Police Departments Spend Vast Sums of Money Creating “Copaganda”

[PICTURED: Officers from the Norfolk Police Department in Virginia danced to Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’s “Uptown Funk” as part of a lip-sync challenge created by police departments nationwide. - via Norfolk Police Department]

By Alec Karakatsanis

Republished from Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

In May of this year, I testified at a hearing in San Francisco where city leaders questioned the police department’s funding and use of public relations professionals. That funding was heavier than you might expect.

According to police department documents provided to the County Board of Supervisors, budget items included a nine-person full-time team managed by a director of strategic communications who alone costs the city $289,423; an undisclosed number of cops paid part-time to do PR work on social media; a Community Engagement Unit tracking public opinion; officers who intervene with the families of victims of police violence and who are dispatched to the scenes of police violence to control initial media reaction; and a full-time videographer making PR videos about cops.

San Francisco is not unique. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has forty-two employees doing PR work in what it calls, in Orwellian fashion, its “Information Bureau.” The Los Angeles Police Department has another twenty-five employees devoted to formal PR work.

Why do police invest so much in manipulating our perceptions of what they do? I call this phenomenon “copaganda”: creating a gap between what police actually do and what people think they do.

Copaganda does three main things. First, it narrows our understanding of safety. Police get us to focus on crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society and not on bigger threats to our safety caused by people with wealth and power.

For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined — from burglaries, to retail theft, to robberies — costing some $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. There are hundreds of thousands of Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, and damage to the nervous system. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, five times the number of all homicides.

But through the stories cops feed reporters, the public is encouraged to measure a city’s safety by whether it saw an annual increase or decrease of three homicides or fourteen robberies — rather than by how many people died from lack of access to health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by illegal eviction or foreclosure, or how many thousands of illegal assaults police committed.

The second function of copaganda is to manufacture crises or “crime surges.” For example, if you watch the news, you’ve probably been bombarded with stories about the rise of retail theft. Yet the actual data shows there has been no significant increase. Instead, corporate retailers, police, and PR firms fabricated talking points and fed them to the media. The same is true of what the FBI categorizes as “violent crime.” All told, major “index crimes” tracked by the FBI are at nearly forty-year lows.

The third and most pernicious function of copaganda is to manipulate our understanding of what solutions actually work to make us safer. A primary goal of copaganda is to convince the public to spend even more money on police and prisons. If safety is defined by street crime, and street crime is dangerously high, then funding the carceral state leaps out to many people as a natural solution.

The budgets of modern police departments are staggeringly high and ever increasing, with no parallel in history, producing incarceration rates unseen around the world. Police and their right-wing unions (which have their own PR budgets) want bigger budgets, more military-grade gear, more surveillance technology, and more overtime cash. Multibillion-dollar businesses have privatized nearly every element of these bureaucracies for profit, from the tasers and AI software sold to cops to the snacks sold at huge markups to supplement inadequate jail food. To obtain this level of spending, they need us to think that police and prisons make us safer.

The evidence shows otherwise. If police and prisons made us safe, we would have the safest society in world history — but the opposite is true. There is no link between more cops and decreased crime, even of the type that the police report. Instead, addressing the root causes of interpersonal harm like safe housing, health care, treatment, nutrition, pollution, and early-childhood education is the most effective way to enhance public safety. And addressing root causes of violence also prevents the other harms that flow from inequality, including millions of avoidable deaths.

The insistence that increased policing is the key to public safety is like climate science denial. Just like the oil companies, the police are running an expensive operation of mass communication to convince people of things that aren’t true. Thus, we are left with a great irony: even if what you most care about are the types of crimes reported by police, those crimes would be better reduced by making our society more equal than by spending on police and prisons.

Powerful actors in policing and media both manufacture crime waves and respond to them in ways that increase inequality and consolidate social control, even as they do little to actually stop crime. Copaganda not only diverts people from existential threats like imminent ecological collapse and rising fascism, but also boosts surveillance and repression that is used against social movements trying to solve those problems by creating more sustainable and equal social arrangements.

Hearings like the one I testified at in San Francisco are needed across the country. Local councilmembers should scrutinize the secretive world of police PR budgets, because the public deserves to know how police are spreading misinformation. It is possible to achieve real safety in our communities, but only if we end the copaganda standing in its way.

Alec Karakatsanis is a civil rights lawyer and the founder of Civil Rights Corps. He is also the author of the book Usual Cruelty and a weekly newsletter called Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter.

Directing the Moderate Rebels: Syria as a Digital Age Crucible for Information and Propaganda Warfare

By Ben Arthur Thomason

A decade into Syria’s catastrophe as one of the deadliest wars of the 21st century, we can take greater stock of its effects not just on geopolitics and Syria itself, but on imperial management strategies, information warfare, and popular culture, particularly when considering the interventions by the West and its regional allies. A key pillar of Western imperialist projects next to the hard power of bombs and economic sanctions is the soft power of diplomatic maneuvering, media and cultural imperialism, manufacturing public consent for war, and inventing realities to maintain ideological hegemony. The complementary dialectic between hard and soft power in the US led imperial project in Syria built on historical ventures in Muslim majority countries and evolved propaganda and civil society hybrid warfare strategies that may become foundational for 21st century warfare.

Complementing hard and soft power: the UK FCO media and civil society consortium

Early in the Syrian conflict, through a scheme code-named Operation Timber Sycamore, the CIA partnered with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar to flood Syria with weapons, many of which ended up on the black market or in the hands of extremist groups. In an echo of the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, where Mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan were supplied with billions of dollars in arms including Raytheon manufactured anti-aircraft guided Stinger Missiles, the US and its allies supplied Syrian rebels, including Salafist groups like the Harakat Nur al-Din al-Zenki Movement, with Raytheon produced anti-tank guided BGM TOW missiles.

Supplementing the hard-power pressures of sanctions and lethal aid to militants was a soft power strategy that combined diplomatic pressure, propaganda, and civil society programs. Western governments and NGOs funded, supplied, and trained pro-opposition Syrian journalists, newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV stations. Pro-rebel outlets that sprung from this support were needed because Western journalists largely stayed out of reporting from rebel-held Syria for risk of being kidnapped or killed, despite the purported moderation of the Western backed Free Syrian Army and attempts to downplay the strength of extremist forces in Western media. Perhaps the most important organization, at least that we have significant documentation of right now, was a consultancy firm, Analysis Research Knowledge (ARK), and their search and rescue and media production group, Syria Civil Defence (British spelling), popularly known as the White Helmets.

Figure 1- An example of ARK’s “rebranding” projects for armed militias to sell the “moderate rebels” image (CPG01737 ARK 1.3.1, n.d.: 1)

ARK’s modern form was established as ARK FZC in 2011 and is based in Dubai, though its roots go back at least to 2009 when it was formed in Beirut, Lebanon as ARK Group or ARK Lebanon. The United Arab Emirates avoided full involvement in the arming and support of Syrian militants, instead opting to become an important partner in diplomatic and civil society efforts against the Assad government. ARK was started by former British Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) employee Alistair Harris, who got his start serving in the Yugoslav Wars. Contracting under the UK FCO, ARK first established a program for collecting and documenting alleged war crimes and set up an opposition media program called Basma Syria (Basma meaning smile in Arabic). In 2012 ARK, led by employee James Le Mesurier, a former UK military intelligence officer who also got his start in the Balkans during the Yugoslav Wars, established the search and rescue teams that would become the White Helmets. The group sold itself as a grassroots citizen activist humanitarian group and became media darlings in the West. 

The White Helmets were the bridge between the civil society and propaganda aspects of these soft-power pro-rebel operations. Not only did they provide services such as search and rescue, medical transport, fire suppression, and post-battle clean-ups and reconstruction, they filmed and photographed themselves doing all these things. They were often first on the scene reporting on bombings, skirmishes, and alleged chemical weapons attacks. The most famous accusations against the White Helmets, lobbed by Russian and alternative Western media, were that they collaborated with terrorist groups and staged fake attacks and/or rescue missions. Yet perhaps the more interesting and revealing thing about the White Helmets that can be confirmed is that they were a key part of a wider propaganda and civil society operation to support anti-Assad forces in Syria and justify and encourage foreign intervention led by corporate contractors working under the UK FCO.  

As the military war dragged on, Western backed militias needed to administer the areas they conquered as well as fight an information war. Since these rebel-held spaces were too dangerous for Western journalists, Western states raised a local media infrastructure through local proxies. US and European NGOs and governments funded, trained, and supplied outlets like Aleppo Media Center while ARK and its fellow UK FCO contractors set up their own media outlets like Basma, Moubader, and Syriagraph, establishing TV, radio, and magazine production for themselves or partner organizations. Other FCO contractors like Albany Associates Ltd identified and trained select spokespeople from and developed communication strategies for violent sectarian Salafi militias like Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam. One prominent ostensibly grassroots media outlet for the Battle of Aleppo, Revolutionary Forces of Syria, was directly run by an FCO consortium member that partnered closely with ARK, The Global Strategy Network (TGSN), directed by Richard Barrett, former director of counterterrorism at MI6. These outlets then fed propaganda to their “well-established contacts with numerous key media organisations [sic] including Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Orient, Sky News Arabic, CNN, BBC, BBC Arabic, The Times, The Guardian, FT [Financial Times], NYT [New York Times], Reuters and others.”

Figure 2- One of several maps of Syria showcasing ARK’s media and civil society operations in Syria. “ICSP Beneficiaries” refer to local Free Syrian Police units while “Media Stringers” refer to freelance journalists trained and or employed by ARK (ITT Lot C – Technical Response)  

UK FCO contractors like Adam Smith International and ARK tried to create civil society infrastructure to provide essential services that could compete with Syrian state services. They set up a Free Syrian Police (FSP) as well as municipal governance, education, and sanitation services, while the White Helmets provided emergency fire, transportation, and rubble clean-up services. The FSP alone received hundreds of millions of dollars through US and European funding and had its own scandals of corruption and connections with terrorist groups. The White Helmets alongside media outlets set up with extensive help from Western governments and NGOs like Aleppo Media Center, or media outlets directly run by Western government contractors like Revolutionary Forces of Syria, audio-visually recorded and disseminated these services from local Arabic speaking audiences to global, particularly Western Anglophone audiences. For ARK, their civil society services and “media products” were one and the same. The US and European states spent over $1 billion on these media and civil society initiatives refined through constant polling, focus groups, data analysis, and target audience segmentation to maximize their media and public opinion impact.

Figure 3- ARK “Project Schematic” showing how civil society initiatives immediately became propaganda for local and Western audiences. The events for September-November were planned by ARK to both provide rebel governance and turn their services into pro-rebel, anti-regime propaganda. (ARK 1.2.1 Methodology, c2017)

Target Audiences: The Home Front

The White Helmets became the star group of this initiative not just because they provided local services and produced propaganda at the same time; they also gave the opposition to Assad a singular humanitarian face that could shroud the sectarian and theocratic violence that characterized the bulk of the Western backed armed opposition that eventually coalesced into ISIS. Among Western media and celebrities, that’s exactly what the White Helmets became. 

The program of influence peddling and manufacturing public consent for intervention in Syria made it to the highest levels of Western entertainment with the 2016 Oscar winning documentary The White Helmets, profiling the ARK created group. The documentary created a narrative of Russian and Assad military devils bombing helpless civilians who relied on angelic White Helmets as their only line of defense, scrubbing all rebel militias from the conflict except ISIS. It was made possible by the cheap labor of the White Helmet workers, with whom ARK had previously produced several Arabic-language documentaries, the money and government connections of oil and industrial interests through philanthropies like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the enthusiastic endorsements of US and UK media. The organization that led the impact campaign for the documentary and the White Helmets targeting celebrities and the media as well as Western halls of power was The Syria Campaign (TSC). TSC was started and heavily funded by a Syrian expat, US educated billionaire oil CEO and major UK Tory party donor, Ayman Asfari, whose company was convicted and fined in 2021 by a UK court for paying millions of dollars in bribes to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE for oil contracts. Even before the Syrian Civil War started Asfari had his hands in dirty influence peddling with the UK who led the propaganda and civil society war against Syria, the UAE, who served as a regional conduit for those efforts, and the Saudis, who helped lead the hard power militia war against Syria.

While The White Helmets documentary tugged at viewers’ heartstrings over the brutality of Syrian and Russian air power, the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets pushed for the US and its allies to establish a no-fly zone over Syria. This was the same kind of intervention that was instrumental in lynching Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and throwing that country into chaos and strife it still has not emerged from. Despite the risk of inciting a hot war with Russia that a no-fly zone in Syria implied, this policy was pushed by powerful political leaders, including the 2016 Democratic party presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.

Cynical weaponization of real and alleged atrocity stories to justify intervention and create easy good vs. evil stories for the benefit of US backed rebel factions in Muslim countries is not new. Journalist Joel Whitney (2016) showed that the weaponization of refugees and training pro-rebel activists to encourage and film atrocities has historical precedent in Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan. The resumes and CVs from leaked UK Foreign Commonwealth Office documents also point to these programs repeating and building off each other through history, particularly in the destabilized Muslim majority regions of the world in the past 30 years. Several prominent employees with leadership roles in these government contractors in Syria have long resumes before joining ARK and other FCO contractors. Their employee profiles demonstrate a pattern of receiving military, media, civil society, and government transition positions in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, sometimes in that order and often including several sub-Saharan African countries like Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, Mali, and Nigeria as well. These ventures have occurred before and will continue.

Many details of the Western propaganda and interference schemes in Syria are still unknown, locked in classified internal government and corporate documents. Yet the few leaks and investigative reports we have reveal an extensive, well-funded, years-long propaganda and disinformation warfare campaign waged first against the Syrian government but perhaps more intensely against Western publics. Through groups like the White Helmets and the media they produced, Western governments and corporations backed up their multi-billion-dollar effort to flood Syria with weapons and fighters with propaganda and civil society campaigns worth about a billion dollars. These facilitated rebel administrations on the ground and helped sell a simplified whitewashed narrative of the Syrian Civil War and build war fervor for Western intervention. This built off historical precedents, committed by the same people who engaged in similar campaigns in other Muslim majority countries. 

It must be said that these efforts failed in important ways. While nearly all Western mainstream corporate media and politicians fell in line behind the White Helmets and the consortium’s pro-intervention narratives, war weary Western publics, particularly in the US and UK, were skeptical and unconvinced. Outlets like the Syria Campaign, the Guardian, and the BBC were quite troubled by the popular pushback they got which, despite their best efforts, could not be smeared as all Moscow agents or their useful idiots spreading disinformation. Russia and Syria did have their own propaganda strategy to counter Western media, and this is an inevitable reality of modern warfare. Their tactics included accusations against the White Helmets that, while containing important grains of truth, were overly simplistic and designed to paper over the brutal acts they engaged in as belligerents in a generally brutal war. Yet it is striking that, after so many criminal imperialist adventures in the region, public skepticism and disillusionment toward institutional narratives pushing humanitarian intervention in another Muslim country would be dismissed by political and media professionals with such pious Cold War style deflection and finger-pointing. These went so far as to include a sting operation and media smear campaign led by yet another organization created by ARK against academics investigating Western intervention in Syria. This ideological disciplining of public discourse is particularly outrageous when critical investigations into what Western states and their allies were doing in Syria without substantial, if any, public consent or knowledge reveal disturbing patterns of violence, manipulation, and good-old fashioned corruption and self-aggrandizement.

The Unwakeable American Dream

By Jack Ely

For many, to varying degrees, picking the next president (or nearly any elected official) feels analogous to deciding which doctor is best fit to care for a terminal patient. Their job is merely to mediate the impending decline, to maintain all the basic life processes so long as that patient can go on existing without ever hoping for more health than what they precariously still cling to. The terminal nature of this condition, however, can never be openly acknowledged without fracturing the ideological fantasy that maintains our collective reality as Americans. But over the last few decades the Settler-Capitalist mythology that imbued the cultural consciousness of the 20th century has developed into something else entirely, a form of hyper-reality. The lofty, idealistic language of past American leaders remains as popular as ever, yet detached from anything real. Nowhere is this more prevalent than with the American Dream, an ideal rooted in a past that never was and speaks to a future that will never be. The promise of economic security and upward mobility that so many White, “Middle-Class” Americans enjoyed in the decades following World War II remains as ubiquitous as ever within the political ethos of both major parties, yet strays further and further from the actual experience of workers today. My goal is not to dive into the specific causes of this phenomena, as there is already plenty of existing research that can explain them far better. What I am interested in are the philosophical implications of this shifting material landscape and how they’ve reverberated across our social reality in the 21st century to deliver us to our current political moment.

At the forefront of both of the last two presidential elections has been the question of “How did we end up here?” Many in the media and general public alike opt for a top-down chain of causality, attributing the dismal selection of candidates on both sides to an institutional decline in our political system. There are several problems with this kind of moralizing, the first of which being that the bygone, golden era of party politics that both Republicans and Democrats wish us to believe we’ve strayed away from never really existed to begin with. We saw this with the media’s incessance on exceptionalizing Trump as some sort of uniquely depraved and corrupt deviation from past GOP presidents of the likes of the Bushes and Reagan. In reality, Trump only differed from them on the surface. Behind all of his outsider rhetoric and populist eccentricity, Trump largely governed like any standard Neoliberal of the past 40 years. In fact, the material damage sanctioned by his administration was rather mild compared to his Republican predecessors, yet George W. Bush receives cushy media coverage with the blood of a million Iraqi citizens on his hands, while Ronald Raegan still remains nationally beloved despite his numerous domestic and international crimes. Perhaps Trump was ostracized to the extent he was because he ripped the mask off and showed us who the ruling class is and always has been. Rather than a deviation from the norm, Trump is American Capitalism personified in its most crude form, stripped of all its niceties and decorum. If that is true, then what does that make Biden? 

In Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Leatherface is not the mastermind behind the violent acts he carries out; his family takes advantage of his mental impairment to force him into killing for them. It’s also heavily implied that the Sawyer family are displaced slaughterhouse workers who kill in order to continue their way of life and means of subsistence. In many ways, Leatherface can be seen as a sympathetic character who is as much a victim of his family and circumstances as the people he slaughters. For Joe Biden, the mask he wears may be symbolic, but it is just as crude and disfigured as the one Leatherface wears of human skin. Like the Sawyers, the American ruling class grows increasingly desperate as they cling to an unstable status quo, the only difference being they are the architects of this instability rather than its maddened victims.

What Trump offered was a bombastic alternative to the glib, sanitized politics that came to represent the Neoliberal order, even if this alternative was itself a different form of masquerade. Nonetheless, his defeat by Joe Biden, narratively, was a ‘return to normal’. Yet, as I alluded to earlier, there is a sense that this normal can no longer exist. They can piece the mask back together, but the cracks can no longer be ignored. Joe Biden exemplifies this desperation to maintain this reality so acutely because for so many years he was the ideal personification of it; the traditional White moderate with an All-American charm who made a career of bolstering the Imperial and Carceral industries while tempering the public's expectation that any real or meaningful change is possible. Additionally, his proximity to Obama (whom Democrats truly long for) made him the obvious Neoliberal torch bearer to take on Trump. However, the Biden of today far better reflects the Late-Capitalist decay that we find ourselves in, contrary to the Pre-Neoliberal idealism that cloaks his administration. He appears as an anachronism, a relic of a past only accessed through fading memories much like the abandoned remnants of industrial America that litter our roadsides. And in his lassitude, the exhausted breath of a dying political order can almost be felt.

Still, Trump and Biden seem to have only warped America’s ideological mythos. Ruling class ideology still remains potent as ever in shaping our reality in this country, and no amount of cracks seem likely to change that anytime soon - regardless of how unpopular the last two presidents have been. In fact, that may only be reinforcing it, as the 2020 election had one of the highest voter turnouts in history. But why, in a time when faith in our government is so low, does its grip on power remain so strong? Here I turn to Slavoj Žižek’s insight on how ideology functions under Postmodern Capitalism - “Even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them” (Žižek 33). Many supporters of Biden (especially young people) had a sort of weary, begrugended attitude in doing so - a choice between the ‘lesser of two evils’. What matters is not whether that wager was true, rather why so many people unequivocally accepted voting for any form of ‘evil’ in the first place. The politics of cynicism that we find ourselves living in today seem to be even more subordinating than any form of propaganda that authoritarians could hope to devise. As Žižek pointed out, Nonbelief  is the prevailing ideology of Neoliberalism, and it does all the work of propaganda without us ever realizing it. No matter how much we disavow the ruling class in our beliefs, we still support them in our actions - which ultimately produces an even more totalizing form of control. 

Despite this, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that those of us who’ve grown up in 21st century America still hold a very different image of it than our parents do. If Nixon and Vietnam fractured the ideological consensus of post-war America, today’s younger generations have grown up in the chasm left in its wake. Endless imperial war and presidential scandals seem to us almost banal - as Marx once said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” The waning patriotism and political pessimism among young people in response may be justified, but it also presents a new problem in the form of cynicism. We’ve seen one crisis after another, all directly caused or exacerbated by the Imperial rot unfolding all around us. Yet we remain as disengaged and detached as ever, transfixed in a near catatonic gaze on the endless stream of attention grabbing media bites informing us of the latest horrible event that deserves our outrage. 

Accordingly, two horrific massacres just recently unfolded in Buffalo, NY and Uvalde, TX. The discourse surrounding these uniquely American forms of pathological violence has been trite to say the least. Lost in the clamor over guns, video games, and mental illness is the reality that those factors by themselves are not enough to explain what’s happening to the degree it has here. Only in a country as deeply alienated, hyper-individualistic, and foundationally violent as America could these seemingly unthinkable acts be so commonplace. Mass shootings, especially ones as gut-wrenching as the one at Robb Elementary School, clearly provoke a more visceral and outspoken reaction. It often feels like the solutions are right in front of us and all that stands in the way is legislative action from our political leaders. But once again, this brings us to the Sisyphean predicament at the forefront of all aforementioned issues; the American ruling class is not interested, nor capable of reconciling the inherent contradictions within our country. To do so would mean to unravel the Settler-Capitalist fabric of the nation itself, which is antithetical to their class interests and roles in maintaining those very power structures. 

In light of this, it's no wonder why so many (young) people feel hopeless that things can change. The America we’ve grown up in has made it nearly impossible to go on believing in the fantasies told to us about it, yet we remain ideologically imprisoned to the very structures we know are broken. Neoliberalism’s greatest triumph is how thoroughly it’s managed to obscure and weaken our collective capacity to envision a different, better world. Even the Anti-Capitalist Left falls victim to this lack of political imagination far too often, and our task moving forward shouldn’t simply be to try and recreate past forms of struggle. We’ve reached an inflection point in American politics with Donald Trump and Joe Biden. However, we can’t, and shouldn’t wish for a return to Obama-era politics that do nothing more than mask the underlying reality playing out in this country. As Fascists try to drive us off a cliff, the Democratic party has done nothing but pave the road for them. Now, in the face of ecological collapse and every other imminent crisis at bay, our hopes will have to lay outside of the ballot box and in new forms of collective political struggle. 

Citations

Desilver, Drew. “Turnout soared in 2020 as nearly two-thirds of eligible U.S. voters cast ballots for president”. Pewresearch.org, January 28 2021, https://pewrsr.ch/3oAN3MB

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso Books, 1989. 

The Canadian Government Embraces the "Working Definition" of Antisemitism

By Morgan Duchesney

The Canadian government’s current enthusiasm for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) “non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism” is troubling, given the Canadian government’s traditional indifference to Israel’s illegal occupation of conquered Palestinian territory and ongoing defiance of International Law. By offering uncritical support for this “working definition”, the government encourages the false notion that even accurate criticism of Israel state policy is a form of antisemitism. 

According to Allan C. Brownfeld in the 2022 Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA), “It is a sleight of hand. The trick is to enforce a set of boundaries around criticism of Israel without investigating whether these boundaries bear any relation to boundaries on the ground.”

 While this “working definition” has not entered the Criminal Code of Canada, the Canadian Human Rights Act or provincial human rights codes, Canadian government rhetoric strongly suggests the possibility it might. 

According to a 2022 WRMEA article by Michael Beuckbert, former “...Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau declared that Canada ‘categorically’ rejects the “apartheid label,” following the 2021 release of Amnesty International and human Rights Watch reports which both concluded that Israeli officials are committing the crimes against humanity of “apartheid” and “persecution” against the Palestinian people.”

Before its 2016 adoption by the IHRA, this little-known “working definition” was a favourite cause of the former Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism (CPCCA) whose membership included Irwin Cotler, Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, a man with strong ties to the IHRA. Prior to its 2011 disbandment, the CPCCA’s lobbying created a lasting chill among Canadians who publicly criticise Israeli misconduct and Canadian government complicity. 

The IHRA “working definition” is a product of the 2000 Stockholm Declaration. Aside from its indifference to the Israeli government’s illegal actions and mistreatment of Palestinians, this Declaration seems a well-intentioned and necessary tool to combat actual antisemitism, especially Holocaust denial.

“The IHRA…was initiated in 1998 by former Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson.” In  2000 the IHRA adopted the, “…Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust (or “Stockholm Declaration”) as the founding document of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance…The declaration was the outcome of the International Forum convened in Stockholm between 27-29 January 2000 by former Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson. The Forum was attended by the representatives of 46 governments…” Canada recently reaffirmed its past commitment to the Declaration.

As well, the Declaration is currently supported by the following organizations: United Nations, UNESCO,OSCE/ODIHR, European Agency for Fundamental Rights, European Union, Council of Europe and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany. 

The 2015 Budapest IHRA Plenary developed the current “working definition.” subsequently, in 2016, the Bucharest Plenary convention of the IHRA adopted the following non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism: 

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Examining the Definition 

This article’s main focus is “working definition” points concerning the Israeli state. These points appear italicised in their entirety and are followed by critical commentary revealing both the irony and hypocrisy of Israeli state exceptionalism. In this author’s opinion, the definition’s points on generalized antisemitism are valid and necessary tools to reduce hate.

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

While Israel has a right to exist, its official behaviour is often racist, violent and contrary to UN Resolutions and the Geneva Convention. Since 1947, the Israel state has ignored over 70 UN resolutions, invaded and conquered parts of Jordan, Syria and Egypt and imposed permanent martial law on over 2.9 million Palestinians in the occupied territories. As well, over 1.8 million Gaza Palestinians endure an Israeli-blockaded existence of violence, poverty and environmental pollution.

Unfortunately, the Israeli state openly opposes the creation of a Palestinian state and has often denied the existence of a Palestinian people. Oddly, the IHRA authors refer to “a” State of Israel” rather than “the” state, which is suggests Zionist support for an ever-expanding Biblical Israel.

Israel’s right to “self-defence” is loudly proclaimed by Israeli and Canadian officials. Conversely, when Palestinians in the occupied territories exercise their lawful right to resist martial law, their violence is routinely-condemned as terrorism. 

Applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation. 

The Canadian government’s response to Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine and past annexation of Crimea differs radically from its response to the Israeli government’s many violations of the Geneva Convention and its defacto annexations of Palestinian territory. According to a recent report by the organization, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East,  

“...just days after the invasion (of Ukraine), Canada imposed significant sanctions on Russia, targeting both the country itself and specific Russian-occupied or annexed territories. In contrast, Canada has implemented free trade with Israel, including its illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.”

Rather than apply high ethical standards to its dealing with Israel, the Canadian government refuses to challenge its belligerent ally or take concrete action to discourage Israeli government misconduct. 

Among those who benefit from this stance are Canadian government-sponsored organizations like the Canada-Israel Industrial Research & Development Foundation (CIIRDF) who provide administrative support and channel public funds to businesses operating in one or both countries. As well, government bodies like Defence Research and Development and Canada and Export Development Canada are deeply involved in facilitating business ties between Israel and Canada.

As this author wrote in the 2020 Peace and Environment News (PEN), 

“Operation Proteus is the Canadian military mission in the West Bank, part of the U.S. Security Coordinator Office in Jerusalem and aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA). Behind the façade of peace enhancement, Canada is committed to supporting and training the security forces of the PA, a collaborationist administration whose governance of the Palestinian areas of the West Bank primarily serves the interests of local elites and the Israeli state.”

Over 2.6 million Palestinians under military occupation are forbidden from voting although they pay Israeli taxes. In spite of its official opposition to Israel’s illegal occupation, Canada respects Israeli tax law in the West Bank, a de facto acknowledgement of sovereignty.

Occasional PA disputes with the Israeli government do not alter the fact that Israeli intelligence and border services depend on PA security forces to crush both violent and peaceful resistance by Palestinian democracy advocates. This includes imprisonment, torture and transfer of prisoners to indefinite detention in Israel. 

Again, from this author’s 2021 PEN article, “Nizar Binat’s June 24 death at the hands of PA security forces is a harsh reminder of the PA’s attitude toward Palestinians who dare to criticize their authoritarian policies and security cooperation with Israel. Binat had been a candidate in the PA’s overdue parliamentary elections recently cancelled by PA leader Mahmoud Abbas over "uncertainty if Israel would allow the election to proceed in Jerusalem."

Canada’s government should not support any nation inflicting martial law on conquered people. Aside from the 1947 UN Resolution that created it, the State of Israel has ignored nearly 70 UN Resolutions, mostly pertaining to its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory and mistreatment of Palestinians both within Israel and the occupied territories. 

According to Human Rights Watch, “At least five categories of major violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law characterize the occupation: unlawful killings, forced displacement, abusive detention, the closure of the Gaza Strip and other unjustified restrictions on movement, and the development of settlements, along with the accompanying discriminatory policies that disadvantage Palestinians.” 

Writing in the 2021 WRMEA, Allan C. Brownfeld included these paraphrased remarks by the late Desmond Tutu, former archbishop of apartheid South Africa, “What Tutu found ‘not so understandable’ was what Israel did to another people to guarantee its existence. ‘I’ve been very deeply distressed in my [2008] visit to the Holy Land. It reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of Palestinians at checkpoints, suffering like us…”

As this author also wrote in 2021, “Nineteen [now 20] years ago the Israeli state chose to keep the conquered territories of Gaza, Golan and the West Bank rather than accept the Arab League Peace Initiative. This proposal from the major Arab states offered the ‘…establishment of normal relations in the context of a comprehensive peace with Israel in return for the…full Israeli withdrawal from all the Arab territories occupied since June 1967, in implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338…’”

Real peace was possible but Israeli government chose a policy of permanent militarism and illegal territorial expansion facilitated largely by U.S. military, economic and diplomatic support.

Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion. 

Conversely, Israel contains many radical Hebrew religionists, including West Bank settlers and clergy, who are also, “Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming” of Palestinian Muslims and Christians in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.” Rather than prosecution or even sanction, these groups enjoy military protection and financial support from the Israeli State.

Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations. 

Approximately 70 Canadian-Israeli dual citizens currently serve as unpaid volunteers in the Israel Defense Force (IDF). According to a 2019 CBC article, “Neither Global Affairs Canada nor the Department of National Defence nor Public Safety Canada currently keeps track of the Canadians serving in the Israeli military.” Worse still is the fact Canadian taxpayers are unwittingly subsidizing this “Canadian Foreign Legion.”

As the author wrote in the spring 2015 Leveller,

“Revenue Canada offers charitable status benefits to organizations that provide financial and moral support to active duty IDF soldiers. These include Disabled Veterans of Israel or Beit Halochem…and the Israeli-based Lone Soldier Center. 

Additionally, elite Canadian business figures like Gerry Schwartz and Heather Riesman provide up to $3 million yearly in post-military scholarships to Canadian IDF volunteers.”

While Canada and Israel are formal allies, that situation could change and create conflicts of interest for Canadian-Israeli dual nationals who might reasonably be expected to choose a side during hostilities. Such a choice would reasonably apply to the dual nationals of any state.

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis. 

The Israeli state’s policies of illegal expansion, cynical use of PA collaborators and its violent marginalization of a subject population are reminiscent of Apartheid South Africa to anyone with even a casual knowledge of history. However, highlighting these Israeli offenses is often presented as a graver matter than the offenses themselves. 

Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel. 

Israeli mistreatment of its Palestinian citizens and occupied subjects has gradually weakened international support for Zionism. This includes Jews and younger evangelical Christians, formerly a bloc of faithful Zionists. Also, by falsely claiming to represent all Jews, the Israeli government may pretend that any persecution of Jews outside Israel is automatically linked to Israel. 

Conclusion

Supporters of the Canadian government’s uncritical enthusiasm for the IHRA “non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism” are by, extension excusing censorship and exceptionalism. 

Effective opposition to Canada’s role in Israeli misdeeds is hampered by corporate media coverage that routinely portrays Palestinians a, terrorists. The Israeli state is presented as a model democracy whose noble intentions sometimes go awry, in Gaza and the occupied territories.

A more comprehensive understanding of the lingering Israeli-Palestinian divide may be derived from alternative press reporting, social justice organizations, and a wide reading of Middle East history. The resultant knowledge will empower those who oppose the Canadian government’s cynical support for Israel and other nations who trample human rights.

Morgan Duchesney is a Canadian writer and Karate teacher whose work has appeared in Humanist Perspectives, Adbusters, Briarpatch, Canadian Dimension, Shintani Harmonizer, Victoria Standard and the Ottawa Citizen. In addition to political writing, Morgan has published martial arts work and short fiction. 

Web Site: http://honeybadgerpress.ca

Contact: morjd@sympatico.ca

Sources

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/

https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/canada-holocaust/canada-pledges.html

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/why-is-the-israeli-military-still-recruiting-in-canada

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/un-officer-reported-israeli-war-crimes-before-deadly-bombing-widow-1.703087

https://www.cjpme.org

https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/working-definition-antisemitism

https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/about-us/stockholm-declaration

http://http://honeybadgerpress.ca/node/247

https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/06/04/israel-50-years-occupation-abuses

https://mondoweiss.net/2021/10/trudeau-speech-latest-example-of-weaponizing-antisemitism-to-defend-israel/

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/canadian-passports-the-disguise-of-choice-for-international-dirty-deeds/article8282163/

https://https://www.un.org/unispal/in-facts-and-figures

Beuckbert, M. “Amnesty report on Israeli apartheid demands debate on Canada’s role” Canadian Dimension: February 2, 2022.

Bobnaruk, C. ``Pushback to Canada’s Contract with Elbit.” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs: January/February 2022.

Brownfeld, A.C. “Unravelling of American Zionism Sharply Divides American Jews.” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs: January/February 2022.

Chakrborti, K. ``Prisoners of Occupation.” New Internationalist: January/February 2022.

Duchesney, M. “Palestinian Nakba and Israel’s Creation Deserve Equal Recognition.” Canadian Dimension: 2020.

Duchesney, M. “Harper’s Israeli Foreign Legion.” the Leveller: Spring 2015 

Engler, Y. Building Apartheid – Canada and Israel: 2010.

Pappe, I. A History of Modern Palestine 2nd Edition: 2006.

Resurrecting the Ghouls: On the West's History of Hating Russians and Rehabilitating Nazis

[Pictured: The Azov Battalion, a Nazi paramilitary group that is part of Ukraine’s armed forces]

By Julien Charles

The immensely popular Swedish noir crime procedural novels by Lars Kepler are part of one of the more compelling series in Nordic crime fiction. In particular the Joona Lina series, in which police detectives track a Hannibal-esque serial killer who wreaks havoc on those he deems deserving. It only occurred to me late in the first novel that the killer is a Russian. Jurek Walter is an ex-soldier, remorselessly cynical, immune to pain, and a brutally efficient torturer and murderer of men and women alike. His feverishly demented goal is to ‘restore order’ by punishing those who have gotten away with a lot less criminal activity than murder. In short, an unimaginable psychopath of the kind that could only emerge from the ruins of the Soviet Union. The personification of evil.

The character in the novel embodied a version of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a process by which the West caricatures other regions, nations, and people in cartoonish and sophomoric ways. The better to understand them at a glance. Almost like a kind of intellectual shorthand by which to characterize and dismiss entire populations. Perform conceptual violence on them until they can be shunted into a shape that slides neatly into a western man’s conception of the world. Fits the Western cosmology, in which the U.S. and Europe shine as lodestars in a firmament of flickering blight. Everything in the heavens is of course in desperate need of guidance from the western polestar.

Examples of the dynamic of Orientalism are particularly rife in Hollywood. Countless series and movies have pitted pious Americans against a raft of crackpot Latinos, Slavs, Arabs, Persians, and Asians bent on genocide, world domination, and numberless other monomaniacal schemes. There’s of course no small amount of projection at work here in the fictional stylings of “the best minds of [our] generation”, as Ginsberg put it.

Not unlike the Kepler book, the Tom Cruise Jack Reacher films capitalize on the by now threadbare trope of a Soviet psychopath set loose in the naive and peaceable democracies of the West. The Zec is a man who escaped or survived the gulags in Siberia to wreak havoc on the West. In one scene, he describes how he once gnawed off a few fingers to avoid working in Siberian sulfur mines. A man of such exceptional capacities is no doubt useful to certain organizations, he muses. The Zec then encourages one of his low-level thugs to chew off his thumb as a show of fidelity, or some such deranged proof. The man—human, all too human—cannot do it and is summarily executed. The bloodless Zec then waxes psychopathic, wondering why westerners are so weak.

Observe the set pieces in the Jennifer Lawrence vehicle Red Sparrow. Scenes from the West are well-lit and overflowing with human emotion; scenes from behind the “iron curtain” are dimly lit, drab in color, stylistically old-world, barren of human empathy. In short, thoroughly depressing. Of course, as part of Lawrence’s character Dominika’s training in demolishing her human emotions (weaknesses all) and steeling herself in the arts of pitiless manipulation, she must appear naked before her class and satisfy the lust of a man who previously assaulted her.

Chronic Resentments

These are caricatures of Russians who evidently have been thoroughly dehumanized by life in the USSR. What has really dehumanized these characters is the propaganda which invented them.

Few events ignite this kind of Orientalism more than a war or proxy war with Russia, America’s bete noire. Despite the fact that the wall has been down for 30 years. Despite the fact that the West enjoyed an extended period of unrestrained looting in the Former Soviet Republics. During which time mortality rates skyrocketed for citizens of those fledgling states, thanks principally to the loss of the generous social supports that underpinned their Soviet economies. Despite the fact that Vladimir Putin is an avowed neoliberal who has repeatedly sought deeper integration with Europe and America, like a stepchild desperate to claim his birthright among a welter of siblings. Despite all this, Putin’s patriotic desire to reconstitute Russia as a viable economic and military power has damned him irreparably in the eyes of the West. He is like Kepler’s killer, the manifestation of undiluted evil. Except that Putin is real.

All this comes from a long lineage of Russophobia. It dates back to the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, which stirred fears of Russian plots to conquer Europe; to subsequent paranoia by British colonialists that Russia would steal the Indian subcontinent from its grasp; to the war to unseat the Bolsheviks and blistering responses to stories of mass slaughter under Soviet rule. In 1944, Hitler described Russians thusly, “These are not human beings: they are beasts from the Asiatic steppes, and the battle I am leading against them is the battle for the dignity of the people of Europe.” This view summarized the ideology behind Germany’s plan to murder 100 million Russians after the defeated the USSR. Likewise, we rarely hear that one of the small handful of groups energetically targeted for liquidation by the Nazis were communists. The Russians sacrificed 27 million people fighting off fascism. This loss is also infrequently highlighted.

The McCarthyite paranoia was a particularly acute instance of this chronic phobia. One can catch a whiff of the age-old bigotry in the propaganda of the present moment. The reflexive aggression toward Russia action in Ukraine (a recent article in The Times (UK) was entitled, “Russia’s casual savagery is seared into its soul”) This latest surge of bile seems in part an explosion of unresolved angst from the Russophobia of the Trump years, and perhaps a hundred years prior, though partially diffused by the fall of the wall. Yet it was still there even in the post-wall melees of capitalist looting under the doddering oversight of the Pushkin-quoting boozer Boris Yeltsin. Russians, Muscovites mostly, were freshly depicted as amoral, thieving mafiosi seduced by the flash of capital, the men brutal grotesques and the women biddable jades. Little was made of the valueless cosmos into which they’d been hurled by the blitzkrieg of capital on a society not remotely prepared for it.

(Much like the diagnosis of mental health in the West, problems of post-fall Russians were and are localized in the person, in the soul of a people, rarely traced to their societal causes. The New York Times just released a series on the “Inner Pandemic” of mental health issues, though it spends little time focusing on the circumstances that generated these crises, and which it enthusiastically supported.)

Even today one finds strains of the old Hitlerian trope coursing through the western mainstream. Recently on Germany’s ZDF channel, a guest of the Markus Lanz Show reminded viewers, with a slim smile, that, “Even if Russians look European, they are not European.” She rambled on incoherently about the Slavic view of death and noted that, “They have no concept of a liberal, post-modern life.” She may as well have said they were beasts from the Asiatic steppes and referred viewers to the Jack Reacher movie. After which, perhaps, they might donate to the latest national purity fund.

This seems to be part unhinged racism, but also a psychological necessity for enemies in nation-states. And one wonders if race isn’t utilized to that end. And whether this psychological need springs from a desire for national purpose, or more from an unrelenting need of capital for new markets—and the geospatial requirements that go with it. Surely the historical Lebensraum looms large behind modern geopolitical conflicts.

Addicted to Conflict

But it isn’t just the xenophobic fear of Slavic people. There’s another element at work here. One is reminded of Colin Powell, former leader of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and dissembler nonpareil—before the U.N. Security Council. He once told a reporter that he feared he was “running out of enemies” in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. He was unwittingly disclosing a clandestine principle of Washington foreign policy. Namely, that it must always have an enemy. It cannot conceive a world of peaceful inhabitants, engaged in serene market exchange, celebrating a peace dividend while occasionally reminding new generations of the perils of conflict. This is not a conceit in the mental universe of the planners of American hegemony, be they retired generals on media networks, cabinet lieutenants sketching hemispheric takeovers, or well-compensated scriveners in beltway think tanks. And certainly not among the lurid corridors of K Street defense lobbyists. If Putin did not exist, Washington would have invented him. Much as they invented, to a surprising degree, Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda henchmen.

More often than not, the enemy must be cut from whole cloth. They do not ordinarily present themselves. Few countries are interested in going to war with the United States. At worst most nations are disinterested in submitting themselves to American rule, which manifests in numberless ways, a protean ogre extending its tentacles across the globe. Soft power, hard power, invisible power. Be it the petro dollar and the SWIFT system that places a subject nation under the perpetual threat of American sanctions. (A form of economic colonialism.) Be it bilateral security arrangements that infiltrate the country with U.S. military personnel and ensnare it in long-term weapons contracts with beltway defense contractors. (A form of military subjugation.) Be it onerous and odious loan agreements with Bretton Woods institutions that enslave generations of citizens to corrupt banks of the global North. (A form of vassalage.) From which those citizens’ meager avenues of escape include metastasizing debt service and consequent debt deflation, firesales of national patrimony, or the trauma of default, runaway inflation, and economic collapse. Choose wisely.

Rather than being enemies of the American state, such nations would really rather be left alone. To experiment with alternative economic models including socialism and its various hybrids. To trade in local currencies. To align in regional economic blocs. But this option–attempting to implement an economic structure other than western neoliberalism–is anathema to Washington. Just ask Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Syria, Libya, North Korea, and any other nation that wishes to forge its own path.

The Real Enemy

Which brings us to the real enemy of the United States. Despite reports to the contrary, it is not fascism. Fascism is merely an end-point of capitalism, which will almost assuredly emerge wherever capitalism is practiced in unregulated and unrepentant fashion. As middle class wealth craters, however broadly, and extreme wealth and privilege expands, however narrowly, it will require force to generate compliance within a resentful and restive population. We are witnessing this transition in the West right now.

All this to say that, no, fascism was never the primary nemesis. The real enemy is communism. Western capital cannot abide the notion of a workers' state full of nationalized enterprises committed to the general welfare. One which deprioritizes the profit motive and tars it with the stigma of avarice and usury. This is and has always been Washington’s worst-case scenario, which it watched materialize in the Bolshevik Revolution, a knife in the side of capital that drew blood for 74 years, and which it tried hysterically to end all the while.

Not even the shameful scourge of Nazism rising up in the heart of civilized Europe was enough to lift fascism above communism as public enemy number one. As John Steppling notes in an excellent essay on the rehabilitation of fascism, Arthur Schweitzer, author of Big Business in the Third Reich, says that many German businessmen saw virulent anti-semitism as little more than a form of “economic policy reform.”

It is instructive to read works like The Splendid Blond Beast, which outlines the myriad deceptions of the postwar era of supposed deNazification in Western Europe. As it turns out, Washington was torn on the prosecution of Nazi war crimes. Although Frederick Roosevelt and others supported harsh punishment, helped establish Nuremberg and sent principled judges like Robert Jackson, others like powerful Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles and his Secretary of State brother John Foster Dulles sought to shield German industrialists and military officers, all deeply complicit and enthusiastic collaborators in the Nazi extermination campaigns.

Then there was Operation Paperclip, a full program dedicated to repatriating Nazis in the United States and installing them in key posts in pivotal internationalist institutions like the UN. And Nato’s alleged role in Operation Gladio, code name for a series of stay behind secret armies committed to armed resistance, acts of subversion, and terror, that were to be activated in the event of an invasion of Western Europe by Warsaw Pact nations, something never on the books in Moscow, but alive in the feverish imagination of beltway anti-communists. These dispersed embedded and hastily assembled paramilitaries were actually left behind to agitate against and prevent the rise of leftist (see communist) political blocs. They operated in Italy, Greece, France, Germany, Portugal and across Northern Europe. Nato, the CIA, and various European intelligence agencies were not about to watch Western Europe go communist regardless of what the democratized masses aberrantly desired.

Much of this history suggests that the underlying need of capitalism for new markets is primary, and perhaps that race is a tool leveraged to rationalize what is at bottom base exploitation. Hence our general acceptance of fascism in Ukraine and hysteria against Russia.

Selective Outrage

We might argue that this is different: Russia invaded another country. On investigation the argument falters, fractures amid a sea of sharp facts: a foreign backer, a coup d’etat, an ultranationalist takeover, a Nato infiltration, a legal apparatus mobilized against its own citizens, a massacre of ethnic Russians, preparations for a final assault. And finally, a full response from Moscow.

But even if an invasion were our threshold for outrage, none of this pathos has been evident in our response to the U.S.-backed Saudi war on Yemen, or U.S. wars on Libya and Syria. Even though the western aggression is criminal and death tolls are staggering. Even though there were plenty of visuals and myths available to rouse the choler of the people: visions of rampaging soldiers on Viagra rape sprees; grotesquely thin and lifeless children in the dust of the KSA’s induced famine; the hurling of gays off rooftops in Raqqa by ‘moderate rebels’. No, our collective consciousness has definitely been conditioned to despise most of all the legatees of Soviet communism, punished for the sins of the father in the first instance and for the defense of their national autonomy in the second. War, and war propaganda, is often a kind of industrialized hatred, organized malice armed with the implements of death.

As Arthur Ponsonby says in his book Falsehoods in War Time, deceitfulness is extraordinarily useful because humanity is mendacious and credulous in near equal measure. It lies and refuses to believe it is being lied to. Ponsonby, a member of British Parliament writing after World War I, says that nations must “justify themselves by depicting the enemy as an undiluted criminal; and secondly, to inflame popular passion for the continuance of the struggle.” Obviously little has changed since our initial experience of industrial warfare. We are constitutionally and economically committed to domineering aims, are inimical to anything that might impede our expansion, and we rationalize our behavior to these ends with a healthy dose of projection abetted by racist caricature. It is a frightful concoction of pitiless greed and base prejudice.

Yet every time we think we have put these cruel rancorous sides to our human selves to rest, they reappear, refashioned in new apparel, with fresh logic, ironclad rationales. We are sold a bill of goods. Perhaps this should come as no real surprise to citizens of a country that worships a single skill, salesmanship, and a single “virtue”, wealth, as its most sacred values. Everything is a commodity and everything that has been sold in the past will be sold again. Our entertainment culture is rife with reproductions of yesterday’s stories. Why not re-commoditize fascism? Wave the colors of a new flag and herald the insignia of a new battalion. Lionize a new leader, dress him in army green and pose him on the marble stairs of the halls of power, sandbags stacked to the roofs behind him. Honor under siege.

What has been sold before will be sold again; what we have hated before we will hate again. If it isn’t quite eternal return then it surely is history recurring as tragedy then farce. This soft embrace of fascism and rabid anti-communism goes all the way back to the Bolshevik uprising. As one of Kepler’s Nordic tales is subtitled, “Sometimes the past won’t stay buried.” Yes, the graves are always rather too near the surface.

Julien Charles is a concerned citizen hoping to call attention to the authoritarian drift of states across the Western world, and the disingenuous narratives promoted to gain consensus for such measures.

The U.S. Gives Us Hell But It’s A Liberated Africa That Can Douse the Flames

By Mark P. Fancher

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

African Liberation Day is a reminder that African descended people make progress when joined together in international unity. Internationalism is essential.

When U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) was established in 2007, the only thing more offensive than its use of proxy African soldiers to carry out imperialist missions was the appointment of a Black man, William E. (“Kip”) Ward, to lead AFRICOM operations.

After Ward stepped down, white men assumed leadership of AFRICOM. But now, yet again, AFRICOM will be headed by a man of African descent. Lt. Gen. Michael Langley will assume the role of training and directing the armed forces of African countries to militarize Africa and plunder the continent’s resources for the benefit of foreign governments and corporations. The publication Stars and Stripes reported that for Langley “a top priority will be countering militants in the East African country of Somalia.”

The cynical use of Africans to control and exploit Africa is surpassed in its odiousness only by a willingness of Africans like Ward and Langley to engage in the enterprise. Those committed to Africa’s liberation have long been aware of the importance of ensuring that members of African communities decline such collaboration with oppressors. To that end, in 1963, the Organization of African Unity proclaimed May 25th as African Liberation Day - a day when the African World might orient itself to a serious commitment to achieving Africa’s genuine independence.

Although the commemoration of African Liberation Day throughout Africa and the African diaspora has become an ever-growing tradition, this year, in the wake of the racist massacre in Buffalo, New York, there are no doubt many Africans born and living in the U.S. who can’t bring themselves to think of Africa’s plight when their personal circumstances seem so precarious. If the only problems were violent white supremacists, prospects for survival might not seem so bleak. But the anti-Black hostility has manifested in so many ways that signal that help is not on the way from any of the quarters from whence Africans in America might expect it.

Specifically, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a police bullet was fired into the head of Patrick Lyoya at point-blank range making him one of the latest of a very long series of Africans killed by cops and affirming yet again that not only are Africans unable to look to the police for protection, but that the police themselves are an enemy force.

Less blatant, but no less concerning, is the U.S. government’s seeming indifference to the international dilemma of WNBA star Brittney Griner, a captive in Russia, purportedly for drug-related offenses, even as the U.S. State Department fought more efficiently and vigorously for the release of others. In fact, it took weeks for the U.S. to even acknowledge its belief that Griner had been wrongfully detained. Concern is not limited to the plight of Griner as an individual, but it is also for the unmistakable message that a U.S. government that should presumably protect its nationals can’t be counted on if the person in question is Black.

It is not surprising then that persons of African descent in the U.S. might perceive themselves to be adrift, alone, vulnerable and unprotected even by the government entities charged with keeping them safe. The perceived intensity of the danger means that calls to work for Africa’s liberation may not resonate. While this is understandable, historically, the challenges of Africa’s diaspora have not deterred engagement in internationalist service.

The list of revolutionaries who have emerged from communities under stress but who have nevertheless thrown themselves into Africa’s struggles is long. Frantz Fanon left colonized Martinique to struggle alongside those fighting for Algeria’s independence. Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) physically relocated himself from the U.S. where Civil Rights and Black Power struggles raged to become a vital member of the Democratic Party of Guinea. Che Guevara was not content with his sterling service to the Cuban revolution, and he fought in Congo and ultimately Bolivia where he was captured and killed.

In fact, some of the most important internationalist service to Africa has been rendered by Cuba, even in the face of extreme pressure from not only western imperialism but also from the Soviet Union. Of Cuba’s assistance to the efforts to liberate Angola, Piero Gleijeses, a Johns Hopkins University professor explained:

“In early November 1975, as South Africans were advancing along the coast, Angola sent a desperate appeal request to Cubans for help. The military mission also told Fidel [Castro] that the Cubans had to do something, because Luanda was going to fall. On November 4, Fidel decided to send troops to Angola. The Soviet Union was miffed, because it didn’t want the Cubans to intervene. It showed its annoyance by not assisting in the dispatch of Cuban troops to Angola. Until 1975 or 1976, the Cubans arrived by ship and old transport planes.”

Cuba went on to play a vital role in the liberation of Angola and the fall of apartheid in Namibia and South Africa. Cuba’s sacrifices for Africa neither began nor ended in Southern Africa. Even after its military forces withdrew from the region, they were replaced by brigades of Cuban physicians and other medical personnel deployed throughout the continent.

For Black people in America, internationalist service can be not only as noble as that rendered by forebears, but it can also be pragmatic. This is because Africans are not only a numerical minority in the U.S., but also a powerless minority. Meanwhile, Africa’s population is exploding. Foreign Policy columnist Adam Tooze explained that by 2050, Africa’s population will account for nearly 25 percent of the population of the planet. He said:

“In the 2040s alone, it is likely that in the order of 566 million children will be born in Africa. Around midcentury, African births will outnumber those in Asia, and Africans will constitute the largest population of people of prime working age anywhere in the world.”

It just makes good sense for Africans in the U.S. to see themselves as part of that mass of humanity. This does not even consider the potential of Africa to seize control of the continent’s natural resources and to use them for the benefit of Africans worldwide. Such global sharing and collaboration will happen more organically if the African diaspora participates not only in reaping the benefits of the power that flows from control of Africa’s natural wealth, but also in the struggle on the front end to make such control a reality.

While a united and socialist Africa, with all its resources could be a powerful social, economic and political engine for communities throughout the African diaspora, as a practical matter it would need to do nothing to impact them. The mere existence of a powerful, unified Africa would be a deterrent to every police officer inclined to kill brothers like Patrick Lyoya. When the Brittney Griners of our communities might find themselves in international predicaments, the State Department would likely turn somersaults if necessary to assist them because of the need to curry favor with a powerful Africa. In the end, Africans in America need to make Africa a primary focus of their struggles despite the many hardships and challenges presented by the U.S. It just makes good sense.

Mark P. Fancher is an attorney and writer. He is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace Africa Team and the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of organizations with which he is affiliated. He can be contacted at mfancher[at]comcast.net.

A History of Naked Imperialism Continues as Biden Approves Somalia Redeployment

By TJ Coles

Republished from Internationalist 360

Almost as soon as the administration of President Joseph Biden announced a redeployment of US Special Operations Forces to Somalia on May 16, the Western media began to spin the intervention.

As the BBC framed it, Biden’s deployment would “support the fight against militant group al-Shabab” (sic). The intervention coincides with the re-election of former Somalian President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who governed between 2012 and ‘17.

Similarly, the New York Times (NYT) reported that “Biden has approved a Pentagon request for standing authority to target about a dozen suspected leaders of Al Shabab, the Somali terrorist group that is affiliated with Al Qaeda.”

But are these motives true? Does Washington really want merely to defeat al-Shabab? Is al-Shabab actually linked to al-Qaeda and, if so, to what degree? As usual, the mainstream state-corporate media reportage is missing context and reference to international law.

As we shall see, the context behind the US redeployment is naked imperialism using counterterrorism as the latest in a long line of excuses to interfere in the politics of the strategically-significant country on the Horn of Africa. In terms of international law, signatories of the UN Charter have legal responsibilities to gain authorization from the Security Council before launching military operations –– something the Biden administration and its predecessors have never done in Somalia, or anywhere else, for that matter.

It is also worth tackling the Trump-era propaganda, which is double-edged. Trump supporters claimed that their hero ended America’s “forever wars,” as he “bombed the shit out of ISIS,” in his words, which often meant dumping munitions on Iraqi and Syrian women and children, while blowing Somalis to pieces via drone operators in numbers greater than during Obama’s term. It is accurate that Trump withdrew US ground forces from Somalia, though it appears to have been both an America First PR stunt and a device to make things difficult for the incoming Biden administration.

On the other side, the pro-war, neoliberal, anti-Trump establishment sought to portray Trump’s withdrawal of ground troops as a sign of American weakness in the face of globalized “Islamic” terrorists. By demonizing Trump and inaccurately reporting the motives of his withdrawal, the NYT, BBC and company were essentially clamoring for US militarism in Somalia: Trump bad so militarism good. And as usual, their reporting was absent of any critical or skeptical voices.

The real agenda: “acquire and maintain the capability to respond to any military contingency that could threaten U.S. interests”

Billionaire-backed, self-appointed “fact-checkers” like Snopes, PolitiFact often rate what they call “fake news” as having “missing context,” yet mainstream state-corporate media operate almost entirely on an unspoken doctrine of propaganda-by-omission. Researchers are left to piece together the kind of coherent recent-historical narratives that MSM refuse to provide. Somalia’s “missing context” can be summarized as follows:

In 1997, the US Space Command (which is still operational, though its duties are largely second to the Space Force) committed the Pentagon to achieving “full spectrum dominance” of land, sea, air, and space by the year 2020, “to protect US interests and investment,” which means elite corporate interests. Since then, numerous oil-rich and strategically-important nations have been occupied by the US and its allies. Various Pentagon departments, including the Central Command and Africa Command, divide the world into self-appointed Areas of Responsibility, based on the given region and/or nation’s strategic relevance to the Pentagon. This follows Britain’s colonial model.

In the 1950s, the Colonial Office described Aden—the Gulf between Yemen and Somalia—as “an important base,” from which forces could rapidly deploy to the energy-rich Middle East. In those days, the so-called Scramble for Africa (which began in the late-19th century) was justified under the doctrine of the “white’s man burden”: the mission to civilize the backward black races, as their lands and resources were plundered.

But Somalia gained independence in 1960 before being governed by the one-time CIA-backed dictator Siad Barre, who ruled from 1969 to ‘91. At the time, US support for Siad—including his killing of tens of thousands of political rivals—was justified as part of American Cold War policy.

With the Cold War over and Siad deposed, successive US administrations tested new “interventionist” doctrines, the first post-Cold War ideology being humanitarian intervention. Operation Restore Hope was launched in 1992 by the outgoing George H.W. Bush administration, supposedly to provide humanitarian relief during the famine triggered by the civil war. But a Fort Leavenworth paper reveals a hidden agenda: “Throughout our involvement with Somalia, our overriding strategic objective was simply to acquire and maintain the capability to respond to any military contingency that could threaten U.S. interests in the Middle East, Northeast Africa and the Red Sea area.”

Under an umbrella of Islamic political parties, known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), most of them non-extremist, Somalia enjoyed a short period of peace, stability, and an increase in living standards. Branches of the UN, Amnesty International, and the British foreign policy think-tank Chatham House have acknowledged that the ICU prevented “piracy,” provided schooling for large numbers of children, and reduced malnutrition.

The US and UK wage proxy war on the ICU, infiltrate the movement with Al Qaeda extremists

The attacks of 9/11 in 2001 provided the George W. Bush administration an excuse to sanction Somali banks, even though the 9/11 Commission cleared the banks of wrongdoing. Since then, Somalia has become a testing ground for the imposition of cashless societies.

Convinced that the more right-wing elements of the ICU were “al-Qaeda” fronts, the Joint Special Operations Command and CIA operated covertly in Somalia. Failing to destroy the ICU from within, the US and Britain backed an opposition government in exile comprised of Ethiopian and other warlords.

In December 2006, Ethiopia invaded Somalia as a US-British proxy war. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled to neighboring Kenyan and Ethiopian refugee camps, while others made the perilous journey in rickety boats to Yemen. The so-called Transitional Federal Government was comprised of killers and torturers funded by the British taxpayer and given homes and citizenship in the UK. The war reversed the ICU’s social achievements and thousands starved in successive famines.

The frightening-sounding al-Shabab simply means “the Youth,” and was the young persons’ wing of the ICU. In 2007, with the non-violent ICU destroyed by a campaign of US-British terror, al-Shabab turned to violence to defend its country against Ethiopian aggressors and Somali collaborators. British intelligence agencies saw their chance to infiltrate al-Shabab with terrorists and transform it from a nationalist militia into an extremist group that could then be used as pretext for more Western aggression against Somalia. And indeed, some of the high-profile terrorists operating in Somalia post-9/11 were US-British intelligence assets.

It is well-known that the British and American militaries helped fuel the rise of what was later known as “al-Qaeda” to battle the Soviets in 1980s’ Afghanistan. One Afghanistan-based terror cell at the time was a Somali group called Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, whose leader Ahmed Abdi Godane went on to lead al-Shabab after the ICU collapsed. In London, an MI5 double agent tasked with spying on mosques tried in vain to alert his handlers to the fact that Osama Bin Laden’s main UK connection, Abu Qatada, was training and sending fighters to half a dozen Muslim-majority countries, including Somalia. TIME had reported that Qatada was an asset of MI5.

A US puppet takes control in Somalia as drone war escalates

In 2010, with war still raging, US President Obama signed Executive Order 13536, describing Somalia — a country nearly 8,000 miles away with a GDP of less than $5 billion — as an “extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” As you wipe tears of laughter away, notice the emphasis on “foreign policy”: non-compliant regimes in Somalia might threaten total US operational freedom along the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

That year, the radicalized and infiltrated al-Shabab launched its first foreign attacks (in Uganda and later Kenya), prompting regional governments to join the US in “counterterrorism” operations. A year later, drone strikes against “al-Shabab” and other groups began, killing at least 300 people by 2017; tragedies small in comparison to the hundreds of thousands who died in multiple, human-made famines over the last decade.

In 2011, the group allegedly pledged allegiance to “al-Qaeda.” The 2012 election of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud provided the US with a client who was described by Obama’s National Security Council spokesperson, Caitlin Hayden, as committed to “strengthen[ing Somalia’s] democratic institutions and promot[ing] economic development.”

By 2016, Bush and Obama had launched a total of 41 confirmed strikes largely from the US base at Camp Lemonier in neighboring Djibouti. The Shabab leader, Godane, was killed in one such strike. His replacement is supposedly named Ahmad Umar, and is a shadowy bogeyman about whom little is known.  By 2020, Trump alone had launched 40 drone strikes against Somalia, eliminating AFRICOM’s accountability protocols.

Exploiting “playgrounds for a new scramble in the Horn of Africa”

We cannot say that corporate-state media do not do their job. They have successfully kept the public ignorant and deluded on virtually every geopolitical issue of significance. Nor can we say that the “war on terror” has failed (i.e., that after 20 years terror groups still operate), because it is not designed to combat terrorism. It is designed to produce an endless cycle of tit-for-tat killings and to create extremist groups where none previously existed. Permanent counterterrorism is a thin smokescreen to justify “full spectrum dominance” to the voting and taxpaying American public whose purse is plundered to fund these wars.

As we see from recent history, professed justifications for bloody US interference in impoverished Somalia shift according to the political climate: countering the Soviets until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, preventing famine under the guise of 1990s’ humanitarian intervention, stopping “pirates” as European ships plunder the starving country’s fish stocks, and, for the last two decades, fighting endless hordes of post-9/11 terrorists; many of them incubated in London by protected intelligence assets.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence recently announced that 70 personnel are training 1,000 Somalis as part of the African Union’s so-called Transition Mission in Somalia, “protecting civilians from Al Shabaab and other terrorist groups.” A more plausible reason for the ongoing US-British involvement is offered by a policy paper published last year by the European University: “Strategic areas of the western shore and the Horn of Africa are being incorporated in the Red Sea geopolitical map and Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia and Eritrea have become playgrounds for a new scramble in the Horn of Africa.”

As excuses change, the geographies of power remain the same. These strategic interests are the real motivations for war. Ordinary people, as always, pay the price.

T.J. Coles is a postdoctoral researcher at Plymouth University’s Cognition Institute and the author of several books, the latest being We’ll Tell You What to Think: Wikipedia, Propaganda and the Making of Liberal Consensus.

Two Years Since George Floyd’s Death, Has Anything Changed in the U.S.?

By Natalia Marques

Republished from People’s Dispatch.

Police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on May 25, 2020, shocking the consciousness of the entire United States. On May 25 of this year, President Joe Biden announced that he will instate an executive order which is a watered-down version of a police reform proposal that previously failed to pass in the Senate. The failed proposal would have altered “qualified immunity”, a doctrine that makes it difficult to sue government officials, including police. The proposal would have kept the doctrine intact for individual officers, but made it easier for police brutality victims to sue officers or municipalities. 

This new executive order would merely create a national registry of officers fired for misconduct, in addition to directing federal agencies to revise use-of-force policies, encouraging state and local police to tighten restrictions on chokeholds and no-knock warrants, restrict the transfer of most military equipment to law enforcement agencies, as reported by the New York Times. 

The real concern for activists and those who are targeted by police is primarily the police who are still on the job, and may have several complaints against them for violence already. This was the case with Chauvin, who had used excessive force in six previous arrests. Even of the officers who are fired for misconduct, of which there are few compared to the massive number of victims killed by police, nearly 25% are reinstated because of police union-mandated appeals. 

Government officials are not responding with the seriousness compared to the intensity of the crisis of police violence that plagues the United States. This is especially true in light of the radical demands generated by the mass movement which followed the death of George Floyd. Some of the most popular were: end police brutality, jail killer cops, and defund the police. This movement shifted the mainstream language on police violence, which had originally placed the blame on individual cops or “bad apples”, to include more discussion of systemic, institutionalized racism. 

“Even though you had the largest social uprising that had ever hit the country, in terms of numbers of people actually hitting the streets, you’ve seen no substantive reforms to address the issues, even in a small way regarding racism and bias in policing,” socialist organizer and journalist Eugene Puryear told Peoples Dispatch, speaking of the 2020 anti-racist uprising. Polls estimate that between 15 and 26 million were out on the streets, making these uprisings the largest protests in US history.

Movement demands

The movement shouted “Jail killer cops!” and “End police brutality!” in the streets, but the state has fallen short on delivering these demands. 

There was no reduction in police killings in the US from 2020 to 2021, according to data compiled by the website Mapping Police Violence. Police killed 1,145 people in 2021, 12 more than in 2020, and 16 more Black people specifically. 

2021 was marked by landmark trials that broke the paradigm of convictions for vigilante and police killings of Black people. The most notable example is Derek Chauvin’s guilty-on-all-counts verdict, for which he was sentenced to a historic 22.5 years. 

However, there was also no notable spike in the number of convictions and sentencing in general of police officers, although there is some evidence that public outrage does generate results. Of the 1,145 police killings in 2021, only two have resulted in convictions thus far. One of them is the trial of Kim Potter, whose murder of Daunte Wright made headlines when she gunned down the 20-year-old Black father 10 miles from where Chauvin was standing trial at the time.

A notable setback, however, was the not-guilty verdict for the killer of Breonna Taylor, Brett Hankinson, who, alongside other officers, killed Breonna by firing 16 rounds into Taylor’s apartment during a raid while she was sleeping. Hankinson was never even on trial for the killing of Taylor. In fact, the officers responsible have faced no criminal charges at all for her death. Hankinson was on trial for “wanton reckless endangerment” for firing ten shots through a wall into Taylor’s neighbor’s apartment. Even for this, he was found not-guilty on May 3 of this year. “Thank you Jesus!” tweeted John Mattingly, another officer involved in Taylor’s murder.

Were the police ever defunded?

“One of the things that was the most notable in the context of the George Floyd uprising, and the rise of the slogan ‘defund the police’, it went beyond simply the issue of police brutality,” Puryear told Peoples Dispatch. “It was connecting at a deeper level, the reality of white supremacy in causing oppression for Black Americans across almost every single social sphere that exists, policing being one of the most egregious examples of this racism and this discrimination and the xenophobia that’s directed towards Black Americans.”

“Defund the police” was indeed a radical slogan in a country in which police budgets as a share of general city expenditures have only increased since the 1970s. These budgets followed the trend of the rise in incarceration, both of which were part of the “war on crime” era of racist policing and incarceration that served to suppress 1960s and 70s Black rebellion. 

As a result, police budgets in the United States are some of the largest in the world, especially compared to underfunded schools and social services. According to a study, schools in the US are short of funding by nearly $150 billion every year. Meanwhile, in a city like New York, the annual police budget is over $10 billion. If the New York Police Department (NYPD) were a military, it would be one of the world’s most well-funded. 

Did city governments ever respond to demands and defund the police? Generally, the answer is no. While the 50 largest cities reduced their police budgets by 5.2% in aggregate, police spending as a share of general spending rose slightly from 13.6% to 13.7%. Many of the budget reductions that did occur were a result of larger pandemic cuts, in which other parts of the city budgets were also reduced. 26 out of 50 major cities actually increased their police budgets.

These numbers are the material reality, but in the full swing of the uprisings, city governments were making lofty promises to their people, who were marching outraged in the streets. In June of 2020, a veto-proof majority of city council members in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, promised to dismantle the police entirely. But when it came time to deliver on these demands, city council members backtracked, claiming that the pledge was “in spirit” or “up to interpretation”. In the end, the city did not dismantle their police force. However, they did end up reducing the police department’s ability to spend overtime and began sending mental health and medical professionals instead of police to respond to emergencies. Activists also won a $8 million cut from the city’s police budget. 

Some city officials resorted to blatant deception, making it seem as if activists won demands when in reality, little had changed. In New York, for example, the mayor pledged to move $1 billion out of the massive NYPD budget. But even at the time of this pledge, activists and progressives were calling out the mayor for “just moving money around”. “Defunding police means defunding police,” said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math.” As described by a report authored by Andrea J. Ritchie and published by Interrupting Criminalization, the mayor claimed to have cut $300 million from the NYPD budget by moving police officers stations in schools out of the NYPD budget and into the Department of Education Budget. This was never a demand of the movement against police brutality, which has always agitated for “police free schools”. In the end, however, this $300 million was never even cut from the NYPD budget, while the Department of Education budget was actually defunded by over $780 million.

Were there any victories?

Although the post-2020 realities are disappointing for many, there were some notable victories. Some cities did in fact make major cuts, such as Austin, which cut a third of its police budget. And the uprisings did in fact halt the trend of ever-increasing police budgets that had existed since the “war on crime” began. Budgets did decrease across major cities, however minimally. 

According to Ritchie’s report, organizers shifted $840 million countrywide away from police forces, and secured $160 million for community services. Activists moved police out of schools, where they often generate more violence than they prevent. 25 cities canceled contracts with police departments operating in schools, saving a total of $35 million. Activists have also begun to demilitarize the highly militarized US police forces, winning bans on chemical/military-grade weapons in 6 cities and facial recognition in 4 cities.

But the key victory of 2020, argues Puryear, was the changing of mass consciousness. “The very fact that you could have a situation where a majority of people are recognizing the fact that there is racism, the fact that there is tremendous discrimination against black people in policing, in prisons and in the criminal legal system, and not have any change whatsoever, shows how intrinsic racism is to capitalism in the US context,” Puryear said. 

He continued, “[Those in power] actually cannot afford to eliminate these clear and obvious biases that exist. It’s essential to the social control of the black community, as a part of the broader efforts to super exploit black people, as it has been since the first slaves arrived here as a central pillar of the capitalist system. 

“It exposed once again the deep relationship between capitalism and racism, and the inability to overcome racism without overcoming capitalism. Because it isn’t just incidental, it isn’t a few bad apples, it isn’t just the attitudes of certain people, but it’s structural and it’s systemic in a way that can’t be changed by good intentions.”

Russia and the Ukraine Crisis: The Eurasian Project in Conflict with the Triad Imperialist Policies (2014)

By Samir Amin

Republished from Monthly Review.

This was originally written by Samir Amin in 2014, at the time of the Maidan Coup in 2014. It provides insight into today’s conflict in the region.

The current global stage is dominated by the attempt of historical centers of imperialism (the U.S., Western and Central Europe, Japan—hereafter called “the Triad”) to maintain their exclusive control over the planet through a combination of:

1. so-called neo-liberal economic globalization policies allowing financial transnational capital of the Triad to decide alone on all issues in their exclusive interests;

2. the military control of the planet by the U.S. and its subordinate allies (NATO and Japan) in order to annihilate any attempt by any country not of the Triad to move out from under their yoke.

In that respect all countries of the world not of the Triad are enemies or potential enemies, except those who accept complete submission to the economic and political strategy of the Triad—such as the two new “democratic republics” of Saudi Arabia and Qatar!  The so-called “international community” to which the Western medias refer continuously is indeed reduced to the G7 plus Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  Any other country, even when its government is currently aligned with the Triad, is a potential enemy since the peoples of those countries may reject that submission.

2. In that frame Russia is “an enemy.”

Whatever might be our assessment of what the Soviet Union was (“socialist” or something else), the Triad fought it simply because it was an attempt to develop independently of dominant capitalism/imperialism.

After the breakdown of the Soviet system, some people (in Russia in particular) thought that the “West” would not antagonize a “capitalist Russia”—just as Germany and Japan had “lost the war but won the peace.”  They forgot that the Western powers supported the reconstruction of the former fascist countries precisely to face the challenge of the independent policies of the Soviet Union.  Now, this challenge having disappeared, the target of the Triad is complete submission, to destroy the capacity of Russia to resist.

3. The current development of the Ukraine tragedy illustrates the reality of the strategic target of the Triad.

The Triad organized in Kiev what ought to be called a “Euro/Nazi putsch.”  To achieve their target (separating the historical twin sister nations—the Russian and the Ukrainian), they needed the support of local Nazis.

The rhetoric of the Western medias, claiming that the policies of the Triad aim at promoting democracy, is simply a lie.  Nowhere has the Triad promoted democracy.  On the contrary these policies have systematically been supporting the most anti-democratic (in some cases “fascist”) local forces.  Quasi-fascist in the former Yugoslavia—in Croatia and Kosovo—as well as in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe, Hungary for instance.  Eastern Europe has been “integrated” in the European Union not as equal partners, but as “semi-colonies” of major Western and Central European capitalist/imperialist powers.  The relation between West and East in the European system is in some degree similar to that which rules the relations between the U.S. and Latin America!  In the countries of the South the Triad supported the extreme anti-democratic forces such as, for instance, ultra-reactionary political Islam and, with their complicity, has destroyed societies; the cases of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya illustrate these targets of the Triad imperialist project.

4. Therefore the policy of Russia (as developed by the administration of Putin) to resist the project of colonization of Ukraine (and of other countries of the former Soviet Union, in Transcaucasia and Central Asia) must be supported.  The Baltic states’ experience should not be repeated.  The target of constructing a “Eurasian” community, independent from the Triad and its subordinate European partners, is also to be supported.

But this positive Russian “international policy” is bound to fail if it is not supported by the Russian people.  And this support cannot be won on the exclusive basis of “nationalism,” even a positive progressive—not chauvinistic—brand of “nationalism,” a fortiori not by a “chauvinistic” Russian rhetoric.  Fascism in Ukraine cannot be challenged by Russian fascism.  The support can be won only if the internal economic and social policy pursued promotes the interests of the majority of the working people.

What do I mean by a “people-oriented” policy favoring the working classes?

Do I mean “socialism,” or even a nostalgia of the Soviet system?  This is not the place to re-assess the Soviet experience, in a few lines!  I shall only summarize my views in a few sentences.  The authentic Russian socialist revolution produced a state socialism which was the only possible first step toward socialism; after Stalin that state socialism moved towards becoming state capitalism (explaining the difference between the two concepts is important but not the subject of this short paper).  As of 1991 state capitalism was dismantled and replaced by “normal” capitalism based on private property, which, as in all countries of contemporary capitalism, is basically the property of financial monopolies, owned by the oligarchy (similar to, not different from, the oligarchies running capitalism in the Triad), many coming out of the former nomenklatura, and some newcomers.

The explosion of creative authentic democratic practices initiated by the Russian (October) revolution was subsequently tamed and replaced by an autocratic pattern of management of society, albeit granting social rights to the working classes.  This system led to massive depoliticization and was not protected from despotic and even criminal deviations.  The new pattern of savage capitalism is based on the continuation of depoliticization and the non-respect of democratic rights.

Such a system rules not only Russia, but all the other former Soviet republics.  Differences relate to the practice of the so-called “Western” electoral democracy, more effective in Ukraine, for instance, than in Russia.  Nonetheless this pattern of rule is not “democracy” but a farce compared to bourgeois democracy as it functioned at previous stages of capitalist development, including in the “traditional democracies” of the West, since real power is now restricted to the rule of monopolies and operates to their exclusive benefit.

A people-oriented policy implies therefore moving away, as much as possible, from the “liberal” recipe and the electoral masquerade associated with it, which claims to give legitimacy to regressive social policies.  I would suggest setting up in its place a brand of new state capitalism with a social dimension (I say social, not socialist).  That system would open the road to eventual advances toward a socialization of the management of the economy and therefore authentic new advances toward an invention of democracy responding to the challenges of a modern economy.

It is only if Russia moves along such lines that the current conflict between, on the one hand, the intended independent international policy of Moscow and, on the other hand, the pursuit of a reactionary social internal policy can be given a positive outcome.  Such a move is needed and possible: fragments of the political ruling class could align on such a program if popular mobilization and action promote it.  To the extent that similar advances are also carried out in Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia, an authentic community of Eurasian nations can be established and become a powerful actor in the reconstruction of the world system.

5. Russian state power remaining within the strict limits of the neo-liberal recipe annihilates the chances of success of an independent foreign policy and the chances of Russia becoming a really emerging country acting as an important international actor.

Neo-liberalism can produce for Russia only a tragic economic and social regression, a pattern of “lumpen development” and a growing subordinate status in the global imperialist order.  Russia would provide to the Triad oil, gas, and some other natural resources; its industries would be reduced to the status of sub-contracting for the benefit of Western financial monopolies.

In such a position, which is not very far from that of Russia today in the global system, attempts to act independently in the international area will remain extremely fragile, threatened by “sanctions” which will strengthen the disastrous alignment of the ruling economic oligarchy to the demands of dominant monopolies of the Triad.  The current outflow of “Russian capital” associated with the Ukraine crisis illustrates the danger.  Re-establishing state control over the movements of capital is the only effective response to that danger.

Further Readings

• Amin, Samir. The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism. London and NY: Pluto and Monthly Review Press, 2013.

• Amin, Samir. “What ‘Radical’ Means in the 21st Century.” Review of Radical Political Economics 45.3 (September 2013).

• Amin, Samir. “The Democratic Fraud and the Universalist Alternative.” Monthly Review 63.5 (October 2011).

• Amin, Samir. “Unity and Diversity in the Movement to Socialism.” Monthly Review (forthcoming in the June 2014 issue).

• Amin, Samir. “Russia in the Global System.” Translated from Arabic into Russian by Said Gafourov.

Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh Remind Us of the Roots of White Supremacy in the Aftermath of the Buffalo Shooting

By Danny Haiphong

Republished from Substack.

On May 15th, a white supremacist named Payton Gendron opened fire on a Tops supermarket in Buffalo’s Black district of Kingsley, killing ten people. The massacre was immediately labeled a hate crime and liberal mainstream corporate media went to work finding easy explanations that would absolve them and their elite handlers of any wrongdoing. Democrats placed blame on the GOP for normalizing racism. GOP-aligned Fox News host Tucker Carlson was given special attention for mainstreaming the “Great Replacement Theory” that filled the pages of Gendron’s manifesto.

Indeed, white supremacy has been the GOP’s organizing principle for more than a half century. The “Great Replacement Theory” is the 21st century version of a historic trend. The Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy” successfully mobilized white Americans fearful of the Black movement for social justice into a formidable political bloc. Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy transformed the racist rhetoric within the Republican political establishment into a coded war on “welfare queens” and “crime.” The “Great Replacement Theory” is another iteration of white supremacist ideology which posits that Black Americans, immigrants, Muslims, and non-whites generally are invading the Anglo world in a bid to eradicate whites.

There is no doubt that the influence of far right and white supremacist ideology has played a role in the more than one hundred mass shootings that have occurred in the United States over the past several decades. A society organized to dehumanize and wage war on the masses is ultimately a society at war with itself. However, it is too simplistic to view white supremacy as a purely ideological phenomenon. White supremacy is not merely a set of ideas that, once spread, sets the stage for racist violence. This idealist conception of history strips white supremacy of its roots in the system of U.S. imperialism and simplifies its existence to a matter of moralistic virtue.

Such idealism presents only one solution to white supremacy; the marginalization or eradication of a few bad apples in Tucker Carlson and the GOP.  On May 19th, the world will celebrate the birthdays of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, two deceased revolutionaries who commented extensively on the roots of white supremacy. Ho Chi Minh was the first president of an independent and socialist Vietnam and arguably the most important force in that country’s struggle for liberation from colonialism. Malcolm X was one of the most important leaders of the Black liberation movement that the United States has ever known, and his influence on the political development of the global struggle for peace and self-determination remains immense.

Though Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh spent much of their lives on different hemispheres, both charted a course for liberation that was influenced by the rising prestige of Black nationalist, anti-colonial, and socialist politics. Both were internationalists who traveled the world learning and seeking solidarity from movements abroad. Ho Chi Minh traveled to New York City and worked as a dish washer while attending United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) meetings held by Marcus Garvey. Shortly before his assassination in 1965, Malcolm X made his third trip to the African continent and paid visits to Ghana, Egypt, Kenya, Algeria, and Tanzania. He would go on to form the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) upon his return, stating in his first public address for the new organization that the success of African nations in uniting against colonialism directly inspired his determination to organize and unite Black people in a global struggle for freedom, peace, and dignity.

Ho Chi Minh wrote several articles on racism and the Black condition in the United States. In his 1924 article on lynching, the Vietnamese revolutionary declared:

It is well known that the black race is the most oppressed and most exploited of the human family. It is well known that the spread of capitalism and the discovery of the New World had the immediate result the rebirth of slavery which was, for centuries, a scourge for the Negroes and a bitter disgrace of mankind. What everyone perhaps does not know, is that after sixty-five years of so-called emancipation, American Negroes still endure atrocious moral and material sufferings, of which the most cruel and horrible is the custom of lynching.

Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X believed that racist violence could not be understood outside of the global struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor. Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution inspired Ho Chi Minh to embrace socialism in the liberation of Vietnam from colonialism and imperialism. It was African revolutions which motivated Malcolm X to adopt an internationalist vision for Black liberation in the United States. For each, racism was not about bad apples. The entire system of imperialism was rotten and both sought to uproot it through the positive means of winning the power of the oppressed to control and manage their own societies.

This doesn’t mean that Ho Chi Minh or Malcolm X ignored ideology. Ho Chi Minh struggled intensely with the socialist parties of the Second International, opposing their chauvinistic support of “fatherland” Western governments in the First World War to the detriment of colonized people. Malcolm X outlined the key tenets of what is now called the “Great Replacement Theory” nearly sixty years ago in 1964 when he said,

During recent years there has been much talk about a population explosion. Whenever they are speaking of the population explosion, in my opinion, they are referring to the people primarily in Asia or in Africa— the black, brown, red, and yellow people. It is seen by people of the West that, as soon as the standard of living is raised in Africa and Asia, automatically the people begin to reproduce abundantly. And there has been a great deal of fear engendered by this in the minds of the people of the West, who happen to be, on this earth, a very small minority.

In fact, in most of the thinking and planning of whites in the West today, it’s easy to see that fear in their minds, conscious minds and subconscious minds, that the masses of dark people in the East, who already outnumber them, will continue to increase and multiply and grow until they eventually overrun the people of the West like a human sea, a human tide, a human flood. And the fear of this can be seen in the minds, and in the actions, of most of the people here in the West in practically everything that they do. It governs their political views, it governs their economic views and it governs most of their attitudes toward the present society.

But even here Malcolm X related white fears of replacement not to some unexplainable hatred but to the material reality that white Americans and Westerners were quickly losing their ability to control the destinies of oppressed peoples of the world. Malcolm X’s words have only become more relevant in the current period. The rise of socialist China has precipitated a Cold War response from imperialism that has poured gasoline on the fire of anti-Asian racism and violence. The Black struggle for self-determination has faced a severe backlash from the U.S. mass incarceration state, opening the floodgates of racist reaction. And the fact that Payton Gendron was wearing a white supremacist Black Sun symbol so commonly seen on the uniforms Nazi Azov fighters in Ukraine is no coincidence. White supremacy is a global system of social control that is directed at any person, government, or movement (Russian, Chinese, Black American, Muslim, Arab, etc.) that is perceived to threaten the domination of Euro-American imperialism.

The entire system of U.S. imperialism is thus implicated in racist violence. This includes the Democratic Party, which has for decades been wedded to a neoliberal model of governance reliant upon austerity, state repression, and war. The Republican Party is but the loudest and most ideologically influential political branch of the U.S.’s racist and imperialist system. The more that the U.S. finds itself bogged down in its own contradictions, the stronger the tide of racist reaction becomes. A true fight against white supremacy involves popular organization against the forces that gave it birth: the U.S. military state waging wars fueled by dehumanization, the two-party duopoly enacting policies that deprive oppressed people of their needs, and the economic system of capitalism robbing the earth of public wealth and ecological sustainability to enrich its corporate masters.

Danny Haiphong’s work can be followed on Twitter @SpiritofHo and on YouTube as co-host with Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report Present's: The Left Lens. You can support Danny on Patreon by clicking this link.   He is co-author of the book “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News- From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.” You can contact him at haiphongpress@protonmail.com.