Reopening Schools: We Do Not Have To Descend Into COVID Hell

By Steve Miller, Rosemary Lee and E.B. Shaw

With Corona virus cases spiking across the country, America is on the verge of forcing millions of people into extreme danger. Suddenly, everyone from CEOs, the President, state governors, and the corporate media are calling for schools to open “to save the economy”.

No country has tried to open schools with the virus spreading like here in the US. We are currently in a massive wave of surging cases in 40 states. There are not enough tests or testing. How do you open schools if you can’t test and trace? There’s no way that you can keep a school safe from coronavirus if the virus is raging out of control in the community where the school is located.

Before schools physically re-open, certain principles of public health must be established:

• No re-opening without full scientific best practices. So far, this is seriously lacking.

• No re-opening without dealing with the vast practical hurdles. These steps require more funding, not less. So far, the funding to address these problems does not exist.

• No re-opening without total and complete public transparency. So far, decisions are made behind closed doors. Planning is slapdash and haphazard at best. Teachers, unions and communities must be fully involved as co-equals with politicians in establishing policies.

• Schools should continue to be food centers for the communities, but they should reinstate and expand what government has cut — access to nurses, vision services, mental health and cultural support. Communities need these services now more than ever.

• We cannot fail to hold government accountable for securing public health and public safety. Governments must do what it takes to guarantee childcare in safe ways.. We have no choice here. Public schools are still controlled locally. We must exert our power to protect our children.

We’ve already seen what happens when we use shortcuts and go against public health guidance in reopening. Other countries have been successful in suppressing the level of COVID-19, they have one thing in common — a national coordinated strategy.

The US response to the virus has been fractured, reckless, and incompetent. Rather than the federal government organizing a national coordinated response, it has put corporations in total control.

The government refuses to provide adequate unemployment or health care, thus making families desperate to work.  Many European countries cover 60% to 90% of workers’ wages when they can not work. So do we really have to risk our children and our families so corporations benefit? It really does not have to be this way.

Corporations are demanding their workers return to work so they can make a profit from their investments, but they refuse to provide childcare. So children, teachers and school staff, families and communities, must risk their lives to open schools that could not even guarantee toilet paper before the virus. The only people to benefit from a premature physical opening will be billionaires and politicians of both parties. This is why they tout political reasons to re-open, while ignoring scientific precaution.

These same people, who previously had no trouble closing schools throughout neighborhoods and subjecting children to hours of high-stakes testing at computer screens, now state that keeping children out of school denies them the “emotional, social, and knowledge growth they desperately need.” Suddenly, also, the teachers who were degraded as the worst problem with public schools are now heroic essential fron-tline workers!

Schools are set to open district-by-district across the country while many nail shops, gyms, and bars remain closed. Many schools only use easily contaminated recycled air throughout whole buildings instead of widows that can be opened to bring in fresh air. Taking steps as minimal as social distancing will cost vast amounts. Little things become big problems. Before, a Kindergarten teacher could take the whole class to the bathroom at once. Now a class of 15, that requires 6 feet of spacing, forms a line 90 feet long! And how exactly are bathrooms going to be sanitized?

There are no clear guidelines; planning is confused and hidden from the public; PPE’s are in short supply; school budgets are being slashed even as the costs of adequately dealing with the virus skyrocket. School nurses were virtually eliminated before the virus hit. Now, what exactly is going to happen if a child feels sick?

The gap between school finances, destroyed by the virus, and the greatly increased costs, also caused by the virus, runs into billions. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has estimated the funding required to reopen public schools safely is at least $116.5 billion.

Trey Hollingsworth, Indiana Congressman, stated that people dying from the virus is the lesser of two evils to the economy not opening up. CNN reported that Hollingsworth said: “it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.” Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, announced that old people should welcome re-opening, even if that means they would die.

This corporate class also touts the murderous notion of “herd immunity”, meaning that after 3 million people or so die, the virus cannot spread any more. We have watched health care workers sicken, live in their cars so not to infect their families, and wear plastic bags instead of PPEs. What will happen to school staff?

When policies and political choices set up people to die at “acceptable levels”, it is fair to conclude that this is not an accident. Even before the virus, digital technology has been turning jobs into temp work or no work at all. Corporations are simply not going to spend money to support people they cannot use. In this context, physical re-opening is designed to accept a specific amount of death, to establish toleration of death as a new normal.

Can schools physically re-open now? If so, how?

Hawaii has announced that schools will re-open when no one in the state has tested positive for one month. The Florida Education Commissioner, Richard Corcoran, is the former Speaker of the Florida House and a charter school owner. He demands that Florida open its schools 5 days a week even as Florida COVID cases reach record high levels. Precaution is scrapped for pragmatism.

America’s schools do not meet even the most lenient advice for physical re-opening, which are found on the White House website. Teachers advocate no physical re-opening until no new cases arise in the past 14 days, the time for symptoms to appear. Some districts are beginning to scrap immediate physical re-opening.

Once again, as with the George Floyd rebellion, our character as a people will be tested. Will we stand together, or will our passivity make us complicit in sanctioning unnecessary public death?

Yes, the mental, physical and emotional health of children is critical. No, this cannot be achieved by physical re-opening schools like before. That is impossible. We can find ways to bring young people back together again, but it means letting go of the idea that schools can return to normal. This step requires the imagination and agency of the communities schools serve.

The virus proves that no one is safe unless everyone is safe. The same is true for our schools. For a country founded on genocide, slavery and inequality, the challenge once again is to stand up for the right of quality public education for all.

Everyone now can see the critical and vital importance of public schools to our communities. Even before the virus, schools have been the anchor of the community. Closing public schools is a method of gentrification and community dispossession. Now we see once again that healthy schools create healthy communities and healthy communities create healthy schools.

Teacher unions and parents are advocating that public schools, in these times of COVID, should anchor the communities by expanding the public services they offer.

Immediate and Future Challenges

Whether schools physically open or not, the nature of public education has dramatically changed. Through the Spring, public schools offered online distance learning. As students graduated in June, Zoom Video Communications, Inc announced that it was being used by 100,000 schools globally.

Education has gone from being supported by technology to being dependent on technology and from being corporate-supported to becoming corporate-dependent.

Corporations like Pearson and Google tout online education as a way of saving money in tough times, but this just leads to private profits for corporations.

The latest vampire is Turnitin.com. Students turn in their essays. The website checks for plagiarism; then it sends it back to you, marked in red where you copied something out of the encyclopedia. But they also offer school districts more advanced options like: grading every paper… or maybe even student surveillance.

Under corporate control, online learning, distance learning and virtual charter schools are a dismal failure. The California Attorney General is investigating the entire virtual charter industry for putting private profit ahead of quality education. The largest virtual charter corporation, K12 Inc, “educates” 120,000 students, making $900 million in revenue, all from taxpayer money earmarked for public education. Only half of online high school students graduate within four years, compared to 84% nationally. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that students in virtual charters do so poorly in math and English that it’s as if they didn’t attend school at all.

Most teachers estimate that only about 25% of their students do well in online education. The education model is the same drill & kill, test & fail regime that students could not succeed in even before the virus. Most students have trouble learning through screens since the other vital ways that humans learn are eliminated or reduced. And, of course, how does a family provide enough laptops for every child, much less the expense of connecting through Wi-fi?

Government at every level has invited billionaires, tech corporations, and CEOs to determine what public education will look like as the virus rolls on. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo invited Bill Gates and Google into the state to “re-imagine public education.” In other words, government is systematically replacing elected officials, who are (theoretically) accountable to the people, with private, unaccountable capitalists in a campaign to defund and privatize public schools and debase the purpose of education.

The ethical and moral implications of this corporate effort to terminate the education our children and communities need are highly disturbing. There is little public discussion about this even as government proclaims online learning as the miracle of the age.

US schools at every level are facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions. By the time the 2020-2021 school year is over, corporations and governments – if unopposed – will establish a degraded model that works only for the elite and very few others.

When government can bailout billionaires with trillions of dollars, we see that the money exists to build a system of public education that can build the leaders we need to transform the world.

Teaching today must unleash the marvelous powers and creativity of our collective humanity. Students are the people the world needs today to overcome the challenges of a desperately sick population, a sick society and a sick planet.

Unlike most of the world, where the needs of society were put first, in the US every problem is presented as an individual problem and every solution is presented as an individual solution.

It is the same with public education. Ronald Reagan proclaimed that there was no such thing as “society”, meaning no problems result from society, so you’re on your own. This has been America’s mantra ever since, unless of course it relates to corporate governance.

But now we see, scientifically, that the only solutions that can work must be organized at the national level by government to benefit everyone. Social problems are not individual; the emanate from how society is organized. Social problems require social solutions.

Just as COVID-19 demands a national coordinated strategy, the problems of safely re-opening public schools demand national solutions. Not piecemeal, local, short-term quick fixes. Instead, upgrade our schools by combining a public health approach with a public schools approach.

Steve Miller, Rosemary Lee, and E.B. Shaw are members of the National Public Education Committee of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America

Racism and the Logic of Capitalism: A Fanonion Reconsideration

By Peter Hudis

Originally published at Historical Materialism.

The emergence of a new generation of anti-racist activists and thinkers battling police abuse, the prison-industrial complex and entrenched racism in the US, alongside the crisis over immigration and growth of right-wing populism in Europe and elsewhere, makes this a crucial moment to develop theoretical perspectives that conceptualise race and racism as integral to capitalism while going beyond identity politics that treat such issues primarily in cultural and discursive terms. The last several decades have produced a slew of important studies by Marxists of the logic of capital as well as numerous explorations by postcolonial theorists of the narratives that structure racial and ethnic discrimination. Far too often, however, these two currents have assumed different or even opposed trajectories, making it all the harder to transcend one-sided class-reductionist analyses and equally one-sided affirmations of identity that bypass or ignore class. In light of the new reality produced by the deepening crisis of neoliberalism and the looming disintegration of the political order that has defined global capitalism since the end of the Cold War, the time has come to revisit theoretical approaches that can help delineate the integrality of race, class and capitalism.

Few thinkers are more important in this regard than Frantz Fanon, widely considered one of the most creative thinkers on race, racism and national consciousness of the twentieth century. Fanon’s effort to ‘slightly stretch’ (as he put it) ‘the Marxian analysis … when it comes to addressing the colonial issue’[1] represented an important attempt to work out the dialectic of race and class through a coherent theoretical framework that does not dissolve one into the other. This may help explain the resurgence of interest in his work that is now underway. At least five new books on Fanon have appeared in English over the past two years[2] – in addition to a new 600-page collection in French of his previously-unpublished or unavailable writings on psychiatry, politics and literature.[3] Although Fanon has remained a commanding presence for decades, the extent of this veritable renaissance of interest in his thought is striking. It is no less reflected in the many times his words have appeared on posters, flyers and social media over the past year by those protesting police abuse, the criminal-injustice system, and racism on and off college campuses.[4]

These ongoing rediscoveries of Fanon’s work mark a radical departure from the tenor of debates among postcolonial theorists over the past several decades – when the prevailing issue seemed to be whether or not he was a ‘premature poststructuralist’.[5] If one were to limit oneself to such academic discussions, one might come away thinking that the validity of Fanon’s body of work rests on the extent to which he succeeded in deconstructing the unity of the colonial subject in the name of alterity and difference.[6] Yet these approaches – some of which went so far as to sanction even the discussion of capitalism or its unitary logic as representing a capitulation to epistemic imperialism – could not be further from what drives the renewal of interest in Fanon’s legacy today.[7]

What makes Fanon’s work especially cogent is that contemporary capitalism is manifesting some of the most egregious expressions of racial animosity that we have seen in decades. One need only note the attacks on immigrants of colour in the US and Europe, the revival of right-wing populism, and most of all, the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the US presidency. This raises the question of why there is such a resurgence of racial animus at this point in time. At least part of the answer is the work of groups like Black Lives Matter, Black Youth Project 100 and many others, which, in engaging politics from a ‘black-feminist-queer lens’, has put the spotlight on issues of race in as creative a manner as the Occupy movement did for economic inequality.[8] In reaction, a section of bourgeois society has decided to drop the mask of civility and openly reassert the prerogatives of white male domination. ‘Whitelash’ is in the driver’s seat – and not only in the US. This should come as no surprise, since the forces of the old always rear their heads when a new challenge to their dominance begins to emerge.

Not unconnected to this is the growth of reactionary challenges to neoliberalism. This calls for a serious reorganisation of thought, since many have focused so much attention on critiquing neoliberalism that they have had rather little to say about the logic of capital as a whole. It is often overlooked that neoliberalism is but one strategy employed by capitalism at a particular point in time – as was Keynesianism at an earlier point. And just as Keynesianism was jettisoned when it no longer served its purpose, the same may be true of neoliberalism today. What brought down the Keynesian project was the crisis in profitability faced by global capital in the 1970s. Capitalists responded by embracing the neoliberal stratagem as a means to restore profitability. This made perfect sense from their point of view, since it is profitability – not effective demand – that in the final analysis determines the course of the development of capitalist society.[9] Profit-rates did go up from the early 1980s to 2000 as the forces of global competition, free trade, and privatisation were unleashed, but most of these gains were in real estate and finance – whereas manufacturing profitability remained at historically low levels. And since much of the profit from real estate and financialisation has not been invested in the real economy, there has been a decline in recent decades in the rate of growth in the productivity of labour.[10] This at least partly explains the anaemic rate of growth in today’s world economy, which is causing so much distress – not only among those most negatively impacted by it, but also to sections of the ruling class that increasingly recognise that the neoliberal ‘miracle’ has proven to be something of a mirage.

In many respects, this established the ground for Trump. His electoral victory (pyrrhic as it may well turn out to be) is a sign that a significant section of the Right has found a way to speak to disaffected segments of the working class by draping criticism of neoliberalism in racist and misogynist terms – while ensuring that capitalism goes unquestioned. Hence, opposition to such tendencies must begin and end with a firm and uncompromising rejection of any programme, tendency or initiative that in any way, shape or form is part of, or dovetails – no matter how indirectly – with racist and/or anti-immigrant sentiment. Any other approach will make it harder to distinguish a genuine critique of class inequality, free trade, and globalisation from reactionary ones.

For this reason, holding to the critique of neoliberalism as the crux of anti-capitalist opposition no longer makes much sense. Needed instead is an explicit attack on the inner core of capitalism – its logic of accumulation and alienation that is inextricably tied to augmenting value as an end in itself. And racism has long been integral to capital’s drive for self-expansion.

Capitalism first emerged as a world system through the anti-black racism generated by the transatlantic slave trade, and it has depended on racism to ensure its perpetration and reproduction ever since.[11] Marx argued,

Slavery is an economic category like any other … Needless to say we are dealing only with direct slavery, with Negro slavery in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America. Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.[12]

Marx was clearly cognisant of the peculiar role played by race in American slavery – and he was no less aware of how integral race-based slavery was to capitalism’s origins and development as a world system. But does this mean that racism is integral to the logic of capital? Might racism be a mere exogenous factor that is only built into specific moments of capitalism’s contingent history? To be sure, it is possible to conceive of the possibility that capitalism could have emerged and developed as a world system without its utilising race and racism. But historical materialism does not concern itself with what could have occurred, but with what did occur and continues to occur. According to Marx, without race-based slavery ‘you have no modern industry’ and no ‘world trade’ – and no modern capitalism. Hence, the logic of capital is in many respects inseparable from its historical development. I am referring not only to the factors that led to the formation of the world market but to the role played by race and racism in impeding proletarian class consciousness, which has functioned as an essential component in enabling capital accumulation to be actualised. Marx was keenly aware of this, as seen in his writings on the US Civil War and the impact of anti-Irish prejudice upon the English workers’ movement.[13] He took the trouble to address these issues in Capital itself, which famously declared ‘labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.’[14]

Racism is not and never has been an epiphenomenal characteristic of capitalism. It is integral to its very development. The time is therefore long past for holding onto such notions as ‘there is no race question outside the class question’[15] or ‘the race issue, while important, is secondary to class’. Since capitalism was shaped, from its inception, by racial factors, it is not possible to effectively oppose it without making the struggle against racism a priority. And for this very reason, the present situation also makes it increasingly anachronistic to hold onto forms of identity politics that elide issues of class and a critique of capital. The effort to elevate ethnic identity and solidarity at the expense of a direct confrontation with capitalism is inherently self-defeating, since the latter is responsible for the perpetration of racism and the marginalisation of peoples of colour in the first place. Since race and racism help create, reproduce and reinforce an array of hierarchies that are rooted in class domination, subjective affirmations of identity that are divorced from directly challenging capital will inevitably lose their critical edge and impact over the course of time.

Class struggle and anti-racist struggle have a common aim – at least from a Fanonian perspective. It is to overcome the alienation and dehumanisation that define modern society by creating new human relations – termed by Fanon a ‘new humanism’.[16] But the path to that lofty goal is not one of rushing to the absolute like a shot out of the pistol. It can be reached only through ‘the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative’.[17] Re-engaging Fanon on this level can speak to us in new ways.

II.

Fanon repeatedly emphasises that anti-Black racism is not natural but is rooted in the economic imperatives of capitalism – beginning with the transatlantic slave trade and extending to the neo-colonialism of today. As he writes in Black Skin, White Masks, ‘First, economic. Then, internalization or rather epidermalization of his inferiority.’[18] At the same time, he held that racism cannot be combatted on economic or class-terms alone, since racialised ways of ‘seeing’ and being take on a life of their own and drastically impact the psychic, inner-life of the individual. Both the black and the white subject are impacted and shaped by class domination, but they experience it in radically different ways. Any effort to ignore or downplay these crucial differences for the sake of a fictive ‘unity’ that abstracts from them is bound to fall on deaf ears when it comes to a significant portion of the dispossessed. On these grounds, Fanon insisted that both sides – the economic and the cultural/psychic – have to be fought in tandem. As he put it, ‘The black man must wage the struggle on two levels: whereas historically these levels are mutually dependent, any unilateral liberation is flawed, and the worst mistake would be to believe their mutual dependence automatic … An answer must be found on the objective as well as the subjective level.’[19]

For Fanon, what makes racism especially deadly is that it denies recognition of the dignity and humanity of the colonised subject. As a result, the latter experiences a ‘zone of nonbeing’ – a negation of their very humanity. He calls this ‘an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential form from which a genuine new departure can emerge.’[20] It is a zone of depravity that renders implausible any ‘ontology of Blackness’. The black is not seen as human precisely by being ‘seen’ – not once, but repeatedly – as black. The colonial mind does not ‘see’ what it thinks it sees; it fixes its gaze not on the actual person but on a reified image that obscures them. For the coloniser, the black is indeed nothing. However, this zone of non-being in no way succeeds in erasing the humanity of the oppressed. The denial of the subject’s subjectivity can never be completely consummated. This is because, as Fanon never ceases to remind us, ‘Man is a “yes” resonating from cosmic harmonies.’[21]

On this issue, there are striking parallels between Fanon’s works and Marx’s – even if it is rarely acknowledged. In the first essay in which he proclaimed the proletariat as the revolutionary class, Marx defined it as ‘the class in Civil Society that is not of Civil Society’.[22] The proletariat lives in civil society, but unlike the bourgeoisie its substantiality is not confirmed in it. Since workers are robbed of any organic connection to the means of production in their being reduced to a mere seller of labour-power, they find themselves alienated from the substance of civil society. This is because what matters to capital is not the subjectivity of the living labourers but rather their ability to augment wealth in abstract, monetary terms. There is only one ‘self-sufficient end’ in capitalism – and that is the augmentation of (abstract) value at the expense of the labourer. Insofar as the worker’s subjectivity becomes completely subsumed by the dictates of value production, the worker inhabits a zone of negativity. He is dehumanised is insofar as his ‘activity [is] not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.’[23] Self-estrangement is therefore integral to the domination of capital. This makes for a living hell, but it is also what makes the proletariat potentially revolutionary, since it has nothing to lose but its chains. But what does it have to gain? The answer is communism, defined by Marx as ‘the positive transcendence of human self-estrangement … the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development.’ Since capitalism dehumanises the labourer, the alternative to capitalism is nothing less than a new humanism: ‘This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism.’[24]

This is a far cry from any classless, abstract humanism, since for Marx only the proletariat ‘has the consistency, the severity, the courage or the ruthlessness that could mark it out as the negative representative of society.’ It alone possesses ‘the genius that inspires material might to political violence, or that revolutionary audacity which flings at the adversary the defiant words: “I am nothing and I should be everything.”’[25]

But how could everything arise from nothing? It is only possible if it is not labour that takes the form of a commodity but rather the capacity for labour – labour-power. As Luca Basso puts it, ‘the capitalist buys something that only exists as a possibility, which is, however, inseparable from the living personality of the Arbeiter.’[26] If labour were the commodity, the worker’s subjectivity would be completely absorbed by the value-form and any internal resistance to it would be implausible. Marx’s entire critique of value production – rooted in the contradiction between concrete and abstract labour – proceeds from recognition of the irreducible tension between the subject and the continuous effort to subsume its subjectivity by abstract forms of domination. Here is where the so-called ‘esoteric’ and ‘exoteric’ converge in Marx’s work.

There is more than an echo of this in Fanon’s declaration in Black Skin, White Masks that, ‘Genuine disalienation will have been achieved only when things, in the most materialist sense, have resumed their rightful place.’[27] But Fanon also points to a key difference between racial and class oppression, in that the former cuts deeper than the traditional class struggle insofar as people of colour are denied even a modicum of recognition when structures of domination are over-determined by racial considerations.

Fanon’s insights on this issue are most profoundly posed in his discussion of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic in Black Skin, White Masks. Hegel maintains that the master wants to be recognised by the slave, for without it he is unable to obtain a sense of self-certainty and selfhood. Hegel acknowledges, of course, that what the master mainly wants from the slave is work. Yet the master still aspires to be recognised by his subordinates, since he, like all human beings, wants to obtain a substantive sense of self – and that is something that can only be provided by the gaze of the other. So what happens when the master/slave dialectic is structured along racial lines – something that Hegel does not consider? Fanon argues that the situation becomes radically altered. The master is no longer interested in being recognised by the slave, just as the slave is no longer interested in recognising him. This is because when the master is white he does not see the black as even potentially human.[28] Like all masters, he wants work from his slave; but when race enters the picture, that is all he wants – he denies the slave even the most primordial degree of recognition.

To be sure, matters are hardly pristine when race does not inform the class relation. The capitalist ‘cares’ about the worker only to the extent that she provides work – and if the latter can be attained without her, the capitalist will gladly lay her off and employ a machine. However, the capitalist knows that a worker, like any human being, cannot be worked to the point of extinction – otherwise there is no source of profit. And as much as the worker detests the capitalist, she knows that she may well be out of a job if the capitalist is unable to earn any profit. The two antagonists recognise each other’s existence, even as they battle against each another. But when class relations are structured along racial lines even the most basic level of recognition is blocked, since when the other is seen as black it is not ‘seen’ at all.

Since consciousness of self and identity-formation depend on recognition by the other, its absence produces an existential crisis. In Hegel’s text, the slave obtains ‘a mind of his own’;[29] but when the slave is black the lack of recognition blocks the formation of an independent self-consciousness. The general class struggle does not lead immediately to consciousness of self when the slave is black. Instead, the slave aspires for ‘values secreted by the masters’.[30] Denied recognition, but hungering for it all the same, the slave tries to mimic the white. She has an inferiority complex. But her efforts are futile, since no recognition will be forthcoming so long as the class relation is configured along racial lines. This is a veritable hell, since her very consciousness is dependent on the will of the master. We have reached a level of reification of consciousness that would startle even Lukács. There seems to be no way out if the master totally dominates the very mind of the oppressed. So what is to be done? The black slave must turn away from the master and face her own kind. She makes use of the socially constructed attributes of race to forge bonds of solidarity with others like her. Only then does the master’s dominance begin to be seriously challenged. Through social solidarity born from taking pride in the very attributes that are denigrated by existing society, she gains ‘a mind of one’s own’.

However, as Hegel notes at the conclusion of the master/slave dialectic, the slave’s independent self-consciousness does not overcome the diremption between subjective and objective. The achievement of subjective self-certainty brings to view the enormity of an objective world that it has not yet mastered. Hegel says that unless the subject confronts objectivity and overcomes this diremption, ‘a mind of one’s own’ turns out to be ‘little more than a piece of cleverness’.[31] Fanon’s argument in Black Skin, White Masks follows a similar trajectory. Fanon views Negritude – at least initially – as the pathway by which the black subject affirms pride in themselves as part of reclaiming their dignity. However, Fanon is wary of aspects of Negritude in Black Skin, White Masks, since it tends to essentialise the racial characteristics forged by colonial domination. This is evident in Senghor’s statement that ‘emotion is Negro as reason is Greek’[32] – which, as Lewis Gordon has shown, is actually a phrase from Gobineau![33] Negritude runs the risk of becoming so enamoured of its independent consciousness that it turns away from confronting the social realities of the objective world. Identity-formation is a vital moment of the dialectic that cannot be subsumed or skipped over, but it also carries within itself the possibility of becoming fixated on its subjective self-certainty.

The struggle against racism is therefore not reducible to the class struggle; nor is it a mere ancillary or ally of it. The class relation is fundamentally reconfigured once it presents itself through the ‘mask’ of race. Like any good Hegelian, Fanon points to the positive in the negative of this two-fold alienation in which class and racial oppression overlap. Thrown into a ‘zone of non-being’, yet retaining their basic humanity, the colonised are compelled to ask what does it mean to be human in the very course of the struggle. To be sure, they do so by taking pride in the racial attributes created by a racist society. But since it is society, and not nature or ‘being’ that creates these attributes, the subject can cast them off once it obtains the recognition it is striving for. However, this result is by no means predetermined. There is always a risk that the subject will treat socially constructed attributes as ontological verities. Fixation is a serious risk. It is easy to get trapped in the particular, but there is no way to the universal without it.

The nuances of this position are addressed in a striking manner in Fanon’s critique of Sartre’s view of Negritude. Although Sartre praised Negritude in Black Orpheus, he referred to it as a ‘weak stage’ of the dialectic that must give way to the ‘concrete’ and ‘universal’ fight of the proletariat. Fanon is extremely dismayed by Sartre’s position, stating, ‘The generation of young Black poets has just been dealt a fatal blow.’[34] Fanon rejects the claim that racial pride is a mere way station on the road to confronting the ‘real’ issue – proletarian revolution. He credits Sartre for ‘recalling the negative side’ of the Black predicament, ‘but he forgot that this negativity draws its value from a virtually substantial absoluity’.[35] As against Sartre’s effort to relativise the moment of black consciousness, Fanon contends, ‘this born Hegelian, had forgotten that consciousness needs to get lost in the night of the absolute.’[36] Claims to liberation cannot find their voice if they are treated as arbitrary; they must present themselves in absolute terms (‘I am nothing and I should be everything!’). But since the black subject inhabits a ‘zone of non-being’, its absolute is imbued with negativity. Hence, consciousness of self in this context contains the potential to reach out beyond itself, toward universal human emancipation.

It is not just that negativity is the font from which the individual is impelled toward the positive. It is that upon being subjected to absolute denial and lack of recognition, the individual finds it necessary to draw upon the substantial reservoir of hidden meaning that it possess as a human subject. ‘That which has been shattered is rebuilt and constructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands.’[37]

Sartre’s problem was not in viewing Negritude as a particular, but in rushing too fast to get past it. By the time he writes The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon is long past it as well. But he does not leap there like a shot out of a pistol. He endures the labour of the negative – by dwelling on the specific ways in which the colonised subject can make its subjectivity known in a world that has become totally indifferent to it. Fanon never takes his eyes off the creation of the positive from out of the negative, of absolute positivity from out of absolute negation, of a new humanism from out of total dehumanisation. As Alice Cherki has noted, he was an incurable humanist.[38]

Given the aborted and unfinished revolutions of his time and since, Fanon’s insistence on neither getting stuck in the particular – that is, pride in one’s race and ethnicity (the mark of identity politics) – nor skipping over it in the name of affirming an abstract, colour-blind advocacy of ‘proletarian revolution’, takes on new significance. Hubert Harrison’s conception (voiced in the 1920s) that struggles of African-Americans against racism represent the ‘touchstone’ of American society[39] – later re-cast in Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-Humanist conception of Black masses as the vanguard of US freedom struggles[40] – reflects a similar understanding of the relation of race and class to that which we find within Fanon’s lifelong effort to grasp their dialectical interconnection.

In some respects, the debate between Fanon and Sartre is being replayed today, as seen in the impatience of some on the left who urge anti-racist activists to ‘get to the real issue’ – as if that were the state of the economy. This is not to deny that the economy is of central importance. But so is the psychic impact of racism and discrimination upon the inner-life of the individual. It is only by approaching those struggling for freedom from the particular nexus-point that defines their lived experience as potentially revolutionary subjects that we can work out the difficult question of how to surmount the matrix of contradictions that define modern capitalism. Just as there is no road to the universal that gets stuck in the particular, there is no reaching-it that rushes over the particular.

III.

The fullest expression of these insights is found in The Wretched of the Earth, whose focus is the actual dialectics of revolution – the struggle for national culture and independence against colonialism. One of its central themes is the ‘Manichean divide’ that defines the colonial experience. So great is this divide between coloniser and colonised that Fanon speaks of them as if they were two ‘species’. It would appear that the racial divide is decisive, replacing class dominance as the deciding factor. For some commentators, Fanon’s discussion of the Manichean divide indicates that he has rejected or supplanted the Marxian view of class.[41] However, the appearance is deceptive. First, Fanon is not endorsing this divide; he is describing it. Second, he does not pose this divide as stable or impermeable. As the revolutionary struggle progresses, he shows, it begins to fall apart. He writes,

The people then realize that national independence brings to light multiple realities that in some cases are divergent and conflicting … it leads the people to replace an overall undifferentiated nationalism with social and economic consciousness. The people who in the early days of the struggle had adopted the primitive Manicheanism of the colonizer – Black versus White, Arab versus Infidel – realize en route that some blacks can be whiter than the whites … The species is splitting up before their very eyes … Some members of the colonialist population prove to be closer, infinitely closer, to the nationalist struggle than certain native sons. The racial and racist dimension is transcended on both sides.[42]

We see here how the struggle for national liberation unites the people and breaks apart the racial dichotomies that define colonialism, thereby pointing the way to the death of race and racialism as socially defining features.

Clearly, Fanon does not set aside class relations in his critique of colonialism. James Yaki Sayles, a New Afrikan political prisoner who spent 33 years in a maximum-security prison and wrote what I consider to be one of the most profound studies of The Wretched of the Earth, put it this way: ‘The existence of Manichean thinking doesn’t make economic relationships secondary to “racial” ones – it does exactly what it’s supposed to do: It masks and mystifies the economic relationships … but doesn’t undermine their primacy.’[43] He adds, ‘When Fanon talks about the “species” breaking up before our eyes … he’s talking about the breakup of “races” themselves – the “races” which were constructed as part of the construction of world capitalism, and which must first be deconstructed along with the deconstruction of capitalism.’[44]

Does this mean that Fanon adopts Sartre’s position in Black Orpheus that class is primary and race a ‘minor term’ by the time of writing The Wretched of the Earth?[45] That may seem to be the case, since racial identity is not its guiding or central theme; it is instead the struggle for national liberation and the need to transcend its confines. Yet this is precisely what undermines any claim that he has changed the position outlined in Black Skin, White Masks. In it Fanon also connects racism to class relations by pointing to the economic factors that drive its social construction. And in that work he also poses the deconstruction of race as the essential precondition of a new humanism. As he so poignantly put it, ‘Because it is a systematic negation of the other person, and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: “In reality, who am I?”’[46]

Most important, Fanon held that while race is a product of class relations, which serves as their mask, it is not a secondary factor. While race reflects class formations, the reflection is not a one-way mirror image. The reflection is taken up in consciousness and performs a sort of doubling by mirroring its origin at the same time as reshaping it. Determinations of reflection are not passive but actively reconstructive. And since racial determinations are often not superstructural but integral to the logic of capital accumulation, efforts by people of colour to challenge them can serve as the catalyst for targeting and challenging class relations.

Whereas racial identity is the major focus in Black Skin, White Masks, national identity takes centre stage in The Wretched of the Earth. But the structure of Fanon’s argument remains very much the same. In both works, the path to the universal – a world of mutual recognitions – proceeds through the particular struggles of those battling racial, ethnic or national discrimination. This separates Fanon’s new humanism from an abstract humanism that skips over the lived experience of actual subjects of revolt.

As Fanon sees it, this humanism can emerge only if the colonial revolutions transcend the bourgeois phase of development. He writes, ‘The theoretical question, which has been posed for the last 50 years when addressing the history of the underdeveloped countries, i.e., whether the bourgeois phase can be effectively skipped, must be resolved through revolutionary action and not through reasoning.’[47] Fanon is directly referring to the debates in the Second International prior to World War I and the congresses of the Third International in the early 1920s as to whether revolutions in technologically underdeveloped societies must endure the vicissitudes of a prolonged stage of capitalism. Building on the work of previous Marxists,[48] he emphatically rejects the two-stage theory of revolution, arguing, ‘In the underdeveloped countries a bourgeois phase is out of the question. A police dictatorship or a caste of profiteers may very well be the case but a bourgeois society is doomed to failure.’[49] This advocacy of permanent revolution was a very radical position. It was not put forth by any of the political tendencies leading the African revolutions, Algeria included. Even Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou Touré refrained from such wholesome condemnations of the national bourgeoisie. Fanon was nevertheless insistent on this point in prophetically arguing that if they did not ‘skip’ the phase of bourgeois nationalism, the African revolutions would revert to intra-state conflict, tribalism and religious fundamentalism.

How, then, did he envision bypassing the capitalist stage? Central to this was his view of the peasantry. The peasants tend to be neglected by the national bourgeoisie, which is based in the cities. They constitute the majority of the populace, vastly outnumbering the working class and petty-bourgeoisie. Although they are not included in the agenda of the nationalist parties, they turn out to be the most revolutionary. Fanon insists, ‘But it is obvious that in the colonial countries only the peasantry is revolutionary.’[50] This is surely an exaggeration, which does not take into account the pivotal role of the Nigerian labour movement in the struggle for national independence, let alone the situation in countries like South Africa (where the labour movement later proved instrumental in forcing the elimination of apartheid). Although Fanon is painting with all-too-broad a brush, his view of the peasantry is not without merit. He argued that since most of the newly independent states in Africa had not undergone industrialisation on a large scale, the working class could not present itself as a cohesive and compact force. It has not been socialised by the concentration and centralisation of capital. The working class is dispersed, divided and relatively weak. The peasantry, on the other hand, is socialised and relatively strong precisely because it has been largely untouched by capitalist development. Their communal traditions and social formations remain intact. They think and act like a cohesive group. They live the Manichaean divide that separates them from the coloniser. Hence, the message of the revolution ‘always finds a response among them’.[51] They are therefore unlikely to put their guns away and enable the bourgeoisie to lord over them.

This issue of permanent revolution is also the context for understanding Fanon’s view of revolutionary violence. He did not subscribe (contra Arendt and others) to any ‘metaphysics of violence’. His advocacy of violence was historically specific. He argued that a people armed would not only be better equipped to evict the colonialists; most importantly, it is needed to help push the revolution beyond the boundaries set by the national bourgeoisie after the achievement of independence. It is no accident that one of the first demands of the leaders of the newly independent states was for the masses to give up their arms – the presence of which could impede their embrace of neocolonialism. Fanon also emphasised the need for a decentralised as against a centralised political and economic apparatus that could succeed in directly drawing the masses into running the affairs of society – including the most downtrodden among them, like the peasantry. He warned against adopting the model of statist Five-Year Plans and advocated support for cooperatives and other autonomous ventures. No less significantly, he argued strenuously against a single-party state on the grounds that, ‘The single party is the modern form of the bourgeois dictatorship – stripped of mask, makeup, and scruples, cynical in every respect.’[52] He conceived of parties in terms of ‘an organism through which the people exercise their authority and express their will’ and not as a hierarchical, stratified force standing above them. Most importantly, he emphasised the critical role of consciousness and revolutionary education in providing the most indispensable condition of socialist transformation – overcoming the depersonalisation of the colonised subject. He wrote,

It is commonly thought with criminal flippancy that to politicize the masses means from time to time haranguing them with a major political speech … But political education means opening up the mind, awakening the mind, and introducing it to the world. It is, as Césaire said, ‘To invent the souls of men.’[53]

Needless to say, Fanon’s strictures were not followed by the leaders of the national independence struggles, who found a comfortable place for themselves within the framework of the bourgeois phase of development – even when (indeed especially when!) they anointed their rule as some form of ‘socialism’. But were there  the material conditions present at that time which could have enabled the African revolutions to bypass the bourgeois phase? I am not referring solely to conditions of economic backwardness or underdevelopment, since these would not be decisive barriers if the newly independent nations were in the position to receive aid and support from the workers of the technologically developed world. Marx, after all, held at the end of his life that economically backward Russia could bypass a capitalist stage of development if a revolution centred on the peasantry linked up with proletarian revolutions in the West.[54] Yet in the context of the African revolutions of the 1950s and ’60s, such aid could not be expected – in large measure because forces like the French Communist and Socialist parties disgracefully supported French imperialism’s war against the Algerian Revolution (something that major left-intellectuals inside and outside the French CP at the time, such as Althusser and Foucault, never managed to find time to condemn).

This problem consumed Fanon’s attention in the final years of his life, and marks one of the most controversial aspects of his legacy. In the face of the failure of the established French leftist parties to support Algeria’s struggle for independence (with which he became openly identified by 1955), he issued a series of sharp critiques of the working class for failing to fulfil its historic mission. He writes,

The generalized and sometimes truly bloody enthusiasm that has marked the participation of French workers and peasants in the war against the Algerian people has shaken to its foundations the myth of an effective opposition between the people and the government … The war in Algeria is being waged conscientiously by all Frenchmen and the few criticisms expressed up to the present time by a few individuals mention only certain methods which ‘are precipitating the loss of Algeria.’[55]

In a colonial country, it used to be said, there is a community of interests between the colonized people and the working class of the colonialist country. The history of the wars of liberation waged by the colonized peoples is the history of the non-verification of this thesis.[56]

These statements are often taken as proof that Fanon dismissed the revolutionary potential of the working class tout court. However, only a year later Fanon stated in another piece for El Moudjahid, ‘the dialectical strengthening that occurs between the movement of liberation of the colonized peoples and the emancipatory struggle of the exploited working class of the imperialist countries is sometimes neglected, and indeed forgotten.’[57] Might he have had himself in mind? He now considerably revises his earlier position, as he speaks of ‘the internal relation … that unites the oppressed peoples to the exploited masses of the colonialist countries’.[58] And as The Wretched of the Earth (written a few years later) clearly shows, he did not close the door to the possibility that the working class might fulfil its historic mission even while criticising it for not yet having done so:

The colossal task, which consists of reintroducing man into the world, man in his totality, will be achieved with the crucial help of the European masses who would do well to confess that they have rallied behind the position of our common masters on colonial issues. In order to do this, the European masses must first of all decide to wake up, put on their thinking caps and stop playing the irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty.[59]

Nevertheless, the hoped-for aid from the workers of the industrially-developed West never arrived – notwithstanding the heroic efforts of numerous individuals in France and elsewhere who spoke out in favour of the independence of the African colonies. In lieu of any significant support from the industrially-developed West, how were the African Revolutions going to obtain the resources needed to sustain genuine independence, let alone move further towards the creation of a socialist society?

Fanon responded by turning his energies to Africa as a whole. This is reflected in his decision to become a roving ambassador for Algeria’s FLN, travelling to over a dozen countries pushing for an ‘African Legion’ to come to the aid of the Algerian struggle and revolutions elsewhere on the continent. It is also reflected in his effort to create a ‘southern front’ of the Algerian struggle by procuring a route for the shipment of arms and other materiel from Ghana, Guinea, Mali and Niger. Concerned that the French might strike a rotten compromise with the FLN to keep it within its neocolonial orbit, he was trying to radicalise both the Algerian and sub-Saharan struggles by cementing closer relations between them.

It may be true, as Adam Shatz has recently argued, that Fanon’s efforts were rather quixotic, since ‘the southern Sahara had never been an important combat zone for the FLN, and there was little trust between the Algerians and the desert tribes.’[60] However, this should not cause us to lose sight of his broader effort to convey the militancy of the Algerian struggle ‘to the four corners of Africa’ as part of rejecting any compromise with capitalism. As Fanon put it, the task is ‘To turn the absurd and the impossible inside out and hurl a continent against the last ramparts of colonial power.’[61] This was no mere rhetorical declaration, since he spent the last several years of his life working incessantly to coordinate activity between the various revolutionary movements in Africa. He forthrightly stated, ‘For nearly three years I have been trying to bring the misty idea of African unity out of the subjectivist bog of the majority of its supporters. African Unity is a principle on the basis of which it is proposed to achieve the United States of Africa without passing through the middle-class chauvinistic phase…’ In case there is any doubt about the provenance of this embrace of permanent revolution, he states on the same page: ‘We must once again come back to the Marxist formula. The triumphant middle classes are the most impetuous, the most enterprising, the most annexationist in the world.’[62]

For Fanon ‘it is no longer possible to advance by regions … [Africa] must advance in totality.’ The key to that, he held, was Congo – since ‘a unified Congo having at its head a militant anticolonialist [Patrice Lumumba] constituted a real danger for South Africa’.[63] For if South Africa, the most industrially-developed country in Africa, was brought into the orbit of revolution, the material conditions might be at hand to push the continent as a whole beyond the confines of capitalist development.

Despite their verbal commitment to Pan-Africanism, virtually all the leaders of the newly independent states – including the most radical among them – were more interested in gaining acceptance and aid from the major world powers than in promoting pan-African unity. Close as he was in many respects to Nkrumah, Fanon was embittered at Ghana’s failure to provide material aid to Lumumba in the Congo, and he grew increasingly embittered at the failure of the African Legion to get off the ground. It became clear that for the new leaders of independent Africa, the way forward was to ally with one or another pole of global capital – either the imperialist West or the so-called ‘communist’ East. Fanon was opposed to this approach.

It [is] commonly thought that the time has come for the world, and particularly for the Third World, to choose between the capitalist system and the socialist system. The underdeveloped countries … must, however, refuse to get involved in such rivalry. The Third World must not be content to define itself in relation to values that preceded it. On the contrary, the underdeveloped countries must endeavor to focus on their very own values as well as methods and style specific to them. The basic issue with which we are faced is not the unequivocal choice between socialism and capitalism such as they have been defined by men from different continents and different periods of time.[64]

Fanon was clearly not satisfied with existing ‘socialist’ societies ‘as they have been defined’. He was aware of their deficiencies. But this does not mean that he conducted a thorough analysis of them or acknowledged their class basis and thoroughly oppressive character. This is unfortunate, since it has led some followers of Fanon to whitewash their crimes, which has only fed into the general discrediting of the Left for supporting regimes which were as exploitative of their working class as imperialist ones. No less importantly, the lack of a thoroughgoing critique of ‘Soviet-type’ societies on Fanon’s part rendered his effort to conceive of the transcendence of the bourgeois phase somewhat abstract and even quixotic, since it was left unclear how technologically underdeveloped societies might skip the bourgeois phase if they could not depend on the beneficence of the purportedly ‘socialist’ regimes.

Fanon cannot be blamed for his rather inconclusive discussion of how to surmount the bourgeois phase of development in The Wretched of the Earth, since he was only beginning to explore the issue of permanent revolution and he passed from the scene only days after the book came off the press. However, we who today face the task of developing an alternative to all forms of capitalism – whether the ‘free market’ capitalism of the West or its state-capitalist variants – do not have that excuse. Fanon’s work may not provide the answer to the question, but it does provide resources that (in conjunction with the work of many others) can aid our effort to do so.

Today’s realities are of course far different than those that defined Fanon’s life and times – on an assortment of levels. But they also provide new possibilities for coming to grips with the problems he was addressing, especially at the end of his life. Fanon departed from the scene declaring, ‘Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet murders him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world.’[65] These words are hardly rendered obsolete by the fact that today many from the global South are trying to find their way into Europe, as is seen from the response of the European powers to an influx of refugees which is transforming the continent. It may turn out that the growing presence of the global South inside the global North provides a material basis for thinking out new pathways to the transcendence of neocolonialism and class society, just as the racist resurgence that has accompanied it gives new urgency to working out the dialectical relation of race, class and gender anew. Fanon’s work will live on so long as these problems continue to concern us.

References

Anderson, Kevin B. 2010, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Basso, Luca 2015, Marx and the Common: From ‘Capital’ to the Late Writings, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

Bhabha, Homi K. 1999, ‘Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition’, in Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue, edited by Nigel Gibson, New York: Humanity Books.

Bird-Pollan, Stefan 2015, Hegel, Freud and Fanon: The Dialectic of Emancipation, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Cherki, Alice 2006, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, translated by Nadia Benabid, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Coulthard, Glenn Sean 2014, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cox, Oliver Cromwell 1948, Race, Caste and Class: A Study in Social Dynamics, New York: Doubleday.

Debs, Eugene V. 1903, ‘The Negro in the Class Struggle’, International Socialist Review, 4, 5: 257–60.

Dunayevskaya, Raya 2003, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Fanon, Frantz 1967, Toward the African Revolution, translated by Haakon Chevalier, New York: Grove Press

Fanon, Frantz 2004, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox, New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz 2008, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox, New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz 2016, Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté, edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young, Paris: La Découverte.

Gordon, Lewis R. 2015, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought, New York: Fordham University Press.

Harrison, Hubert 2001, ‘The Negro and Socialism: 1 – The Negro Problem Stated’, in A Hubert Harrison Reader, edited by Jeffrey P. Perry, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1977, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Books.

Hudis, Peter 2012, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, Historical Materialism Book Series, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Hudis, Peter 2015, Frantz Fanon, Philosopher of the Barricades, London: Pluto Press.

JanMohamed, Abdul 1986, ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature’, in ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lee, Christopher J. 2015, Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Marx, Karl 1975a, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction’, in Marx–Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1975b, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx–Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1976, The Poverty of Philosophy, in Marx–Engels Collected Works, Volume 6, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1977, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes, New York: Penguin.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1983, ‘Preface to Russian Edition of the Communist Manifesto’, in Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘The Peripheries of Capitalism’, edited by Teodor Shanin, New York: Monthly Review Books.

Parry, Benita 1987, ‘Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse’, Oxford Literary Review, 9, 1: 27–58.

Roberts, Michael 2016, The Long Depression: How It Happened, Why It Happened, and What Happens Next, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Shatz, Adam 2017, ‘Where Life Is Seized’, London Review of Books, 39, 2: 19–27, available at : <https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n02/adam-shatz/where-life-is-seized&gt;.

Wyrick, Deborah 1998, Fanon for Beginners, New York: Writers and Readers Publishing.

Yaki Sayles, James 2010, Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Chicago: Spear and Shield Publications.

Zeilig, Leo 2016, Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Revolution, London: I.B. Tauris & Co.

Notes

[1] Fanon 2004, p. 5.

[2] See Gordon 2015, Lee 2015, Bird-Pollan 2015, Hudis 2015, Zeilig 2016. See also Coulthard 2014.

[3] See Fanon 2016.

[4] For specific expressions of this, see Hudis 2015, p. 1.

[5] See Parry 1987, p. 33.

[6] See especially JanMohamed 1986 and Bhabha 1999.

[7] Of course, vital appropriations of Fanon’s work occurred in recent decades that were outside the purview of most postcolonial theorists – as by South African youth during and after the Soweto Uprising in 1978. The impetus for this came from the Black Consciousness Movement and not the ANC – which adhered (as it still does) to the two-stage theory of revolution, which calls for a prolonged stage of national capitalist development while pushing a socialist transformation off to the distant horizon.

[8] For a fuller discussion of these developments, see Taylor 2016.

[9] For more on this, see Hudis 2012, pp. 169–82.

[10] For a substantiation of these claims, see Roberts 2016.

[11] For a pathbreaking study that put forward this thesis, see Cox 1948.

[12] Marx 1976, p. 167.

[13] See Anderson 2010, pp. 79–153.

[14] Marx 1977, p. 414.

[15] See Debs 1903 for a classic formulation of this position.

[16] Fanon 2008, p. xi.

[17] Hegel 1977, p. 10.

[18] Fanon 2008, p. v.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Fanon 2008, p. xii.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Marx 1975a, p. 186.

[23] Marx 1975b, p. 274.

[24] Marx 1975b, p. 296.

[25] Marx 1975a, p. 185.

[26] Basso 2015, p. 4.

[27] Fanon 2008, p. xiv.

[28] It is therefore no accident that one of the most commonly circulated posters during the US Civil Rights Movement was the simple – albeit enormously profound – statement, ‘I am a Man.’ Curiously, thousands of virtually the same posters resurfaced, in a new form, during the street protests against police abuse in Chicago, New York, and other cities in 2015 and 2016 – although many of them also read, ‘I am a Woman.’

[29] Hegel 1977, p. 119.

[30] Fanon 2008, p. 195.

[31] See Hegel 1977, p. 119: ‘Having a “mind of one’s own” is self-will, a freedom which is still enmeshed in servitude.’

[32] Fanon 2008, p. 106.

[33] Gordon 2015, p. 54.

[34] Fanon 2008, p. 112.

[35] Fanon 2008, pp. 112–13.

[36] Fanon 2008, p. 112.

[37] Fanon 2008, p. 117.

[38] Cherki 2006, p. 64.

[39] See Harrison 2001, p. 54.

[40] See Dunayevskaya 2003, pp. 267–73.

[41] See Wyrick 1998, p. 132: ‘In fact, Fanon believes that colonialism causes the Marxist model of base and superstructure to collapse altogether because economic relationships are secondary to racial ones. That is, the Manichean thinking on which colonialism depends blots out other distinctions, hierarchies, logical patterns.’

[42] Fanon 2004, pp. 93–5.

[43] Yaki Sayles 2010, p. 304.

[44] Yaki Sayles 2010, p. 181.

[45] Shatz thinks that Fanon had already reached this position by the end of Black Skin, White Masks (Shatz 2017, p. 20). However, Fanon’s emphasis on ‘reaching out for the universal’ and creating ‘a new human world’ is better seen as a concretisation of his insistence (in critiquing Sartre) that black consciousness is the mediating term in the movement from the individual to the universal.

[46] Fanon 2004, p. 182.

[47] Fanon 2004, p. 119.

[48] Alice Cherki, who knew Fanon very well, reports that the transcripts of the proceedings of the first four Congresses of the Third International, which debated this issue, held ‘a great fascination for Fanon’. See Cherki 2006, p. 93.

[49] Fanon 2004, p. 118.

[50] Fanon 2004, p. 23.

[51] Fanon 2004, p. 69.

[52] Fanon 2004, p. 111.

[53] Fanon 2004, p. 138.

[54] See Marx and Engels 1983, p. 139.

[55] Fanon 1967, p. 65.

[56] Fanon 1967, p. 74.

[57] Fanon 1967, p. 144.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Fanon 2004, p. 62.

[60] Shatz 2017, p. 26.

[61] Fanon 1967, pp. 180–1.

[62] Fanon 1967, p. 187

[63] Fanon 1967, p. 192.

[64] Fanon 2004, p. 55.

[65] Fanon 2004, p. 235.

Frantz Fanon: A Personal Tribute to the Philosopher of the Colossal Mass

By Alieu Bah

Originally published at Red Voice.

"The colonized intellectual you so much detest has come to become the so-called guardian of your name. I hope you come into the whirlwind and destroy that myth... But in the end, I guess that’s our battle to fight."

The wretched of the earth, the damned of humanity are still here. Still clamoring, still caught in a thousand many battles with themselves and the world built to keep them in their place. Their fate signed, sealed, and packaged for the consumption of the rich and wealthy few of the earth — buffets where the flesh, blood and tears of the poor are served to a greedy, barbaric, capitalist horde are even more sumptuous. Their feasting is the stuff of legend and their belch a recognition of a satisfied bunch of heartless thieves who rejoice more in their heist than any sort of remorse or regret thereof. The proverbial cocktail party list that was supposed to be changed at the dawn of decolonization remains the same even as it is inherited and one family name supplanted for another in a vicious circle of inheritance.

(Un)fortunately your book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ is still relevant to us. It was supposed to be an artifact of history, forever to rest in the museums of liberated territories. But fact is, it remains this living, breathing, painful reminder to us the colonized of the earth. We still study it because it’s more relevant than ever in this colonial continuity. From the favelas of Brazil, the hoodlands of America, the jungles of Chiapas, from the townships of Johannesburg to the slums of Nairobi, this masterpiece continues to shine in the eyes of a new generation whose parents were sold nothing but dreams.

The shantytown, the medinas, the slums of the world still persist. The compartmentalization of the world continues unabated. However, the divide gets deeper and more cancerous, the line, the border isn’t in the same town or neighborhood anymore, but between the geography of the oppressed — the third world — and the center of the oppressor, the colonist. With the ever-increasing globalized configuration of capital, the choke hold of a staggering market to the expansion of “soft” imperialism in the form of intergovernmental organizations and NGOs from the colonizer, the metropolis has exceeded all expectations of a shared analysis between our generations; the chasm deepened as Hannibal crossed the alps. It all has gotten deeper since you've succumbed to the white claws of death in that hospital in Maryland. The rich neighborhood and the slums today are mostly populated by the same faces, the same race of men and women. When I was in Nairobi last year, it reminded me so much of your analysis on the divided, schizophrenic colonial society.

In more ways than one it’s as if your take was about the neocolonial state in those illuminating first chapters of The Wretched of the Earth. The naked violence of it and the wanton disregard for human life makes you a prophet in this secular tradition of progressive politics we share. But more searing and penetrating of your analysis was the scholar and intellectual who comes home from the west. They’re here after all this time, still concerned about particulars and false western moralisms. They do all kinds of gymnastics with the minds of the masses to divert them from the struggle for land, bread, and water.

They are being found out, though. Young and old progressive Africans have started studying and propagating your works and see their (colonized intellectuals') likeness once again. The objective conditions are also giving rise to a newer, more badass context that defies the pull and gravity of bourgeois intellection grown from those barren western soils. These new rebels, ghetto-grown intellectuals, unknown revolutionaries, are at once denouncing these puppets and concretely building again the old-but-known mass organizational model that led to our liberation in times gone by from the clutches of classic colonialism.

Your name, though, continues to raise colonial anxiety. It continues to sound like metal dropping on the silence and soothing sounds of the corporate world. From Palestine to Panama, it continues to liberate, to agitate, even, as it brings home sanity to a lost generation. Your righteous ghost keeps coming back to haunt the Towers of Babel. Even after all this time! It reminds one of the old saying that wickedness tarries but a little while, but the works of the righteous lives on forevermore. Your lives and afterlives have clearly shown the truth and precision of that good old saying. Year after year, you resurface in the most unlikeliest of places, but unbeknownst to bourgeois historians, so long as oppression exists and there is a demand for the objective material conditions to change, you, the philosopher of the colossal mass, will show face, heart, and mind, and guide the movement even from the grave.

But there is trouble now. Your name and your work continues to be appropriated by academe. You’ve become a career for the well-to-do, the ones who erase. They have complicated your legacy. The colonized intellectual you so much detest has come to become the so-called guardian of your name. I hope you come into the whirlwind and destroy that myth. I hope you come into the thunder, into the tsunami, into the catalytic force of nature. But in the end, I guess that’s our battle to fight. To honor your name by bringing it home to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth.

There is so much to enrich this letter with, but so little time and space. But we who inherited the disinherited, we who took the pledge to raise a billion-strong army, we who know liberation and freedom is a birthright, we who want to end the compartmentalization of the world — the Manichaeism of the land — we are here, in our many forms, subjectively and objectively honoring the call to “...shake off the great mantle of night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light. The new day which is dawning must find us determined, enlightened and resolute. We must abandon our dreams and say farewell to our old beliefs and former friendships. Let us not lose time in useless laments or sickening mimicry.”

Breonna Taylor and the Framing of Black Women as "Soft Targets" in America

By Ameer Hasan Loggins

Originally published at the author’s blog.

12:38 a.m. was the last peaceful minute of Breonna Taylor’s life.

On March 13, 2020, at 12:38 a.m., Breonna Taylor and her partner Kenneth Walker were asleep in bed. At 12:39 a.m. officers beat on her door for approximately one-minute. During that 59-seconds of banging, Taylor screamed “at the top of her lungs,” “Who is it?” But no one said a word. “No answer. No response. No anything.” The boogeymen kept beating on her door. By 12:40 a.m. Plainclothes Louisville Metro Police Department Officers Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison, as well as Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, shattered the forest green front door of Breonna Taylor’s apartment with a battering ram.

“Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.”

The police blindly shot over 20 rounds of bullets into the home of Breonna Taylor. Eight of those officers’ bullets found their way into Breonna’s Black body.

Sgt. Mattingly spoke to Louisville Police internal investigators roughly two weeks after Breonna’s killing. During that conversation he said officers were told her ground floor apartment was a “soft target” and that Taylor too was a soft target, because she, “should be there alone.”

A “soft target.”

A soft target is a person, location, or thing that is deemed as unprotected. As vulnerable. As powerless against military or terrorist attacks. Attacking soft targets are meant to, “disrupt daily life, and spread fear.” They are meant to target, “identities, histories and dignity.” They are meant to ambush and bring unexpected carnage. In 1845, attacking soft targets is how James Marion Sims, who is considered to be “the father” of modern gynecological studied, was permitted to experiment on enslaved Black women without consent, without anesthesia, and without consideration of their humanity. In 2015, attacking soft targets is what lead to 13 Black women testifying against Officer Daniel Holtzclaw. They spoke of how Holtzclaw targeted them during traffic stops and interrogations. How the officer forced them into sexual acts in his police car or in their homes. Prosecutors spoke to how Holtzclaw, “deliberately preyed on vulnerable Black women from low-income neighborhoods,” while committing his acts of sexual terrorism. 170 years separates the hellish acts of Sims and Holtzclaw, but what bridges the gap in time between those two men serially targeting the identities, dignities, and humanhood’s of these Black women is an unbroken history of war being waged on their entire self.

I cast my mind back to Malcolm X’s rebuking of this nation in 1962, when he said, “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.” Here we are, in the year 2020, and the Louisville Police are framing Breonna Taylor as a “soft target.” It’s as if Brother Malcolm was talking about Breonna’s death before she was even born into this world. Before she was awakened by police pounding on her front door. Before she had a name that needed to be said. While Malcolm’s words may feel prophetic in their preciseness, they are not. They were painfully predictable. Malcolm lived, and died in anti-Black America. He was a scholar of America’s history of anti-Blackness.

There has never been a period in the history of America where Black women’s bodies, hearts, minds and beings have not been reduced to being treated as soft targets.

Black women have always been exploited in America. Violated in America. Terrorized in America. Killed in America. The relationship between Black women and America was birthed in targeting and torture.

In Antebellum America, white owners of enslaved African women freely and with legal impunity raped them, often in front of their own families and fictive kin. In Jim Crow America, close to 200 Black women too were murdered by lynch mobs in the American South, many of whom had been raped before having their necks bound and burned by knotted nooses before being hanged to death.

Black women too, were strange fruit.

Black women like Eliza Woods. Woods was a cook. A cook, who in 1866, was accused of poisoning a white woman to death by the woman’s husband. She was arrested and taken from the county jail by a lynch mob. She was stripped naked. She was hung from an elm tree in the courthouse yard. Her lifeless body was then riddled with bullets as over a thousand spectators watched.

In 1899, the husband admitted that he poisoned his wife — not Woods.

Black women like Laura Nelson. Nelson allegedly shot a sheriff, in 1911, to protect her 14-year-old son. A mob of white people seized Nelson along with her son, and lynched them both. Laura Nelson, “was first raped by several men. The bodies of Laura and her son were hung from a bridge for hundreds of people to see.”

Elderly Black women like 93-year-old Pearlie Golden (2014), 92-year-old Kathryn Johnson (2006), 66-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs (1984), and 66-year-old Deborah Danner (2016), all were in their homes and shot to death by the police. Michelle Cusseaux (2014) was 50-years-old. Kayla Moore (2013) was 41-years-old. Aura Rosser (2014) was 40-years-old. Tanisha Anderson (2014) was 37-years-old. Natasha McKenna (2015) was 37-year-old. Alesia Thomas (2012) was 35-years-old. Miriam Carey (2013) was 34-years-old. Charleen Lyles (2017) was 30-years-old. India Kager (2015) was 28-years-old. Sandra Bland (2015) was 28-years-old. Atatiana Jefferson (2019) was 28-years-old. Mya Hall (2015) was 27-years-old. Meagan Hockaday (2015) was 26-years-old. Shantel Davis (2012) was 23-years-old. Korryn Gains (2016) was 23-years-old. Rakia Boyd (2012) was 22-years-old. Gabriella Nevarez (2014) was 22-years-old. Janisha Fonville (2015) was 20-years-old.

The police did not give a damn about the ages of these Black women. They did not care if they had nearly lived for a century on this earth, or if they were just a few years removed from their high school graduation. They killed them just the same. The police have shown that anybody, at any age, can be on the fatal end of their force, if you were born with Black skin.

Aiyana Mo’nay Stanley-Jones was only seven-years-old. On May 16, 2010, at 12:40 am, a Detroit Police Department Special Response Team Officer ended her life. Her last peaceful minutes in this world were spent sleeping on the couch, near her grandmother. That’s before a no-knock warrant (at the wrong apartment) was executed. That’s before law enforcement threw a flash-bang grenade through her family’s front window. That’s before the grenade burned the blanket covering Aiyana’s body. That’s before the wooden front door exploded under the force of police boots. That’s before Officer Joseph Weekley fired a single shot, that entered Aiyana’s head and exited through her neck — all while an A&E crew were filming an episode of the cop- aganda program, The First 48.

There is no softer target in this world than a sleeping child.

Aiyana never had the chance to reach womanhood, but had she, her “soft target” status, both in perceived personhood and lived location, would have left her vulnerable to domestic anti-Black police terrorism attacks. The disturbing truth is that, as Kimberlie Crenshaw notes, “about a third of women who are killed by police in the United States are Black, but Black women are less than ten percent all women,” in this country. This speaks directly to the hazard level and susceptibility to anti-Black police terrorism faced by Black women of all ages in America. The devil is in the details. Look directly into the data, and see how many of the law enforcers who have killed Black women have been convicted of committing a crime. The American Judicial System does not protect Black women. It too treats them as soft targets. The lack of Black women’s names being said in conversations surrounding anti-Black police terror speaks directly to their deaths and narratives as being deemed as unworthy of outrage. Of newsworthiness. Of action.

Breonna Taylor’s killers are free. Brett Hankison, Jonathan Mattingly, and Myles Cosgrove are walking the streets…free. Breonna was shot dead in her home in March, and we are in the month of August. 143 days have passed…and her killers are free. There is no justice to be had for Black women when the intersections of their Blackness, their class, and their gender mark their bodies, their homes, and their narratives as “soft targets” to be attacked with little to no consequences.

The politics of Black women being unprotected against targeting in America, predates America being a sovereign nation. It goes as far back as Virginia’s December 1662 decree, “that the children of enslaved Africans and Englishmen would be ‘held bond or free according to the condition of the mother’ which, in effect, monetarily incentivized the sexual terror against Black women, “as their offspring would swell planters’ coffers — a prospect boon to countless rapes and instances of forced breeding.” One must understand, when you witness Black women passionately protesting on behalf of Breonna Taylor, yes, it is a fight for Black women today, but it is also a part of the uninterrupted fight Black women have always faced in America — the fight against being casualties of “soft target” terrorists attacks.

Gold and Oil: A Tale of Two Commodities

By Contention News

Enjoy this special edition of Contention News — a new dissident business news publication — with analysis exclusive to Hampton Institute. You can read more and subscribe here. 

Gold broke $1,930 an ounce this week, its highest level ever. This follows weeks of record inflows to gold-related exchange traded funds (ETFs), and comes alongside silver’s biggest weekly gain in four decades.

Oil also advanced last week, but prices remain depressed -- the fracking industry now faces “extinction.”

Solving the puzzle of how metals can be gaining while the production of the most crucial commodity of our times can “peak without ever making money in the aggregate” unlocks important insights into how our global system works at its core. 

Money and the world of commodities

To repeat: money exists to circulate commodities. [1] Anything can serve as money as long as there is a stable relationship between the value of money at large and the world of commodities it circulates. The best way to do this: pick a representative commodity to serve as money. [2] Metals have low carrying costs and are easily divisible, so most epochs have settled on gold or some other metal for this purpose.

Since 1973, however, the world money system has not relied upon a representative commodity. Instead it has relied upon the United States to use political and military means to keep commodity prices stable. [3] The easiest way to keep prices steady: pin them down. Prices and profits serve as the signal for action: higher commodity prices = higher input costs = squeezed margins. 

Politicians don’t have to worry about the monetary system, they just have to think about corporate earnings. 

Oil prices and economic crisis

This worked for most of the world’s commodities save one: petroleum. The oil crises of the 1970s prompted a multi-year inflation crisis and economic “stagflation.” The United States responded with the Carter Doctrine, which defined the free flow of oil in the Persian Gulf region as a matter of U.S. national interest, justifying persistent military presence in the region and strategic alliances with key oil-producing states to keep prices low.

This system broke down between 2003 and 2008, with oil prices spiking more than $120 a barrel over that period. What caused the spike? The most likely causes:

• unanticipated popular resistance to the U.S. intervention in Iraq 

• accelerating energy demand from China’s rapid economic development

• significant financial speculation [4]

This price rise reached crisis levels in 2008 immediately prior to the Great Recession. Correlation isn’t causation, but it isn’t out of line to think that rising fuel and other commodity costs might have prompted an uptick in mortgage defaults. The same goes for investors selling off previously iron-clad securities as prices in general grew unstable. 

Fracking provides a crucial response to this kind of crisis. Not profitable under normal conditions, rising prices draw investment into the sector, bringing on new supply, driving prices down again. Companies borrow big to get started and go bust quickly, but executives get their golden parachutes, creditors get their settlements, attorneys make killer fees, and large firms gobble up all the abandoned assets. Only oil workers, royalty owners, and taxpayers lose.

Gold’s moment today 

Now a new crisis from outside the energy sector has destroyed demand and plummeted prices. [5] Central bank “money printing” in response should be inflationary, and thus the rise in gold prices, according to conventional economic wisdom.

Except that conventional wisdom is actually backwards. The money supply does not determine prices, commodity production determines how much money you need. If production goes up or production costs get bid upwards, [6] you need more money. Money gets pulled out of savings, banks increase lending, and the supply and velocity of money goes up.

Simply pouring more money into a depressed market, on the other hand, drives that cash into savings. This oversupplies money markets, driving down interest rates. As real rates — interest minus expected inflation — dip into negative territory, gold’s zero yield becomes a better bet than anything else. That’s how you end up with low oil prices, a collapsing fracking industry, and rising gold values. 

But now U.S. political failure is putting the whole dollar system into question over and on top of this. The result: investment flowing out of the dollar and into the yuan and the Euro. Without a clear alternative to the dollar as “world money,” gold is even more attractive as an asset. If rising demand in countries outside the United States drives up oil costs, price instability could make it even better. 

The puzzle still has pieces that have yet to be placed, but the image is clear: a fragile system is coming to an end, and when it falls who has the gold will rule. 

For more anti-imperialist business analysis, subscribe to Contention. 

Notes

[1] Much of the analysis here is inspired by collective study of The Value of Money by Prabhat Patnaik

[2] Any advances in the productive forces at large will shift the marginal value of all commodities, the money commodity included. Industrialization, for example, allowed the same amount of labor-power to produce a larger quantity of commodities, lowering the marginal value of each. Industrialization did the same for gold production, shifting its relative value to the world of commodities in the same way.

[3] The recent right-wing coup in Bolivia represents an example of this strategy. The United States could not tolerate an independent government controlling a significant supply of lithium. Even if Tesla buys its lithium in Australia, the prospect of an anti-colonial government controlling enough supply to boost prices — especially in alliance with China — not only impacts the automotive industry, it actually poses a risk for the whole monetary system. 

[4] Another way of putting this: the falling rate of profit produced rampant financialization which collided with class struggle against imperialist occupation and Western hegemony to destabilize commodity exchange on a fundamental level. 

[5] The crisis is internal to capitalism, not exogenous, the result of rampant deforestation and imperialist supply chains. See Rob Wallace et al. “COVID-19 and the Circuits of Capital.”

[6] Bid upwards by class struggle — workers fighting for higher wages, peasants demanding fairer prices for their outputs, colonized countries taking charge of their resources, etc.

Remembering Guaidó’s Last Stand

[Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images]

By Matthew Dolezal

Originally published at the author’s blog.

The year of our Lord 2020 will likely go down in the history books as one of the most existentially ridiculous years ever. It began with President Donald Trump belligerently assassinating Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who was on a peace mission in Iraq. Unlike many controversial Middle Eastern figures, Solemani was universally beloved in Iran and played a leading role in the defeat of ISIS in Syria. Shortly thereafter, Chinese officials isolated a novel coronavirus strain noticing a strange influenza-like ailment afflicting residents in and around the city of Wuhan weeks earlier. Needless to say, the coronavirus behind what is now referred to as Covid-19 has led to a massive global pandemic. On May 25, with said catastrophe in full effect, a white Minneapolis police officer lynched an unarmed, nonviolent black man named George Floyd, causing nationwide rebellions and calls to defund/abolish the institution of American policing. And that’s just the tip of the quickly melting iceberg.

It has certainly been a hell of a year. But there’s a special little story that may have barely registered on the radar of all but the most avid connoisseurs of current events. During the first week of May, a ragtag gang of mercenaries launched from Colombia and was quickly apprehended by Venezuelan forces and socialist fishermen after attempting to invade the neighboring country via the coastal La Guaira State and the peninsula of Chuao. In the wake of this misadventure, news broke that two of the approximately sixty combatants were in fact American citizens and former Green Berets Luke Denman and Airan Berry. This embarrassingly botched mission, coined “Operation Gideon”, was quickly revealed to be yet another coup attempt against democratically-elected Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the Bolivarian government more broadly. A leaked contract described tactics that included captures, assassinations, drone strikes, and even death squads in order to “liberate” the oil-rich nation.

The lead planner behind the foiled operation was none other than Silvercorp CEO Jordan Goudreau. Gourdreau's Florida-based private security firm was contracted for $212.9 million, yet only offered the aforementioned mercenaries between $50,000 and $100,000 each for their life-threatening services. Silvercorp USA initially began with hopes of converting military veterans into school security personnel — theoretically to protect students from school shooters for a small subscription fee — but the scheme appears to have been shelved. Gourdreau, himself a U.S. Army veteran, teamed up with retired Venezuelan General Cliver Alcala, who had previously been involved in various coup plots, often with assistance from the right-wing Colombian government. This was supposed to be Silvercorp’s big break.

As journalist Lucas Koerner summarized, “Jordan Goudreau, 43, was responsible for training a contingent of 300 Venezuelan army deserters in Colombia, who were to penetrate Venezuela in a heavily armed caravan and seize the capital of Caracas within 96 hours.” These details and more had been laid out in the aforementioned contract, which, thankfully, also contained an equal opportunity employment clause, promising to be inclusive “across gender, ethnicity, age, disabilities and national origin…”

One of the most notable aspects of the contract, however, is the fact that it named Juan Guaidó as the operation’s “Commander in Chief.” Guaidó, who initially denied any involvement, is a disgraced Venezuelan politician who clumsily declared himself “interim president” of the Bolivarian republic early last year and has since become embroiled in a corruption scandal.

The political trajectory of Guaidó is fascinating in its own right. In 2007, after graduating from Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas, Guaidó moved to Washington, D.C. to study under neoliberal economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia at George Washington University. Later that year, he took part in anti-government rallies after the Venezuelan government declined to renew the license of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) — a privately owned station that played a prominent role in the 2002 coup attempt against then-president Hugo Chávez (an event chronicled in a documentary entitled, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"). And thus began Guaidó’s tumultuous tenure in the realm of Venezuelan politics.

The young Guaidó continued taking part in anti-government demonstrations with “Generation 2007” youth activists, and, in 2009, helped establish the Popular Will Party with infamous right-wing political figure Leopoldo Lopez. During the subsequent years, Guaidó met with various regime change specialists and wealthy business owners, and even participated in the violent guarimbas in 2014, which aimed to destabilize and ultimately overthrow the government. The emerging political figure then proceeded to publicly whitewash the deadly tactics used by right-wing protesters, presenting himself as a polished and professional advocate for democracy.

Guaidó also participated in Venezuela’s National Assembly, spending many years as an alternate deputy, until the 2015 elections when he narrowly secured a seat on the governing body. The opposition-dominated National Assembly eventually selected Guaidó as its president — a position that is awarded on a rotating basis. This new development made Guaidó the perfect candidate for Washington’s regime change efforts. Despite still being unknown to 81% of Venezuelans, Guaidó declared himself “interim president” on January 22, 2019 with the full support of the Trump administration. What followed was a series of Western media misinformation campaigns, bungled coup attempts, and, after all else failed, a new wave of U.S. economic sanctions that killed an estimated 40,000 Venezuelans in just one year.

After losing his National Assembly seat in early January, 2020, Guaidó staged a childish scene in which he attempted to climb over the fence surrounding parliament. The floundering politician then faded from the spotlight until the recent failed incursion. Indeed, Operation Gideon — also referred to as “Stupid Bay of Pigs” — appears to have been a pathetic, last-ditch effort to install Guaidó as Venezuela’s president and implement a program of neoliberal “shock therapy”, primarily focused on privatizing the country's vast oil reserves.

Though appearing exotic on its surface, this quaint anecdote also fits into the “bigger picture” of 2020’s troubling zeitgeist. As part of its long-standing policy of violent imperialism throughout Latin America, the U.S. government funded the aforementioned 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, hoping to oust popular president Hugo Chávez. Despite its consistent two-decade commitment to disrupting the progressive Bolivarian Revolution, the world’s only remaining empire has evidently failed miserably. This defeated regime change effort mirrors other recent U.S. foreign policy failures, such as that of the devastating Syrian proxy war. In keeping with its increasingly desperate imperial ambitions, the U.S. has now lashed out against China — its main competitor on the global stage and a nation that has aided Venezuela amid the aforementioned brutal sanctions. The epic downfall of Juan Guaidó is not only a tale of personal and professional shortcoming, but could also symbolize a decline in the neoliberal global order more broadly, with new possibilities on the horizon.

The Garifuna in Honduras: A History of Pillage and Dispossession

By Yanis Iqbal

Originally published at Green Social Thought.

Amid the current Covid-19 pandemic, the Garifuna community of Honduras is experiencing state-sponsored violence and regulated repression. On July 18 2020, heavily armed personnel of the Police Investigation Department (DPI) barged into the house of Alberth Sneider Centeno, Garifuna president of the land community of El Triunfo de la Cruz, and abducted him. Later, the same armed group kidnapped Suami Aparicio Mejía García, Gerardo Mizael Rochez Cálix and Milton Joel Martínez Álvarez, members of the OFRANEH (Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras), and a fifth person, Junior Rafael Juárez Mejía. The General Confederation of Labor (CGT) has issued a statement saying “that the kidnapping of these people is motivated by the activity of the Garifuna people in defense of their ancestral lands and the rights of Afro-indigenous and indigenous people in these territories.”

The Honduran Solidarity Network (HSN) has similarly stated that “There are powerful people and businesses that have every interest in terrorizing the Garifuna communities in Tela Bay including Triunfo de la Cruz. Snider Centeno was an outspoken leader fighting against the global tourist industry allied with powerful and wealthy families in Honduras. Centeno was defending his community's collective and ancestral land rights. An investigation into the Honduran government's role in not only the kidnapping but also the context in which the kidnappings occurred, is absolutely necessary and important. The Honduran government has violated the Garifuna's land rights for decades.”

From the statements issued by CGT and HSN, it is clear that the kidnapping is not a regionally restricted event. Rather, it is an act involving myriad actors, both national and international. For example, DPI, the armed group responsible for the kidnapping, is a police force which is economically supported by the US State Department’s Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. With American assistance, the DPI has enormously expanded and by 2022, it is expected to have 3,000 personnel or 12% of the entire Honduran force.

Furthermore, the authoritarian alacrity with which the state has suppressed protests against the kidnappings betokens that there is something deeper of which the government is afraid. These peaceful protests were carried out by the residents of El Triunfo de la Cruz, Sambo Creek, Nueva Armenia and Corozal on Highway CA-13 and demanded that the 5 Garifuna activists be returned alive. In order to understand the underlying factors which are shaping the dynamics of violence and intimidation against the Garifuna community, we need to take a look at the historical backdrop against which it is occurring and understand the path-dependent nature of present-day happenings.

The Garifuna people are a community who find their existential roots in the soil of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. In 1675, a ship carrying Mokko people, slated to be enslaved, was wrecked near Saint Vincent, an island in the Caribbean. These people settled in the Caribbean island and resolutely resisted colonialist attempts by the French and British. Inspired by the heroic courage of the indigenous people in Saint Vincent, enslaved Africans escaped from the clutches of colonialism and arrived at the Saint Vincent Island. Through the intermixing of enslaved Africans and Caribs-Arawaks, the Garifuna subjectivity was produced which moored its identity in a revolutionary fight against the savagery of slavery and cruelty of colonialism.

While the Treaty of Paris of 1763 granted to Britain the Saint Vincent Island, the Garifuna people fought against colonialism for 34 long years. It was only in 1797 that the British were able to colonize the island of Saint Vincent, segregate the intermixed population and deport the darker colored Mokko to the island of Roatan, off the Northern coast of Honduras. Initially, the Garifuna community faced a lot of xenophobia and Ramon de Anguiano, the intendant governor of Honduras, had suggested that “all this coast be left clean of blacks...before they multiply further…in order to remove them from this Kingdom a people only good for itself [and] useless for our works”.

Later, it dawned on the Spanish officials that they could exploit the expendable bodies of black workers for mahogany tree cultivation and banana production. The Spanish considered the Garifuna as “diligent in agriculture, incessant in the work of cutting exquisite woods, like ‘fish in the water’ for fishing, skillful sailors, and brave soldiers. By virtue of their physical constitution they are strong and robust; for them, these climes are healthy, and they multiply in great numbers—wherefore they are very suitable for populating the immense wastelands of this coast with benefit to the state, and for forming settlements along the roads, which are so sorely lacking.”

Despite the evident exploitation of Garifuna workers by colonial trade, the community’s territory remained protected. The low population density of the coastal territories ensured that Garifuna people continued to cultivate their ancestral lands at least till the late twentieth century. But beginning in the 1990s, Garifuna land ownership got jeopardized as private investments in activities such as coastal tourism, housing and palm oil production became dominant. Dressed in development, these trade activities pulled to pieces the indigenous culture of the Garifuna people.

While the Garifuna people are present in four different countries (Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua and Guatemala), Honduras has the largest Garifuna population at an estimated 250,000 people located primarily within 48 coastal and island communities. For money-grubbing barons, this meant that “development” required enhanced efforts in Honduras where stronger and sterner techniques would have to be used to subjugate such a large population and conquer their large territory. This type of development was initiated in the 1990s, the age of neoliberalism and Washington Consensus, and the Garifuna labeled it as la maldición – the curse.

In 1992, the government passed the 1992 Law for the Modernization and Development of the Agricultural Sector (LMA) which “promoted foreign and domestic investment in agriculture by accelerating land titling and enabling land cooperative members to break up their holdings into small plots to be sold as private lands.” The Congressional Decree 90-90 supplemented LMA by making foreigners eligible for purchasing coastal lands for tourism.

Earlier, the Honduran constitution had restricted such a free-flowing movement of foreign capital through article 107 which had enunciated that “The land of the Republic, municipal, communal and private property situated on the border zones with neighboring states and on the shores of both oceans for 40 kilometers inland, and the islands, cays, reefs, cliffs, and sand banks, may only be acquired and possessed by Hondurans by birth or corporations made up of only Honduran stockholders and by state institutions, punishable by annulment of the respective title or contract.” Now, any foreign capital seeking to build tourism project is allowed to purchase lands within 40 kilometers of the coast.

Impact of Tourism on the Garifuna People

The Honduran government, apart from instituting the Congressional Decree 90-90, has also passed the Tourism Incentives Law in 2017 which has given a number of benefits to tourism in Honduras: touristic initiatives are exempt from taxes on profits for 15 years, taxes on construction-related activities for 5 years and are provided with the freedom to not pay custom duties and tariffs tax for 10 years. These incentives are paying off as international tourism spending increased from $685 million in 2016 to more than $700 million in 2017. While the pockets of select-few Honduran elites and foreign businessmen get filled to the brim, the unsavory side of tourism is being delicately obscured: As European and American “recreational investors” visit Honduras, the Garifuna people get whipped by the scourge of suppression.

According to Christopher A. Loperena, “Tourism, like mining, is an export-based industry, since the products (e.g. hotel stays, package tours, air and ground transportation) are mostly marketed to, and consumed by, foreigners….Touted as sustainable development, the “industry without smoke” entails the intense commodification of natural and cultural resources, giving rise to recurrent conflicts between subsistence based producers and elite investors.” In Honduras, a number of tourism-related conflicts have arisen between the Garifuna collectivity and politically powerful capitalists and international organizations.

In 2007, for example, “Garifuna land between San Martin and Santa Fe was sold by Omar Laredo, president of the Garifuna community, to a local businessman. There was a community consultation in which it was agreed that about 20 hectares would be sold. The businessman paid $5000 to the president of the Garifuna community and then immediately sold the land for US$20,000 to Randy Jorgensen [a Canadian investor]. Without community consultation, however, the amount of land sold had increased to 53 hectares. According to INA [National Agrarian Institute] surveys done later, Jorgensen then actually fenced-in 62 hectares.” In a similarly shoddy manner, lands belonging to the villages of Cristales and Guadalupe were usurped by Canadian investors and the entire village of Rio Negro was evicted to make way for the construction of “Banana Coast” cruise ship port, a project of the Life Vision Properties, a company owned by Randy Jorgen.

John Thompson, a close friend of Randy Jorgensen, while arguing for the benefits of the cruise terminal in Rio Negro, said that “This cruise ship terminal is vitally important to this entire town . . . all these people are going to lose everything that they could possibly have here because of this. Because he’s [referring to Jorgensen] about to give up and go home. And then we’ll be left on our own, with no money, no cruise ships, no passengers, no airport. Nothing. That’s it. So these people are killing the golden goose.” No one apparently knows what else was left for the Garifuna to lose. With the loss of ancestral territories, Garifuna lose everything and according to Miriam Miranda, the coordinator of OFRANEH, “Without our lands, we cease to be a people. Our lands and identities are critical to our lives, our waters, our forests, our culture, our global commons, our territories. For us, the struggle for our territories and our commons and our natural resources is of primary importance to preserve ourselves as a people.”

Eco-tourism, a sub-category of tourism related to the visiting of fragile and endangered ecosystems, is a “green” way of dispossessing Garifuna people and attracting tourists to sanitized places, purged of little impurities called “indigenous people”. The Honduras Caribbean Biological Corridor (HCBC), part of the larger Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC), is one such example of eco-tourism which uses “neoliberal conservation” to build purified (cleansed of indigenous people) eco-tourist destinations. The Jeanette Kawas National Park, present with the HCBC, covers over 70,000 hectares in Tela Bay and houses the Garifuna communities of Miami, Barra Vieja, Tornabe and San Juan. In this national park, intermittent bans are constantly placed on fishing and the areas of cultivation have also been reduced. In the Cayos Cochinos Marine Protected Area (MPA), similar restrictions have been placed on the extraction of marine life, leading to clashes between the inhabitants of Chachahuate, a Garífuna fishing village, and the state security forces.

In both the instances, the “environmentally conscious” policies of the government have undermined the Garifuna’s primary subsistence strategy i.e. fishing. Apart from being the economic foundation of the Garifuna group, fishing is the main protein source for the Garifuna living in the Tela Bay. Moreover, the limiting of land cultivation in the JKNP shows how indifferent capitalists are to the exceptionally viable agricultural practices of the Garifuna people. According to a local Garifuna individual, “We don’t use fertilizers because we don’t want to offend the earth. What do we do? There is a model of working, it’s called Barbecho. We work five years in one area, then we let it ferment and fertilize, and then we occupy another space. This is why our property is collectively owned. Because we need this space, which relates to our functional habitat … so the cultural and ancestral life we are accustomed to can continue. Rights are collective; there is no private property in our way of thinking.” In order to utterly uproot this anti-capitalist idea of land ownership and use, imperialists are effectuating “green grabs” i.e. the violent dispossession of lands in the name of sustainable development and environmental conservation. Instead of overtly and barbarously displacing Garifuna people from their lands, a green grab strategy uses the ideological integument of nature conservation to viably and ecologically expel them from their lands.

Through the deliberate destabilization of existential paradigms, eco-tourist projects are excluding Garifuna people from the ecologies in which these indigenous individuals are embedded. CA Loperena calls this “Garifuna Otherness” which is “packaged as a good to further the development of the Caribbean coast as a tourist destination. Garífuna subsistence practices, including fishing, are not contemplated within national development imaginaries, since environmental foundations view these activities as a threat to the touristic potential of protected areas and the sociospatial order pursued by the Honduran government.”

The Violence of Palm Oil

Honduras is the biggest exporter of palm oil in Central America. In the last two decades, its production has increased by 560%, making it the third largest producer in Latin America and eight largest in the world. This productivity increase has been propelled by a favorable global context where both demand and supply are consistently ballooning. From 15 million tonnes in 1995, global palm oil production has increased to 66 million tonnes in 2017. In response to this rising demand for palm oil, Honduras too expanded its production, exporting almost 50% of its palm oil. While countries such as China, India, USA and Netherlands indifferently import palm oil for manufacturing cosmetics, soaps, toothpastes and consumer retail food, the Garifuna community in Honduras is paying a heavy price for the production of these goods.

Vallecito, a Garifuna ancestral land in the municipality of Limón on the north-east coast, is an appropriate example for depicting the dispossession and disruption which has accompanies palm oil production. In this area, “the INA [National Agrarian Institute] handed out new titles to new ‘settlers’ who promptly sold them to the palm oil magnates. In this area alone, the Garifuna communities went from owning 20,000 hectares to 400 within a decade.” An important and strategic player in this chain of dispossession was Miguel Facusse, a Honduran business magnate labeled by locals as "the palm plantation owner of death”.

Between 1970 and 1989, Facusse had expropriated a large number of Garifuna lands to plant African palm, a product necessary to sustain his prosperous company Dinant which sold detergents, soaps and foodstuffs. In 1989, OFRANEH started a land recuperation campaign, aimed at retrieving an ancestral plot of 1600 hectares that 6 Garifuna cooperatives had cultivated. After sporadic and violent clashes between Dinant’s private security forces and Garifuna activists, the land was finally granted to the latter in 1989 by INA. But this gain was soon reversed by the 1992 Agricultural Modernization Law that, in a period of 5 years, planted African palm in 28,000 hectares of Garifuna land. The Vallecito region too experienced the pressures of palm oil predation as Facusse again arrived in the Vallecito cooperatives in 1995 and initiated his palm oil violence. The INA, after much Garifuna activism, chose to extend its administrative sinews and in 1995, restored the stolen lands. Not demoralized by consecutive failures, Facusse came to Vallecito in 1997 and planted African palm on 100 hectares of Garifuna land. OFRANEH, in response to this intrusion, took this land case to the Honduran court and surprisingly, was able to expel Facusse from that piece of land.

The constant cycle of dispossession in Vallecito continues till the present-day, despite the fact that a 2012 INA survey had confirmed Garifuna ownership of specific lands and had asked Facusse to evacuate the region. In 2019, it was found that armed groups carrying high-caliber weapons were patrolling Vallecito, cutting security wires, randomly shooting at community members and raiding the beach everyday with motorcycles. The Honduran poet Chaco de la Pitoreta’s poem “Ode to the African Palm”, written a few years back, lyrically expresses the current situation in Vallecito:

You came when we least needed you

and remained longer than we expected.

You displaced the ancestral kapok tree that used to

rise upon my fields

and shook off the maize that filled my plains…

Oh, African palm!

neither white, nor black…

red and bloodied.

You are not from the…peasants

nor from Honduras or Central America.

You are of the looters that ruin us,

of Facussé and his killers.

Challenging Development

With the kidnapping of Garifuna people in Honduras, the thick mystificatory veil of development is slowly peeling off. For decades, the Honduran Garifuna community has been culturally compressed and tyrannized into accepting development. The current kidnappings belong to that concatenation of development-oriented cold-bloodedness. Miriam Miranda, while delivering a speech in New York during the September 2014 People’s Climate March, said that “The time has arrived to question the model of ‘development’ that has been imposed on us in these last decades. We cannot accept nor perpetuate this supposed development which doesn’t take into account or respect nature and the earth’s natural resources...We act NOW against the culture of death that we are being condemned to by the grand corporations of death and transnational capital.” In the current conjuncture, we can’t remain silent on the development which has kidnapped Garifuna people and depredated the entire community. The time has come to challenge development.

Yanis Iqbal is a student and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com. His articles have been published by different magazines and websites such as Monthly Review Online, ZNet, Green Social Thought, Weekly Worker, News and Letters Weekly, Economic and Political Weekly, Arena, Eurasia Review, Coventry University Press, Culture Matters, Global Research, Dissident Voice, Countercurrents, Counterview, Hampton Institute, Ecuador Today, People’s Review, Eleventh Column, Karvaan India, Clarion India, OpEd News, The Iraq File, Portside and the Institute of Latin American Studies. 

Disturbing the Peace: UN Peacekeepers and Sexual Abuse

By Devon Bowers

Author’s Note: This article and series focuses on sexual abuse and assault, with some graphic descriptions of such acts. Reader discretion is advised.

The United Nations is an organization in which the main goal is to “maintain international peace and security” and “to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace”[1] as a means to those ends. However, what has cropped up time and again, most recently with a 2019 New York Times article[2] focusing on UN peacekeepers in Haiti, is sexual abuse. It’s something that has not just plagued the organization for decades, but has utterly shattered, destroyed the lives of poor women around the world where they lay forgotten, often not seeing justice meted out to the ones who harmed them.

This problem, along with analyzing past and present plans to fight against this scourge, should be examined along with possible solutions. The purpose is not to ‘bash the UN’ in particular, but rather to study the systemic problems within UN peacekeeping and how it can be fixed or at least put on such a path.

Cambodia

In 1991, the UN formed the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) with the goal of “[taking] control of [Cambodia’ government] and [setting] up and run national elections” and to “help bring about a ceasefire between the various warring factions, disarm their forces and repatriate thousands of refugees languishing in camps on the Thai border.”[3] The mission seemed simple and yet problems occurred.

During this time period, there was a large resurgence of prostitution in Cambodia that was fueled by the economy but also the appearance of UN peacekeepers, which greatly increased the numbers from 10,000 in 1990 to 20,000 in 1993 when the UN exited the country.[4]

There were also allegations of sexual abuse by peacekeepers. Raoul M. Jennar, then-director of the European Far Eastern Research Center in Belgium, reported that “in the Preah Vihear hospital, there was for a time a majority of injured people who were young kids, the victims of sexual abuse by UN soldiers.” The situation was never handled, though women did come forth with rape and sexual abuse allegations, they were often days or weeks after the fact and so fact-finding and gathering evidence was a struggle.[5]

Besides the time lapse, such activity was openly supported by the chief of UNTAC, Yasushi Akashi, who argued that the peacekeepers “have a right to drink, enjoy themselves, and chase ‘young, beautiful beings of the opposite sex.’” This was in direct opposition to over 100 Cambodians and Westerners who alleged that sexual harassment of women occurred with disturbing frequency in any and all settings.[6]

It was this lax, uncaring, and cold attitude towards prostitution and sexual abuse that would set the tone for the UN’s peacekeeping missions.

Bosnia/Kosovo

In 1992, the United Nations established a peacekeeping force as to “provide security for the flows of humanitarian aid that were flowing into Bosnia from the international community.”[7] Approximately 40,000 UN personnel from a variety of nations were sent to aid in this goal.

Again, sexual abuse reared its ugly head. The Washington Post reported in 1993 that some UN peacekeepers, in visiting a Serb-run brothel, “took sexual advantage of Muslim and Croat women forced into prostitution, according to Muslim witnesses and the local Serb commander.” [8] The spokesman for UN forces in Sarajevo, LTC Bill Aikman, argued that such talk was nothing but “disinformation,” further stating that he didn’t “think U.N. troops could have done that.”

However, this was in direct conflict with eyewitnesses who, when being interviewed by Newsday, stated that in the summer and fall of 1992, they say on numerous occasions “saw young Muslim or Croat women being forced into U.N. armored personnel carriers or civilian cars that followed the U.N. vehicles to an unknown destination.”[9] Apparently the situation was never formally investigated by the UN, with an informal inquiry being dismissed “because ‘there was no grounds for pursuing it.”[10] Such logic is rather strange, deciding that there should be no further investigation because there isn’t any ‘real basis’ to do so, despite there not having been any formal inquiries into the matter.

Some years later, the US House of Representatives launched a formal investigation into the entire situation of prostitution and sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers and the full extent of the corruption of the UN was revealed.

The UN’s International Police Task Force was regularly involved at such aforementioned brothels. A raid of three nightclubs was done in November 2000, which found a total of six IPTF monitors in the clubs and it was revealed, according to verbatim statements from five of the women rescued from these brothels that IPTF monitors had been among the clients of these captured women.[11] When discussing the matter, UN officials contradicted themselves by denying allegations that their forces were involved in sex trafficking but “admitted that members of the force were found to have been involved in the use of young girls' services and that sometimes the children were unwilling participants.”[12]

The situation worsened due the fact that there was an active cover-up by the UN of such activities by the IPTF.

David Lamb, a human rights investigator for the UN, tore back of the curtain on the UN’s operations in Bosnia, directly linking it to sexual abuse. He even went so far as to say that:

U.N. peacekeepers' participation in the sex slave trade in Bosnia is a significant, widespread problem, resulting from a combination of factors associated with the U.N. peacekeeping operation and conditions in general in the Balkans. More precisely, the sex slave trade in Bosnia largely exists because of the U.N. peacekeeping operation. Without the peacekeeping presence, there would have been little or no forced prostitution in Bosnia. [13](emphasis added)

The Bosnian prostitution industry was organized in such a manner that there was no difference between victims of sex trafficking or women who had been forced into prostitution, creating a situation where anyone who engaged with prostitutes aided the sex slave trade.

The United Nations, on an organizational level, was completely complicit in the sex slave trade, with Lamb noting that he and others “experienced an astonishing cover-up attempt that seemed to extend to the highest levels of the U.N. headquarters.” Investigators would not only be rebuffed by those they were investigating, but the UN would launch “formal investigations against the investigators while giving no support to the original investigation, a scenario which was not new to the U.N. Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”[14] (emphasis added) So rather than punish the people who were committing crimes, the UN found it easier to harass and intimidate the investigators.

Lamb’s testimony bolstered previous claims. In December 2001, it was reported that the UN “quashed an investigation earlier this year into whether U.N. police were directly involved in the enslavement of Eastern European women in Bosnian brothels, according to U.N. officials and internal documents.”[15] During this time, Lamb noted that “his preliminary inquiry found more than enough evidence to justify a full-scale criminal investigation,” however it was killed by higher-ups. The UN even argued that there wasn’t enough evidence to point to systemic police involvement, in spite of the previous November 2000 raid.

Such activities weren’t just occurring on Bosnia, but also in neighboring Kosovo. Amnesty International reported within months of UN soldiers arriving in 1999 to aid in the aftermath of the Bosnia-Kosovo war, brothels sprung up and Kosovo “soon became a major destination country for women trafficked into forced prostitution.”[16] The situation persisted over a decade later, with UN forces being blamed for the growth of the sex slave industry in which many under-age girls were viciously tortured, raped, and abused.[17]

The biggest hurdle towards obtaining justice for the women and children who had been abused was that issue of legal immunity. Foreigners that were part of the UN mission, whether as a military/police force or a civilians, had near-absolute legal immunity. Specifically, Article 6 of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the U.N.” provides immunity from personal arrest or detention and from seizure of personal baggage, and in respect to words spoken or written and acts done by them in the course of the performance of their mission, immunity from legal process of every kind.”[18] Thus, the perpetrators of so much horror were never able to be brought to justice.

This only compounded the situation for the victims as not only was there a cover up by the UN, but the legal immunity created a situation in which they would never get to take their abusers to court.

Mozambique

Due to an ongoing civil war, which displaced over six million Mozambicans, the UN was called in an attempt to create a situation where both sides, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique as the legitimate government and the rebels known as the Mozambican National Resistance, could come to talks.[19]

Similar to Cambodia and Bosnia, the very presence of the peacekeepers was argued to have led to an increase in prostitution and while there were investigations which resulted in some soldiers being expelled from the country, not a single one of them was actually prosecuted.[20]

These arguments were later confirmed when then-UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had a formal inquiry conducted into peacekeepers involvement in child prostitution which found that “after the signing of the peace treaty in 1992, soldiers of the United Nations operation in Mozambique recruited girls aged 12 to 18 years into prostitution”[21] as well as the linkage between the arrival of peacekeepers and growth in child prostitution.

The year UN forces left, 1994, it came out that Italian soldiers were engaging in sexual misconduct with child prostitutes, as young as twelve to fourteen years old.[22] This incident was simply the one which was put on blast. International NGO Save The Children conducted an investigation into the matter of Italian soldiers being involved in sexual abuse.

The report explained that suspicions were raised and questions asked when the Italian soldiers engaged in commercial sex, but the matter became even more serious “when the soldiers started to make a clear request for sex with minors and recruited street children for all kind of services: domestic work (at a marginal fee), shopping, procuring illegal goods for trade and as mediators (pimps) for commercial sex,”[23] with the situation evolving to the point where the Italians had one of their liaison officers act as a mediator between the soldiers and the pimps/girls.

It goes on to note the disposition of soldiers, prices paid, and punishments for speaking out, which should be quoted at some length.

Most girls in the trade were aged between 13 and 18 years. Private conversations with the soldiers indicated that this was because of `more fun and excitement' and due to the fear of AIDS. Rates for sex differed. Generally, the price was 1.00 US Dollar for sex with a condom and $ 1.10 without. Some soldiers started a liaison with girls, and arranged a flat, room or other venue for them for regular encounters. […] The military doctor of the Italian Contingent Albatroz who served in Chimoio from October 1993 till early 1994, got reprimanded by the (Italian) Regional ONUMOZ Commander Mazzaroli when he reported in writing on the developments. In fact, the doctor was to serve till May 1994 in Chimoio and it is believed that he was repatriated to Italy at an earlier stage due to his critical attitude.[24] (emphasis added)

By late 1993, the Italians became so comfortable and lax that the local staff of NGO Redd Barna (presently known in Mozambique as Save The Children), the Norwegian branch of the International Save the Children Alliance, noticed them having sex with minors in uniform, in and on UN vehicles in the city of Chimoio, with houses even being rented for parties and sex.[25]

In response to this, on September 24, 1993 the head of the Mozambique branch of Redd Barna contacted the head of the main organization to discuss the situation. After visiting Chimoio to get first-hand knowledge of the activities of Italian soldiers, the Secretary-General of Redd Barna joined forces with elements of the International Save the Children Alliance resulting in, most importantly, a letter being written to head of UN forces in Mozambique regarding the situation.

This letter was released by the Children Alliance in December 1993, which the very next month, January 1994, was quoted in an independent Mozambique newspaper, specifically that the letter had been faxed from a high official in the headquarters UN Mozambique to the newspaper. The anonymous official even told Redd Barna that this was done because senior UN staff were “making all possible attempts” to hide and cover up the incidents.

This article was subsequently picked up by various outlets including Associated Press, CNN, NBC, and Reuters. In the immediate aftermath, Italian soldiers were confined to their respective bases. On January 26, 1994, the UN Mozambique contingency issued a statement in which they said, in part, that because “no concrete evidence or information was supplied by the initiators of this accusation, it has not been possible to complete the investigation.”[26]

It should be noted here that the language used is far from neutral, by referring to Redd Barna as “initiators of this accusation” it creates a tone where the NGO is seen as spreading rumors and hearsay. It also leads to the question of how they can’t complete an investigation unless concrete evidence has been supplied. One would think that their investigators, given the serious nature of the situation, would actively be looking for such evidence.

An investigative commission was formed by UN Mozambique and actively utilized Redd Barna to aid in its investigation. This, coupled with them having been the main source, along with the Save the Children Alliance, of the situation going public, painted a target on the organization’s back.  This resulted in Italian soldiers intimidating Redd Barna workers, threatening phone calls, telephone lines and the radio network being tapped when transferring fax messages, and feeding disinformation to journalists.

There was a reveal of a civilian-military divide in that on the week of February 18, 1994, the departing UN commander, Lélio Gonçalves, gave interviews where  he actively denied that UN peacekeepers were engaging in “sexual abuse of minors and sneered about [the International Save The Children Alliance’s] and Redd Barna's concern.” It should be noted that such statements were made “while his superior, [the special representative of the UN Secretary-General, Mr A.Ajello], had already confirmed the involvement of [UN] personnel.”[27] In addition, more and more UN staff approached the organization to provide information, yet were often despised and harassed by colleagues and superiors.

Still, after all of that, nothing was done. The actors just moved deeper into the darkness. After the publication of the investigative report, the Italian soldiers simply continued to engage in their sick practices in more hidden and remote locations and senior officers would intimate girls, forcing them to sign statements saying that the Italians weren’t engaging in any wrongdoing.[28]

Somalia and Haiti

The UN mission in Somalia, only lasting from 1992 to 1995, revealed that even when soldiers were caught in the wrong, their respective nation’s militaries wouldn’t mete out full justice.

Belgian peacekeepers accused of torturing Somali children, Italians, of raping Somali women. The Italian situation was so bad that two generals resigned as evidence of torture mounted and a day after photo evidence of an Italian soldier raping a Somali woman were published.[29]

In 1993, a Belgian paratrooper “allegedly procured a teenage Somali girl as a birthday present to a paratrooper. She was reportedly forced to perform a strip show at a birthday party and to have sexual relations with two Belgian paratroopers.”[30] A military court in 1998 sentenced that paratrooper to one year imprisonment (six months were suspended), a fine, and discharged them from the army. Meanwhile, even though the Italian government conducted a commission which “found credible evidence of a number of instances of gang-rape, sexual assault, and theft with violence,”[31] nothing was done to actually punish those troops.

In Haiti, months after international forces arrived in 1994, a number of women’s organizations petitioned the Justice Ministry to investigate the foreign soldiers as it was public information that “several cases of abuse of women and girls by soldiers in several towns throughout the country” had taken place. A former UN staff member even confided that observers had told their superiors in 1995 in Port-au-Prince of “allegations of sexual abuse committed by French and [Caribbean] UN ‘peacekeepers,’ only to be promptly ordered to desist from exploring the claims any further.”[32]

So on one instance we see just what happens when military personnel are subjected to their justice system, in which a slap on the wrist of sorts occurs and on the other we see still the UN covering up and stonewalling investigations into abuse.

East Timor

In 1999, international forces were deployed to East Timor to oversee its transition to becoming a fully independent country and to deal with the Indonesian intervention which consisted of backing guerrilla groups.[33]

Three years into the mission, it was reported at least two soldiers from Jordan had been accused of sexually assaulting an unknown number of boys. When asked if any investigations regarding these allegations had been conducted, the senior UN military observer, LTC Paul Roney, stated that he was unable to answer the question.[34]

The Jordanian peacekeepers were a major problem as “[interviews] by UN investigators [made claims of] Jordanian involvement in several alleged rapes of boys and women.”[35] This was known by the UN administration in East Timor itself, with the administrator Sergio Vieira de Mello, doing his best to keep the matter quiet.

An incident paralleling Bosnia took place in 2003. A UN police force raided an illegal brothel and found 23 Thai women who had been trafficked into the country, some even being underage, along with six UN police officers. The UN made the incredibly weak argument that the officers were just getting massages and didn’t know it was an illegal brothel.

Specifically, the UN’s Acting Deputy Operations Commissioner, Alan King, stated that the officers came “from a country where massage is quite a legitimate business and in many cases here in East Timor massage parlors exist and they are quite legitimate” and there was no indication “that they went there for anything other than a legitimate purpose.”[36]

Just like so many of the other cases, not a single person faced justice. Daily Australian outlet The Age reported in 2006 that “Sukehiro Hasegawa, the top UN official in East Timor, has acknowledged for the first time that the UN system failed to bring anyone to justice for crimes that included sex abuse of children and bestiality.”[37] Hasegawa announced that a ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards sexual abuse by any and all UN forces would be put into motion immediately.

The abuse of women in East Timor had long lasting impacts. There were approximately 20 cases of children who had been fathered by peacekeepers, however, no national record exists to get a better grasp of the situation.[38] Soldiers had made promises to marry the women, but would simply return to their home countries. The women and children were left behind to deal with being shunned by their community.

In 2003, the UN put out a bulletin putting the entire entity on notice that sexual abuse would not be tolerated, including that exchanging money for sexual favors “or other forms of humiliating, degrading or exploitative behavior, is prohibited.”[39] It established that the head of the mission in question would be responsible for fostering an environment in which such activities would be discouraged and prevented, ensuring each staff member would receive a copy of the bulletin to ensure that there is no excuse of someone not knowing the rules, and that a system would be established to report on sexual abuse cases. Still, this would have no serious effect on sexual abuse.

Sierra Leone

To deal with rebel elements in Sierra Leone and aid in the creation of a unity government comprised of the rebels and legitimate government, forces were sent to the country in 1999.[40]

The entire situation amounted to a horror show for the women of Sierra Leone. The Telegraph made known a report from Human Rights Watch.

But it found evidence of sexual atrocities being committed by troops from the regional intervention force, Ecomog, and the UN peacekeeping mission.

Women were used by all sides as chattels, kidnapped from their homes often in rural areas and forced to act as sex slaves for the troops as well as domestic maids responsible for cooking and household chores.

"To date there has been no accountability for the thousands of crimes of sexual violence or other appalling human rights abuses committed during the war in Sierra Leone," the report said.[41]

There was no reprieve for women here, the very people that were supposed to protected them were also the ones raping and abusing the

That same report revealed a number of crimes done by international forces. In April 2002, “witnesses saw a woman apparently being raped by two Ukrainian peacekeepers near the eastern town of Joru. There was no formal investigation into the matter.” (emphasis added) [42] In June, an officer from Bangladesh was accused of sexually assaulting a 14 year old boy, but a formal investigation found results to be inconclusive and the officer was soon sent back to his home country.

During March 2002, UN spokesperson Margaret A. Novicki, stated that the mission in Sierra Leone was going about conducting an ongoing training program for military personnel which focused on women’s rights and the zero tolerance policy for sexual exploitation and abuse and that the military command was visiting sector and contingent commanders to emphasize the need to police soldiers’ conduct.[43] The previous month, however, the a probe from the UN Human Right Council and the UK arm of the organization Save The Children revealed just how much the conduct of peacekeeping forces had deteriorated.

The joint investigation found a major disconnect between what was being said and what was going on the ground. A UN officer stated that “Every soldier, officer has been read and shown the code of conduct; no one can plead ignorance.”[44] Thus, while knowing the code of conduct, peacekeepers still engaged in abuse by exchanging money and food with children for sexual services, paying between $5 and $300 USD. Witnesses “spoke of teenage girls being asked to strip naked, bath and pose in certain positions while the peacekeepers took pictures, watched and laughed. Some are alleged to have had sex with the girls without using condoms.”[45]

There were several incidents of peacekeepers going to extremes in that they would meet with the child’s parents, feigning good intentions, but would leave abruptly, give the parents money to take care of the girl, or even shower the girl with gifts. The victims, on all levels, were the girls. While they were being abused by the peacekeepers, the community would respond by parading and publically shaming the girls in town.[46]

There was a separate inquiry conducted by the UN in late 2002 where it came to light that “there was no encouragement for staff or other persons to report ethical issues to management, nor for that matter is there a particular office or person with whom this type of problem can be discussed,”[47] but there were slight improvements such as the formation of a Personal Conduct Committee to examine cases of misconduct for UN workers, both military and civilian. Yet, it was known that sexual abuse cases were underreported. The Office of Internal Oversight Services found a single allegation of such abuse, but with over 17,000 soldiers, it shows that there are serious deficiencies with the reporting system rather than a lack of cases.[48]

A Human Rights Watch report documented several cases of rape by peacekeeping troops.

A Sergeant Ballah, from Guinea, was alleged to have engaged in the rape of a twelve year old girl according to the Sierra Leone police. The victim was raped in March 2001 “when she asked for Sgt. Ballah’s assistance in securing a ride to Freetown at the checkpoint that he was manning”[49] and even though Ballah went to court, he was simply sent back to Guinea. In a separate case, a Bangladeshi peacekeeper allegedly raped a fourteen year old boy (the rape had ben medically confirmed) and the police began to conduct an investigation, “until the UNAMSIL provost marshal took it over. The provost marshal concluded that there was no conclusive evidence to link the crime to the perpetrator.”[50] The inquiry was conducted haphazardly, with members of the Bangladeshi contingent speaking with the victim, despite the fact that they shouldn’t have been able to, nor did the UN mission even issue the victim or his family an apology, much less provide compensation or note the outcome of the investigation. This lines up with the summary that there was “reluctance on the part of UNAMSIL to investigate and take disciplinary measures against the perpetrators.”[51] Despite setting up a code of conduct and reinforcing a zero tolerance policy, we see that such acts were half-hearted measures given incorrect investigation methods and flat out interference in cases.

The UN even noted that charges against its own personnel and humanitarian workers working at UN camps, such as forcing women and children to provide sexual favors for food, medicine, and relief supplies, were investigated by the Office of Internal Oversight Services but dropped on the grounds that there wasn’t enough evidence.[52] It seems that the OIOS acts as many internal investigatory groups: covering up incidents and protecting criminals.

Congo

Peacekeepers were sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to aid in the implementation of a ceasefire between several warring factions starting in 1999.[53]

In mid-2002, Human Rights Watch published the report The War within the War: Sexual Violence against Women and Girls in Eastern Congo, where several acts of sexual assault were recorded. One such incident occurred in December 2001, when a Congolese woman dropped off an eleven year old girl to a Moroccan soldier, who proceeded to sexually assault the girl, but was kept at his post.[54] Though the zero tolerance policy had been in effect and there was an increase in gender awareness training and even a gender advisor, the mission still lacked any training strictly revolving around the sexual violence.

During July 2004 the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services began to investigate a number of accusations, ranging from a child prostitution ring being ran out of a UN airport to Nepalese soldiers raping minors and even allegations of a Tunisian officer soliciting sex from minors.[55] Most of the allegations revolved around the town of Bunia.

The UN seems to have ignored the situation until it reached a critical mass as The Independent obtained documents which showed that in August 2003, the child-protection office sent a memo to the UN’s Congo headquarters “detailing their fears about the allegations of sexual exploitation by [UN] forces. No action was taken.” Children were put at risk as despite allegations of Moroccan troops engaging in “child pornography, organized sex shows and the rape of babies,” they were still sent to Bunia where in 2004 it was found that “19 out of 50 cases of sexual violence against minors in Bunia were carried out by [Moroccan] troops.”[56] By transferring the Moroccan’s despite such extreme allegations, it could be argued that the UN on some level played a role in these sexual violence cases having occurred.

Horrors against the most vulnerable of Congolese society continued unabated. The New York Times reported in December 2004 on a 12-year-old girl, Helen, and a 13-year-old girl, Solange, both of whom were raped by UN peacekeepers who lured the girls in using food.[57]

In January 2005, the UN conducted an investigation into the matter, finding that “Congolese women and girls confirmed that sexual contact with peacekeepers occurred with regularity, usually in exchange for food or small sums of money.”[58] Unfortunately, the vast majority of allegations were unable to be substantiated. The Office of Internal Oversight Services complied a total of 20 cases and was able to corroborate only seven cases, as in remaining cases the victims and witnesses weren’t able to positively identify perpetrators.

Shockingly, while this investigation was going on, peacekeepers were still engaging in sexual acts, “evidenced by the presence of freshly used condoms near military camps and guard posts and by the additional allegations of recent cases of solicitations brought to the attention of the OIOS team during the last days of the investigation.”[59]

Out of the report came several recommendations, among them were: to create and implement a prevention program, “establish a rapid-response detection program, utilizing personnel experienced in such cases,” ensuring that UN administrators and officers can demonstrate that current rules and regulations aimed at preventing sexual abuse/exploitation are being enforced, and creating a program to “provide regular briefings for troops on their responsibilities to the local population and on prohibited behaviors”[60] so that everyone, from peacekeepers on up, would be on the same page.

Due to this report, a sexual abuse focal-point element was created for all UN agencies in the Congo, a website was established to educate staff on exactly what constituted sexual abuse/exploitation, and a strict curfew was put in place. In March 2005, the UN Security Council issued a resolution focusing on the Congo, which in part they asked the Secretary General to ensure compliance to the zero tolerance policy on sexual abuse, that perpetrators be investigated and punished.[61]

The UN began looking into the alleged child prostitution ring in August 2006. While many of the patrons were Congolese soldiers, early testimonies from victims revealed that ring leaders became interested in the presence of UN forces and the money they had as a catalyst for creating the ring.[62]

There were further child prostitution ring allegations surround a contingency from India two years later, but the soldiers were found innocent by Indian courts.[63] In another instance of abuse by Indian soldiers, there were allegations that they had fathered nearly 12 children after DNA tests were conducted and showed the children having distinct Indian features. While one soldiers was punished as it was found that his DNA sample matched with one of the children born, others only had administrative action recommended and others still were given a clean slate.[64]

Despite sexual abuse allegations having been on the decline[65], the situation seemed to continue to deteriorate as The Globe and Mail reported that in February 2011, two teenaged orphans were attacked with two Congolese soldiers beating one of the girls, while the other was gang raped and impregnated.[66] The UN soldiers were still out in the field even after the incident.[67]

Overall, there was a complete lack of punishment for soldiers that engaged in abuse and exploitation. The Independent reported in 2007 that nearly 200 peacekeepers had been disciplined in sexual abuse cases since 2004, but not a single one had been prosecuted. In fact, of the 319 people that had been investigated in the 2004-2007 time frame for sexual misconduct, 180 had been either dismissed or sent back to their home countries.[68]

Just for the missions launched in the 1990s, there were cover ups, lies, and even an outright acceptance of blue helmets engaging in abuse. Unfortunately, for the missions that started up in the 2000s, the women and girls of a myriad of nations would be subject to abuse, no more so than in Haiti. 

Notes

[1] United Nations, Chapter 1: Purposes and Principles, https://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter-i/index.html

[2] Elian Peltier, “U.N. Peacekeepers in Haiti Said to Have Fathered Hundreds of Children,” New York Times, December 18, 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/world/americas/haiti-un-peacekeepers.html)

[3] Kevin Ponniah, “In 1993, the UN tried to bring democracy to Cambodia. Is that dream dead?,” BBC News, July 28, 2018 (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44966916)

[4] Donna M. Hughes, “Welcome to the Rape Camp: Sexual Exploitation and the Internet in Cambodia,” Journal of Sexual Aggression 6 (Winter 2000), pg 4

[5] Sandra Whitworth, “Gender, Race and the Politics of Peacekeeping,” in Edward Moxon-Browne, editor, A Future in Peacekeeping? (New York, New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1998), pg 179

[6] Anne Orford, “The Politics of Collective Security,” Michigan Journal of International Law 17:2 (1996), pgs 378-379

[7] Globalization 101, Peacekeeping in Bosnia, http://www.globalization101.org/peacekeeping-in-bosnia/

[8] Roy Gutman, “U.N. Forces Accused of Using Serb-run Brothel,” Washington Post, November 2, 1993 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/11/02/un-forces-accused-of-using-serb-run-brothel/78414de2-36d0-41c0-9081-c3a5ee513078/)

[9] Ibid

[10] Susan Dewey, Hollow Bodies: Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia, and India (West Harford, CT: Kumarian Press, 2008), pg 101

[11] U.S. Congress, House, Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on International Relations and Human Rights, The U.N. and the Sex Slave Trade in Bosnia: Isolated Case or Larger Problem in UN System (Washington D.C.: Subcommittee on International Relations and Human Rights, House Committee On International Relations, 2002) (http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa78948.000/hfa78948_0f.htm), pg 47

[12] Ibid, pg 8

[13] Ibid, pg 66

[14] Ibid, pg 68

[15] Colum Lynch, “U.N. Halted Probe of Officers' Alleged Role in Sex Trafficking,” Washington Post, December 27, 2001 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/12/27/un-halted-probe-of-officers-alleged-role-in-sex-trafficking/2e2465f3-32b4-42ff-a8df-7a8108e4b9ee/)

[16] Amnesty International, Kosovo (Serbia & Montenegro) “So does that mean I have rights?” https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/96000/eur700102004en.pdf (May 6, 2004), pg 7

[17] Ian Traynor, “Westerner troops fuelling Kosovo sex trade,” Irish Times, May 7, 2004 (https://www.irishtimes.com/news/westerner-troops-fuelling-kosovo-sex-trade-1.1139448)

[18]Human Rights Watch, Hope Betrayed: Trafficking of Women and Girls to Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina for Forced Prostitution, https://www.hrw.org/report/2002/11/26/hopes-betrayed/trafficking-women-and-girls-post-conflict-bosnia-and-herzegovina (November 26, 2002), pg 46

[19] William Gehrke, “The Mozambique Crisis: A Case for United Nations Military Intervention,” Cornell International Law Journal 24:1 (1991), pg 135

[20] A.B., Fetherson, UN Peacekeepers and Cultures of Violence, Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/un-peacekeepers-and-cultures-violence (May 1995)

[21] United Nations, General Assembly, Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Children, A/51/306, August 26, 1996 (https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/3b00f2d30.pdf), pg 31

[22] Stanley Meisler, “Prostitution Report Accuses U.N. Troops in Mozambique,” Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1994 (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-26-mn-27378-story.html)

[23] Ernst Schade, Report On Experiences With Regards to the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces in Mozambique, November 20, 1995, pg 13

[24] Ibid

[25] Ibid, pg 14

[26] Ibid, pg 17

[27] Ibid, pg 20

[28] Ibid, pg 21

[29] Raf Casert, “In Italy, Belgium and Italy, Somalia peacekeeping scandals growing,” Associated Press, June 24, 1997 (https://apnews.com/deea729ccf6dfe142799ed245261b675)

[30] Ingrid Westendorp, M. W. Wolleswinkel, Ria Wolleswinkel, eds., Violence In The Domestic Sphere (Holmes Beach, FL: Gaunt Inc), 2005, pg 15

[31] Ibid

[32] Ibid

[33] Government of Canada, International Force in East Timor (INTERFET), https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/military-history/history-heritage/past-operations/asia-pacific/toucan.html

[34] Ginny Stein, Allegations against Jordanian peacekeepers, Australian Broadcasting Company, https://www.abc.net.au/am/stories/s317953.htm (June 25, 2001)

[35] Mark Dodd, “Hushed Rape of Timor,” The Weekend Australian, March 26, 2005 (https://web.archive.org/web/20050328014753/https://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12655192%5E2703,00.html)

[36] Nick McKenzie, Claim UN officers customers in East Timor sex slave brothels, Australian Broadcasting Company, https://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2003/s898377.htm (July 9, 2003)

[37] Lindsay Murdoch, “UN acts to stamp out sex abuse by staff in East Timor,” The Age, August 30, 2006 (https://www.theage.com.au/world/un-acts-to-stamp-out-sex-abuse-by-staff-in-east-timor-20060830-ge3114.html)

[38] Sofi Ospina, A Review and Evaluation of Gender-Related Activities of UN Peacekeeping Operations and their Impact on Gender Relations in Timor Leste. PeaceWomen, http://peacewomen.org/sites/default/files/dpko_timorlesteevaluation_2006_0.pdf (July 11, 2006), pg 44

[39] United Nations, Secretary-General’s Bulletin, Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse, ST/SGB/2003/13, October 9, 2003 (https://undocs.org/ST/SGB/2003/13), pg 2

[40] World Peace Foundation, United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone Brief, https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/files/2017/07/Sierra-Leone-brief.pdf

[41] Tim Butcher, “UN troops accused of 'systematic' rape in Sierra Leone,” The Telegraph, January 17, 2003 (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/sierraleone/1419168/UN-troops-accused-of-systematic-rape-in-Sierra-Leone.html)

[42] Human Rights Watch, World Report 2003, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k3/pdf/sierraleone.pdf, pg 70

[43] Global Policy Forum, UN Takes Action Against Peacekeepers’ Misconduct, https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/203/39393.html (March 18, 2002)

[44] United Nations Human Rights Council, Save The Children-United Kingdom, Sexual Violence & Exploitation: The Experience of Refugee Children in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, https://www.unhcr.org/en-au/3c7cf89a4.pdf (February 2002), pg 6

[45] Ibid

[46] Ibid, pg 7

[47] United Nations, General Assembly, Investigation into sexual exploitation of refugees by aid workers in West Africa, A/57/465, October 11, 2002 (https://undocs.org/en/A/57/465), pg 16

[48] Ibid

[49] Human Rights Watch, “We’ll Kill You If You Cry: Sexual Violence in the Sierra Leone Conflict, https://www.hrw.org/report/2003/01/16/well-kill-you-if-you-cry/sexual-violence-sierra-leone-conflict (January 2003), pg 48

[50] Ibid, pg 49

[51] Ibid, pg 4

[52] Michael Fleshman, Tough UN Line on Peacekeeper Abuses, United Nations, https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/april-2005/tough-un-line-peacekeeper-abuses (April 2005)

[53] United Nations, United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, https://peacekeeping.un.org/mission/past/monuc/

[54] Human Rights Watch, The War within the War: Sexual Violence against Women and Girls in Eastern Congo, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/drc/Congo0602.pdf (June 2002), pg 95

[55] Children & Armed Conflict: Impact, Protection, and Rehabilitation Research Project, Abuse by UN Troops In D.R.C. May Go Unpunished, Report Says, http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/childrenandwar/news_abuse_by_un_troops.php (July 12, 2004)

[56] Kate Holt, Sarah Hughes, “Will Congo's women ever have justice?” The Independent, July 12, 2004 (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/will-congos-women-ever-have-justice-46938.html)

[57] Marc Lacey, In Congo War, Even Peacekeepers Add to Horror,” New York Times, December 18, 2004 (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/18/world/africa/in-congo-war-even-peacekeepers-add-to-horror.html)

[58] United Nations, General Assembly, Investigation by the Office of Internal Oversight Services into allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse in the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, A/59/661, January 5, 2005 (https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/SE%20A%2059%20661.pdf), pg 1

[59] Ibid, pg 11

[60] Ibid, pgs 12-13

[61] Susan A. Notar, “Peacekeepers as Perpetrators: Sexual Exploitation and Abuse of Women and Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law 14:2 (2006), pg 420

[62] United Nations News, UN investigates allegations of child prostitution involving peacekeepers in DR Congo, https://news.un.org/en/story/2006/08/189322-un-investigates-allegations-child-prostitution-involving-peacekeepers-dr-congo (August 17, 2006)

[63] Kwame Akonor, UN Peacekeeping in Africa: A Critical Examination and Recommendations for Improvements (New York, NY: Springer, 2017), pg 39

[64] Gautam Datt, “Indian army's shame: Indictment of 4 Indian peacekeepers for 'sexual misconduct' on a UN posting in Congo dents the army's honor,” India Today, November 5, 2012 (https://www.indiatoday.in/india/north/story/indian-army-shamed-action-against-jawan-for-fathering-child-congo-india-today-122447-2012-11-25)

[65] UN News, Sexual abuse allegations decline against UN peacekeepers in DR Congo and Liberia, https://news.un.org/en/story/2011/07/382842-sexual-abuse-allegations-decline-against-un-peacekeepers-dr-congo-and-liberia, July 27, 2011

[66] Gerald Caplan, “Peacekeepers gone wild: How much more abuse will the UN ignore in Congo?” The Globe and Mail, August 3, 2012 (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/peacekeepers-gone-wild-how-much-more-abuse-will-the-un-ignore-in-congo/article4462151/

[67] Matthew Russell Lee, On UN Report of Peacekeeper Rape in Congo, Ladsous' DPKO Says Nothing, Inner City Press, http://www.innercitypress.com/ladsous1congorape080712.html (August 7, 2012)

[68] Ruth Elkins, Francis Elliot, “UN Shame Over Sex Scandal,” The Independent, January 7, 2007 (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/un-shame-over-sex-scandal-431121.html)

Guns Without Political Education is Like a Journey Without Direction

[Brett Carlsen/Getty Images]

By Ahjamu Umi

Originally published at the author’s blog.

Africans (Black people) everywhere are expressing joy and support for the presence of this Not F – - king Around Coalition (NFAC).  If you don’t know, they are the coalition of armed Africans who have gathered hundreds of armed Africans, mostly men identifying folks, to display weapons and demonstrate symbolic resistance against white supremacy.

The idea is understandable. Five hundred plus years of African people being terrorized systemically all over the world would certainly generate a strong desire on behalf of our people to strike out against the terror we experience.  So, the concept is perfectly valid.  The only question/concern is what the proper response actually is to address our oppression?

The answer to that last question can only be answered one of two ways.  Either we desire to engage in performative actions that make us feel better about the oppression we experience every-day.  Or, we want to figure out how to eliminate this suffering once and for all.

The challenge of this internet/social media based reality we live with today is we all function under the illusion that just because all of us have the same accounts, a computer, and an ability to voice a perspective, it has become normalized for people to believe all opinions matter.  Or, just because someone has the ability to express an opinion in a post, meme, video, etc., that constitutes a perspective where its value is gauged not on the quality of the information within it, but the form in which the perspective is presented.  In other words, form always supersedes essence.  If something looks good, it will get more likes and attention than something with much more substance that doesn’t appeal to us the same way.

As a result, most Africans, and most people overall, are choosing symbolic actions that make us feel better over actual work to eliminate the oppression.  The European woman in Portland, Oregon, U.S. stripping naked and standing/sitting in front of terrorist police makes some of us feel better because for that moment, the police left.  Of course, the gestapo terrorists came back with a vengeance the very next night, probably further infuriated that they couldn’t terrorize as they wanted the night before. This reality hasn’t stopped scores of primarily European observers from praising this individual act. This symbolic act, as if it represents some tangible victory.  This is the surreal reality we face when we know not one less African has been brutalized by state-sanctioned terrorists anywhere on earth as a result of that woman showing her genitals to those terrorists.

By the same token, these Africans come out in the thousands with these guns.  There is no clear plan or idea about how the guns will be used.  And, as someone who has lots of experience handling firearms, I was more than a little squeamish watching the video of the action today, about how careless many of the armed participants were in handling their weapons (and that was before there were reports of gunshots at the action).

Still, more than a few Africans and other goodhearted people were jumping to the ceiling at the sight of these armed Africans, as if this symbolic action was going to intimidate one gestapo cop or white supremacist from their plans to terrorize any of us.  In fact, the videos from today’s events show glimpses of the white right militia members of the Three Percenters present at the NFAC action.  I’m speaking as an activist/organizer who has stood up against the Three Percenters on multiple occasions.  If those Africans permitted those clear white supremacists (their name depicts their racist interpretation of the history of how this country was formed) to rub shoulders with them armed, that’s nothing we should feel any comfort and strength from. 

There should be absolutely no question that guns, no matter how many of them, without organized political education guiding the usage and existence of the guns, is never a good formula.  Guns without political education, like the title says; is like a journey that has absolutely no direction.  We like the guns and the imagery because it symbolizes us having the power to defend our lives, but as was demonstrated when the shots rang out earlier today, the police – the same gestapos we are in the streets protesting in the first place – were able to instantly take control of the day, despite the presence of all of those Africans with guns.  If nothing else, that should show you how its performative and not anything designed to build capacity and strength for our liberation because if it was, we could never surrender our authority to the same gestapos who are killing us.

The final conclusion for us has to be that even if we have a militia of 10,000 people, even 50,000, while the overwhelming majority of our people are not even involved in any organization, that represents no real strength for the masses of our people.  Instead, it has the potential to be a detriment to our forward progress.  Our history is full of examples of paramilitary groups with no political education and clearly this has not worked out well for us.  In Azania (South Africa), we had the Inkatha Movement in the 80s which was mobilized by the racist apartheid regime to use its massive military strength to work against the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, the Black Consciousness Movement, the Azanian People’s Organization, and all the anti-apartheid forces operating there.  This was possible because of the lack of political education which caused people who rallied around Inkatha to believe the talking points that the anti-apartheid organizations mentioned were fronts for outside “communist agitators.”  In the same vein, the U.S. government was able to manipulate the lack of political maturity within our Black power organizations to easily facilitate violence between the Black Panther Party and the US Organization in which a number of Panthers, including Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins were killed on the UCLA campus in 1969.  There are volumes written by those who lived through those experiences expressing dismay at the toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and the use of guns without the level of organization to ensure the masses are being organized to confront the state to seize power (the only logical reason weapons should ever exist for us).
​
Until we get people engaged with organizations, the guns are useless.  We realize that Mao Tse Tung said “power grows out of the barrel of the gun” but his statement should be viewed in the context of the mass organization that his Communist Party in China certainly demonstrated. Without the organized masses – which requires people in organizations – we can’t do anything with guns above just attempting theater to make us feel better about the system continuing to dominate our lives.  At least the good news is simple.  Join some organization working for justice and if you don’t see an organization you feel you can join, start one.  And make sure your organization has a strong political education process.  Once those components are in place, you can add community defense projects that help you train with weapons, but all of that work should always be couched in political education.  Once we recognize this, we can really begin getting to work towards liberation.

Systemic Racism and the Prison-Industrial Complex in the 'Land of the Free'

[Image by Keith Negley via NY Times]

By Holly Barrow

Following the tragic murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on 25th May, the world has erupted into protest to demand an end to the vicious racism which continues to infiltrate society. At the forefront of this crucial public discourse on race lies the criminal justice system as it has disproportionately targeted and traumatized BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) communities for decades.

Systemic racism and inequality is intrinsic to law enforcement in the US, with mass incarceration riddled with racial disparities. From the thirteenth amendment loophole to the War on Drugs, Black communities have suffered exponentially under this facade of ‘justice’, with families torn apart as a result. The War on Drugs is in fact one of the plainest and most brazen examples of heavily racialized laws borne out of a desire to incriminate Black communities. When looking at initial federal sentences for crack cocaine offenses, such inequalities within law enforcement become strikingly clear: conviction for crack selling - more heavily sold and used by people of color — resulted in a sentence 100 times more severe than selling the same amount of powder cocaine — more heavily sold and used by white people.

This is no coincidence and just one example of a system patently stacked against low-income, Black communities. We need only look at some key statistics to recognize how deeply this goes: African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested, are more likely to be convicted and are more likely to experience lengthy prison sentences. Beyond this, African American adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated as white adults.

In light of such disproportionate arrest and convictions of Black people in the US, dismantling the current prison system - particularly the prison-industrial complex - is key in the fight against racism. The prison-industrial complex describes the overlapping interests of government and industry; essentially, it refers to the corruption at the heart of the criminal justice system in the use of prisons as a mechanism for profit.

This is a system that abolitionists and activists have been attempting to eradicate for decades as it has become increasingly clear over the years that there is a very real and dangerous incentive to incarcerate human beings. With the rise of for-profit prison systems has come further exploitation of predominantly African-American men and other ethnic minorities. With regards to class, this system additionally hurts low-income citizens at a significantly higher rate, with many recognizing the harrowing reality that, in the US, poverty is often treated as a crime.

Poor and minority defendants are typically unable to access the same level of protection and defense as their wealthier counterparts. Similarly, the state recognizes the likelihood of their inability to afford bail, with over 10 million Americans in prison as they await trial on low-level misdemeanors or violations simply because they cannot afford the bail set for them. This keeps prisons filled; a key proponent of the prison-industrial complex.

With police officers incentivized to make arrests as they are aware that police departments will not be funded adequately if there is no motive to do so, and billion-dollar corporations having stakes in the private prison system - from technology such as tagging to hospitality for inmates - incarceration has become a means to generate wealth and boost local economies. This comes at the expense of the most marginalized groups, namely poor people of color.

Regrettably, this line between ‘justice’, ‘protection’ and corporate interest is becoming comparably distorted across immigration removal centers. And again, it is BIPOC who largely fall victim to this. Detention, surveillance and border wall construction have all become big business, with approximately two-thirds of all detainees being held in for-profit facilities. Tech companies have thrived off of tracking migrants, with software company Palantir holding a $38 million contract with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

To provide further insight into just how money-oriented the detention of predominantly vulnerable individuals - such as asylum seekers - has become, we can observe the distressing rise in shares in the largest prison company in the world. Shares in CoreCivic — which runs both private prison facilities and detention centers — spiralled by 40% when Trump was elected as president. This came following his promises to deport thousands and demonstrates a clear recognition that this would see private, for-profit immigration detention facilities boom.

To deny the concerning correlation between incarceration - both within prisons and detention facilities - and investment suggests willful ignorance. The treatment of prisons and detention facilities as money-making machines is of detriment to democracy and makes a mockery of those who hail America as the ‘land of the free.’

In fighting systemic racism, we cannot neglect to tackle the prison-industrial complex. Its roots and very mechanisms are rooted in the oppression of the most marginalized.

Holly Barrow is a political correspondent for the Immigration Advice Service; an organization of immigration lawyers based in the UK and the US