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leonaesque · 4 years ago

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Poetic Injustice: On Ateneo and Negotiating Complicity

To be a successful comprador is an art. Tony Tan Caktiong knows this. Given the scale at which multinational corporations influence Philippine culture, at this point, who are we to refute it? And how? Profit-seeking forces itself on us; to be recognized. Every mass-produced item of clothing featuring the pattern of an ever-smiling billion-dollar bee is indication enough: Art is execution. In fact, being the recipient of foreign capital requires deliberate hands able to maintain thousands upon thousands of labor-only contractual workers, despite their having worked at the same establishment for years on end. These workers produce what no middleman can. Yet a company will still view being bought-out by an industry giant as the ideal exit strategy. Each moving part makes for one striking image of monopoly– worthy, one might insist, of being featured in a gallery.

Jollibee Foods Corporations (JFC) acquires stakes or ownership of restaurant chains in order to expand, as it has done over the course of many years with local and foreign brands. Their current roster includes Greenwich, Chowking, Red Ribbon, Mang Inasal, Burger King PH, The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, and Panda Express PH. The company also runs businesses internationally, such as Smashburgers in the United States, and Yonghe Dawang or Yonghe King in China.[1] Of course, the face of this massive undertaking remains the once tiny Magnolia-inspired ice cream store, Jollibee, now every business-oriented insect’s wet dream.

Ernesto Tanmiantong, brother and successor of Tony Tan Caktiong as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Jollibee Foods Corporation, is the latest former Chairperson of the Ateneo de Manila University Board of Trustees.[2] One can even find his name, along with his wife’s, gracing a first-floor exhibit hall of the Ateneo Art Gallery, found inside the university’s so-called creative hub, the Arete. In the months before the start of the first semester of S.Y. 2018-2019, Tanmiantong’s adorable, marketing-committee-approved buddy in white gloves and a chef’s hat took a trip to the then-newly inaugurated art gallery for a photo-op. The mascot then posed with several installments and paintings, a couple of which depicted farmers and workers.

According to the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), JFC is one of the most notorious businesses with regards to the perpetuation of the practice of contractualization.[3] Contractual workers are, according to law, not employed by– and, therefore, not the responsibility of– the company they provide labor to. Because of this, these workers do not receive benefits or compensation, are often subject to abusive working conditions, and are vulnerable to the shameless practice of mass termination. No doubt, the Public Relations stunt with the Ateneo Art Gallery was ill-timed; right at the height of protests against the corporation, in the midst of its non-compliance with the DOLE’s order to regularize upwards of 6,000 of its workers– there was Jollibee: tone-deaf and taking pictures to post on his Facebook profile, The Atenean Way.

Ironically, as the statement by Ateneo’s School of Humanities Sanggunian (which condemned the incident) pointed out, perhaps even the person inside that oversized blinking head of the Jollibee mascot was a contractual worker, posing in a space that he might never have been able to enter without the cartoon-bee-mask of his exploitation.[4] Surely, it does not matter whether or not the institutional faux pas was an intentional case of art-washing. At least, it should not. Is there such a thing as art for art for art’s sake?

---

There is this poem entitled “The Doomed” written by Mikael De Lara Co. A friend of mine recommended it to me once after a workshop session because my piece, he said, reminded him of it. I do not think my friend meant to insult me. Unless he did.

“The Doomed” is a poem about writing a poem, wherein the poet-persona is aware that, while he is writing poems about lilies, there is violence somewhere, which he is both physically and socially detached from. This violence is manifest into the shooting of Liberal Party supporter and candidate, Hamira Agcong, in 2010, as well as the infamous Ampatuan Massacre that occurred in 2009, where 58 people were kidnapped and killed.

Where do poems fall under in the realm of social praxis (if at all)? “The Doomed” ends with the lines “I want to find beauty in suffering. / I want to fail.” Yet, the poem’s aestheticization of the murders via tone and imagery is blatant. The declarative rejection of an ideal like beauty or portraying beauty betrays the poet’s pretentiousness in what can only be his underlying conservativity. There is no attempt to avoid it. With lines like “You sit at your desk / to write a poem about lilies and a clip of 9mm’s / is emptied into the chest of a mother…” and “… a backhoe in Ampatuan crushes the spines of 57 / – I am trying to find another word for bodies”, it sounds as though these killings are more poetic material than actual, politically motivated deaths. Tell me, is the reader to blame for reading what is on the page? Mikael De Lara Co fails in failing, making the poem and its project a useless endeavor.

Despite the pointedly crafted grief into the persona’s voice, “The Doomed” does nothing to grieve the circumstances which brings about its dramatic situation. Why are people “doomed”, if not for the bureaucrat capitalists that viciously plot to stay in power? Could the poet not have addressed that, instead of weeping about his writing process? I do not believe that the poem would have failed that, at least, because all language inevitably fails in the face of social reality. That would be lazy, if it were not bullshit.

But I suppose that is why “The Doomed” fails, most of all: The poet believes it is fine to write speeches for a leader who allowed farmers and indigenous people to be harassed, as long as they could be tagged as members of the New People’s Army, the armed faction of the Communist Party of the Philippines. A text speaks, though the words are not on the page. So, the poet dooms.

Mikael De Lara Co has won many awards for his writing and translations, including the prestige-inducing Don Carlos Palanca Award for Literature. He graduated BS Environmental Science from Ateneo de Manila University, where he was once an editor of Heights, the school’s official literary publication. He has been published in many other magazines, literary journals, and the like, where his author’s notes proudly indicate all these accomplishments and more, such as having, himself, worked for the Liberal Party and once been a member of the former President Benigno Aquino III’s staff under the Presidential Communications Operations Office. Ergo, ghostwriter, alongside a number of other Ateneans who were also once part of Heights.

“Noynoy Aquino was a fascist” is a phrase that does not get said often enough. The Aquino administration, with its neoliberal policies the color of dehydrated piss, is credited with the starving thousands of farmers to death. Unsurprising, I suppose, for a family of landlords to inherit a disdain for the very hands that feed them. Corazon Cojuanco Aquino passed the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) during her regime, and her son amended it with an extension and reforms (CARPer), making it even easier for land owners not to have to redistribute their lands at all.

For all its “Kayo ang boss ko” and “Daang Matuwid” pandering, the Aquino administration did not skimp on its counterinsurgency program, Oplan Bayanihan, which heavily drew from the U.S. Counterinsurgency Guide.[5] Here, it was farmers and Lumad, some of the most vulnerable sectors of Philippine society, that were tagged as rebels, terrorists, communists, etc., simply for knowing and standing for their rights, as the government failed to decimate actual armed revolutionaries in the countryside.

The massacre that took place under the Aquino administration occurred in Kidapawan, Cotabato on April 1, 2016. According to reports, among the group of 6,000 protesters that was mainly composed of farmers and activists, 116 were injured, 87 went missing, and 3 were killed.[6] Perhaps the lilies in “The Doomed” were a metaphor for De Lara Co’s beloved Noynoy.

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Speaking of Ateneo: For an institution that makes yearly claims to combat historical revisionism and uphold the memory of the victims of human rights violations under the Martial Law era, this university loves to slurp on major Marcos ass. In 2014, President Fr. Jose Ramon Villarin, SJ drew flack for having rubbed elbows with the iron butterfly herself, Imelda Marcos, at an Ateneo scholars’ benefactors’ event.[7] The mere thought of Imelda posing as a charitable, bloated cockroach in a wig that feasts on all that is lavish and garish, while the university welcomes her to do so is nearly comical. I imagine the blood.

In 2019, a similar incident ensued[8], this time with Imelda’s daughter, Irene, whose art connoisseur lifestyle she lives second-hand. It was during the inauguration of the Arete’s amphitheater, named after Ignacio B. Jimenez, a crony of the corrupt family themselves.[9] Community backlash forced the building’s executive director, Yael Buencamino, to resign and for University President, Fr. Jose Ramon Villarin, SJ to issue a statement in response to the instance.

Yet, despite the triumph of Ateneans in demanding accountability for having the Marcoses at our literal and metaphorical dining table, there are also the Camposes, the Consunjis, the Lorenzos, and other local elite whose hands are stained with generational blood, that have established their presence in the campus with no near hopes of showing them out. Students could also be as loud as they pleased about the violations on workers’, farmers’, and national minorities’ rights that these families are frequently attached to, with only the answer of a warning that school organizations may lose sponsorship opportunities. What else can we expect? Of course, the names that line the halls that one studies in are the limits of academic freedom.

---

A few semesters ago, I wrote a poem to be workshopped by my co-English staffers in Heights as part of our membership retention requirements. It was not a good poem, I know. It was about my experience of integrating with the striking workers of Sumifru, a multinational Japanese company that produces fruit, whose union was called NAMASUFA (Nagkahiusang Mamumuo sa Suyapa Farm). After struggling to get word out of their plight and facing violent dispersals and harassment, 200 workers came all the way from Compostela Valley to Metro Manila via boat and plane, despite the difficulties of travel due to the imposition of Martial Law throughout Mindanao. Their objective was to pressure the DOLE and its Secretary, Silvestre Bello III, into action; that is, to be firm in enforcing Sumifru’s compliance to regularize their workers, which the company refused to do even though the DOLE had legally recognized them as their workers’ employer. The workers set up camp in various places, such as Mendiola, Liwasang Bonifacio, and beside the Commission on Human Rights inside the University of the Philippines Diliman campus, and often welcomed students who came to learn about their cause.

During the workshop, the discussion began with a silence and an awkward laugh. Political realism was how my poem was diagnosed, for obvious reasons. However, the main critique that I remember was that my use of language– the words multinational corporation and bureaucrat capitalists, in particular– did not induce the feeling of the struggle that the workers went through. It was not the language workers used or would use. I refuted this claim, saying I had talked to the workers. That this is exactly what they say. No, it is not poetic. It is real.

I agree, though, with the verdict that my poem was not good, if the basis were form. I agree because I do not think poems need to be good to say what is needed. If the basis were factors other than form, I still do not think the poem is good. I mean, either way, it does not change the fact that, ultimately, I only wrote a poem for a workshop, despite any intention of bringing awareness to NAMASUFA. Is a poem going to save them their jobs? Does that make a difference? Did it make a difference?

The Sumifru workers returned to Mindanao last July, 2019. I have left Heights as well.

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Within the Ateneo campus, a tarpaulin overlooks the red brick road that the entire Loyola Schools population traverses. The sign merits a purposeful, impossible-to-miss position on the old Rizal Library building, immortalizing the critique: “We find the Ateneo today irrelevant to the Philippine situation because it can do no more than to service the power elite.” Nothing could be more fitting, in my opinion. The Ateneo de Manila University’s commitment to performativity deserves to be blasted in our faces, if at least once a day.

This declaration was taken from the “Down from the Hill” manifesto published by The Guidon in November of 1968. The manifesto was written by a group of five students, namely Jose Luis Alcuaz, Gerardo Esguerra, Emmanuel Lacaba, Leonardo Montemayor and Alfredo Salanga, all of whom actively campaigned for an anti-imperialist orientation to nationalism.

I want to talk about Eman Lacaba. Throughout the Marcos regime, he was a student activist– a radical, so to speak, as disapproving administrative bodies might now label him. Presently, he is known for being a poet, revolutionary, guerilla, and a martyr during the Martial Law era. One of his most often discussed poems is “An Open Letter to Filipino Artists”, a piece that finds itself into syllabi like a de-fanged snake. The poem is a detailing of his experience as a cadre of the New People’s Army; the provinces he visits, his process of proletarianizing from a burgis boy to a communist rebel, and so forth. The epigraph of the work, a quote from Ho Chi Minh, affirms his praxis– “A poet must learn how to lead an attack.” The poem is the revolution that Lacaba takes up arms for. I guess now that he is dead, Ateneans can wholeheartedly claim him as one of their own.

After the Martial Law era, Ateneo decided to create a body dedicated to the integration of its students with various disenfranchised sectors of society, as encouragement for their middle to upper-middle class youth to become more socially aware and active. The Office of Social Concern and Involvement (OSCI) is the current iteration of this. Their programs, from first year to fourth, require students to be socially involved enough to pass their Theology units. Commendable, no? Still. You can almost get sanctioned for so much as lighting candles for state-murdered farmers on the sidewalk by the gates outside of campus if it is not an Office of Student Activities-approved event– something I learned the hard way. I was not aware that bureaucracy was a key principle in Catholic Social Teaching.

So, does this mean the opposite of active non-violence is that which is inactively violent? The areas that OSCI allows their students to immerse in are carefully chosen, the interactions are prepared for in advance. In fact, they do not want to use the term “immerse” lest they be misconstrued with the damn leftists that climb mountains and “brainwash” unsuspecting poor people. You know, the ones that dare challenge the status-quo? Ateneo, or at the very least, its administration, will recognize the necessity of political action, but only to a certain extent. Nothing like Eman, the warrior-poet, whose militance is much too red to aestheticize.

The contradiction between what is said (marketed, poeticized, apologized for, etc.) and what is done should be scrutinized, instead of convincing ourselves that our interests are not merely our own. The dominant culture of a society will expose who supports those who hold political and economic power.

[1] Cigaral (List: Brands operated by Jollibee Foods Corp.)

[2] (Leadership)

[3] Patinio (Jollibee tops list of firms engaged in labor-only contracting: DOLE)

[4] SOH Sanggunian (The Statement of the SOH Sanggunian on Jollibee's PR Stunt)

[5] Karapatan (OPLAN BAYANIHAN For Beginners)

[6] Caparas (WITH VIDEOS: 3 dead, 87 missing, 116 hurt as police fire on Cotabato human barricade)

[7] Francisco (Ateneo de Manila 'sorry' over Imelda's visit)

[8] Paris (Irene Marcos was invited to Ateneo, and students are up in arms)

[9] Rappler.com (Ateneo hit for art ampitheater named after Marcos 'dummy')

Works Cited

Caparas, Jeff. “WITH VIDEOS: 3 Dead, 87 Missing, 116 Hurt as Police Fire on Cotabato Human Barricade.” InterAksyon.com, 1 Apr. 2016, web.archive.org/web/20160402013745/interaksyon.com/article/125901/breaking--security-forces-open-fire-on-cotabato-human-barricade.

Cigaral, Ian Nicolas. “List: Brands Operated by Jollibee Foods Corp.” Philstar.com, The Philippine Star, 24 July 2019, www.philstar.com/business/2019/07/24/1937490/list-brands-operated-jollibee-foods-corp.

Francisco, Katerina. “Ateneo De Manila 'Sorry' over Imelda's Visit.” Rappler, 6 July 2014, www.rappler.com/nation/62549-ateneo-manila-imelda-marcos-apology.

Karapatan (Alliance for the Advancement of People’s Rights). OPLAN BAYANIHAN For Beginners, Karapatan, 2011.

“Leadership.” Leadership | Ateneo Global, global.ateneo.edu/about/leadership.

Paris, Janella. “Irene Marcos Was Invited to Ateneo, and Students Are up in Arms.” Rappler, 8 Apr. 2019, www.rappler.com/nation/227702-irene-marcos-invited-to-ateneo-students-protest-april-2019.

Patinio, Ferdinand. “Jollibee Tops List of Firms Engaged in Labor-Only Contracting: DOLE.” Philippine News Agency RSS, Philippine News Agency, 28 May 2018, www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1036679.

Rappler.com. “Ateneo Hit for Art Ampitheater Named after Marcos 'Dummy'.” Rappler, 21 Apr. 2019, www.rappler.com/nation/228633-ateneo-ignacio-gimenez-ampitheater-marcos-dummy.

“SOH Sanggunian.” SOH Sanggunian - The Statement of the SOH Sanggunian on..., 2 July 2018, www.facebook.com/sohsanggu/photos/a.157891440898864/1893103380710986/?type=3.

#mine #nonfic #essay

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workersolidarity · 5 years ago

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[Today's Worker's Unity March: Burning of an effigy of Cop as a Pig in uniform and another police uniform in front of the statue of Andrew Jackson in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana 9/27/19 7pm.]

Tonight I marched for Socialism.

I marched for various Socialist and Social causes more generally including Worker's Rights, police and prison abolition, LGBTQ causes and more. The march was organized by a coalition of groups including the New Orleans Worker's Group, the New Orleans People's Assembly, New Orleans Hospitality Workers, and other local, regional and national groups fighting for Immigrant Rights, disolution of our borders, and the various struggles our Immigrant Community is faced with daily among other things. The march was also dedicated to all the incredibly talented Street Musicians in our beautiful city. Our amazing musicians who represent the purist expression of New Orleans culture. This is a culture so rich and unique that it draws in millions of people and millions in tax revenue to our city every year. Even though these musicians are an integral part of the exotic experience of New Orleans culture, they are still being driven out by the gentrification of our city. The rich Bourgeois scum moving into our city suck up the profits WE earn, then turn around and avoid paying THEIR SHARE in taxes, and then profoundly drive up our rents. To top it off, these Bourgeois scumbags have a habit of calling the fucking pigs on these incredibly talented and hard working musicians (conveniently only the Black ones) who've been in the city long before themselves, and will surely be here long after they're gone. Our March was also in Solidarity with our wonderful New Orleans Hospitality Workers! Women and men who cater seemingly endlessly to the Bourgeoisie and their freeloading grown children day in and day out. Hospitality workers display unparalleled patience in dealing with these rich, drunk assholes, and they do it daily for disgustingly low wages, no health insurance or any other benefits, unreliable hours, and Bosses free to fire workers on a whim. These supercilious fucks treat our hospitality workers like human trash. Our Comrades toil away in horrible conditions, living with constant job insecurity. They invest their blood, sweat and tears into the restaurants, stores and hotels in which they work. Many put up with intolerable practices like illegal wage theft, pervasive sexism, sexual harassment and even sexual assaults that go unreported for fear of losing their jobs. Yet, despite working extra hours without overtime pay (a common practice in the city) and other indecencies, these workers at the end of the day can no longer afford to live in their own city. How fucked up is that?

Tonight we also Marched for and stand in Solidarity with our Comrades in the LGBTQ Community, Comrades who suffer these indecencies often to extremes our straight, cis-gendered Comrades would NEVER tolerate. We love you all. Your battle is our battle. Your blood spilled is our blood spilled. Your struggle is our struggle, and we'll gladly stand by your side, and die by your side fighting the injustices you suffer. Our hearts are with you Comrades. ♥️

Of course we also Marched in Solidarity with our incredibly resilient but ever struggling Black Community. I stand in awe of our Black community that rebuilt after Katrina despite the Local and State Government's sickening efforts to permanently prevent black communities from rebuilding; using the immense power of the State to exclude Black Communities, often using zoning regulations designed to be nearly impossible to comply with in order to exclude Black and Brown people from the years long rebuilding effort. These efforts coincided with the firing of all public school teachers in Orleans Parish, a majority of whom were Black and Unionized. They then proceeded to Privatize the entire public school system in Orleans Parish, leading it to become the first school district in the United States to completely privatize the public school system and turning public education in New Orleans into a grand Neoliberal experiment with Black and Brown children playing the part of lab rat. The effect this all had on teacher's wages has been astounding. Some teachers are now making less than $10.00 an hour to educate the majority black students. Most of the public school teachers who were fired after Hurricane Katrina never got their jobs back, leading to thousands of Black educators forced to choose between early retirement, unemployment, or moving out of the city entirely. The city's newly empowered Charter Schools recruited (mostly white) recent college graduates, many of them without ANY teaching experience at all! Just hundreds of deeply inexperienced, completely unqualified, non-unionized "educators" paid starvation wages.

And then of course there is our Immigrant Community. These Comrades give so much back to the rest of us, words could never do them justice. Our Immigrant Communities that do so much to enrich our culture and add so much to our city that we could never repay them for it in a thousand years. And yet, Louisiana is on the frontline of the race to incarcerate, profit off and deport them back to violence filled, corrupt countries with few, if any, opportunities. Despite the fact that their work, their farms, and even their tax dollars form the backbone of American society, this is how to Bourgeoisie choose to thank their hard work. US Imperialism, regional domination big oil and big ag industries and other forms of profiteering has so decimated the countries from which many immigrants seek to escape, that it has become nearly impossible, and downright dangerous to raise a family in countries like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatamala. The US empire has spent centuries controlling these country's governments for the benefit of the US Bourgeoisie in the name of Capital. Throughout our shared history, the US has been busily overturning those governments we've deemed unsatisfactory to the needs of our mega-corporations, with our CIA sponsoring Right-Wing Military Dictatorships, Fascist Regime's, and death squads. And yet we have the audacity to act surprised when these families seek to escape these auxiliaries for corporate control we call "Independent" governments? They deserve our welcome, our hospitality, and our love. They are our brothers and sisters. They are our working class Comrades.

Maybe one of the most important issues on which to take a stand is that of the history and struggle of indiginous peoples in the Americas. Tonight we proudly march in Solidarity with our indigenous Communities. Indiginous people have endured genocidal slaughter, torture, starvation, and some of the most horrid political, cultural, and educational oppression imaginable. Over the course of centuries of being dominated by the colonization and Imperialism of European Capitalist States, it's unquestionable that the indiginous community lived through the kind of systematic slaughter that only a handful of cultures worldwide have ever experienced. We are not unaware of who's land it is on which we protest tonight. The struggle for indiginous rights, indiginous emancipation, and the continued suffering of indiginous peoples at the hands of their colonizers is a crime of unimaginable proportion that weighs heavily on our minds tonight. Your struggle will no longer be ignored as long as we have air in our lungs to make ourselves heard! We will never forget your struggle. And when the Revolution we seek comes and we can stand together on the piles of Bourgeoisie bones, begins the moment when all the oppressed people of this nation can finally begin the healing process that is so desperately needed. This will be the very moment we begin to dismantle the farce that is the republic of the United States of America. We will dismantle this empire of the rich and our very first governing action will be to return the land stolen so long ago by the Imperial European colonizers to the Indiginous people's it was stolen from. The oppressed will become the oppressor and never again will we allow the interests of a few to dominate the workers of the world again.

That is the future we march for today.

All of these different groups, with different histories, suffering from different forms of the same Capitalist oppression, are all united on this night as ONE Working Class. We are the Proletariat! We clean your toilets, cut your grass, grow your food, make your dinner, take out your trash, fix your cars, play the music you listen to; we are your designated driver, your waitress, your bar tender, your street cleaners; we fix your roofs, educate your children, check you out at the store, deliver your Amazon purchases. WE ARE THE WORKING CLASS AND WE OUTNUMBER THE RULING CLASS 10'000 TO 1. WHEN WE STAND TOGETHER IN SOLIDARITY WITH ALL OUR COMRADES, WE ARE UNSTOPPABLE. WE MUST REJECT THE IDENTITIES GIVEN TO US BY RULING CLASS AND THE BOSSES. WE MUST FIGHT BACK AGAINST ALL FORMS OF OPPRESSION, INCLUDING RACISM, SEXISM, GENDER BIAS, XENOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA AND ALL THE TOOLS THE CAPITALISTS USE TO KEEP US DIVIDED SO WE CAN NEVER BECOME A THREAT TO THEIR PROFITS. WE MUST ORGANIZE, MARCH, DEMONSTRATE, PROTEST, USE CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AND ANYTHING ELSE WE CAN THINK OF TO BREAK THE GRIP OF THE CAPITALISTS AND THEIR STATE APPARATUS. WE MUST SMASH THIS STATE APPARATUS THEY'VE BUILT SOLELY FOR THE PURPOSE OF VIOLENTLY ENFORCING OUR CLASS POSITIONS!!!

The time has come for workers to claim the mantle of those Revolutionaries who came before us, and to destroy the Capitalist system and the ruling class once and for all.

Viva La Revolucion!

Viva La Liberte!

Viva La egalite!

Viva La Socialisme!

Viva La Communiste!

Da zdravstvuyet bol'sheviki!

Solidarity to all my Comrades!

Tonight we march!

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crimethinc · 6 years ago

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We Don’t Forget: Support Joseph Dibee, Environmentalist Accused of Sabotage

After 12 years of fruitless searching, federal agents have captured Joseph Dibee, accused participant in the Earth Liberation Front. Dibee is charged with arson and conspiracy. The following statement from our collective, It’s Going Down, and a network of anti-fascist groups explores why his case matters today.

In the 1990s, environmentalists and animal rights activists engaged in campaigns to put a stop to climate change, animal exploitation, and the destruction of biodiversity. They shut down board meetings, interrupted construction projects, organized demonstrations and sit-ins, held public outreach events at punk shows and vegan potlucks, liberated animals from captivity, and occasionally utilized vandalism, sabotage, and arson against corporations involved in particularly egregious behavior. Across the world, informally organized groups claimed anonymous actions in the names of the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts.

International networks grew out of these movements. Struggles emerged against superhighways, gold mines, luxury ski resorts, old-growth logging, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and animal testing facilities on several continents. For years, corporate profiteers had cause to fear that they would face consequences when they perpetrated ecological harm. At that time, it was still possible to imagine that humanity could avert the catastrophe that is unfolding today in the form of ever-rising temperatures, hurricanes, droughts, forest fires, and mass extinctions.

At the turn of the century, federal authorities counterattacked, launching a campaign of repression to crush the Earth Liberation Front and subdue environmental movements of all kinds. Their goal was to protect business interests at any expense—even if that meant making the world uninhabitable. At the same time, increasing attention on climate change from the likes of Al Gore served to professionalize environmental activism, imposing the logic of the non-profit industry and bribing activists to moderate their tactics and targets in return for salaries. This two-pronged assault set back environmental movements a full generation or more.

The cataclysm that is unfolding today can be laid at the doorstep of the law enforcement agencies that have paved the way for it by making it so difficult for ordinary people to defend themselves against ecological devastation. If we don’t stop them, they will frogmarch us directly into the apocalypse, profiting all the way—and when the last well is poisoned and the last forest burns up, they will be the last to die.

The remains of the Cavel West horse meat packing plant after it burned down in 1997, allegedly with the assistance of Joseph Dibee. The plant never reopened.

The Green Scare

At the end of 2005, the FBI escalated its assault on earth and animal liberation movements with a new wave of indictments. This offensive, dubbed Operation Backfire, was intended to obtain convictions for many of the unsolved Earth Liberation Front arsons of the preceding ten years.

Of those arrested in Operation Backfire, 12 of the accused became federal informants, collaborating with the authorities against their former comrades and the struggle against catastrophic climate change. The collaborators arrested include Stanislas Meyerhoff, Kevin Tubbs, Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, Suzanne Savoie, Kendall Tankersley, Jennifer Kolar, Lacey Phillabaum, Darren Thurston, and, much later, Briana Waters. Daniel McGowan, Jonathan Paul, Nathan Block, Joyanna Zacher, Justin Solondz, and Rebecca Rubin all refused to collaborate. William “Avalon” Rodgers passed away in an apparent suicide following his arrest.

This case took place alongside a variety of similar operations, including the proseuctions of Marius Mason, who is still serving a 22-year sentence for environmental sabotage of a GMO facility, Eric McDavid, who served 9 years of a two-decade sentence before a judge threw out his conviction because the prosecution had withheld thousands of pages of exonerating evidence, and other earth and animal liberation prisoners, including Rod Coronado, Jeff “Free” Luers, and Chrisopher McIntosh. The campaign “Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty” faced multiple waves of repression, including the infamous SHAC 7 case, in which all six of the accused served up to six years in prison for maintaining a website. Other people refused to testify before grand juries, a commonly used tool for repressing autonomous movements, and served time for resisting FBI fishing expeditions against environmental activists.

For many years, federal authorities ranked anarchist environmental activism over white supremacist mass shootings and abortion clinic bombings as the number one domestic threat—even though it involved no injuries to human beings whatsoever. Yet despite all the resources they invested in this witch hunt, it took the FBI decades to capture some of their targets. Operation Backfire target Joseph Dibee remained free until August 9, 2018. As of this writing, one of the accused remains at liberty. Our thoughts are with them, wherever they are.

Operation Backfire Defendant Joseph Dibee Arrested in Joint Cuban-US Operation

At 4:53 pm, on August 9, 2018, Joseph Dibee, 50, was booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center by federal agents. Detained by authorities at an airport in Cuba, he was brought to Oregon via a secretive international policing operation. The next day, Billy J. Williams, US Attorney for Oregon, announced his arrest. Williams received Donald Trump’s support in 2017 and advocates for even more aggressive repression of undocumented immigrants.

Joseph Dibee is accused of participating in environmental direct action in the 1990s with the Earth/Animal Liberation Front. Specifically, he is accused of participating in the sabotage of a horse slaughtering facility that resulted in the permanent closure of the company. His charges include arson, conspiracy to commit arson, and destruction of an energy facility.

He has been wanted by federal authorities for 12 years, during which he is alleged to have traveled in Mexico, El Salvador, Cuba, Lebanon, Syria, and Russia.

Defend Joseph Dibee—Defend Autonomous Movements

Why is the state still persecuting environmentalists nearly twenty years after actions that never injured anyone? Because as the consequences of resource accumulation and ecological collapse intensify, cracking down on resistance is becoming an ever more urgent priority for the authorities. In The Dawn, Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that you can measure the health of a society according to the number of parasites it can tolerate; today, the custodians of order know that they cannot tolerate any resistance whatsoever, on pain of insurrection.

As prisoners across the country prepare for a nationwide strike against forced labor and undignified conditions, the authorities are preemptively cracking down on organizers. Many rebellious black protesters are imprisoned for attempting to engage in proportionate response to racist extrajudicial police murders in Ferguson, Baltimore, Charlotte, Milwaukee, and elsewhere around the US. Indigenous and non-native water protectors faced unprecedented violence from state counterinsurgency forces and private security firms during the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, North Dakota. Over 200 anarchists and other anti-fascists faced eight or more felony charges apiece in one of the largest conspiracy cases in US history on account of participating in protests against the inauguration of President Donald Trump, during which anarchists smashed the windows of corporate storefronts, clashed with police, and burned a limousine. Those charges were finally dropped in July after a year and a half of punitive mass intimidation directed at the arrestees.

The state is pouring all its resources into repression at a time when self-organized revolt and mutual aid are needed more than ever. Fascists and neo-Nazis are targeting hurricane relief organizers while Facebook and Google censor radical content online. Tech giants like Amazon and Palantir are working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to capture undocumented people while landlords and developers collaborate with IBM and finance capitalists to reimagine cities emptied of the working class, transforming vibrant and rebellious communities into enclaves for the wealthy.

Joseph Dibee was arrested with the collaboration of Cuban authorities in a coordination between rival authoritarian powers that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. As climate chaos, popular uprisings, and economic uncertainty continue to shake the globe, we are witnessing unprecedented collaboration between states in policing and extradition. It remains to be seen what this means for other rebels from previous eras—such as Assata Shakur, who has lived in Cuba for many decades despite being at the top of the FBI’s “most wanted” list. What is clear is that all who oppose the coordinated international suppression of resistance must organize now to defend those who are currently being targeted, lest the authorities be emboldened to expand their scope still further.

Imagining a New Horizon of Struggle

The resurgence of street-level fascism in the US on the coattails of the Trump campaign is merely the tip of the iceberg. Worldwide, we have seen a wave of reactionary populism that will continue to circumscribe the popular imagination for a number of years. As sea levels rise and natural disasters continue to displace poor and working class people in Latin America, the Middle East, Indochina, and Oceania, warlords, right-wing gangs, xenophobic governments, and broad sections of the wealthy and ruling classes will collaborate to produce fanatical nationalist and life-denying discourses. Refugees from across the world are already being denied safe passage into the gated communities of the global north.

It is no longer realistic to imagine that climate change and ecological chaos can be prevented. But this only makes it more paramount to defend what wildness remains, impose consequences for the most environmentally destructive activity, and defend those who take risks to make the world hospitable for both human and nonhuman life. If we do not want to spend the next century locked in ethno-nationalist, religious, and racial warfare, we have to foster new struggles against climate change and ecological destruction, we have to build mutual aid networks capable of surviving in disaster zones, and we have to resolutely defend everyone who fights for a world without cages. Free Joseph Dibee.

You can send letters of care and encouragement to Joseph. DO NOT write about his case or reference anything illegal. Write him here:

Joseph Dibee #812133 Multnomah County Detention Center 11540 NE Inverness Drive Portland, Oregon 97220

We don’t forget those who fight.

Further Reading

“Green Scare Defendant Apprehended in Cuba After 12 Years“—statement from Lauren Regan of the Civil Liberties Defense Center

The SHAC Campaign

Green Scared?—A comprehensive overview of the Green Scare and the lessons it holds for today’s activists.

Desert: Reflections on the implications of unstoppable global climate change for ecologist strategy.

We borrowed the header image from Steve Cup, a radical artist based in New York City.

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miaoandthemao · 5 years ago

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I’ve never liked Star Trek’s Prime Directive. Avoid influencing other cultures at all costs? If they have bigotry and slavery, just let it happen, they’ll eventually grow out of it naturally? As a theory to try to stop wars and promote peace it’s not the worst, but you’re allowing slavers and fascists to exist and bring suffering to countless sentient beings. It’s the kind of thinking that makes people accept that the slavery of our own past was simply ‘the way things were back then’. Women weren’t allowed to vote or own property or be anything other than the property of a man, was that just how people thought back then? I’m sure there was one significant portion of the population that did not simply ‘accept’ this reality and wished both privately and publicly for it to change - women. Slaves did not simply ‘accept’ their reality, or else there never would have been any slave revolts. Instead of a policy of non-interference, the Prime Directive should’ve been a policy of educating these garbage alien societies in socialist values that would lead to actually meaningful peace and the betterment of all. What about technology, should technology be shared with less advanced cultures? Once you sufficiently educate them so they won’t use that technology to enslave or oppress each other, then there’s no reason not to teach them how to use your fancy technology. Would it be wrong to teach a primitive tribe that lives in leafy huts how to make concrete and build structures that last a lot longer? First of all, they can still live in leafy huts if they want, but now they have the option to make something else too. Sure, they’ve managed to not go extinct with their stone tools, but would they be better off with motor-driven tractors? Absolutely, they would progress from scarce or merely sufficient resources to an abundance, which they could utilize to free up more minds to make new scientific discoveries that may benefit the whole universe, not to mention to create more unique art.

Is forcing primitive societies to discover technologies and ideas on their own any different from capitalist intellectual property restrictions? I mean yeah, one would feel proud having invented/designed a forge that uses bellows so that now their tribe can smelt iron, but maybe if they had been educated in modern science and technology, they could’ve invented something that no tribe/nation/federation has ever seen before. Rather than a hundred different companies/societies inventing and reinventing the wheel because they couldn’t use wheels invented before them, if they all work together you only need one wheel to be originally invented and then everyone can work together to make a better wheel.

Isn’t this just a form of imperialism? I mean, maybe, in a cultural and/or moral sense you are indeed trying to force your values on others. But do any of you socialists bitterly regret when the Soviet Union crushed Nazi Germany and created the ‘satellite’ state of the GDR (in response to the capitalist west creating the Federal Republic of Germany and filling its leadership with reinstated Nazis)? Should the Soviets have only worried about affairs within its own Russian borders and sought nothing more than brokering peace and trade between other countries? If the Nazis never invaded the USSR, should Stalin have simply demanded ceasefires and acted as an intermediary to let the Nazis and the countries they were invading come to peaceful compromises? Knowing that trade unionists, socialists, blacks, Romani, LGBT, and Jews were being systematically exterminated, should the USSR simply have accepted that the Nazis were not so different from czarist Russians of not even a century before, and therefore would eventually realize that they shouldn’t be so cruel? Should they have simply sent spies into Nazi Germany to observe what was happening, for science? No, the Soviets were absolutely correct to smash those foreign fascists and to promote and defend socialism wherever it could. They didn’t even seek to promote the sort of bleak cultural conformity that capitalist propaganda always claims, each nationality kept their own culture and art, each nationality had its own fair say in the government, however any parts of those cultures that may have involved oppression or cruelty to other humans were relegated to history and replaced with socialist ideals. As a related side note, I also feel all monkey and ape species that are capable of learning sign language should absolutely be taught sign language (and whatever else we can teach them as well, technology, science, socialism, history whatever), as should literally every human in the world. There should be one international sign language, and all of us should be able to have conversations not only with all other humans but also with these hairy friends who for too long have been left either to the wild or trapped in cages. The fact that we try to secretly study them, just the same as the Star Trek’s Federation would create invisible research stations to study primitive societies, when we could instead be out there educating them, it’s garbage. We’re allowing some to exist naturally outside of zoo enslavement, and in most countries we aren’t slaughtering them mercilessly, which could definitely be much much worse, but we could absolutely do better for them.

I understand that there are facts to be discovered by studying primitive societies untouched by our modern technologies and cultures, but are those facts really that useful to anyone? Wouldn’t it be more ethical to educate those societies as equals? I know this may instinctively rub the wrong way with the historical reality of indigenous children being stolen and ‘educated’, but look, imagine if the colonist douches were actually moral humans, maybe even socialists, if they treated the natives as equals and agreed to share the land and resources with the locals, with each side teaching the other skills and technology, would that not have led to an entirely different and better outcome than the misery and genocide that happened thanks to capitalism and white supremacy?

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clubofinfo · 7 years ago

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Expert: The summer of 1919, called “The Red Summer” by James Weldon Johnson, ushered in the greatest period of interracial violence the nation had ever witnessed. During that summer there were twenty-six race riots in such cities as Chicago, Illinois; Washington, D.C.; Elaine, Arkansas; Charleston, South Carolina; Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; and Omaha, Nebraska. More than one hundred Blacks were killed in these riots, and thousands were wounded and left homeless. The seven most serious race riots were those which occurred in Wilmington, N. C. (1898), Atlanta, Ga. (1906), Springfield, Ill. (1908), East St. Louis) Ill. (1917), Chicago, Ill. (1919), Tulsa, Okla. (1921) and Detroit, Mich. (1943). — Robert A. Gibson, The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States,1880-1950 A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct. — California Governor Peter H. Burnett, 1851 At the time, Executive Order 9066 was justified as a “military necessity” to protect against domestic espionage and sabotage. However, it was later documented that “our government had in its possession proof that not one Japanese American, citizen or not, had engaged in espionage, not one had committed any act of sabotage. These Japanese Americans, half of whom were children, were incarcerated for up to 4 years, without due process of law or any factual basis, in bleak, remote camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. — Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps, March 1, 1978 The recent attack in Charlottsville hardly stands out as in any way unique in American history. But there are several very telling aspects to this display of organized white supremacist values. First, how is it the police allowed it to happen? Well, ok, we know the answer. That was rhetorical. The next question would be perhaps the media coverage of this. Third would be the President and his response. In a sense, the media coverage actually encloses the other issues. For the narrative being manufactured by the NY Times and Washington Post and all the rest, CNN and MSNBC is pretty much the same, with only variations that are designed to target specific demographics. The story of U.S. racism and colonial plunder, of a settler mentality and the reality of Manifest Destiny and genocide is simply erased. In its place is the fairy tale of white American goodness that I and millions of others were taught in school. Charlottsville is thus not a result of Trump, of his personality, of his friends such as Steve Bannon. It is part of a deep current in the collective psyche of the U.S. There has never been a time when America was good. There was goodness in America, certainly in culture, in art and even in certain movements for social justice. There was the Wobblies and early socialists and union organizers. But the overriding reality has been one of acute racism, both institutional and individual, and of conquest and since WW2 of a rabid all consuming anti communism and quest for global hegemony. The U.S. was founded on the twin pillars of slave labor and the genocide of six hundred indigenous tribes. It is a settler colonial project that has never wavered in support for the Capitalist system. It was founded by rich white men, and that also has never changed. Blacks can’t run it. Nowhere, and they won’t be able to for a hundred years, and maybe not for a thousand. … Do you know, maybe one black country that’s well run? — Richard Nixon (Whitehouse tapes) I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of 10 are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the 10th. — Theodore Roosevelt I mean one could just go on and on. Woodrow Wilson worked to keep blacks out of Princeton when he was that University’s president. Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Johnson, James Polk — who deserves a special place as the most pro slavery president, perhaps, in U.S. history. In fact, it’s pretty hard to find a president who wasn’t overtly racist. While it may be tempting to dismiss 500 knuckle-dragging racists marching through Charlottesville waving Confederate flags as unrepresentative of a nation that takes pride in values of tolerance and racial equality, it would be wrong. Those who took part in those ugly scenes are the reality rather than the myth of America. They know that the American exceptionalism which Obama, while president, declared he believed in with every fiber of his being, is in truth white exceptionalism – ‘white’ in this context being not only a racial construct but also an ideological construct. — John Wight, “Charlottesville: Outrage, Hypocrisy & Obama’s Betrayal“, Greanville Post, August 16, 2017 But what has struck me is the outcry from the educated white class. Those gatekeepers to media and what passes for culture these days. The outrage is extreme and this has served to amp up the anti Trump sentiments even further than they already were. But none of these people uttered a peep about Obama and his CIA support for radical head chopping takfiri killers in Syria, and not a word when Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland (and John McCain) orchestrated the coup in Ukraine that installed a full-on Nazi Party, complete with swastikas. But then U.S. foreign policy has a long history of support for fascism. In Africa, the U.S. supported war lords and mass killers…as Keith Harmon Snow wrote… The violence wreaked on Congo-Zaire by Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame was exported by perpetrators who first waged genocidal campaigns and coups-d’état that violated the most fundamental international covenants on state sovereignty first in Uganda, then Rwanda, then Zaire (Congo). On 6 April 1994, they assassinated heads of state from Rwanda and Burundi, again the most fundamental and egregious violations of international law. The U.S., U.K., Canada and Israel could not have been happier. These first campaigns of Tutsi-Hima guerrilla warfare set the stage for unprecedented violence as the terror regimes of Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame tortured, slaughtered, raped, disappeared, assassinated, and terrorized millions of innocent non-combatant civilians from Uganda to Rwanda to Burundi to Congo (and in South Sudan). They had the backing of western intelligence and covert operations at the start. Or take Haiti. The U.S. ushered out President Aristide at gunpoint and replaced him with former Ton Ton Macoute fascists. The U.S. removed Zelaya in Honduras (on order from Hillary Clinton) and replaced him with a far right wing fascist. The U.S. supports fascist Leopoldo Lopez and his friends in Venezuela at this very moment. But rarely if ever do I hear a word from those people *outraged* at the tiki torch Blood and Soil pro confederate neo Klansmen in Virginia this week. The U.S. openly supported the fascist loving Croatian secessionists under Franjo Tudjman, an ardent admirer of the fascist state of Croatia in the 1930s under Ante Pavelic, as they dismantled socialist Yugoslavia. The racist murderers in Charlottsville are ideologically the same as countless parties and leaders the U.S. has supported for sixty years. No, for two hundred years and supports today. I read a meme on social media yesterday that described Trump as having disgraced the office of the President. This is from a liberal and a Democrat. Honestly I’m not sure what one would have to do to disgrace that office. Harry Truman ordered the destruction of two Japanese cities with Atomic bombs, the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians, women, children, the elderly…everyone. Disgrace the office? The School of the Americas, now rebranded, taught torture and subjugation to several generations of right wing dictators, and helped train death squads throughout Latin America. I suspect that if Barry Goldwater returned from the dead and ran as a Democrat today he would be hugely successful. There is a certain swooning adoration for rock ribbed conservatives in liberal America. It is the result of an endless inculcating of the idea of money equating with merit. Most Americans have an unconscious knee jerk respect for the wealthy. Listen to how the owners of major sports franchises are talked about…it is always MISTER Bennet, MISTER Dolan, MISTER Snyder, MISTER Kendrick. It is a kind of weird hologram of the plantation system brought to you on network TV. While demanding an Open Door in China, it had insisted (with the Monroe Doctrine and many military interventions) on a Closed Door in Latin America-that is, closed to everyone but the United States. It had engineered a revolution against Colombia and created the “independent” state of Panama in order to build and control the Canal. It sent five thousand marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a revolution, and kept a force there for seven years. It intervened in the Dominican Republic for the fourth time in 1916 and kept troops there for eight years. It intervened for the second time in Haiti in 1915 and kept troops there for nineteen years. Between 1900 and 1933, the United States intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama six times, in Guatemala once, in Honduras seven times. By 1924 the finances of half of the twenty Latin American states were being directed to some extent by the United States. By 1935, over half of U.S. steel and cotton exports were being sold in Latin America. — Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1980, Chapter 16, “A People’s War?” The white liberal today operates from an ideological position of intellectual containment. One might think Hiroshima would be condemned without qualification. This is not the case. The intellectual containment is to partition aspects of history and simply ignore the disturbing parts — things like the reality of slavery, for example. Hollywood goes a long ways in sanitizing the story of the slave trade, and more, of the enduring scars, emotional and psychic, that such barbarism produced. White supremacism is, as John Wight rightly notes, is an ideological construct. So back to Charlottsville. The goofy Hitler haircuts and ridiculous tiki torches (Wal Mart sells them by the by) make for good TV and provide an easy target for hand wringing liberals, but the reality is, of course, that most people have no desire to upset the status-quo. How many white American football fans applaud Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the anthem? According to a Reuters poll 72% of Americans saw Kaepernick as unpatriotic. The overt racism and fascist symbols in Virgina are easy to denounce. They seem almost made for that. And the attendant cries of how empowered the Trump base is seem almost silly (for one thing Trump’s real base is upwardly mobile whites, suburban usually, and nominally educated). The cartoon crackers in Virginia are not a significant force. But they do have symbolic weight. And yes, a woman died. Killed by a former Marine. Quelle surprise says I. The police watched. The U.S. domestic police system was born of militia hunting runaway slaves. It has not traveled a very great ideological distance since. As an internal colony in what some refer to as a prison house of nations that characterizes the U.S. nation state, black communities are separated into enclaves of economic exploitation and social degradation by visible and often invisible social and economic processes. The police have played the role not of protectors of the unrealized human rights of black people but as occupation forces. — Ajamu Baraka, “Philando Castile, Charleena Lyles: The Body Count in the U.S. War against Black People Continues”, Black Agenda Report, June 21, 2017 The U.S. society is one in distress. There is a desperation in the affluent classes that suggests a growing recognition that the system they believe in, that has protected their privilege, is starting to fray at the edges. And maybe worse than fray. A recent study on addiction to smart phones among teenagers links depression and feelings of isolation with smart phone usage. It also has resulted in a generation that goes out less, has less sex, and desires independence less. Teens live at home longer, and wait longer to get their driver’s license. One in four Americans take anti depressants. Jonathan Crary’s excellent book 24/7 dissects the global present in which most Westerners today live. And disruptions of sleep play a prominent role in the infantilization of U.S. culture. Everyone today sleeps less. Six and half hours a night compared to eight hours only a generation ago. In a society that metaphorically sleepwalks when awake, the material reality is that people sleep less. They are more anxious, and more afraid. The anti war movement (of the 60s) had spawned an identification with pacifism and public empathy for the victims of war; but in the 1980s the conditions nurturing these currents had to be eliminated and replaced in all areas with a culture of aggressivity and violence. That millions of supposedly liberal or progressive Americans will not dutifully avow that they ‘support our troops’ while remaining silent about the thousands murdered in imperial wars attests to the success of these counter measures. This marked the conscious ridicule of the sixties counterculture in mass media. It also marked the start of an aggressive re-writing of history, even recent history. Today it is a criminal offense in many places to feed the poor. It is criminal in many places to grow a vegetable garden in your front yard. It is illegal to criticize the Israel, too. Poverty is shameful, and worse. Against this has come an onslaught of demonizing all communist leaders from Castro to Mao. Chavez is routinely called a dictator, a caudillo, a strongman. Never mind this is only more racism, it is also untrue, factually untrue. No matter. It is a society of mass propaganda on all levels. So Charlottsville will distract the educated white populace for a week or so, and Trump will be made fun of and denounced. One wonders who watched his TV show, though. I mean it can’t have been just those guys in Hitler haircuts, right? Now Trump is a vile and dangerous man. Clearly close to illiterate, weak, resentful and insecure. But Trump is only a signifier for a wider problem. And that problem is that the United States has never altered its basic course. It began as a settler colony, one with genocidal tendencies and a thirst for violence. And so it is today. Eight hundred military bases across the planet. And allies like Saudi Arabia, where women are beheaded for being witches. Where confessions are the result of torture. Torture that isn’t even denied. The UN appointed Saudi Arabia as head of their human rights council. You see the problem…its much bigger than Charlottsville. If a society has stopped reading, and cannot sleep, and is the most obese in history, and where fertility rates are in steep decline; well, one suspects this is the dawn of the Empire’s collapse. Ajamu Baraka summarized it best I think. Looking at white supremacy from this wider-angle lens, it is clear that support for the Israeli state, war on North Korea, mass black and brown incarceration, a grotesque military budget, urban gentrification, the subversion of Venezuela, the state war on black and brown people of all genders, and the war on reproductive rights are among the many manifestations of an entrenched right-wing ideology that cannot be conveniently and opportunistically reduced to Trump and the Republicans. George Jackson wrote… The Capitalist class reached its maturity with the close of the 1860-64 civil war. Since that time there have been no serious threats to their power; their excesses have taken on a certain legitimacy through long usage. Prestige bars any serious attack on power. Do people attack a thing they consider with awe, with a sense of its legitimacy? The U.S. military lays waste to parts of every continent on earth, or threatens to. There are U.S. troops killing people in Yemen, in Syria, in Afghanistan. The U.S. threatens small nations without real power. And the leadership today, and not just Trump, is infantile and narcissistic and ill-educated. It is as if the very worst and most stupid people in the country are now running it. But this has been trending this direction for thirty years now. It is not new. It has only gotten much worse, I think. There were mass pro Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden in the 1930s. Americans adore royalty, too. The same Euro royals who have supported and protected fascists for hundreds of years. There is an unmediated worship of power and authority. Nearly anyone in uniform is fawned over. The American bourgeoisie always side with authority. With the status quo. With institutional power. Charlottsville is indeed a symptom, but it is not in any way an aberration. http://clubof.info/

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teachanarchy · 8 years ago

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Truly, there are stains that it is beyond the power of man to wipe out and that can never be fully expiated.

But let us speak about the colonized.

I see clearly what colonization has destroyed: the wonderful Indian civilizations—and neither Deterding nor Royal Dutch nor Standard Oil will ever console me for the Aztecs and the Incas.

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

In the wake of the election of Donald Trump to the south of the colonial border there’s been a blooming of discussion on fascism and the necessity for anti-fascist organizing amongst various left-wing streams of thought (anarchists, marxists, anti-racists etc.). This has only increased in the wake of his inauguration, the subsequent series of worrying (though unsurprising) executive orders that he has issued since taking the office, and the resistance that has flourished against them.

Whether or not Trump himself is a fascist is a question that’s up for debate (many who argue that he is no doubt point to claims by one of his ex-spouses that he sleeps/slept with a volume of Hitler’s speeches next to his bed). It is also arguable that several key political figures within his inner circle, such as Steve Bannon, are para-fascist. Undeniable though is that Trump and his closest advisers are right-wing national-populists, which in the context of north amerikan settler colonialism is, invariably, inseparable from white nationalism.

Likewise, it is undeniable that a number of explicitly white nationalist organizations have been highly motivated and emboldened by Trump and his broad popular support amongst amerikan settlers, across gender and class lines, who perceive amerika as having been betrayed and dirtied by immigrants, “minorities,” queers, feminists and a neoliberal capitalism that has sent industrial jobs overseas. Driven by these broad feelings of white ressentiment, and thirsting for a new frontier, these prophets of naked and proud white power, such as Richard Spencer, rallied to Trump’s campaign, and now presidency. Whether they will continue to stay in Trump’s corner though is yet to be seen.

Additionally, as I write this from kanada it would be foolhardy to believe that this country is hermetically sealed from what has been going on south of the border. Prominent figures in the race to replace Stephen Harper as the leader of the federal Conservative Party have sought to emulate Trump’s rhetoric, and have even openly called for bringing his message here. Do not forget that before Trump’s executive orders baring immigration from seven Muslim majority countries and authorizing the building of a wall on Mexican border, the late Harper administration passed the nakedly Islamophobic Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, as well as the Anti-terrorism Act, 2015 (Bill C-51) and the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act (Bill C-24), two laws which have respectively strengthened the already existing kanadian police state and allowed for the stripping of kanadian citizenship from dual citizens and those with the ability to obtain dual citizenship. None of these are issues that been positively acted upon by the current Liberal Party government of Justin Trudeau.

Most strikingly, and tragically of course, is the recent shooting at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City. This event, which cost six lives, was carried out by a French-speaking settler who openly espoused support for the right-wing national-populism and Islamophobic politics of Trump as well as Marine Le Pen in France. Many fear that acts such as this could be the tip of the iceberg, rather than some sort of isolated long-wolf type incident.

In general, while the emergence of the noth amerikan far-right goes back further than Trump, and was certainly emboldened by the election of Barack Obama as the first non-white person to the office of the president, Trump’s campaign and election has undeniably led to a marked acceleration of the movement. For the time being, naked white nationalists feel that they now have one of their own in the White(st) House, or, at the very least, someone who will led them their ear when they come calling and who’s movement they can springboard off of in order to further build their own.

I also know, and want to recognize, that many people are scared as well of the current situation. As I noted in my commentary on the Trump election, my mother called me at nearly 3 in the morning to tell me that she felt like she was going to throw up in light of. Similarly, my brother, who is generally no liberal, told me that he felt as though he may have to leave his job because of the smothering atmosphere of Trumpian white nationalism in his workplace. Since the election I’ve read what seem like daily updates of the fear, depression and rage felt by many of my fellow Indigenous scholars, and many, many non-scholars, as Trump has re-activated pipeline deals, ordered the construction of a border wall to keep out our Indigenous family from south of the Rio Grande, and hung a painting of perhaps amerika’s most prolific Indian killing president, Andrew Jackson, in the Oval Office. The fear and worry being experienced and expressed by family, friends, colleagues and comrades across Turtle Island is palpable, and it would be cold, as well as disingenuous, for me to not give space and voice to those feelings.

Bracketing off some of these issues though, what I want to do here is to ask a basic question: what is fascism? And, more particular to what I want to say here, what does fascism mean to Indigenous people? Is it even a useful analytic category for us in light of existent settler colonialism? Also, what does anti-fascism mean to us in light of the struggle for decolonization?

Defining Fascism

So what is fascism? Open any left-wing tome and you are bound to come across one of two definitions. The first, and perhaps more common these days, views fascism as some form of particularly virulent authoritarian nationalism. Generally they attach fascism to manifestations of aggressive racism, reactionary and conservative traditionalism, anti-liberalism and anti-communism, as well as expansionist and revanchist approaches to foreign policy as part of a general movement towards the seizure of absolute political power, the elimination of opposition and the creation of a regulated economic structure to transform social relations within a modern, self-determined culture. Other essential features include a political aesthetic of romantic symbolism, mass mobilization, a positive view of violence, and promotion of masculinity, youth and charismatic leadership (Griffin and Feldman, 2004). The general historical examples of fascism, without paying much heed to unevenness between them, are the Italy of Mussolini and his Fascist Party and, of course, the National Socialist movement that seized political control of Germany in the early 1930s. Additionally they may look to Franco’s Spain, the clerical fascism of Romania under the Iron Guard and Ion Antonescu, or the various governments of Hungary in the 1930s and during the second inter-imperialist world war.

To the left of this essentially liberal-historical, though not entirely unhelpful, definition of fascism is that which is taken up by the majority of the revolutionary anti-capitalist movement, primarily by Marxists, though also by class-struggle anarchists as well. This particular definition traces itself back to the Bulgarian communist and General Secretary of the Communist International Georgi Dimitrov. Dimitrov’s famous description of fascism was of it as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital” (1935). While there is more that can be said about this particular formulation of fascism, its pithy nature most certainly does have a certain political appeal to it. However it also clearly lacks the degree of specificity that one might consider necessary to make it actually helpful. Additionally, though this particular definition of fascism in many ways still is the definitive, go-to, definition amongst the revolutionary anti-capitalist movement, it is not the only one.

In particular I’d note Don Hammerquist’s Fascism & Anti-Fascism. In this work Hammerquist, himself an autonomist Marxist, rejects the traditional, primarily Marxist-Leninist, Dimitrov derived view of fascism as simply a tool for big business. Indeed Hammequist states that:

In opposition to this position [NB: the Dimitrov position], I think that fascism has the potential to become a mass movement with a substantial and genuine element of revolutionary anti-capitalism. Nothing but mistakes will result from treating it as “bad” capitalism—as, in the language of the Comintern (2002: 10).

Centrally Hammerquist sees the danger in a new fascism that is more independent than the classical “euro-fascism” of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and, seemingly in contradiction with broad left opinion, more oppositional to capitalism. For Hammerquist fascism is not some blunt instrument to be used used as a prop for industrial capitalism but is, rather, a whole new form of barbarism, one that quite disconcertingly comes with mass support. Perhaps most importantly though Hammerquist emphasizes the degree to which fascism has its own independent political life, and as such, while it can be influenced by the bourgeoisie, it is ultimately indepnendent of it. For him, fascism is a form of populist right revolution (Hammerquist, 2002).

Agreeing with Hammerquist in broad strokes, while also making putting forth criticism and contributions, J. Sakai calls “disastrous” the old “1920s European belief that fascism was just ‘a tool of the ruling class'” (2002: 33). Sakai also emphasizes the class composition of fascist movements, using as his primary case study the German national socialist movement, noting them as primarily formed by men of lower middle class and declassed backgrounds (2002: 34). Sakai has also made interesting contributions to the role of ecological thought, in particular blood & soil doctrine, to fascist, in particular national socialist thought (2007).

However, while Hammerquist and Sakai’s writings on the question of fascism provide a most interesting, and probably fruitful, avenue for discussion, they nevertheless remain a minority view within the left. As such, let us return to Dimitrov’s definition which, as was noted above, remains the most popular by those self-professing credentials as part of the revolutionary anti-capitalist movement. It is here that I wish to direct my own critique of fascist ideology, identity, and the question of resistance.

Firstly, reflecting back on the lack of specificity within Dimitrov’s formulation of fascism, let us note that others have had to delve deeper into the fascist experience to flesh it out further and to attempt to deliver a genuinely helpful analytic. In particular, Third Worldist political economist Zak Cope (2015), in his book Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism, sums up the results of attempting to give more depth to the Dimitrovian analysis of fascism. It is worth quoting him at length:

Fascism is the attempt by the imperialist bourgeoisie to solidify its rule on the basis of popular middle-class support for counter-revolutionary dictatorship. Ideologically fascism is the relative admixture of authoritarianism, racism, militarism and pseudo-socialism necessary to make this bid successful. In the first place, authoritarianism justifies right-wing dictatorship aimed at robbing and repressing any and all actual or potential opponents of imperialist rule. Secondly, racism or extreme national chauvinism provides fascist rule with a pseudo-democratic facade, promising to level all distinctions of rank and class via national aggrandisement. Thirdly, militarism allows the fascist movement both to recruit déclassé ex-military and paramilitary elements to its cause and to prepare the popular conscience for the inevitable aggressive war. Finally, social-fascism offers higher wages and living standards to the national workforce at the expense of foreign and colonised workers. As such, denunciations of “unproductive” and “usurers” capital, of “bourgeois” nations (that is, the dominant imperialist nations) and of the workers’ betrayal by reformist “socialism” are part and parcel of the fascist appeal (294).

As Cope further notes, this summation is not out of line with the pre-Dimitrov (and, also, pre-Hitlerian) discussion of fascism in the Programme of the Communist International, which noted that “[T]he combination of Social Democracy, corruption and active white terror, in conjunction with extreme imperialist aggression in the sphere of foreign politics, are the charecteristic features of Fascism” (1929). However, as with most of the contemporary left, Cope essentially remains within the general contours of Dimitrov’s work, holding fascism to be an “exceptional form of the bourgeois state” (2015: 294).

Beyond the COMINTERN: Colonial Violence Turned Inwards

For the colonized, both inside and outside of north amerika, these formulations of fascism are ultimately insufficient. However, in his own reading of fascism, Cope does open up a window looking onto what I feel is the true heart of fascism. He notes: “Geographically speaking, on its own soil fascism is imperialist repression turned inward” (294). This is an aspect of fascism which I believe is essentially missing from other definitions, from the liberal-historical, from Dimitrov, from Hammequist & Sakai, from both the pithy and the detailed. In essence, following this line of reasoning, we can say that fascism is when the violence that the imperialist nations have visited upon the world over the course of the development of the modern, parasitic capitalist world-system comes back home to visit.

This direct lineal connection from colonial violence to fascism was beautifully, if disturbingly, described by Aimé Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism (1972), saying:

[W]e must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact…each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France and they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery (13).

Regarding the shock of fascism’s recapitulation of colonialist-imperialist violence arriving on the shores of the homeland Césaire adds:

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind-it’s Nazism, it will, pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack (14).

So this brings me back to my secondary question, what does fascism mean to the Indigenous person? To the colonized? In particular, as Cope adds that fascism “whilst on foreign soil” is “imperialist repression employed by comprador autocracies” (2014: 294) or even Hammerquist and Sakai’s discussion of the globalization of fascism (2002; 2002)? But what does it mean when “foreign soil” is its “own soil?” In other words, what, if anything, can fascism mean to those of us trapped within the belly of a violent settler colonial beast?

The Terrain below Fascism

Building on this recognition of fascism as colonial violence turned inwards, we are then immediately confronted with the truth that the terrain for even the possibility of the development of a domestic fascist movement in north amerika is a terrain—in terms of both the literal material meaning of the land, as well as less direct meanings of the psychic, political, social, cultural, ideological and economic fields—is a terrain already soaked in blood. In particular it is a terrain that is already soaked in the blood of Red and Black Peoples.

In the case of the north amerikan settler colony, the sense of exteriority inherent in Césaire’s description of the perfection of what would become fascist oppression within the deployment of colonial violence overseas becomes interior. While for Césaire and Cope the violence of fascism is brought home from the distant colonies of the metropolitan imperialist powers, in the settler colonial context this violence is one that was perfected within the exceptional state of the expansion of the frontier, the clearing and civilizing of Indigenous People to make the land ripe for settlement, and the carceral continuum that has marked Black existence on this land from chattel slavery to the hyperghetto.

Thus, before one can even begin a discussion of fascism (or even capitalism for that matter[i]), and the possibility of its emergence on this land, it is important to recognize that fascism in north amerika can only occur in a context always-already defined by two fundamental axes of violence: indigenous genocide and antiblackness. These two axes, while being somewhat incommensurable with one another, also overlap, and of course also intersect with the general parasitism of the imperialist countries upon the Third World and other colonized peoples worldwide. Broadly we can say though that both the psychic and material life of white north amerikan society is sutured together by anti-indigenous and antiblack solidarity.

Settler Colonialism & Indigenous Genocide

Firstly, north amerika is a settler colonial estate. As noted above, this means that one of the principal features that distinguishes north amerikan settler colonialism (as well as the autralasian and israeli forms) from more traditionally theorized metropolitan, or franchise, colonialism is the fundamental drive towards the elimination of Indigenous peoples (Veracini, 2010). This is what the late theorist of settler colonialism Patrick Wolfe referred to the logic of elimination (2006). Indeed for there to even be a kanada or a united states of amerika Indigenous People must disappear in order for non-Indigenous settlers to claim rightful ownership and title over the continent. Further the logic of elimination exists in a dialectic with an extensive project of settler self-indigenization. While this process is most stark in regions such as Appalachia and Quebec (Pearson, 2013) it is pervasive across the continent and, as Andrea Smith[ii] points out, is one in which “non-Native peoples then become the rightful inheritors of all that was Indigenous—land, resources, indigenous spirituality, or culture” (2012).

Additionally, while much of these processes have taken place juridically, and are daily reinforced within the codes of the civil society of the white settler formation, these processes are, and always have been, drenched in Native blood. To define Native life under the existence of settler colonialism is to see it defined through the multiple, converging “vectors of death” arrayed against us, and our resistance to them (Churchill, 2001). All of these processes can be summed up in what Nicolas Juarez refers to as the grammars of suffering of Red life: clearing and civilization (2014). Additionally, while this violence is structural and ontological, it is also enacted in a quotidian fashion by the settler population itself. As Patrick Wolfe notes, there is, from the Indigenous perspective, a fundamental inability to separate the individual settler from the settler state, with the former being the latter’s principal agent of expansion (2016).

Antiblackness and the Continued Inheritance of Enslaveability

Along with the clearing of the continent of Indigenous Peoples, within the racial discourses of north amerika, as thinkers as diverse as Sora Han (2002), Jared Sexton (2008) and Angela Harris (2000) have noted, blackness is equated with an inherent (and inheritable) status of enslaveability, and is marked for permanent exclusion from the social fold. While, as sociologist Loïc Wacquant has pointed out, the particular manifestations of this process have evolved over time—from chattel slavery, to Jim Crow, to the ghetto to the modern hyperghetto with its accompanying carceral continuum (the ghetto to prison to ghetto circuit)—the underlying logic has remained the same (2010; 2002). Under this regime the Black body itself becomes a site of accumulation, nothing more than property, which can then be subjected to violence. This is what Sexton, Frank B. Wilderson, III (2010) and other related theorists mean when they note that the grammars of suffering for Black life are accumulation and fungibility. The enduring legacy of antiblackness is the direct line from slaveability through lynching, extrajudicial executions of Black men, modern hyperincarceration and the criminalization of Blackness. All of this is enforced is enforced and made allowable by continuous, gratuitous antiblack violence.

What is Fascism then to Red and Black People?

So what then does fascism mean to us, the colonized, the Red and Black Peoples of this land, from whom it was stolen and who were stolen to work it? What does it mean for us if Trump is indeed a fascist? A proto-fascist? A para-fascist? What does it mean to us if he is one of those things, a right-wing national-populist, or something else that facilitates their rise and their existence?

To paraphrase the African People’s Socialist Party (2015) and Jesse Nevel of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (2016), and to ask this question more specifically, what does the potential rise of fascism in north amerika mean to Red and Black peoples who have suffered, and who continue to suffer, the hells of genocide, slavery, land theft, convict leasing, forced marches, Jim Crow, popular lynchings, public police murders, corralling and containment in reservations, ghettos and barrios, mass incarceration numbering in the millions, residential schools, economic quarantine and military occupation of our communities? What does fascist violence mean to us as peoples who already face structural processes that seek to drive us to alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, mental illness and abject poverty, and which, in collusion with the more blatant aspects of our colonial oppression, seek to wipe out Red and Black Bodies? What does fascism violence mean to us when we already live under such states identified by Jodi Byrd (2011) as “unlivable, ungrievable conditions within the state-sponsored economies of slow death and letting die” (38).

Thus it may seem that to equate our current status with fascism is erroneous, if not outright outrageous, given what our people have already experienced, and what we continue to experience on a daily basis. Again, the African People’s Socialist Party (2015) notes “A stand that fears Trump fails to recognize that when Africans in the U.S. were subjected to public, mass lynchings, that terror was carried out by non-fascist “democratic” states and ordinary white citizens.”

However, with that said, we should not ignore the potential for violence in excess of standard settler colonial operating procedure that the modern north amerikan fascist movement holds. This is seen most starkly in the Quebec City mosque shootings. While the suspect, Alexandre Bissonnette, appears to have acted alone, we must not forget that this is a city where the local Soldiers of Odin chapter has stated that is wishes to launch patrols of Islamic neighbourhoods. In general we can say that, as noted by Stephen Pearson (2017), in excess of the right-wing national-populism of Trump and his kanadian interlocutors, these forces, whether they explicitly engage in the kind of German Nazi fetishism associated with such individuals and organizations Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer or the National Socialist Movement, something which many people continue to stereotype as the most publicly visible mark of fascism, they all thirst for a new frontier, for recolonization, for territories, for a white homeland. In other words, they thirst for the fulfilment of the settler dream—which is a project, it is important to note, they think has failed—to be dreamt anew

And this is where we can begin to tease out a distinction between a genuine fascist movement, and the right-wing national-populism of the Trump presidency. While Trump drove home the slogan “make America great again,” it was not fundamentally premised on the idea that the amerikan project had failed. The modern north amerikan fascist movement however embraces a body politic that embodies a love for what amerika “might have been, if only.” In this sense it is a different rhetoric and politic than that of Trump. Indeed, it exceeds the standard settler colonial project of settler self-Indigenization (though, of course, they engage in this as well) by way of a complete embrace of the settler self, including all its horrors. It is a proclamation of reassertion: white power naked and with no smiling lies. It is white power that is not only unashamed, but proud (Pearson, 2017)

Ultimately, however, the issue does fold back in on itself, because the factof the foundational anti-indigenous and antiblack violence of the north amerikan political project is ever present. The basal liberalism of north amerikan political life and civil society has always articulated a war over life and death with two fundamental aims: the elimination of Indigenous peoples and the subjugation and exclusion of Black peoples. In this regard, liberalism and fascism in north amerika are on the same ethical-political continuum, one rooted in settler colonialism and antiblackness. In this regard, from the perspective of the colonized, the distance between a Dimitrovian formulation of fascism as a tool of big business and one rooted in Hammerquist and Sakai that regards it as an altogether different social force begins to lose its importance.

And so here we return again to the question of colonial violence in the politic of fascism, because from the perspective of colonized life, whether the governing political logic of the colonial state is liberal or fascist, the fundamental warfare remains in place. The principal threat then of fascism to colonized peoples is not one that we would move from a state of having not been subjected to violence from every angle to one where we would face that, but rather that the pacing the eliminative and accumulative logics of settler colonialism would be accelerated.

However, this means that in the final analysis the question being posed to Red and Black peoples by our erstwhile white left allies, who right now are sounding the anti-fascist alarm, is an impossible choice between non-fascist, nominally “democratic” colonialism, and fascist colonialism. Not only is this an impossible choice, but it is also, as I have shown, a false one, because what is fascism in the face of gruelling colonial violence without end? At best the choice lies between a slow (“democratic”) and a fast (fascist) colonialism, in which the latter would most certainly acceleration of north amerika’s underlying anti-indigenous and antiblack logics. We cannot choose between “democratic” colonialism and fascist colonialism, because, as regards us, the ultimate question is the same: colonialism.

What is to be Done?

All of that said though, the question remains of how do we fight fascism? For myself the answer is much the same as my answer to what we must do to fight capitalism (2016), and in this regard the answer is simple: anti-fascism without decolonization, genuine decolonization, is meaningless—if you want to fight fascism, you have to decolonize. Again, to quote the African People’s Socialist Party, ” Our liberation—and that’s what we must win—will only come about by an all-out struggle to overturn the colonial relationship we have with white power” (2015).

This is a basic truth that I believe should, indeed must, be grasped by all people claiming revolutionary credentials. We must have the power to decide our own fate, and we must be independent of any need to rely on the white ruling class, the colonialist-capitalist state and its institutions of civil society. Perhaps the most basic way to say this is to say that our goal must be Red and Black Power.

Additionally, as we move towards this goal, we must resist something that has become traditional for the white left when it comes to colonized peoples, which is to attempt to set the agenda for our liberation. A principal effect of this imperialist and opportunist practice on the part of the white left is to disorient our peoples, turn us away from the struggle against the forces and structures of colonialization, and to set as the common programme for all the needs of the colonizer, over and above the needs of the colonized (African People’s Socialist Party, 2015; Ena͞emaehkiw Wākecānāpaew Kesīqnaeh, 2016).

But what does Decolonization look like? What does Red and Black Power look like? The overarching goal of course is, as the African People’s Socialist Party States, “the revolutionary overthrow of U.S. capitalist-colonialism—this includes U.S. capitalist-colonialist democracy or fascism or whatever form the colonial State assumes in imposing its illegitimate rule over our oppressed people” (2015). In particular though the programme of decolonization was broken down into three succinct aspects by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012), outlined below with a few expansions of my own:

The repatriation of land to sovereign Native nations; that is, all of the land, not just symbolically and without compensation for the settler population who stole it and who’s continued occupation has been to ensure that it remains stolen;

The abolition of slavery in its contemporary forms, including the carceral continuum of antiblackness, reparations to Afrikan people for kidnapping and stolen labour and the right to control their own communities free of military occupation;

The dismantling of the imperialist metropole, and an end to the parasitism of the imperialist nations upon the bodies of the colonized peoples of the Third World.

These goals are also summed up in part by Frank B. Wilderson, III who asks, and then answers:

What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Give Turtle Island back to the “Savage.” Give life itself back to the Slave. Two Simple sentences, fourteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled (2010: 2-3)

To put it another way, and to echo the great revolutionary anti-colonial leader of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Amílcar Cabral (1972), while we cannot be sure that the defeat of fascism (or capitalism) alone will be enough to bring about the decolonization of Turtle Island, we can be sure that the defeat of colonialism on this land will be the final defeat of even the possibility of fascism, much less fascism itself.

Finally, all of this applies to white people as well, many of whom I know are worried, as I said before, about the possibile rise of fascism in the united states and kanada. I say to you, my white friends, coworkers and allies, that the best way for you to guarantee the defeat of fascism is to rise with us, in solidarity with us, and united with our goals for decolonization. Join us in fighting against the parasitic relationship all white people have enjoyed at our expense for 600 years. Work in solidarity to Defeat u.s., kanadian and european colonialism–in all corners of the world, from Afrika, to the Caribbean, to Afghanistan, to Palestine, to Syria, to the South China Sea, to so-called “South America” to Turtle Island–and fascism, along with all the other most vile manifestations of capitalism, will surely fall with it.

A better world awaits all of us.

Notes

[i] To be clear, as I have always tried to be on this site, I am not saying that capitalism is not problem. It most certainly is, and I believe for there to ever be any kind of development of real world wide justice then the capitalist world-system must be torn down and replaced. In this regard, despite ideological growth I retain many of my old Marxist principles, commitments and points of analysis.

[ii] While I hear quote Smith, it is not an endorsement of her, especially in light of the question that have arisen in the past few years regarding the veracity of her claims to Indigeneity.

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#fascism #antifa #decolonize #colonialism

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