes mistakes a "part for a whole."[63] In its place, Kramer posits the need for:

….a category of analysis, not a kind of entity, something to think with more than think about… A language of the 'imperial' rather than 'empire' can help avoid connotations of unity and coherence-thingness-that tend to adhere to the latter term, and move to the side the mostly unproductive question of whether the United States is or has "an empire"-and if so, what type it is, and whether or not it measures up to the rubrics built to account for other empires. Far more is to be gained by exploring the imperial as a way of seeing than by arguing for or against the existence of a 'U.S. empire.' [64]

Kramer's "imperial-as-lens" framework thus eschews the question of whether or not the U.S. is an empire, rejecting generations of analysis by scholars and revolutionaries alike that have identified it as such.

Kramer's most renowned work, Blood of Government (2006), deals with the question of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines (a subject that hardly benefits from the "unproductive question" of whether the U.S. is an empire, given how blatant the imperial project was). The lack of theoretical rigor can be seen when Kramer describes empire as "exercising sovereignty and power over peoples denied the rights that were increasingly coming to define the modern nation-state: it meant inventing ideologies to calibrate inclusion in these expanding and hierarchical polities." [65] The reader quickly notices that imperialism is a fundamentally non-economic act for Kramer. Instead, empire is primarily a question of race and power. To what ends remains unclear; perhaps a reflex of modernity, perhaps as an end in itself. Nothing appears to actually drive empire in Kramer's narrative, given that he offers no explanatory power for the nature of imperial expansion. At his worst, Kramer makes assertions that mean virtually nothing at all, such as the following: "Along the multiple nodes that linked colonizing and colonized societies, simultaneous glances upward and downward along novel axes of power formed new symbolic economies of hope, terror, and identification." [66] Unintelligible passages such as these raise questions regarding the efficacy of the "imperialism-as-lens" approach.

Examples of the "imperial-as-lens" framework being applied to the Middle East exist, and represent various levels of usefulness. For instance, Karine Walther's Sacred Interests (2015) approvingly cites Kramer's "imperial-as-lens" framework in her introduction. She rather successfully explores how different American actors "justified their impingement on Muslim rulers' sovereignty as part of a broader imperial civilizing mission rather than a crude commercial or strategic grab for territory and power."[67] By noting how missionaries and non-state actors adopted an imperial mindset in their dealings with the Muslim world, she pushes the chronological boundaries of U.S. imperialism backwards and explains how these developments set the ideological stage for future material endeavors. Yet, as others have noted, with the exception of the section on the Moros of the Philippines, "the link between religion and diplomatic/imperialist action could be more fully substantiated." [68] Walther's emphasis on "the imperial" does not help the reader interpret calls for an interventionist foreign policy particularly when the U.S. did not pursue one, as in many of the book's case studies.

Osamah Khalil's America's Dream Palace (2016) is another text that fits within the imperial-as-lens camp. Although Khalil does acknowledge the U.S. as an empire, his primary focus is on the imperial gaze and how U.S. actors of varied stripes understood the Middle East. [69] Khalil contends that U.S. national security interests were a driving force in the emergence of Middle East expertise. A "mutually beneficial relationship" [70] developed between the national security establishment and academia that galvanized Middle East studies programs and area studies more broadly. Eventually, as the national security state relied less on academia, intelligence became privatized as think-tanks supplied state actors with "useful knowledge." Borrowing from Said, Khalil asserts that "Orientalism influenced the analysis, formation, and implementation of American policies" in the Middle East over the past century.[71] In short, the development of Middle East studies was "an articulation of American power, Orientalism and exceptionalism, as well as their limits." [72] One of the problems with Khalil's text is the framework of Orientalism that he employs does not always elucidate how the process of knowledge production informs actual policy. For instance, despite racial and religious tropes inherent in orientalist discourse (particularly vis-à-vis the inferiority of Islam), the reader never gets a sense from Khalil's book that U.S. imperial policy was frequently to support reactionary religious elements to stifle secular leftist politics.

One direction this "imperial-as-lens" analysis has taken more recently is to deal with the way non-state actors in the imperial center, particularly the Black liberation movement in the U.S., have engaged with the Arab and Muslim world. The text that opened the door for this new wave of scholarship was Black Star, Crescent Moon (2012) by Sohail Daulatzai. On Daulatzai's heels came two major academic works discussing the subject, Geographies of Liberation (2014) by Alex Lubin and A Shadow over Palestine (2015) by Keith Feldman. Notwithstanding some quality content, these works all suffer from the deficiencies intrinsic to esoteric academic postmodern discourse (a juncture where the question of audience is particularly vital). In this case, the intellectual frameworks designed to understand transnational solidarities and their anti-imperialist content lack theoretical rigor. Daulatzai's "Muslim International" relies heavily on Chatterjee's "fragments of the nation" concept.[73] Furthermore, the entire analysis is plagued by a sort of poststructuralist analysis that is both exhausting to read and largely meaningless. [74] Lubin's "geographies of liberation" introduces an entire lexicon of jumbled postmodern (occasionally "countermodern") jargon. [75] In Feldman there is much of the same.[76] Although the question of intellectual frameworks is possibly ancillary, it is also an area of the historiography that desperately needs clarity.

The anti-imperialist camp

Historians emphasizing the concrete realities of empire, what may be called the anti-imperialist camp within the historiography, stand in rather stark contradistinction to the "imperial-as-lens" camp and its obsession with discourse. These writers not only recognize U.S. empire, they tend to actively criticize it and, with varying levels of vigor, encourage resistance to it. Works like Rashid Khalidi's Resurrecting Empire (2004) and Sowing Crisis (2009) explicitly consider the U.S. as an empire. Some popular texts, such as Robert Dreyfuss' Devil's Game (2005), have also tried their hand at documenting the nuances of imperial policy. In Dreyfuss' case, this includes detailing the ways in which the United States "spent decades cultivating Islamists, manipulating and double-crossing them, cynically using and misusing them as Cold War allies," and explicitly calls for the U.S. to "abandon its imperial pretensions in the Middle East." [77] A few of the recent and representative texts include Lloyd Gardner's Three Kings (2009), Robert Vitalis' America's Kingdom (2006), and Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy (2013).

In many ways, Lloyd Gardner's Three Kings sits most squarely in the intellectual lineage of William Appleby Williams and his critique of U.S. Empire as "tragedy." [78] In essence, Gardner argues that the Truman Doctrine was the "essential rubric under which the United States projected its power globally after World War II" and laid the foundation for the "imperial presidency." [79] The purpose was not to "fend off the Soviets" but to "shore up friendly governments in strategic areas." Finally, the doctrine addressed the problem of how to replace the British in Middle East. Although John Foster Dulles adopted "International Communism" as an ideological weapon, the principal purpose of American imperial policy was not to deter a Russian attack but to "ensure the loyalty of the countries receiving aid and to maintain their governments in power against internal threats." [80]

America's Kingdom by Robert Vitalis is a text that places "our understanding of ARAMCO… in the long history of empire" and challenges American exceptionalist accounts that purport "to prove American enterprise to be anything but agents of empire." [81] One of the ways he does this is by articulating the vital function of race to the organization of oil production. ARAMCO fought tooth and nail to perpetuate a system of racial discrimination, including significant differentials in wages, working conditions, and housing. In large part this system was intended to lower costs but also enervate the organizational capacities of workers. The American oil giant explained deportations of oil workers by suggesting they were adherents of the "'the Communist line, particularly as regards evils of capitalism and racial discrimination.'" [82] At other junctures ARAMCO's security department worked with Saudi forces to imprison and deport organizers. Unfortunately, Vitalis' understanding of the function that Israel plays as part of parcel of U.S. empire is flawed, and detracts from the analytical rigor of his work.

Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy is a vital intervention in the historiography of oil and oil politics in the twentieth century, particularly as it relates to British and later U.S. imperialism. Challenging the older literature that focuses solely on the corrupting influence of oil money, Mitchell persuasively argues that oil as a commodity, including its physical properties, is fundamental to understanding political power. Mitchell posits that coal allowed, for a brief period of time at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the "era of the Mass Strike" (a la Luxemburg). In essence, Mitchell posits that "dependence on coal" provided the opportunity to "build more democratic forms of politics" [83] while the "conversion to oil provided imperialists like Churchill with the means to evade those democratic demands."[84] The transition to oil was a conscious effort on behalf of U.S. imperial planers in the post-World War II era, utilizing the Marshall plan (half of all oil supplied to Marshall plan countries was subsidized by U.S. companies during 1948-51, making U.S. oil companies the largest beneficiaries of Marshall Plan aid) to reconfigure European energy. [85] Most importantly, Mitchell departs from the three other camps by urging the reader to identify the "points of vulnerability" in the current "socio-technical system" in order to be able to leverage collective forms of power and reshape the world in a more egalitarian and democratic manner. [86]

As seen above, authors in the anti-imperialist tradition, whether they are analyzing specific U.S. policies in a more traditional diplomatic manner or discussing the socio-technical vulnerabilities of carbon politics in the Middle East, tend to both accept U.S. empire as an existing structure and encourage some kind of resistance to it. Mitchell, for instance, by citing the examples of coal workers attempting to engage in mass strikes at a time when such ventures were made possible by material conditions, encourages the readers of today to identify new points of vulnerability. By publishing in a popular press like Verso, Mitchell also avoids falling into the trap of reaching out only to other academics. While still engaging in mainstream academic life, Mitchell avoids, as per the warning of E.P. Thompson, becoming "wholly dependent upon establishing institutions." [87] The anti-imperialist tradition has done well describing the sinews of U.S. imperialism, analyzing some of its strengths and exposing some potential vulnerabilities. In the future, the anti-imperialist tradition must deal seriously with transnational anti-imperialist solidarities, their relationship to imperialism and U.S. empire more broadly, and potential vulnerabilities that could arise (outside of the realm of discourse alone) for anti-imperialist actors. Thus far, transnational solidarities have been largely left to the "imperial-as-lens" tradition, and as such remain relatively confined to the ivory tower.

Conclusion

The four camps delineated in this essay represent fundamentally distinct historiographies. Two variables, the author's relationship to U.S. empire and their audience, help determine these conceptual categories. The euphemism-as-elision camp denies the existence of U.S. empire and generally sets as its audience other academics, policy makers, diplomats, etc. (in order to tweak certain policies and make U.S. empire function more smoothly). The empire-as-celebration camp gleefully embraces U.S. imperialism, and sets as its audience both policy makers as well as the general population (who it attempts to convince of the merits of self-conscious imperial subjects). The imperial-as-lens camp tacitly accepts the existence of U.S. empire, or at least embraces the need for an "imperial historiography," but often does so primarily with other academics in mind (and as such this camp remains largely confined to academia). Finally, the anti-imperialist camp not only accepts the existence of U.S. Empire, especially its structural form, but actively encourages resistance to it, both by academics and those outside of academia. Given that academics lack the sort of political power which grows from the barrel of the gun, our definition of the phenomenon of U.S. imperialism is one of the most powerful weapons we possess. As such, the camp we choose to align ourselves with, in order to make the phenomenon of empire act in the manner we desire, is a question of significant strategic importance.

Notes

[1] "Problems of War and Strategy" (November 6, 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 224. Available here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch05.htm

[2] Huey Newton, "Black Capitalism Re-analyzed I," June 5, 1971 in David Hilliard, The Huey P. Newton Reader (Seven Stories Press, 2002). Newton's definition came in the midst of his schism with Eldridge Cleaver, who continued to cling to the more militant Black internationalist path while Newton attempted to redirect the Black Panther Party along communitarian and reformist lines. See Sean Malloy, "Diverging Directions in Oakland and Algiers, 1970-1" in Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War (Cornell Press, 2017).

[3] See Douglas Little, "Gideon's Band: America and the Middle East Since 1945," in Michael J. Hogan, America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

[4] Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin, 2009), 9-10.

[5] Quoted in Walid W. Kazziha, Revolutionary Transformation in the Arab World: Habash and his Comrades from Nationalism to Marxism (St. Martin's Press, 1975), 61.

[6] Samir Amin, "The US Imperialism and the Middle East."

[7] For more on Syria see Patrick Higgins, "The Enemy at Home: U.S. Imperialism in Syria," Viewpoint Magazine (Feb. 2018) and "The War on Syria," Jacobin (Aug. 2015).

[8] Michael Parenti. Against Empire (City Lights, 1995), 1. Two decades later, Parenti modifies this definition slightly: "The dominant investor interests in one country bring to bear military and financial power upon another country in order to expropriate the land, labor, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets of that other country." The Face of Imperialism (Routledge, 2011), 7.

[9] Richard Drayton, "Where Does the World Historian Write From? Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism." Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 46, no. 3 (July 2011), 679.

[10] Ibid., 680.

[11] Ibid., 680-1.

[12] Karine Walther, Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 170.

[13] Lloyd Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East after World War II (The New Press, 2009). See Chapter 2, "The United States Moves into the Middle East."

[14] Zachary Lockman, Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2016), 101.

[15] Walther, Sacred Interests, 9.

[16] Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Cornell Press, 2015).

[17] See Osamah Khalil, America's Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State (Harvard University Press, 2016), 10-22.

[18] Khalil, 38.

[19] Walther, 297.

[20] Khalil, 117-120. Ironically, these missionary schools often exercised a level of independence from U.S. policy that their stateside counterparts, the real "Cold War Universities" of the 1950s and 1960s, were unable to maintain. AUC, for instance, seriously challenged Truman's position on Palestine in 1947-8, while AUB was derided by British officials as a "center of communist activity in the Middle East." Ibid., 125.

[21] Khalil,40.

[22] Lockman, Field Notes, 82.

[23] Khalil., 97.

[24] Ibid., 92.

[25] Lockman, 102.

[26] Lockman, 134.

[27] Khalil, 165.

[28] Lockman, 158.

[29] McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (University of California Press, 2005), 36.

[30] However, as Lockman points out, its only positive response came from Northrop Grumman. By the 1980s, however, MESA did receive modest donations from other large oil companies, 194-5.

[31] Khalil, 187.

[32] Ibid., 190.

[33] Walter Laqueur, Nationalism and Communism in the Middle East (Routledge Kegan Paul, 1956), 347. See footnote 19.

[34] Philip Baram, The Department of State in the Middle East, 1919-1945 (KTAV Publishing House, 1978), 56-7

[35] David S. Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Oil Policy, 1941-1954 (John Hopkins University Press, 1986).

[36] Little, "Gideon's Band ," 467.

[37] Bruce R. Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece (Princeton, 1980) and Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, 1992).

[38] Peter L. Hahn, United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945-1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War (Chapel Hill, 1991).

[39] Barry Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran (New York, 1980).

[40] Barry Rubin, "America and the Egyptian Revolution, 1950-1957," Political Science Quarterly, vol. 97, no. 1 (Spring, 1982).

[41] Little, "Gideon's Band," 479. Here Little cites Gail E. Meyer's Egypt and the United States: The Formative Years (Fairleigh Dickinson, 1981) and Geoffrey Aronson, From Sideshow to Center Stage: U.S. Policy toward Egypt, 1946-1956 (Lynne Rienner, 1986).

[42] "After Eisenhower's dollar diplomacy forced Britain out of Egypt… the United States stood ready to try its hand at stabilizing the Middle East." Ibid., 485.

[43] Douglas Little, "The New Frontier on the Nile: JFK, Nasser, and Arab Nationalism," Journal of American History 75 (September 1988)

[44] Little, "Gideon's Band," 497.

[45] Little, "Gideon's Band," 489. Little rather uncritically borrows from Alan Dowty's 1984 work Middle East Crisis: US. Decision-Making in 1958, 1970, and 1973 to praise Eisenhower for "wisely relying on a tightly knit and level-headed group of decision makers who shared an 'operational code' that placed a high premium in July 1958 on ensuring American credibility with pro-Western regimes in the Middle East."

[46] Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). It is fairly easy to dismiss this as a kind of metaphor or simply rhetorical flair.

[47] See McAlister, Epic Encounters. These critiques can in some ways be leveled against Osamah Khalil's work America's Dream Palace as well.

[48] "Impatient Crusaders: The Making of America's Informal Empire in the Middle East," in America in the World: The Historiography of US Foreign Relations since 1941, edited by Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2014, pp. 212-35.

[49] Many of these articles read like policy briefs. See, for instance, Eric Jacobsen, "A Coincidence of Interests: Kennedy, U.S. Assistance, and the 1963 Iraqi Ba'th Regime," Diplomatic History, vol. 37 (November 2013). One notices the neutrality of the term "monarchy," the ambivalent use of "regime," and the quite pejorative employment of "dictatorship." For more on the 1963 coup, see Matthews, Weldon C. "The Kennedy Administration, Counterinsurgency, and Iraq's First Ba'thist Regime." International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 43 (November 2011). Writing about 1968 Ba'athist coup against the Nasserist 'Abd al-Rahman 'Arif, Avneri Natenal argues that the "State Department was too sanguine regarding the Ba'th approach towards the IPC and its neighbors."[49] Furthermore, while some U.S. actors may have had connections with opponents of the 'Arif government, Avneri assures the reader that "the American government tried to move away from foreign intervention at this time." See Avneri, Netanel. "The Iraqi Coups of July 1968 and the American Connection," Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 51, no. 4 (2015), 659.

[50] Oddly, the author presents the Shah as a "third world actor," hardly a title the Shah would willingly apply to himself. Roham Alvandi. Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (Oxford University Press, New York, 2014), 3.

[51] Nearly all client states have some autonomy to pursue small-scale initiatives. Furthermore, on most things of importance to grand imperial strategy, the Shah was forced to receive U.S. backing. . The shah's selling of the Kurds down the river was, in the long term, negligent to US empire, who a few years prior cared little about the Kurdish question. To Alvandi's credit, his chapter on the Kurds is by far the most intriguing, as it details the Iranian-Israeli-US intervention in (and facilitation of) the Iraqi-Kurdish conflict. In essence, Alvandi argues that the US was reluctantly drug into the Kurdish situation by the Shah. Both the Mossad and SAVAK had ties with Barzani and the Iraqi Kurds as early as 1958, with both intelligence agencies bent on destabilizing the revolutionary Qasim government and, later, the Ba'ath government. The "reluctant Americans" were brought in only later, and US aid started flowing in large quantities in 1972. As late as September 1974, Ford approved Israeli support in the form of anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles of Soviet manufacture.

[52] Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, vol. 26, Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1974-1976, Memoranda of Agreement, September 1, 1975 (Document 227).

[53] Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Military Power (Basic Books, 2002). E-copy (read in Microsoft Edge), no page numbers available.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Robert Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Military On The Ground (Vintage, 2006).

[56] Ibid.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Ibid.,

[59] See, as one example, Ferguson's sloppy chronology and merging of fundamentally distinct organizations (with widely disparate strategies and ideologies) into a kind of monolithic threat: "Though the PLO had been struck a severe blow by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the 1980s saw the emergence of new groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Hezbollah and Hamas. Whereas the PLO had owed more to nationalism and Marxism, this new generation of terrorists identified themselves primarily with Islam." Neither Abu Nidal nor the PFLP were founded in the 1980s, and in fact the PFLP's strength was already waning by then (their heyday in the 1970s). Neither could Abu Nidal or the PFLP be associated with a new generation of Islamists. Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (Penguin, 2005). E-copy, read in Microsoft Edge, no page numbers available.

[60] Ferguson.

[61] Ferguson continues: "One of the keys to the expansion of the Roman Empire was, after all, the opportunity offered to non-Romans to earn citizenship through military service. One of the mainsprings of British colonization was the policy of transportation that emptied the prison hulks of eighteenth-century England into ships bound for Australia. Reviving the draft would not necessarily be unpopular, so long as it was appropriately targeted."

[62] Paul Kramer, "Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World," American Historical Review (December 2011), 1378.

[63] Ibid., 1378.

[64] Ibid., 1350.

[65] Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

[66] Ibid., 3.

[67] Walther, 9.

[68] Jay Sexton. Review of Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 by Karine V. Walther. The American Historical Review, Vol. 122, Issue 2 (April 2017), 472-4.

[69] Still, he provides no definition of empire, and it is unclear exactly what he means by this.

[70] Khalil, 3.

[71] Ibid., 5

[72] Ibid., 8

[73] Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), xxiii. For a rather convincing and forceful demolition of Chatterjee and his brand of subaltern studies, see Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital.

[74] For Daulatzai the "Muslim International" is "not geographically located." Furthermore, it "is not universalist, nor is it cosmopolitan in the European humanist tradition." It "recognizes that there is no space outside of domination and that power is omnipresent." He claims that since universalizing claims and grand narratives "have the potential to warp our sense of how power works and operates, the Muslim International also sees the local and everyday as potential sites for movement, activity, and subversion." Power, then, is "far from being static and top-down" but is instead a "process that is activated and actualized everywhere." Finally, the Muslim International is a "space where the very idea of the 'political' can come under scrutiny" by the fact that "all activity is political." As such, the Muslim International "can be a shadow or parallel space to the state." Daulatzai, xxii-xxvii.

[75] See Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 7-8. For his reading of intersections as "countermodern" see the following: "In this project, I read modern histories of black Americans, Palestinians, and Jews relationally and in terms of shared histories of exclusion, exile, and countermodern political imaginaries." Lubin, 13.

[76] Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 7-16. Despite his convoluted prose when explicating his primary framework "U.S. imperial culture," the idea is generally intelligible and coherent; other frameworks not so much. His sections "On Racial Relationality" and "On Comparativity" are significantly more convoluted and, hence, significantly less useful.

[77] Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan, 2006), 1 and 15. Mitchell articulates a new portmanteau "McJihad" used to explain why the "more closely a government is allied with Washington, the more Islamic its politics." See Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 201.

[78] See William Appleby Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Williams, from UW-Madison, was a prominent New Left historian who would eventually inspire a generation of historians to rethink the Cold War, including Gar Alperovitz (best known for his revisionist thesis on the use of the Atomic bomb in Hiroshima), Walter LaFeber (who has been highly critical of U.S. empire in Central America, for instance), and Lloyd Gardner.

[79] Lloyd Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East after World War II (The New Press, 2009), 3.

[80] Ibid., 14

[81] Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, 2006), Vitalis, xiv.

[82] Ibid., 118. Although occasionally officials did admit that not all the workers "followed the communist line" and that some were "not even aware of the communist line." See 104 and 152.

[83] The fact that coal required an immense concentration of human labor for extraction, transportation, and conversion to energy was one factor. Coal also faced important bottlenecks in transportation due to the dendritic transit routes it relied upon. Finally, coal was largely delimited by the geographic region it was mined in and was not easily transportable across oceans. These factors combined allowed for workers to leverage these points of vulnerability and make society-wide social and economic demands.

[84] Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2013), 61. In contrast with coal, the transition to oil was meant partially to permanently disempower workers in the post-World War II era. The reasons for this are many. First, oil requires less human labor, and is significantly more capital than labor intensive. Whereas coal was confined geographically, oil is a fundamentally global commodity, with production points all over the world controlled by a handful of corporations. Oil is easily moved via pipelines and tankers, and as such moves more along a grid-like system then the dendritic networks of coal. This grid-like system of movement means oil is significantly less vulnerable when stoppages or sabotage occurs, significantly weakening the power of organized labor.

[85] Ibid., 29-30.

[86] Ibid., 241.

[87] E. P. Thompson argued that radical academics had to occupy "some territory that is, without qualification, their own: their own journals, their own theoretical and practical centers - places where no one works for grades or for tenure but for the transformation of society." Quoted in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 459-60. It is my hope that the Hampton Institute continues to contribute to that objective for a long time to come.

US-Saudi Ties: Drenched in Blood, Oil, and Deceit

By Joyce Chediac

Why do Donald Trump and the CIA disagree about the recent killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Turkey?

The CIA concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, personally ordered the murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi. In an extraordinary statement for a U.S. president, Trump disputed the CIA findings. He said it didn't matter if MBS-as the Saudi ruler is known-was or was not involved in the Khashoggi killing, and that U.S.-Saudi relations are "spectacular."

Trump's statement reflects his narrow cultivation of business relations with MBS, while the CIA's announcement reflects the view that that MBS has become a liability for the U.S. ruling class as a whole. The spy agency, which has deep ties to Saudi intelligence, fears that bin Salman's reckless and impulsive actions could jeopardize the security of the whole Saudi ruling clique, endangering U.S. ruling class interests in Saudi Arabia and the entire Middle East.

For decades, Saudi Arabia has been one of the most strategic and valuable U.S. client states, and the CIA wants to keep it that way. Support for Saudi Arabia is completely bi-partisan. This partnership is drenched in blood, oil, and deceit.

A review of U.S.-Saudi ties shows that Saudi Arabia anchors the U.S. empire in the Middle East. The kingdom, with the greatest oil reserves in the world, is a source of fabulous wealth for U.S. oil companies. The Saudis use their oil capacity to raise and lower world prices to further U.S. foreign policy aims. In the 1980s, for example, Ronald Reagan, got the Saudis to flood the market with oil to reduce the world price as part of an economic war against the Soviet Union.

The kingdom willingly uses religion as a cover for imperialism's aims, exporting thousands of schools, mosques, and other centers that preach intolerance and recruit jihadists for U.S. wars. It allows the U.S. to invade other Arab countries from its territory and has funded covert CIA actions on three continents. It is treated like a cash cow for U.S. corporations and banks. It uses its vast stash of petrodollars to buy billions of dollars in Pentagon weapons at inflated prices, as well as other high-price U.S. products and services.

The country is ruled as the personal fiefdom of one family, the al-Sauds. The government is one of the most repressive and misogynistic in the world. There is no parliament or legislature. The first elections, and then only on a municipal level, took place in 2005, 73 years after the country was formed. Women were only allowed to vote in 2015. These incontestable facts go unmentioned by U.S. officials, Democrats and Republican alike.

While Washington claims to be a protector of human rights abroad, the Pentagon has pledged to send in troops if a mass movement tries to overthrow the Saudi regime.

A country birthed by imperialism

Britain and France emerged victorious after World War I. They carved Western Asia into more than 20 countries, drawing borders to weaken and dismember Arab and other indigenous national groups, and to facilitate imperialist domination.

That's when Saudi Arabia was created. Its rulers, the al Saud and the Wahhabi families and followers merged into a political-religious alliance. The Saudi Arabia we know was established 1932, when the Saudis agreed to stop harassing other British protectorates, and to accept Britain's definition of their borders.

Saudi Arabia's rulers were among the first far-right Islamists assisted by imperialism. They set up an absolute monarchy and theocracy. The only constitution was the Koran as interpreted by the royal family. Slavery was legal until 1962.

Wahhabism, a form of Islam aggressively intolerant of other currents of that faith, and in opposition to secular governments, became the state religion. Saudi Arabia's control of the most important sites in Islam-Mecca and Medina- gave it prestige it had not earned in the Muslim world.

Enter U.S. oil companies and the Pentagon

In 1933, the kingdom granted Standard Oil of California (now Chevron) exclusive oil drilling rights. Huge oil reserves were discovered in 1938, promoting the formation of ARAMCO (Arabian American Oil Company) by Standard Oil and 3 other U.S. partners that later became Texaco, Exxon, and Mobil.

Saudi Arabia would soon be the country with the world's largest known oil reserves. It would be the greatest oil producer in the world. And U.S. companies were pumping it.

Diplomatic recognition soon followed. In 1943, President Roosevelt declared the security of Saudi Arabia a "vital interest" of the United States. The U.S. opened an embassy in the country the next year.

The Pentagon soon arrived to secure the oil. In 1950, the U.S. established the Sixth Naval Fleet as a permanent military presence in the Mediterranean. In 1951, after signing the Mutual Defense Agreement, the U.S. began arming the Saudi government and training its military.

Since World War II, the U.S. empire has been built on controlling the oil flowing from the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia was the linchpin of this control.

Waging holy war for Washington: 'Our faith and your iron'

Following World War II, a wave of militancy and nationalism swept the Arab world. Mass secular movements in Algeria and Iraq overthrew colonial puppets. South Yemen declared itself socialist. The Egyptian and Syrian people deposed imperialist client rule. Many of the new progressive regimes and liberation struggles were aided by the Soviet Union

The thinking of U.S. policymakers was, as Rachel Bronson puts it, "that religion could be a tool to staunch the expansion of godless communism."

Saudi rulers happily complied. The founder of modern Saudi Arabia told U.S. Minister to Saudi Arabia, Colonel William A. Eddy, "Our faith and your iron."

Arab anti-imperialism was especially inflamed by the 1948 destruction of Palestine and the creation of Israel. To undercut this, the Eisenhower administration set out to increase the renown of King Saud, making him 'the senior partner of the Arab team."

A State Department memo documents expectations that the Saudis would redirect Arab anger from Israel to the Soviet Union:

"The President said he thought we should do everything possible to stress the "holy war" aspect. [Secretary of State] Dulles commented that if the Arabs have a "holy war" they would want it to be against Israel. The President recalled, however, that Saud, after his visit here, had called on all Arabs to oppose Communism."

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Saudis gave shelter to extremists seeking to topple nationalist governments. The kingdom started funding a network of schools and mosques that recruited jihadists for the CIA in Soviet republics with Muslim populations, and in poor Muslim countries in Asia and Africa. This included " facilitating contacts between the CIA and religious pilgrims visiting Mecca ."

The oil weapon

Some members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) have advocated using oil as a weapon to force Israel to give up Palestinian land. Saudi Arabia, the biggest oil producer of OPEC, has staunchly opposed this. While calling for "separating oil from politics," the kingdom has repeatedly raised and lowered world oil prices to advance U.S. foreign policy.

There have been exceptions. To maintain credibility among the Arab world, Saudi Arabia joined the OPEC oil embargos against the U.S. and other governments supporting Israel in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. The 1967 embargo lacked OPEC consensus and was not effective. Saudi Arabia agreed to join the 1973 embargo only after the U.S. promised $2.2 billion in emergency military aid to Israel, giving it an advantage in the fighting.

The 1973 oil embargo did not cause international shortages, as many oil producers didn't honor it. However, U.S. companies used the embargo to hold back oil supplies, raise prices, and increase profits. Occidental Petroleum's 1973 earnings were 665 percent higher than those the year before. By the end of 1974, Exxon Corporation moved to the top of the Fortune 500 list. Four other oil companies-Texaco, Mobil, Standard Oil of California and Gulf-joined Exxon in the top seven rankings .

In 1970, the Saudis organized the "Safari Club," a coalition of governments that conducted covert operations in Africa after the U.S. Congress restrained CIA actions. It sent arms to Somalia and helped coordinate attacks on Ethiopia, which was then aligned with the Soviet Union. It funded UNITA, a proxy of the South African apartheid government fighting in Angola.

More recently, the Saudi government likely drove down oil prices in 2014 in order to weaken the Russian and Iranian economies as punishment for supporting the Syrian government.

However, the U.S. ruling class has had it both ways with Saudi Arabia several times. While the country is a key client state of the U.S., the Saudis have also served as convenience scapegoats. When energy costs spike, causing considerable hardship among U.S. working-class families, for instance, the U.S. rulers hypocritically and suddenly start talking about the Saudi royal family, its thousands of princes, their gold bathtubs, and other extremes paid for by petrodollars.

Manufacturing a Sunni-Shia rift

In 1979, a mass revolutionary upsurge in Iran overthrew the Shah, a hated U.S.-backed dictator, establishing the Islamic Republic of Iran. The new government nationalized Iran's huge oil reserves. That same year, an armed band of Sunni fundamentalists denounced the Saudi royal family and seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, taking tens of thousands of religious pilgrims hostage. Hundreds of hostages were killed in the retaking of the mosque. Both events shook the Saudi rulers to their core. They responded by diverting attention to Iran. They began a religious campaign against Shia Iran, claiming they were enemies of Sunni Islam. They upped funding for Sunni jihadists worldwide, encouraging them to hate other strains of Islam, other religions, and secularism.

There was no significant conflict between Sunnis and Shias in the modern era. Saudi rulers fomented it in an attempt to turn Sunnis against the Iranian revolution. Since then, all national liberation struggles or groups fighting for some degree of independence that have Shia members have been falsely labeled as agents of Iran. These include Hezbollah-viewed by Arab progressives as the central force in the national liberation movement of Lebanon-the amalgam of forces fighting Saudi domination in Yemen, and oppressed Shia minorities in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis bought out the ARAMCO oil company in 1980. But this did not make Saudi Arabia independent. The oil was still controlled by U.S. companies, especially ExxonMobil, through their ownership of oil pumping and other technology, oil tanker fleets, storage facilities, etc.

Funding the Mujahideen and the Contras

In 1978, the Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan took control of the country in a coup. It promoted land distribution and built hospitals, road, and schools in one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world. It did this with the help of the Soviet Union. The new government banned forced marriages and gave women the right to right to vote. Revolutionary Council member Anahita Ratebzad gave the new government's view in a New Kabul Times editorial (May 28, 1978).

"Privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country … Educating and enlightening women is now the subject of close government attention."

Seeking to overthrow the Soviet-aligned government, the U.S. covertly supported rural tribes that were opposed to the recent social changes, especially women's rights and secularism. The groups attacked the new rural schools and killed women teachers. In 1979, the Soviet Union sent in troops to support the government.

From 1979-89 the Saudi kingdom recruited reactionary mujahideen forces and financed them to the tune of $3 billion. The CIA formally matched the Saudi funding.

In 1984, when the Reagan administration sought help with its secret plan to fund Contra militias and death squads in Nicaragua , the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. pledged $1 million a month. Saudi Arabia spent a total of $32 million supporting the Contras. The contributions continued even after Congress cut off funding to the them.

U.S. would stop an internal revolution

In 1981, Ronald Reagan's Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger said that the U.S. would not let the Saudi government be overthrown, and that it would send troops to defend the Saudi regime if necessary: "We would not stand by, in the event of Saudi requests, as we did before with Iran, and allow a government that had been totally unfriendly to the United States and to the Free World to take over." The U.S. would intervene "if there should be anything that resembled an internal revolution in Saudi Arabia, and we think that's very remote."

This is a regime that allows no human rights or freedom of speech; where virtually all the work was done by migrants who are super-exploited and have no chance of becoming citizens; where all women are considered legal minors and require an appointed male 'guardian' to supervise them and give permission for getting married, obtaining a passport, traveling, enrolling in a school; where in some court cases, a women's testimony is worth half as much as man's.

Saudi Arabia, 9/11, and extremism

Decades of funding extremist centers to recruit shock troops for CIA wars helped create radical Islamist groupings and individuals. Al-Qaeda's founder, Osama Bin Laden, is a prime example. He was a Saudi citizen and a key recruiter of Saudi fighters to Afghanistan.

Fifteen out of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 1, 2001 were Saudi nationals. One might think that if the Pentagon were to retaliate against any country for the 9/11attack, it would be Saudi Arabia. Not so. While it took a few months to sort things out, the upshot was tighter security ties between Washington and Riyadh.

Instead, Washington sent troops to Afghanistan ostensibly to force the Taliban government to turn over Bin Laden, who was seeking shelter there (even though the Taliban offered to surrender Bin Laden). Ironically, another reason cited was to protect Afghani women from the Taliban that Washington installed. Many believe, however, that a more pressing reason for Wall Street and the Pentagon was that the Taliban government would not permit the U.S. to build gas and oil pipelines through Afghanistan to bring oil from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea.

In 2010,Wikileaks published secret Saudi diplomatic cables revealing that the Saudis had the dubious distinction of being the "most significant" source of funding for Sunni terrorist groups (like al Qaeda) worldwide.

Other published cables confirm how the the Saudis cynically use religious shrines in their control. Jihadists soliciting funds slip into the country disguised as holy pilgrims. They then set up front companies to launder and receive money from government-sanctioned charities.

In 2013, under operation Timber Sycamore, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. partnered to fund, arm, and train jihadists in Syria.

The wars on Iraq

As the Soviet Union neared collapse, the Pentagon took aim at governments in the Middle East that weren't fully under its thumb. Iraq was the first target. When Kuwait waged economic war against Iraq, including the use of slant drilling technology to penetrate the border and steal Iraqi oil, the Iraqi government sent troops into Kuwait. This was the pretext for the U.S. to form an imperialist coalition to invade Iraq. The Saudis officially requested the U.S to send in troops. The Pentagon stationed 500,000 soldiers in the kingdom, and used Saudi soil as a base to invade Iraq, and later to enforce sanctions and a no-fly zone.

The Sept. 11 attack served as a pretext to invade Iraq in 2003. The corporate media whipped up a hysteria that Saddam Hussein bore responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, even though the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda were on opposite ends of the Middle East political spectrum, had no relations, and did not cooperate. U.S. and British leaders fabricated "evidence" that Iraq had developed nuclear weapons and posed an imminent threat to the world.

Once again, Saudi Arabia proved essential. U.S. coordinated attacks on Iraq out of the Prince Sultan Air Base near Riyadh, where some 10,000 troops were stationed. U.S. Special Operations Forces operated out of the country, which tapped into oil reserves to stabilize oil prices.

Subsidizing the U.S. arms industry

For decades, the Saudis have bought large amounts of U.S. weaponry at inflated prices. These purchases peaked under the Obama administration when Saudi Arabia agreed to spend over $110 billion on U.S. weapons, aircraft, helicopters, and air-defense missiles. This made it the largest purchase of U.S. arms in history. These weapons are not for defense. The purchases are far more than is needed for any purpose for a country with 22 million people. In effect, the Saudis are subsidizing the U.S. arms industry. Most of the military equipment sits in the desert.

Of course, the arms are used when needed. When the people of neighboring Bahrain rose up against a backward and repressive regime and Saudi ally in 2011, the Saudi military rode across sovereign borders on U.S. tanks and crushed the uprising. There was no outcry from Washington.

Waging genocide in Yemen

Additionally, in 2015 Saudi Arabia started a war to dominate Yemen. The war is currently at a stalemate, with the Saudi bombings and blockade responsible for a cholera epidemic, indiscriminate civilian deaths, and starvation, in what the United Nations calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Tens of thousands of children have died from disease and starvation. The war is waged with U.S. arms. U.S. advisers provide intelligence and training on the ground. Until this month, U.S. planes were refueling the Saudi planes bombing Yemen.

The U.S. has also been conducting its own operations within Yemen as part of the so-called "war on terror." These operations include drone warfare, raids, and assassinations.

The Saudi rulers clam that the conflict in Yemen in a Sunni-Shia one. But Saudi Arabia didn't think twice in the 1960s about backing Shiite royalist rebels in Yemen-the grandparents of today's Houthis-against Sunni troops from Egypt supporting a progressive Yemini government.

A cash cow for U.S. corporations

Saudi Arabia continues to be a cash cow milked by U.S. businesses. The kingdom bought $20 billion in U.S. products last year, from Boeing planes to Ford cars. It recently signed a $15 billion deal with General Electric for goods and services, and put $20 billion into an investment fund run by the Blackstone Group.

U.S. banks love Saudi Arabia. The kingdom has paid $1.1 billion to western banks in fees since 2010. And truly giant bank fees are in the offing for JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, who are working with ARAMCO to take that company public.

U.S. universities and corporations grease the wheels for these giant business deals by training the kingdom's managers and politicians, and promoting mutual interests. Many Saudi rulers begin their careers working for U.S. banks and businesses. Fahad al-Mubarak, who governed the central bank from 2011-2016 was previously chairman of Morgan Stanley in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Ministers, include those of finance and petroleum, got their degrees in the U.S.

The kingmakers in this oil-rich country have always been the princes of Wall Street. And the only god worshiped by the U.S.-Saudi unholy alliance is the almighty dollar.

This was originally published at Liberation School .

The New European Left: Reasons for Resurgence and Rejection

By Kacper Grass

The events of 1989 which culminated in the success of the Polish Solidarity Movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany, and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union effectively sterilized the revolutionary left in Western Europe. Insurgent militant organizations such the Greek Revolutionary Organization 17 November, the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups in Spain, Action Directe in France as well as the Italian Red Brigades and West Germany's Red Army Faction, lost their patron in Moscow. Moreover, Marxism's failure to contend with global capitalism/imperialism widely discredited the remaining communist parties which sought to seize power through electoral means. Thus, it seemed as though Francis Fukuyama's end of history prophecy was becoming a reality, and neoliberalism was indeed to be the final form of humanity's sociopolitical evolution. In a desperate struggle for survival and relevance, that which remained of the European left was forced to accept the status quo and abandon revolution for reform.

This status quo went largely unquestioned for two decades, and as a result the left had no choice but to move its ideological orientations towards the center, campaigning on social-democratic platforms and often compromising its positions in order to form governments with parties from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Faith in this status quo, however, was immensely shaken by the shock of the European debt crisis in 2009, which was most strongly felt by the Eurozone's southern member states like Greece and Spain. The gravity of the recession made many people, especially those most affected by the crisis, look more critically at fundamental EU institutions such as the European Central Bank, which they saw as the root of the crisis. The right's reaction to the issue was a long line of austerity policies in many countries, which sought to resolve the national crises at the cost of the working-class citizens most dependent on the welfare state. The center-left parties' inability to find an alternative solution to the recession made them practically indistinguishable from their right-wing counterparts in the eyes of many, thus creating a political establishment whose member factions differed merely in name alone. As a result, a large class of unemployed students, workers, and struggling small business owners felt marginalized by the existing system and betrayed by a nominal left which no longer represented their interests. The time had come for an international movement that would change the political landscape of the European Union and put new life into the largely defeated or disappearing European left. This movement, however, would have its limits.

The wave of rebirth for the left did not reach the eastern reaches of the Union, where the 2009 recession was not experienced with the same intensity as it was in Southern Europe. There, the liberal center's rule went largely unchallenged since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, as the newly added members of the 2004 EU expansion slowly made progress down the path of social and economic integration into the European Union. Although rarely questioned and generally applauded, this decade of progress was first threatened by the Union's second major emergency in the 21st century, that of the 2015 migrant crisis. As Germany and the European Commission mandated quotas of Middle Eastern and African asylum seekers to be accepted by each of the Union's member states, many Eastern Europeans felt threatened by what they saw as an attack on their sense of national identity and state sovereignty. What resulted was a firm rejection of the "refugees welcome" slogan, which was largely viewed not only as the product of Angela Merkel's Christian democracy, but also of Western Europe's rising new left. Thus, the fears of many citizens in nations like Hungary and Poland, still mindful of the memories of four decades of communist repression, needed a voice on the European stage. That voice came in the form of a reactionary wave of right-wing nationalist movements unseen since the fall of Western European fascism in the 1970s.

Resurgence of the Left in Greece and Spain

In the words of Watkins (2016), "the common context for all the new lefts is anger at the political management of the Great Recession. The outcomes vary: after several years of zero interest rates, and trillions of dollars in bailouts and quantitative easing, the US and UK are officially in recovery, while Greece and Spain are still far below pre-crisis levels; less severely affected by the crash, France and Italy were suffering from stagnant growth and high structural unemployment well before 2008" (Watkins 2016, 6). She adds that "a second shared feature is the collapse of the centre-left parties, whose win-win 'Formula Two' of Third Way neoliberalism was the governing ideology of the boom-and-bubble years on both sides of the Atlantic. Having abandoned their former social-democratic moorings and working-class constituencies, Europe's Third Way parties were now punished in turn, whether for deregulating finance and pumping credit bubbles, or for implementing the subsequent bailouts and cuts… This rightward shift by the ex-social democrats-often into 'grand coalitions' with the conservatives-opened up a representational vacuum on the left of the political spectrum" (Watkins 2016, 7).

At the forefront of this movement was Greece, where a strong left-oriented political culture dominated the Third Hellenic Republic in reaction to seven years of dictatorship by far-right military juntas that ended in 1974. The first free elections saw the reemergence of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) as well as the formation of the significantly less radical Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), which maintained a strong presence in parliament for nearly 40 years, usually competing for electoral majority with the New Democracy (ND) party on the center-right. Nonetheless, a poll conducted in 2011 by the Athenian newspaper Kathimerini and the television network Skai TV revealed that 92% of people surveyed felt disappointed by the current PASOK government, while only 5% believed that a PASOK government would be best for the nation in the upcoming general elections (Kathimerini and Skai TV 2011). That same year, massive anti-austerity protests in the country's capital revealed the root of people's disenchantment with the ruling establishment, and a political vacuum was created by the absence of an electoral force capable of adequately representing the frustrations of a bankrupt nation in Brussels. That vacuum was filled, however, when "Syriza was founded as a unified party in [2012], through the fusion of the half-dozen groups that had formed an electoral 'coalition of the radical left' in 2004; at that stage its dominant component was Synaspismos, itself a coalition around one of the Greek communist parties, then with some 12,000 members. The new Syriza established a traditional structure: an elected central committee, on which the different factions were represented, a secretariat and a parliamentary group, centred round [Alexander] Tsipras's office and only nominally accountable to its base" (Watkins 2016, 13). Under Tsipras's charismatic leadership, the unified Syriza won a majority of 35% in the 2015 general elections and managed to form a government, putting Tsipras in the position of prime minister of Greece as well as making him the standard bearer of Europe's new left (Ministry of Interior of Greece 2015). Neither job, however, would prove to be an easy task.

Watkins (2016) explains that "by the time it entered office, the Syriza leadership was pledged to keep the euro and negotiate with the Eurogroup. Tsipras refused point-blank to explore Schäuble's offer of support for a structured exit in May 2015, as some of his Cabinet were urging. Syriza was reduced to begging for a debt write-down, abandoning one 'red line' after another, scrabbling for funds from hospitals and town halls to pay the ECB and IMF, until Tsipras was finally confronted with the choice of radicalizing his position, with the overwhelming mandate of the July 5 referendum, or submitting to the will of 'the institutions' and signing the harshest Memorandum yet" (Watkins 2016, 19-20). The party has also struggled in forming a coherent stance on immigration, as "Syriza switched from an avowed policy of anti-racism-closing down the previous government's notorious detention centres-to rounding up refugees for forcible deportation, in line with the EU's new policy" (Watkins 2016, 23).

In many respects, Spain's modern political history runs parallel to that of Greece's. The death of Francisco Franco in 1975 marked the end of his fascist regime, and free elections saw the restoration of the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and the formation of the right-wing People's Party (PP) by former Francoist minister Manuel Fraga. Both parties took turns ruling in what became a de facto two-party system, as the 1986 foundation of the radical coalition United Left (IU) failed to ever become an electoral threat to the PSOE. By the peak of the debt crisis, however, it was becoming quite clear that the PSOE was out of touch with much of its left-leaning voter base. This sentiment of growing popular indignation against the political establishment was ultimately manifested in a nation-wide anti-austerity movement that began with protests in Madrid on May 15th, 2011. Like in Greece the same year, a political vacuum had been created. As Watkins (2016) explains, "Podemos sprang into existence in January 2014, the initiative of the nucleus around [Pablo] Iglesias, who put out a call for a new, anti-austerity platform for the Europarliament elections. Nearly a thousand local 'circles' began forming almost spontaneously, built by 15-M and far-left activists. Podemos was formally constituted as a Citizens' Assembly in October 2014, with over 112,000 members signing up online to vote on its founding documents… Coalitions with regional left forces, sealed by support for a Catalan independence referendum, helped lift Podemos to 21 per cent of the vote in the December 2015 elections, with 69 deputies in the Cortes, nearly a quarter from Catalonia." (Watkins 2016, 14).

Unlike Tsipras, though, Iglesias remained in the opposition following prolonged government formation negotiations that resulted in a second election the following year. This time Podemos ran on the same ticket as the IU under the label Unidos Podemos and finally secured third place in parliamentary seats, behind the PP and the PSOE respectively. In terms of platforms and ideologies Podemos and Syriza share much in common, Iglesias even having referred to Tsipras as "'a lion who has defended his people' in September 2015" (Watkins 2016, 20). Regarding immigration, however, Podemos takes an even more radical stance than Syriza, as the party's "2014 programme called for full citizens' rights for all immigrants" (Watkins 2016, 23).

As Watkins (2016) summarizes, "the founding purpose of the new left oppositions is to defend the interests of those hit by the reigning response to the crisis-bailouts for private finance matched by public-sector austerity and promotion of private-sector profit-gouging, at the expense of wage-workers. In the broadest sense, this is, again, a defence of labour against capital, within the existing system" (Watkins 2016, 28). She adds that "Podemos has… established itself as a fighter for those afflicted by foreclosures in the housing-bubble meltdown, a demand that exceeds-or post-dates-classical liberal democracy. The fruite en avant of Syriza Mark Two towards the social liberalism, or neoliberal austerity, of the other, formerly social-democratic, now tawdry centre-left parties, serves to confirm rather than contradict the general rule" (Watkins 2016, 29).

Rejection of the Left in Hungary and Poland

As Euroscepticism in the south was being fueled by a still unresolved debt crisis, the anti-Brussels sentiment spread eastward following the unprecedented influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants that began in 2014. The following year, the European Commission with Germany's backing set quotas on the number of asylum seekers to be accepted by each member state in an attempt to lessen the burden on Greece, Italy, and the other Mediterranean countries that served as the initial points of arrival for many migrants. The mandate, which was viewed as a violation of state sovereignty by many Eastern Europeans, sparked a wave of nationalism in the largely ethnically and religiously homogenous countries of the Visegrád Group. The political landscape of the group, which serves as an alliance between Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic within the European Union, has experienced a significant shift towards the right, with all members effectively rejecting the European Commission's quotas following the wave of illiberalism that began in Hungary and later spread to Poland, the group's largest member state, before also finding fertile ground in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

Following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, Hungary held its first free elections the following year. After the transition to democracy, the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSzMP) was renamed the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) and adopted a considerably more moderate social-democratic stance, competing for dominance in parliament with the originally libertarian Fidesz party since the 1998 elections. Nonetheless, in 2010 the MSZP was defeated by an increasingly nationalist Fidesz, and the 2014 elections marked the start of another term in office for prime minister Victor Orbán following the landslide victory of a coalition between his Fidesz party and the socially conservative Christian Democratic People's Party (KDNP), which together won 133 out of 199 parliamentary seats. In order to compete for second place with the far-right Jobbik party, the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) had to enter into a coalition with four other center-left parties, finally winning 38 seats compared to Jobbik's 23. The remaining five seats were won by the centrist green party Politics Can Be Different (LMP) (National Election Office of Hungary 2014). With an absolute majority in government and the additional support of Jobbik, Orbán had a free hand in determining Hungary's stance on the migrant crisis. The result was two years of nationalist rhetoric leading up to a referendum on the issue set for October 2nd, 2016. The referendum posed the question: "Do you want the European Union to be able to mandate the obligatory resettlement of non-Hungarian citizens into Hungary even without the approval of the National Assembly?" While the poll was finally considered invalid for its low voter turnout of 44.04%, an overwhelming majority of 98.36% voted 'no' while only 1.64% voted 'yes' in response to the question (National Election Office of Hungary 2016).

Much like Hungary, Poland held its first free parliamentary elections in 1991 following the end of communist rule two years before. More than 100 registered parties participated in the first elections, with the political landscape changing frequently until the elections of 2005, in which the liberal Civic Platform (PO) and the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party emerged as the main contestants. The moderate Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), founded largely by ex-members of the dissolved communist Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), was pushed into opposition after holding president Aleksander Kwaśniewski in office since 1995. By the elections of 2015, the composition of the Polish Sejm was very reminiscent to that of Hungary's parliament. In reaction to the migrant crisis, PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński adopted a significantly more nationalist and conservative rhetoric, which proved effective in winning his party an absolute majority of 235 of 460 seats, effectively forming a government while also enjoying support from the smaller right-wing Kukiz '15 (K'15) party, which won 42. The opposition was dominated by the PO, as it earned 138 seats, and was supported by the smaller liberal Modern (N) party, which won only 28. The agrarian Polish People's Party (PSL) won 16 seats while the regional German Minority (MN) won a single seat (National Electoral Commission of Poland 2015). The election was notable for two principal reasons. Primarily, it was the first time in Poland's democratic history that a party managed to win an absolute majority in the Sejm. Secondly, it was the first time that a left-wing party did not manage to secure any representation. Following the election, the newly inaugurated president Andrzej Duda reversed the previous government's promise to accept 2,000 refugees, adding that he "won't agree to a dictate of the strong. [He] won't back a Europe where the economic advantage of the size of a population will be a reason to force solutions on other countries regardless of their national interests" (Moskwa & Skolimowski 2015). Following Orbán, Duda has since raised the prospect of holding a referendum on the issue.

Germany Caught in the Crossfire

The reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 resulted in the merger of two extremely different political cultures into a single democratic state. Despite this initial obstacle, the country soon recuperated and advanced to become the economic and political hegemony of the European Union in the 21st century. Assuming office in 2005, Angela Merkel of the liberal Christian Democratic Union has been a central figure in European politics from the start of the recession throughout the ongoing migrant crisis. Much as in the cases of Greece and Spain, the onset of the recession proved that the existing left-wing establishment, represented in Germany by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), had compromised too much of its leftist ideology to remain competitive with its opponents in the Bundestag.

As Bergfeld (2016) explains, "the mass movement that emerged in the mid-2000s to oppose Schröder's Hartz welfare- and labor-market reforms led to a significant breakaway from the SPD. Labor and Social Justice - The Electoral Alternative (WASG) was founded in 2005 by activists frustrated with the ruling Red-Green Coalition. The WASG would go on to form one main component, alongside the East German-based Party of Democratic Socialism, of the new Die Linke. After nearly ten years of collaboration, differences between the East and West wings of the party remain stark. Sections of the party based in the former East Germany are eyeing state governments or already hold office in federal states (like Thuringia), while the West German section is not represented in any federal state parliaments, with the exception of Hessia" (Bergfeld 2016, 3). He continues by noting that "Die Linke's founding represented a historical opportunity for the German parliamentary left to move beyond the SPD. Today, it is the main opposition party in German parliament. For all the problems it entails, the party's institutionalization has facilitated the construction of a sturdy platform for antiwar and anti-neoliberal voices in mainstream politics. It was Die Linke that first popularized the demand for a national minimum wage, which was taken up by the trade unions, the SPD, and later on Merkel herself before becoming law in early 2015" (Bergfeld 2016, 3). Despite this, "The party has never acted as a catalyst for social, economic, or political struggles and is unlikely to ever do so. It has been able to involve itself, to varying degrees, in labor mobilizations and social movements initiated by others, most notably the demonstrations against Europe's largest fascist rallies in Dresden in 2011 and 2012. Even Bodo Ramelow - now prime minister of Thuringia - participated in mass civil disobedience to block the fascists from marching" (Bergfeld 2016, 4).

Since the beginning of the migrant crisis, the fascist rallies against which Die Linke demonstrated in 2011 and 2012 have since become an organized political force, opposing Merkel's neoliberalism from the right of the political spectrum. "To Merkel's dismay, her modernization of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has enabled a nationalist-conservative party to develop to her right. The Islamophobic and Eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has emerged on the main stage of German politics as Merkel's positions have become indistinguishable from mainstream social-democratic ones" (Bergfeld 2016, 3). Indeed, the chancellor's inability to secure an absolute majority in the 2017 Bundestag elections illustrates the challenge that the neoliberal status quo faces from both the new left as well as the reactionary right in the very heart of the Union.

Conclusion

Thus far, the events of the 21st century in Europe-from the beginning of the debt crisis in 2009 to the continuing migrant crisis-have done little to reflect the positivity felt by many at the close of the previous century. The neoliberal status quo is not only being openly put to question, but it is under attack by the rise of a new left movement, whose resurgence can be traced back to its Greek and Spanish instigators. There are two principal reasons why Syriza and Podemos were able to win the massive support that put them at the forefront of Europe's new left movement. First of all, they emerged in countries whose left-leaning political cultures were shaped by the lingering trauma of fascist dictatorship. Secondly, by framing the recession as the fault of neoliberal institutions such as the European Central Bank and blaming the political establishment for implementing austerity policies at the cost of the working class, their proposed leftist platforms had a particular appeal to citizenries desperate for economic relief.

Nonetheless, this is not to say that the development of the new left has gone unchallenged. The Eastern European countries of the Visegrád Group, starting with Hungary and Poland, managed to avoid the worst of the debt crisis but under cultural and historical pretexts reacted in stark opposition to the European Commission's assignment of migrant quotas on the grounds that the policy jeopardizes their respective national identities and effectively makes an assault on their rights as sovereign states. Moreover, the still-healing wounds of four decades of repressive "communist" regimes have made it easy for right-wing nationalist movements to blame the migrant crisis on the new left parties that take much more radical pro-immigration stances than do the neoliberal establishments in Brussels and Berlin.

Finally, as the new left continues its trend of resurgence and reactionary right-wing movements continue to form in order to reject it, Germany will be only one case of many where oppositions from both sides of the political spectrum arise to challenge the existing neoliberal status quo. In fact, as is the case in Germany of Die Linke and the AfD, in France Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise is fighting a similar battle against Marine Le Pen's National Rally with Emmanuel Macron caught in the middle. The same can be said of the opposition to Italy's ex-prime minister Paolo Gentiloni, which ultimately resulted in the victorious coalition of Luigi Di Laio's Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini's Lega Nord in the general elections of March 2018. Even in Great Britain, as Jeremy Corbyn fights to return the Labour Party to its leftist roots, Gerard Batten has taken up the work of Henry Bolton in leading the UK Independence Party towards an exit from the European Union. If this trend continues, the parliaments of Europe will continue to be turned into political battlegrounds where the Union's ideology, policies, and future are at stake. If this polarizing trend continues, the Europe of the 21st century may not resemble the perpetual liberal democratic union envisioned by Fukuyama. It could instead devolve into something more reminiscent of the previous century, the age of extremes.

Bibliography

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Moskwa, W., Skolimowski, P. (2015). Poland's Duda Blasts EU 'Dictate of the Strong' on Migrants. Bloomberg News.

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