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Category: Slavery

  • Blood and Iron: Volkswagen and Modern Slavery in Brazil

    On June 14th, prosecutor Rafael Garcia Rodrigues in Brasilia pressed charges against the German car-manufacturing giant Volkswagen for owning a farm filled with slave labor back in the seventies and eighties.

    Law professor and cleric, Father Ricardo Rezende, told Le Monde he spent four decades gathering information on Volkswagen’s complicity in the Brazilian slave trade. The farm named Companhia do Vale do Rio Cristalino allegedly held indebted itinerant workers against their will, without pay, and did not provide adequate accommodation or sanitary facilities. Mr. Garcia Rodrigues is certain Volkswagen “was perfectly aware of the criminal practices underway”.

    These embarrassing accusations emerge less than a decade after the scandal-prone company finally agreed to compensate retired factory workers in São Paulo for handing them over to the secret police under Brazil’s military dictatorship. Another chapter in Volkswagen’s egregious record is about to begin.

    Scholars like Ulrike Lindner, Steven Press, Jan-Georg Deutsch, Andreas Eckert, and Michael Long amply demonstrated that German companies and missionaries have a very long and disturbing history of making use of slave labor.

    In the early 1900s, shortly after waging a genocidal counterinsurgency war against the Herero and Nama peoples in South-West Africa (present-day Namibia), the German Colonial Corporation for Southwest Africa press-ganged Ovambo tribesmen to extract diamonds in the fittingly named “Forbidden Zone”. Hundreds died of exhaustion and disease as a result.

    Similar scenes unfolded in the German Empire’s colonies in Cameroon and Togoland. Professor Philippe Blaise Essomba told journalists that when German soldiers pacified unruly villages or regions, defeated locals ended up in forced labor camps.

    Papa André Pegha Kooh Mbous never forgot the construction process of a German railway line: “Some of us started working as soon as the sun came up…This work was carried out in chains and with lashes so that no one rested…Whenever we went from one place to another, our bodies would convulse under the blows of sticks. Some collapsed and many died. That’s how it was…”

    The German East Africa Company in Tanzania imported 500 Chinese coolies from Singapore in the 1890s to work on major infrastructure projects. Terrible mistreatment at the hands of German foremen convinced many coolies to return home after barely two year’s service.

    Legal scholars Klaus Bachmann and Gerhard Kemp say that at the height of the Maji Maji rebellion in Tanzania, which saw German troops using scorched-earth tactics that killed between 250,000-300,000 indigenous peoples due to starvation or disease, Commander Theodore von Hirsch confessed in his diary that he felt “like a murderer, arsonist, and slave trader”.

    German firms based in the Pacific, such as DHPG (Deutsche Handels und Plantagen Gesellschaft), often “collected” Melanesians from the Solomon Islands or Papua New Guinea and shipped them to coffee, coconut, and pineapple plantations in German Samoa, according to Gerard Hindmarsh.

    Lurking beneath the façade of a fairy tale landscape, to paraphrase author Robert Louis Stevenson, plantation overseers whipped Melanesians and controlled every facet of their lives. A German commissioner casually admitted in his correspondence that Germans preferred imported Melanesians to native Samoans because “they hardly ever complain, even when ill-treated”.

    Colonial cruelties nominally reserved for “lesser races” in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific soon made their way to mainland Europe during World War 2. From June 1940 onwards, Volkswagen conscripted captured Russians, Poles, Scandinavians, and Jews, among many other nationalities, to work as slaves in German factories. Ulrich Herbert estimated that, depending on the week and month, 70% of the company’s workforce was mainly Eastern European.

    Additionally, Volkswagen managers and executives implemented their very own extermination program without any input from Nazi authorities. A company-run nursery in Rühen, according to historian Neal Gabler, sadistically and systematically starved to death hundreds of infants born to Polish and Russian slaves. Nurse Kathe Pisters exclaimed to fellow staff “We will take care that not so many Russian and Polish children will grow up”. The company even made mothers like Anna Snopczyk pay for the burial of her murdered son.

    Volkswagen’s subsidiaries across the globe collaborated, to varying degrees, with unsavoury regimes long after the Nuremberg trials ignored the company’s considerable contribution to the Nazi war machine. Knud Andresen says around fifty West German companies ran manufacturing plants in South Africa and conveniently turned a blind eye to the apartheid state’s heinous crimes until the 1970s. Black labour strikes in Volkswagen of South Africa eventually persuaded the company to press Pretoria for reforms.

    Christopher Kopper’s extensive research proves beyond doubt that Volkswagen do Brasil’s managers welcomed the Brazilian military coup d’état in 1964. The ouster of a left-leaning president marked not a brutal blow to democracy or freedom of speech, but the “restoration of a rational political order”. VW board member Friedrich Schultz-Wenk rejoiced when secret police arrested trade union leaders on factory premises and effectively endorsed a regime that perceived its own citizens as mindless automatons, committed widespread torture, ran hidden concentration camps to repress uncooperative indigenous tribes, and precipitated the environmental destruction of the Amazon.

    However, Volkswagen is not the only multinational corporation with Brazilian blood on its hands. Many other companies handsomely profited from the military regime’s abhorrent conduct towards factory workers and indigenous peoples.

    Journalists like Santiago Navarro emphasize that Mitsubishi, Anderson Clayton, Goodyear, Nestlé, Swift, Ludwig, Mappin, Bordon, Codeara, Camargo Correa, Bradesco, and Bamerindus all made a killing out of the dictatorship’s suppression of labor rights and genocidal occupation of the Amazon—and most so far have escaped the methodical scrutiny and relentless media condemnation Volkswagen has undergone in recent years.

    For posterity’s sake, academics, reporters, and concerned citizens need to pool their resources and expertise to carry out thorough investigations and uncover the true extent of corporate malfeasance under military rule in Brazil.

    Yet it is worth emphasizing that slavery never disappeared in Brazil. The German confectionary giant Haribo allegedly still relies on slave labor to harvest carnauba wax. Westdeutscher Rundfunk released a documentary in 2017 that revealed Brazilian carnauba pickers lived in squalor, slept outside in adverse weather conditions with no access to clean drinking water, and received pay amounting to barely twelve dollars a day.

    Environmentalist Binka Le Breton witnessed firsthand what happens to itinerant and often illiterate laborers the deceitful gatos (contractors) lure into the murky depths of the Amazon with false promises of fortune and glory. An anonymous slave vividly recalled his hellish experience in a far-flung estate: “It was a nightmare. There was one day I was so hungry I ate a dead rat… They thrashed me with a whip; I can still remember the pain of it”.

    Foremen armed with guns forced slaves like Batista to get up before dawn and toil till nightfall. He rarely complained about not getting paid or eating terrible food, when it was available at all, to avoid torture or worse. Beatings and wanton brutality paralyze dissent and prevent slaves from fleeing isolated plantations.

    Unbearable working conditions ensure numerous slaves never return home either. Le Breton says illicit gold mining operations are especially dangerous. Rumors abound about the existence of clandestine cemeteries in Rondônia, where 15-20 labourers perished in a cassiterite mine on a weekly basis in the early nineties.

    Professor Kevin Bales argues that Brazilian authorities have many options to choose from if they truly wish to combat modern slavery. A well-funded national task force spread out across the Amazon’s frontiers can make a real difference on the ground. Federal courts should hand down much quicker and harsher sentences to punish human traffickers and slaveholders. Sweeping legislative reforms must take aim at endemic police corruption as well: it is not uncommon for policemen to warn slaveholders about an impending raid on their property.

    Above all else, anti-slavery bodies like GERTRAF( Executive Group for the Repression of Forced Labour) and the Flying Squads (consisting of labour inspectors and federal policemen) are in dire need of funding. Le Breton found that between 2010 and 2020, the annual budget allotted to eradicating slavery fell from 65 to 25 million real.

    Moreover, the number of federal labour inspectors continues to plummet—not a single one has been hired since 2013. At least 1544 out of 3644 labour inspector positions remain unfilled. Considering the department investigates approximately 20% of suspected slave labour cases at the best of times, and only 45% of those prove the existence of slavery, these staff shortages are a disaster.

    Additionally, powerful agricultural lobbies in the Brazilian Congress block the publication of the “Lista Suja”. This registry of offenders names and shames individuals or businesses guilty of owning slaves and forbids them access to state, federal, or bank funding for two years. Labour inspectors still compile extensive databases despite this obstruction, yet the list is useless if no one can see it.

    Jair Bolsonaro’s administration has done nothing to alleviate these problems. On the contrary, the president believes the sanctity of private property trumps human dignity–  much to the delight of the Parliamentary Agricultural Front (FPA), a lobby whose members rank among Bolsonaro’s staunchest supporters, according to Reuters.

    The president is adamantly opposed to legislation allowing for the confiscation of land where slaves are exploited. In May 2021, Bolsonaro declared his government will not make into law constitutional amendment 81, which states that rural properties hosting forced labour would be expropriated as it poses a serious threat to private property in Brazil, as stated in Globo.

    The Intercept added that Bolsonaro first expressed his disdain for amendment 81 following the trial of Cyro Pires Xavier, a member of the wealthy agribusiness-owning Xavier family in Mato Grosso, who was found guilty of keeping 23 workers (including a pregnant woman) in conditions “analogous to slavery” on a farm. The judge said labourers had no protective gear for handling pesticides, no cleaning products, and not even toilet paper. The pregnant woman had no choice but to defecate in a ditch covered in banana leaves.

    The Xaviers are repeat offenders when it comes to taking advantage of vulnerable labourers and their children. The Public Ministry of Labour in Mato Grosso says that five separate raids saved 324 workers from slavery on Xavier family property over the years. The “Lista Suja” includes the names of patriarch Sebastião Bueno Xavier’s two sons.

    Ultimately, a labour court in October 2018 jointly condemned seven members of the Xavier dynasty to pay six million real in damages, although judges nearly invoked amendment 81 to seize Cyro Pires Xavier’s farm. In a bid to further bolster his burgeoning popularity among rural elites, Bolsonaro, then a presidential candidate, castigated judges rightfully clamping down on slavery for their “judicial activism”.

    Furthermore, iG Brasil reported that on the campaign trail in 2018, Bolsonaro also claimed he would dismantle anti-child labour laws, saying “ The ECA (Brazilian Child and Adolescent Statute) needs to be torn up and thrown down the toilet” for being “ a stimulus for vagrancy and childish trickery”.

    The PT (Workers’ Party) might make a difference in the war on slavery if it returned to power after this year’s presidential elections. The Institute of the Pact for Eradicating Slavery made great strides towards identifying and eliminating slave labour in the value chains of various products and industries under the reigns of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. If elected, the PT could build upon these achievements and finally banish slavery into the past where it belongs.

    The post Blood and Iron: Volkswagen and Modern Slavery in Brazil first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Chains Old And New: A Brief History of the Afro-Colombian Peoples

    June 19th signaled an unprecedented shift in Colombian politics. Gustavo Petro and his left-wing coalition, the Pacto Histórico, defeated the far-right wing multi-millionaire Rodolfo Hernández in the second round of the presidential elections.

    Pedro’s running mate, the environmental activist and human rights lawyer Francia Márquez, is now the first Afro-Colombian woman to ever become Vice-President. This report will therefore contextualize this impressive achievement in the broader history of Colombia’s black minority—a people who endured and continue to endure incalculable misery.

    Frederick Bowser says African slaves with melancholy-scarred faces and bodies riddled with scurvy or broken bones first arrived in Colombia in 1529. Conscripted to work in gold mines, slaves faced the wrath of Spain’s Inquisitorial Tribunals if they displayed the slightest hint of disobedience. Runaway “maroons” fled deep into the jungle or mountains and founded free communities and villages known as palenques.

    Three centuries later, in the early 1810s, Spain’s colonial empire in Latin America began to crumble under the weight of internal pressures (Créole elites seeking self-determination to defend a favorable economic system) and external crises (Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion and occupation of mainland Spain).

    Historian Leonardo Reales writes that Royalist armies, stranded far away from the metropole and desperate to stem the rising tide of revolutionary fervour, saw free and enslaved black populations as expendable cannon fodder. The Spanish Crown offered freedom to slaves in exchange for military service against republican rebels.

    Simón Bolívar, still revered today as a great Liberator for shattering Spanish rule in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, ordered his underlings in 1820 to free thousands of slaves not out of humanitarian concern, but to preempt another Haitian Revolution that would imperil Latin American independence and, above all, endanger white economic interests.

    Moreover, Bolívar assured his nervous comrades that numerous Africans would perish in battle anyway and not live long enough to become threats: “Will it not be useful that they acquire their rights in the battlefield, and their dangerous number shall be decreased through a powerful and legitimate manner?”

    Bolívar’s Gran Colombia, and the Republic of New Granada following the former’s dissolution in 1831, took their time to abolish slavery. Yesenia Barragan says the ubiquity of small-scale slaveholding, combined with the influx of foreign slaveholders into the Chocó region, ensured that wealthy anti-abolitionists postponed full emancipation until 1852.

    The Law of the Free Womb decreed that children born to female slaves after 1821 would be freed at the age of 18 (later extended to 25 in 1842) after a period of temporary bondage, while slaveholders were legally obliged to “tutor” the children until they reached the age of majority.

    Barragan says the law effectively retained traditional slave trading practices at a local level. Non-kin patrons could still purchase and sell Free Womb children separately from their mothers. This compromise satisfied slaveholders convinced that hasty emancipation amounted to releasing “a multitude of furious tigers from their chains…”

    Disappointed slaves, yearning to be repaid for their hefty sacrifices during the Wars of Independence, knew they would likely die before being free. Eduardo Carbó estimated the average life expectancy of men and women in early 19th century Colombia was barely 26.5 years. Grueling working conditions guaranteed an even lower life expectancy for the enslaved.

    In a last ditched effort to prevent the inevitable, anti-abolitionists, invoking the “black menace” boogeyman and the sanctity of private property, rebelled in southern Colombia. The Liberal government under José Hilario López promptly crushed the insurgents, and on the 1st January 1852, slaves finally enjoyed the same rights and duties bestowed upon fellow Colombians at birth.

    This fateful day arrived much too late for the likes of Justo, Magdalena, Alonsa, and countless anonymous slaves savagely whipped, tortured, maimed, crippled, incapacitated, raped, or murdered by their masters. Court proceedings reveal that slaveholders often paid a measly fine for their crimes.

    Yet Nancy Appelbaum says the mere sight of Afro-Colombians free to toil for “the few luxuries their simple natures crave”, to quote an American mining prospector, sent shivers down the spines of Colombian and transnational capitalists itching to exert complete control over pliant work forces. Strict vagrancy laws, constant surveillance, and brutal policemen bound black populations to forced labor in the Pacific lowlands long after slavery ended.

    The specter of the “black menace” never dissipated either. It returned to haunt elites shaken by blatant US meddling in Colombian internal affairs, the independence of Panama in 1903, and the seemingly irreversible social and moral decline of the nation due to industrialization.

    James Henderson argues Colombian physicians, ethnographers, sociologists, scientists, and psychiatrists in the early 20th century, many of whom obsessed with eugenic theories imported from France and Britain, lamented that widespread destitution and disease were symptoms of “racial decay”.

    The scholar and politician López de Mesa, dreading that further “population darkening” would forever banish Colombia from the civilized world, wrote a widely distributed report called The Ethnic Factor in 1927. Therein, he warned government and clerical officials of the grave dangers of miscegenation, especially between black and indigenous citizens: “This mix of impoverished bloods, from inferior cultures, creates subjects…who are subject to nervous disorders, mental disease, madness, epilepsy, and crime”.

    Laureano Gómez, a rabid anti-Semite, borderline fascist sympathizer, and leader of the Conservative Party in the 1930s, dared imply that Afro-Colombians had to disappear if Colombia ever hoped to compete with advanced nations in Latin America or Europe.

    Scholars like Melba Meza, José Lacasta-Zabalza, and Angie Reyes amply demonstrated that Gómez was enamored with the authoritarian and reactionary Catholicism espoused by General Francisco Franco in Spain and António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal. For example, in 1942, Gómez launched an unhinged anti-Freemason, anti-communist, and anti-Jewish  campaign to discredit his liberal opponents. These baseless conspiracy theories bore a disturbing resemblance to the massive disinformation campaigns extreme nationalists unleashed before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

    Furthermore, upon becoming President in 1950 at the height of La Violencia, a civil-war which claimed the lives of approximately 200,000 Colombians over a decade, Gómez planned to implement constitutional reforms that would have granted immense power to the Church and military, curbed press freedoms, and imposed restrictions on electoral suffrage.

    Considering his enthusiasm for Iberian dictatorships and Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish Nuremburg Laws, as Carlos Páramo Bonilla mentioned previously, one can only imagine what ominous solutions Gómez had in mind to get rid of Afro-Colombians: “The black is a plague. In the countries where he has disappeared, as in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, it has been possible to establish an economic and political organization with a strong and stable basis”.

    Nominally “progressive” groups also subscribed to racist beliefs. Jaime Arocha argues that Colombia’s Socialist Revolutionary Party envisioned a nationalist utopia whereby white and indigenous peoples lived in perfect harmony, yet Afro-Colombians were often excluded from these dreams of a brighter future.

    Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the charismatic lawyer, Liberal Party leader, and life-long advocate of the working-classes, was not above embracing or legitimizing repugnant stereotypes as well.

    In an infamous trial, Gaitán defended Jorge Zawadsky, a journalist of Jewish descent who murdered a doctor for having an affair with his wife. With the help of psychiatrist Jiménez López, Gaitán tried to prove that his client’s actions could be explained by examining, in the words of Carlos Páramo Bonilla,“the ancestral pressures of racial temperament”: since his family tree contained “a considerable amount of black blood, of African blood”, Zawadsky, consumed by primordial rage in a momentary lapse of reason, succumbed to the corrupt, primitive, irrational, and violent impulses he inherited from his African ancestors. In other words, the black blood coursing through Zawadsky’s veins compelled him to commit this crime of passion.

    Yet, in 1991, Colombia’s new constitution marked a radical departure from Bogotá’s decades-long indifference, prejudice, or hostility to Afro-Colombian communities along the Pacific coast. Article 55 stressed that as a distinct minority in a multi-ethnic society, Afro-Colombians had the right to preserve their culture and maintain collective ownership of ancestral lands. Two years later, Law 70 intended to broaden Afro-Colombian participation in the political process and even promoted the inclusion of Afro-Colombian history in school curriculums.

    However, this empowering legislation rankled multinational corporations determined to exploit Afro-Colombian territories rich in timber and gold without interference or resistance from black activists. Ulrich Oslender wrote that Bogotá quickly bowed to corporate pressure and abandoned conservation strategies in Pacific regions by the mid-1990s.

    Thereafter, state and paramilitary forces, acting on behalf of insatiable national and transnational companies, evicted Afro-Colombians from their homes and villages with ruthless efficiency. Hit lists in hand, killers systematically cleansed uncooperative locals and brought in laborers to replace them and work for African Palm plantations.

    Human Rights Watch reported in 1996 that the Colombian army, in collaboration with paramilitaries, used the pretext of eliminating leftist guerrillas like the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army) to launch devastating offensives against civilians in the Chocó department.

    An Afro-Colombian community leader vividly remembered the aftermath of air raids in Riosucio: “… they bombed all the surrounding rivers…when someone went down, there was not a single soul along the banks of the Salaquí river.”

    In 2013, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned Colombian authorities for their complicity in the murder of 80 victims and forced displacement of 4,000 people during Operation Génesis in 1997. For Peace Presence added that courts eventually sentenced US-trained General Rito Alejo Del Río to twenty-five years in jail for orchestrating the killing of farmer Marino López. El Espectador reported that paramilitaries barged into López’s home, slit his throat, dismembered his body, and used his head as a football.

    These corporate-backed rampages pushed enraged Afro-Colombians into the arms of violent militias. Daniel Martínez says the Marxist ELN (National Liberation Army) took full advantage of the escalating chaos in Pacific regions to covertly arm and sponsor black “self-defence” regiments like the mysterious Benkos Biohó.

    Benkos Biohó was a West African prince born and raised in present-day Guinea-Bissau. Portuguese colonists had him captured and shipped-off to Colombia as a slave. Undaunted, Biohó amassed many followers, led a slave rebellion, fled to the mountains, founded one of the most resilient “free black” towns in the New World, and waged relentless guerrilla warfare against his former masters.

    Wesley Tomaselli says Spanish Governor Géronimo de Suazo eventually signed a peace treaty with the West African Spartacus, yet his successor broke the agreement, lured Biohó into a trap, and had him executed. Biohó was decapitated and dismembered in the central plaza of Cartagena, then one of the most important slave markets in Spanish America.

    This shameless betrayal and Biohó’s gruesome demise served as warnings to any other African captives tempted to break free from bondage. Over three centuries later, Afro-Colombians keen to protect their autonomy from rapacious corporations and barbaric paramilitaries, like the beheaded farmer Marino López, still suffer a similar fate.

    Yet the Benkos Biohó guerrillas in the nineties never gained the popularity, respect, or notoriety their namesake acquired in the 17th century. Instead of helping to channel endemic discontent among Afro-Colombians into a productive and peaceful mass movement, the Biohós alienated people the EPL (Popular Liberation Army) and other groups indiscriminately attacked by becoming terrorists themselves.

    In August 1994, Biohós ambushed a bus and slaughtered the eighteen soldiers and civilians inside. This disastrous assault tarnished the Biohós reputation among the public, crippled its recruitment drive, and precipitated the militia’s disintegration. Following the death of their leader, the Biohós degenerated into a criminal organisation known for kidnapping people and training child soldiers.

    Moreover, Martínez writes that laws awarding land ownership titles to Afro-Colombians, for territories black and indigenous peoples administered together for centuries, dealt a hammer blow to inter-ethnic solidarity. Land disputes devolved into bloody turf wars as the emergence of indigenous guerrillas tore communities apart. Factions affiliated with the FARC, like the FARIP (Armed Indigenous Forces of the Pacific), contributed to the region’s descent into chaos.

    Francia Márquez ‘s election as Vice-President is a momentous accomplishment worthy of celebration. However, this victory cannot disguise the damning fact that, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, Colombia is home to the world’s third largest internally displaced population. The UN Refugee Agency added that at least 740,000 out of 7.4 million IDPs are Afro-Colombian.

    President Pedro and VP Márquez, if they truly intend to make a definitive break with the past, must devote all their energy and resources to implement the 2016 Peace Agreement, which ended nearly 50 years of war between Bogota and the FARC. Demilitarization on an enormous scale would allow Afro-Colombians to return to their homes. Only then can they start rebuilding the autonomy various regimes so cruelly denied them for so long.

    The post Chains Old And New: A Brief History of the Afro-Colombian Peoples first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Juneteenth Commemorated While Total Freedom For African Americans Remains Elusive

    Juneteenth was designated as a federal holiday during 2021 by the United States administration of President Joe Biden.

    This act of recognition came in the aftermath of an upsurge in mass demonstrations and electoral mobilizations in response to the rash of police and vigilante killings of African Americans during 2020-2021.

    The holiday had been recognized and celebrated within African American communities largely concentrated in Texas and other areas of the South for over a century. After the surrender of the Confederate military forces in early April 1865, the fate of slavery as an economic system was sealed.

    Nonetheless, then President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, with immediate effect beginning January 1, 1863.

    The post Juneteenth Commemorated While Total Freedom For African Americans Remains Elusive appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Nikole Hannah-Jones Calls for Reparations in Speech to UN General Assembly

    In March, the United Nations marked the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times’s groundbreaking 1619 Project, addressed the U.N. General Assembly. As part of our Juneteenth special, we air her full address. “It is time for the nations that engaged in and profited from the transatlantic slave trade to do what is right and what is just. It is time for them to make reparations to the descendants of chattel slavery in the Americas,” Hannah-Jones said. “This is our global truth, a truth we as human beings understand with stark clarity: There can be no atonement if there is no repair.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

    As we continue our Juneteenth special broadcast, we turn now to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist who created The 1619 Project. In March, Nikole Hannah-Jones addressed the United Nations General Assembly as the U.N. marked the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

    NIKOLE HANNAH–JONES: Good morning. It is my deepest honor to speak before you today on this day of international remembrance of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade. I have dedicated my life’s work to excavating the modern legacy of transatlantic slavery, and so my thoughts are never far from what has become the defining subject of my journalism, and what I believe continues to be the defining undercurrent of life in the Americas: the legacy of slavery.

    I stand before you, the great-great-grandchild of enslaved men and women born here in the United States of America, part of the millions who lived and died under the brutal, immoral and inhumane system of chattel slavery that existed for the first 250 years of the land that would come to think of itself as the freest nation in the history of the world.

    We gather here to mark the global trade that took some 15 million beloved human beings across the Atlantic in the hulls of barbaric ships, the largest forced migration in the history of the world, one that would reshape the entire Atlantic world and transform the global economy. We must never forget the scale and the depth of the horrors that people of African descent suffered in the name of profit, profit that enriched the European colonial powers and built the nascent economy of the United States. We must never forget how the systems of slavery collapsed, only to be reborn in other models of violent and racist economic exploitation, such as what we benignly call Jim Crow in the United States, but what is more aptly called apartheid.

    But on this solemn day of remembrance, the looking back cannot be and should not be solely defined by African-descended people’s enslavement. Just as defining, just as important to remembering the legacy of the transatlantic slavery are the stories of Black resistance that would, more than any other force, lead to slavery’s collapse in our hemisphere.

    No people voluntarily submit to their enslavement. And by obscuring the role of Black resistance in our collective rememberings of the transatlantic slave trade, we continue to do the work of those who sought to justify slavery by stripping us of our collective humanity.

    People of African descent resisted their enslavement from the moment of their capture. They resisted on the long walk from the interior of Africa to the coast. They resisted in the castles before being dragged out to the waiting ships. They resisted so frequently on the water that slave ships had to be specially designed to try to prevent mutiny. The ocean became the final resting place of thousands of Africans who resisted by choosing a final swim with the ancestors over enslavement in a strange land.

    As we remember our brutal enslavement by people who believed themselves to be civilized, even as they tortured, abused and murdered other human beings for profit, for sugar for their tea, for molasses for their rum, for cotton to wear and for tobacco to smoke, we must remember most the fierce Black radical tradition of resistance, that did not begin with anti-colonialism efforts on the continent or with civil rights movements in the United States and other places, but with, as the scholar Cedric Robinson argued, the Cimarrones of Mexico, who ran away to Indigenous communities or formed their own fugitive communities known as palenques. We must remember Yanga, who led a community of fugitive Africans and fought the Spaniards so fiercely that they won their status as a free Black settlement.

    We must remember Brazil’s quilombolas, including Palmares, a fugitive Black community that would endure for 90 years in the Portuguese colony, that would import more Africans into slavery than anywhere else in the Atlantic world.

    We must remember the Maroons of British and French Guiana, Cuba and the United States, and the “Bush Negroes” of Suriname, who fought against their oppressors for five decades attempting — as they were attempting to reenslave them.

    We must remember the revolts of enslaved people in Jamaica in 1690, in New York City in 1712, Queen Nanny in 1720, the Stono Rebellion in 1739, and Tacky’s Rebellion in 1760. We must remember the successful uprising of enslaved people — the most successful uprising of enslaved people in the history of the world, the Haitian Revolution, where enslaved people rose up and defeated three mighty colonial empires, becoming the first nation in the Americas to abolish slavery and establishing the world’s first free Black republic — an audacity that the Western world has punished Haiti for ever since.

    We must remember revolts in Barbados in 1816, the Baptist War in Jamaica in 1831 and Nat Turner’s Rebellion that same year in the United States, as Black people attempted to make manifest the words of Patrick Henry, the famed American revolutionary, who proclaimed, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” — even as he enslaved African human beings for profit. We must remember freedom fighters such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass and Gabriel Prosser.

    We must remember that it was not merely the Enlightenment ideas, some reckoning amongst white abolitionists, that brought the end to the system that had enriched colonial powers, but that abolition was propelled by constant revolt that forced colonial powers to realize, as scholar Mary Reckford wrote, it would remain “more expensive and dangerous to maintain the old system than to abolish it.” Black people were actors in their own freedom.

    Obscuring and marginalizing stories of Black resistance serves to justify the hypocrisy of colonial Europe and the United States by insinuating that had slavery been so bad, surely, African peoples would have fought harder against it. These are lies of omission that in the absence of truth warp our collective memory.

    Resistance, therefore, must be central to any remembrances of the transatlantic slave trade, and must, therefore, be connected to the ongoing resistance movements in the fight for Black liberation across the globe.

    I stand here before you today, a recipient of that tradition of resistance.

    My father was born in a little shack in 1945 on a cotton plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi. He was born into a family of sharecroppers, the violently enforced system of labor exploitation that emerged at the end of slavery. He was born into a strictly apartheid state, one where Black people could not vote, could not use the public library, could not attend schools with white children, and were lynched for things such as starting a union, walking into a room where a white woman was alone, failing to get off of the sidewalk fast enough in deference to a white person, or — the greatest crime of all in the American South — having the audacity to be a financially prosperous Black person. In Greenwood in the 1940s, life was so devastating that Black children could be put to the fields as early as the age of 3 to start carrying water to workers. So, when my father was 2 years old, my grandmother, Arlena Paul, a Black woman sharecropper, packed a suitcase and loaded her two young children on a northbound train and escaped the apartheid of the American South.

    My grandmother had a fourth-grade education, and she would spend the rest of her life as a domestic and a janitor. But that single act of resistance, leaving the racial caste system of the American South with nothing but the determination that her own children would not pick cotton like she had, like her parents had, like her enslaved grandparents before her had, set in motion the events that would lead me to stand before this distinguished body today, addressing this most esteemed convening, representing all of the nations of the world. Hers was an act of resistance that mirrored those of millions of enslaved Black people who resisted every day in ways big and small. She, like our ancestors, resisted in order to plant the seed for freedoms and opportunities that she would never see for herself.

    And it is this history, this understanding, that leads me to argue that the defining story of the African diaspora in the Americas is not slavery, but our resistance to it, of people determined to be free in societies that did not believe they had a right to freedom.

    We must acknowledge this history as the legacy of slavery can be seen all around us. Today the descendants of slavery fight to resist their conditions in the societies that once enslaved them. They suffer the highest rates of poverty, the highest rates of incarceration, the highest rates of death and the highest rates of violence. And the tradition of resistance continues in protests against police violence and inequality from Brazil to Cuba to the United States.

    But we, the people of the African diaspora, should not have to find ourselves still resisting. It is long past time for the European colonial powers, for the United States of America to live up to their own professed ideas, to become the great and moral nations that they believe themselves to be. It is not enough to simply regret what was done in the past; they are obligated to repair it.

    As I stand before representatives of the countries that once enslaved African peoples and the peoples who were once enslaved, as we collectively remember this day, the way for me to honor those who toiled and died and fought is to say this clearly and without flinching: It is time for the nations that engaged in and profited from the transatlantic slave trade to do what is right and what is just.

    It is time for them to make reparations to the descendants of chattel slavery in the Americas. This is our global truth, the truth we as human beings understand with stark clarity: There can be no atonement if there’s no repair. It is time — it is long past time — for reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and all the devastation that it has wrought, and all the devastation that it continues to reap.

    I thank you very much for your attention as we all remember this crime against humanity together. Thank you.

    AMY GOODMAN: Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist who created The 1619 Project.

    When we come back, we look at how Harvard University has revealed the school’s extensive ties to slavery. We’ll speak to MIT historian Craig Steven Wilder, author of Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Rwanda refugee policy is like the rendition of slaves in the 1800s | Letters

    Prof Julia O’Connell Davidson likens the government’s plans to deport asylum seekers to the forced returns facilitated by the Fugitive Slave Act in the US. Plus a letter from Mark Stephens

    Priti Patel claims that the policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda is a means to combat criminal gangs involved in people trafficking – a form of modern-day slavery. Yet, unlike African victims of the transatlantic slave trade, the people described as trafficked today actively want to move, and for very good reason.

    A better historical comparison is with people who tried to escape from slavery. Like “fugitive slaves”, they move in search of greater freedom. Through this lens, Patel’s Rwanda policy looks more like the forms of rendition facilitated by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act in the US, whereby those who escaped were more readily returned to the condition they had fled.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Nigeria, Oh, Nigeria, Cry for me, Nigeria!

    So, good friend, Madu, who I met decades ago, at UT-El Paso. He was coming through buildings where part-time English faculty had offices. That big smile, that large voice, and an open hand. He was working the used/discount book gig: going to colleges to get books from faculty and bookstores that might have been extra copies from the respective publishers called review copies.

    So, part-time faculty like myself, in the 1980s, would order tons of these reviewer’s copies of grammar, lit, and survey collections. Then fellows like Madu might come by with hard cold cash to buy them up.

    The old days when students could find alternative prices (lower) than what college bookstores would charge. Madu has that service.

    We talked, and his Nigerian love, his Nigerian spirit, the fact he was in Houston, with a wife and three children, all of that, made the chats open and real. I had just had a baby girl, so we talked about her.

    Then politics, Africa, my own activism around Central America, the US-Mexico border, the environment, twin plants, militarization of campuses and the border, and my own work trying to unionize part-time exploited faculty.

    Global politics. Nigeria, Africa, Diasporas, evil US-backed dictators, colonialism, post-colonialism, the trauma, the long-term biopiracy of Africa, the theft of resources, and alas, imagine, 30 years later, almost, and African countries are in the grips of AFRICOM, the US vassals, the exploiters, the mining, ag, and oil thieves. Until, 2022, many are becoming failed states, famines, the entire world of data mining, Zuckerberg encircling the continent with his Metaverse, and on and on. The story of United Fruit Company, Coca Cola, Monsanto, Big Pharma, Hearts and Minds USA special forces, and proxy wars and Nationa ENdowmenr for Democracy/CIA fomenting hell.

    Oh, this devil USA:

    Phoenix Express 2021, the AFRICOM-sponsored military exercise involving 13 countries in the Mediterranean Sea region, concluded last week. While its stated aim was to combat “irregular migration” and trafficking, the U.S. record in the region indicates more nefarious interests. “AFRICOM military’s exercise: The art of creating new pretexts for propagating U.S. interests” (source)

    Go to MR Online, and then put in AFRICOM. Or, AFRICOM and Nigeria, or pick your country. Mark my words: Everything, I say EVERYTHING, tied to the USA and UK and EU when involving African nations now, well, pure evil:

    This is recent, as in Oct. 2021:

    Please join us for the launch of the international month of action by attending a webinar on October 1st, titled “AFRICOM at 13: Building the Popular Movement for Demilitarization and Anti-Imperialism in Africa.” Speakers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, and the African diaspora will discuss AFRICOM and what we can do to expel imperialist forces from the continent. Following the webinar, events will take place throughout October organized by various organizations on the African continent, in the U.S., and around the world to demand an end to the U.S. and western invasion and occupation of Africa.

    BAP makes the following demands in the U.S. Out of Africa!: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign:

    • The complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Africa,
    • The demilitarization of the African continent,
    • The closure of U.S. bases throughout the world, and
    • That the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) oppose U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and conduct hearings on AFRICOM’s impact on the African continent, with the full participation of members of U.S. and African civil society.

    Written by Tunde Osazua, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Africa Team and the coordinator of the U.S. Out of Africa Network.

    So, I was on Madu’s radio show, and he has run for Senate in Nigeria, and he wants to run for president. However, as he clearly states: “You have to have millions of dollars and militias to buy the votes.”

    This is his organization:

    Here’s a statement from Madu:

    Not rising up by Nigerians from within Nigeria and around the world beyond ethnic, regional, religious and partisan political boundaries to save Nigeria from the hands of her mostly visionless, ignorant, insensitive, inhumane, squandermanic and most painfully, corrupt and morally bankrupt drivers of government at all levels whose actions have significantly weakened her sovereignty and territorial integrity, and made her peoples so poor and vulnerable , is a sin against God and a grave infraction against humanity for which history and unborn generations of Nigerians will judge us all harshly if we fail today to act unconditionally to save the country from an imminent collapse.

    ….Smart Madu Ajaja

    This is a serious and long-term project, the decolonizing of the world, including all those countries’ economies, the land, the people, the cultures and the individuals:

    This Special Issue aims to explore the complex and contested relationship between trauma studies and postcolonial criticism, focusing on the ongoing project to create a decolonized trauma theory that attends to and accounts for the suffering of minority groups and non-Western cultures, broadly defined as cultures beyond Western Europe and North America. The issue builds on the insights of, inter alia, Stef Craps’s book, Postcolonial Witnessing, and responds to his challenge to interrogate and move beyond a Eurocentric trauma paradigm. Authors were invited to submit papers on the theorization and representation of any aspect of postcolonial, non-Western and/or minority cultural trauma with a focus predominately, but not exclusively, on literature. (Source= Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism … 200+ pages!)

    I talked with Madu on his radio show, and below, the show. I do cover a lot of philosophical territory, and alas, this is about Madu and his love of his country and how quickly the country of his birth has spiraled into a country of selling people as slaves, kidnapping people for organs, murder, rape, theft.

    So under the cover of counterterrorism, AFRICOM is beefing up Nigeria’s military to ensure the free flow of oil to the West, and using the country as a proxy against China’s influence on the continent. And that is the issue, too, that Madu is not happy with — his country being exploited by anyone, including China. I explained to him that the USA has the military bases, the guns, and China has the contracts, the builders. In fact, Madu is spiritually exasperated at how his own countrymen turn against their own countrymen, and how there is a overlay of trauma and laziness and desperation and inflicted PTSD, including the post-colonial trauma referenced above.

    USA is like a storm of ticks, locusts, mosquitos, viruses, as the syphilitic notions of Neocon and Neoliberal anti-diplomacy hits country after country like disease. A plague.

    The greatest threat looming over our planet, the hegemonistic pretentions of the American Empire, are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger, and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.

    –Hugo Chavez

    The United States Military is arguably the largest force of ecological devastation the world has ever known.

    –Xoài Pham

    Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill it or betray it.

    –Frantz Fanon (source)

    William Blum wrote about the illegality of the USA’s direct and indirect bombing and invasions.

    Here, a bit of an update:

    The Death Toll of U.S. Imperialism Since World War 2

    A critical disclaimer: Figures relating to the death toll of U.S. Imperialism are often grossly underestimated due to the U.S. government’s lack of transparency and often purposeful coverup and miscounts of death tolls. In some cases, this can lead to ranges of figures that include millions of human lives–as in the figure for Indonesia below with estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people. We have tried to provide the upward ranges in these cases since we suspect the upward ranges to be more accurate if not still significantly underestimated. These figures were obtained from multiple sources including but not limited to indigenous scholar Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology as well as Countercurrents’ article Deaths in Other Nations Since WWII Due to U.S. Interventions (please note that use of Countercurrents’ statistics isn’t an endorsement of the site’s politics).

    • Afghanistan: at least 176,000 people
    • Bosnia: 20,000 to 30,000 people
    • Bosnia and Krajina: 250,000 people
    • Cambodia: 2-3 million people
    • Chad: 40,000 people and as many as 200,000 tortured
    • Chile: 10,000 people (the U.S. sponsored Pinochet coup in Chile)
    • Colombia: 60,000 people
    • Congo: 10 million people (Belgian imperialism supported by U.S. corporations and the U.S. sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba)
    • Croatia: 15,000 people
    • Cuba: 1,800 people
    • Dominican Republic: at least 3,000 people
    • East Timor: 200,000 people
    • El Salvador: More than 75,000 people (U.S. support of the Salvadoran oligarchy and death squads)
    • Greece: More than 50,000 people
    • Grenada: 277 people
    • Guatemala: 140,000 to 200,000 people killed or forcefully disappeared (U.S. support of the Guatemalan junta)
    • Haiti: 100,000 people
    • Honduras: hundreds of people (CIA supported Battalion kidnapped, tortured and killed at least 316 people)
    • Indonesia: Estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people
    • Iran: 262,000 people
    • Iraq: 2.4 million people in Iraq war, 576, 000 Iraqi children by U.S. sanctions, and over 100,000 people in Gulf War
    • Japan: 2.6-3.1 million people
    • Korea: 5 million people
    • Kosovo: 500 to 5,000
    • Laos: 50,000 people
    • Libya: at least 2500 people
    • Nicaragua: at least 30,000 people (U.S. backed Contras’ destabilization of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua)
    • Operation Condor: at least 10,000 people (By governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. U.S. govt/CIA coordinated training on torture, technical support, and supplied military aid to the Juntas)
    • Pakistan: at least 1.5 million people
    • Palestine: estimated more than 200,000 people killed by military but this does not include death from blockade/siege/settler violence
    • Panama: between 500 and 4000 people
    • Philippines: over 100,000 people executed or disappeared
    • Puerto Rico: 4,645-8,000 people
    • Somalia: at least 2,000 people
    • Sudan: 2 million people
    • Syria: at least 350,000 people
    • Vietnam: 3 million people
    • Yemen: over 377,000 people
    • Yugoslavia: 107,000 people (Source: The Mapping Project is a multi-generational collective of activists and organizers in the Boston area who are deeply engaged in Palestine solidarity / BDS work. For over a year, we’ve been tracing Greater Boston’s networks of support for the colonization of Palestine–and how these networks participate in other forms of oppression, from policing to U.S. imperialism to medical apartheid and privatization.)

    Madu and most activist Nigerians know these facts. Big global facts. The vices the United States of America has put the world in. The dirty Empire. The global cop. And, so, Nigerians in the USA number around two million, with a few hundred thousand. Now, of course, off camera, I repeated to Madu that most Americans, oh, 90 percent of the 355 million currently residing (most illegally) here do not care about Black, Africans, Chinese, and again one American is worth a million Nigerians. It is a juggling act, being part of the Diapora, and Madu is a nurse, and he like I said ran for Senate, and lost, and he has been inspired by some youth, but again, youth are being colonized by the ticks of data. Read below the YouTube window.

    So, Alison McDowell at Wrench in the Gears, and then Silicon Icarus and others are talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the next colonialization of Africa. Coltan and gold may be like gold to the Wall Streeters and Transnationalists, and water and food and good land may be like platinum to the same group of thieves, but data is worth its gigbytes/terrabytes in emeralds. “French Imperialism vs. Crypto Colonialism: The Central African Republic Experiment” and “Blockchain Technology & Coercive Surveillance of the Global South” both by Sebs Solomon

    So, Madu, and great honorable youth in Nigeria who want to have a free, open, clean, sustainable, cultural-centric, food security, self-imposing, country of healthy bodies, minds and ecosystems, I am sorry to report the devils wear skinny jeans, and many come to the USA from India with work permits to work and live in Seattle/Redmond to work for Microsoft/Google/Facebook and all the other devils helping put these systems in place:

    At the same time, SingularityNET partnered with UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education (IBE) to establish a new curriculum for children and teens, with an emphasis on emerging technology to prepare the youth for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to UNICEF:

    There will never be enough money allocated in the budget, qualified teachers, or places in schools for the population we have; therefore, emerging technologies like Virtual Reality allow us to leapfrog these problems and offer the hope of more affordable, scalable and better quality education.

    It is striking to read that UNICEF doesn’t believe there will ever be enough money to help all of the children in the world receive a traditional, classroom, education; therefore, it’s better to invest and scale Virtual Reality education — a rather pessimistic take from the “children’s fund” arm of the UN. UNICEF Innovation Fund, has virtual reality education programs in Chile, India, Nigeria, and Ghana. In Ghana, they noted there are “challenges to accessing the necessary teaching and learning resources for students to receive quality education; which is compounded by the lack of necessary and up-to-date education materials, huge class sizes and the lack of necessary infrastructural facilities.” (source)

    How many more battlefields shall honorable people like Madu enter into with no money, no militias and the kings of capital weilding more powerful digital bombs than hydrogen bombs?

    For a rabbit hole or warren, go to: Silicon Icarus and see Alison McDowell’s work on the following: Alison McDowell. Or over at her blog: Wrench in the Gears. She’s expending lifetime hours looking into this evil web of Davos, WEF, the billionaires’ club, the taking over of humanity through transhumanism, blockchain, Singularity, and all the other topics the mainstream and leftstream media and blogs just won’t tackle.

    • Blockchain
    • Gamification
    • Genomics
    • Impact Finance
    • Smart Cities
    • Biosecurity State

    This is what the Fourth Industrialization devils want for all children on earth (minus their kids and their sychophants’ kids). Soylent Green be damned!

    The post Nigeria, Oh, Nigeria, Cry for me, Nigeria! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Landmark California Task Force Calls For ‘Comprehensive Reparations’

    California is the first state in the U.S. to establish a reparations task force for Black Americans. On June 1, the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans issued a 500-page document that traces the history of white supremacy from slavery to Jim Crow through the present. It calls for “comprehensive reparations” for Black people harmed by a historical system of state-sanctioned oppression.

    “Segregation, racial terror, harmful racist neglect, and other atrocities in nearly every sector of civil society have inflicted harms, which cascade over a lifetime and compound over generations,” the report says.

    “The California Reparations Commission’s first report is historic,” Chris Lodgson, Lead Organizer with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, told Truthout.

    The post Landmark California Task Force Calls For ‘Comprehensive Reparations’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Landmark California Task Force Calls for “Comprehensive Reparations” for Slavery

    California is the first state in the U.S. to establish a reparations task force for Black Americans. On June 1, the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans issued a 500-page document that traces the history of white supremacy from slavery to Jim Crow through the present. It calls for “comprehensive reparations” for Black people harmed by a historical system of state-sanctioned oppression.

    “Segregation, racial terror, harmful racist neglect, and other atrocities in nearly every sector of civil society have inflicted harms, which cascade over a lifetime and compound over generations,” the report says.

    “The California Reparations Commission’s first report is historic,” Chris Lodgson, Lead Organizer with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, told Truthout. “It details the atrocities and human rights violations committed against African American Freedmen in California.”

    This report does not include detailed proposals for reparations. It “lays the foundation for the Commission’s work over the next year, which is developing the Reparations Plan, including direct financial compensation, land, and more,” Lodgson said.

    From 1619 to 1865, slavery was sanctioned by the U.S. Constitution and statutory laws. More than 4,000,000 Africans and their descendants were enslaved in the United States, deprived of their life, liberty, citizenship, economic opportunity and cultural heritage. After the abolition of slavery, federal, state and local governmental entities continued to condone, perpetuate and profit from white supremacy. As a result, African Americans today suffer from economic, health and educational inequality.

    On September 30, 2020, the California legislature enacted AB 3121, which established the Task Force and charged it with conducting an “inquiry into the ongoing effects of the institution of slavery and its legacy of persistent systemic structures of discrimination on living African Americans and society in the United States.”

    AB 3121 mandates that the Task Force recommend appropriate remedies, including compensation, rehabilitation and restitution for African Americans, particularly descendants of people who were enslaved in the United States. The bill requires that the Task Force address how its recommendations “comport with international standards” provided by “various international protocols, laws, and findings.”

    Key Findings

    “From colonial times forward, governments at all levels adopted and enshrined white supremacy beliefs and passed laws in order to maintain slavery, a system of dehumanization and exploitation that stole the life, labor, liberty, and intellect of people of African descent,” the report finds.

    Indeed, 160 years after slavery was abolished, “its badges and incidents remain embedded in the political, legal, health, financial, educational, cultural, environmental, social, and economic systems of the United States of America.” The Task Force cites “[r]acist, false, and harmful stereotypes” that continue to plague African Americans today.

    Slave Codes “reborn as the Black Codes, and then as the Jim Crow laws” segregated Blacks and whites “in every aspect of life.” They were emblematic of “a national desire to reinforce a racial hierarchy based in white supremacy.”

    In 1852, California enacted a fugitive slave law that was crueler than the federal fugitive slave law “and this made California a more proslavery state than most other free states,” according to the report.

    Racial terror which “pervaded every aspect of post-slavery Black life” precluded African Americans from earning wealth and political influence equal to that of white Americans. Lynchings in the South weren’t just isolated hate crimes, but rather “part of a systematic campaign of terror to enforce the racial hierarchy.”

    “Today, police violence against and extrajudicial killings of African Americans occur in California in the same manner as they do in the rest of the country,” the report notes.

    The Task Force report documents the political disenfranchisement of African Americans, stating that California’s voter suppression laws provided a model for those in the South. It also discusses housing segregation through redlining, zoning ordinances and California’s “sundown towns,” which required that African Americans leave by dusk or face violence.

    In addition, the report highlights separate and unequal education. Whereas slave states denied nearly all enslaved people an education, the North and Midwest segregated their schools, limiting or denying access to freed African Americans.

    Brown v. Board of Education held in 1954 that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, Congress and the courts erected barriers to integration of schools. California is the sixth most segregated state in the country for African American students.

    The report also details racism in the environment and infrastructure. Residential segregation has led to poor-quality housing for African Americans, “exposing them to disproportionate amounts of lead poisoning and increasing risk of infectious disease.” California follows the national pattern, where Black people are more likely than white people to live in overcrowded housing and near hazardous waste sites. Redlining, racially restrictive covenants and racial violence led to the exclusion of Black Californians from access to clean water in the agriculturally rich San Joaquin Valley.

    Another consequence of racist government policies and practices is the pathologizing of the Black family. As of 2019, while Black children comprised only 14 percent of American children, 23 percent of them were in foster care. This is not because Black parents mistreat their children more often than whites, but is rather a result of racist systems and poverty. The disparities in foster care are even higher in California than the national average.

    The report cites control over creative cultural and intellectual life, where federal and state governments failed to protect Black artists from discrimination. They have allowed whites “to steal Black art and culture with impunity” and deprived Black creators of valuable patent and copyright protections. California has criminalized African American rap artists and allowed rap lyrics to be introduced as evidence in cases involving “street gang activity.”

    Employment discrimination against African Americans did not decrease from 1989 to 2014, according to one meta-study cited in the report. Today, California’s two primary industries — Hollywood and Silicon Valley — employ disproportionately fewer Black people.

    The report also documents the inequities in the legal system, citing the “tough on crime” and War on Drugs era, when politicians criminalized African Americans in order to win elections. That criminalization is “an enduring badge of slavery” and has led to over-policing of Black neighborhoods, the school-to-prison pipeline and mass incarceration of African Americans. “Like the rest of the country, California stops, shoots, kills, and imprisons more African Americans than their share of the population,” the report says.

    Mental and physical harm and neglect are also highlighted in the report. It states that “race-related stress may have a greater impact on health among African Americans than diet, exercise, smoking, or low socioeconomic status.” Black Californians are more likely to get diabetes, be hospitalized for heart disease, die from cancer, and suffer from psychological distress, depression, suicide ideation and other mental health afflictions than white Californians.

    Finally, the report describes the wealth gap between Black and white Americans, both nationally and in California. It details the history of exclusion of African Americans from Social Security and the G.I. bill and discrimination in the federal tax structure.

    Preliminary Recommendations

    The report sets forth recommendations for future deliberation by the Task Force. The recommendations include deleting language in the California Constitution that allows involuntary servitude as punishment for crime; enactment of legislation prioritizing education, substance use and mental health treatment and rehabilitative programs for incarcerated people; compensation for work performed while in prison; and prisoners’ right to vote.

    Additional recommendations involve making it easier to hold law enforcement officers, including correctional officers, accountable for unlawful harassment and violence; governmental acknowledgement and apology for political disenfranchisement; legislation to prevent redistricting that dilutes the voting power of Black Californians; elimination of anti-Black housing discrimination policies; and low interest rates for qualified Black mortgage applicants in California.

    Other recommendations include elimination of racial bias in standardized testing; free tuition to California colleges and universities; college scholarships for Black high school graduates; and requiring that curricula be inclusive and free of bias.

    The report advocates a “K-12 Black Studies curriculum that introduces students to concepts of race and racial identity; accurately depicts historic racial inequities and systemic racism; honors Black lives, fully represents contributions of Black people in society, and advances the ideology of Black liberation.”

    In order to address the racial injustice in the criminal legal system, the Task Force recommends the elimination of “discriminatory policing and particularly killings, use of force, and racial profiling of African Americans.” In addition, it recommends eliminating racial disparities in police stops and criminal sentencing, the over-policing of predominantly Black communities, and the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans, as well as addressing implicit and explicit bias in the criminal legal system.

    The report includes recommendations for compensation of “individuals whose mental and physical health has been permanently damaged by anti-Black healthcare system,” including forced sterilization, medical experimentation, police violence, racist sentencing disparities, environmental racism, and psychological damage from race-related stress.

    Finally, the Task Force recommends the implementation of “a detailed program of reparations for African Americans.”

    Comprehensive Reparations Plan to Be Issued Next Year

    In March, the Task Force voted to limit reparations to descendants of African Americans living in the United States in the 19th century. There is a split in the Task Force about whether to include direct cash payments.

    If the call for reparations for African Americans is ultimately successful, it will be unprecedented. As Nikole Hannah-Jones notes in her book, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, the only Americans who have ever received restitution by the government for slavery were white enslavers compensated after the Civil War “for their loss of human property.”

    Federal Legislation

    At the federal level, HR 40, which was introduced more than three decades ago by former Rep. John Conyers, finally has enough votes to pass in the House, according to supporters.

    The purpose of the legislation is:

    To address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.

    But the future of HR 40 in the Senate is not so promising. Instead, supporters are urging President Joe Biden to issue an executive order that would establish a reparations commission. So far, Biden has refused to respond.

    The Reparations Movement Is a Continuation of the Civil Rights Movement

    In his keynote address at the 2006 reparations conference at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, Conyers said, “The reparations movement is grounded in the civil rights movement and the social justice movements of the 1960s – 1980s.” That struggle has continued in response to the public execution of George Floyd and the ubiquitous police murders of Black people.

    In the international arena, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet issued a report in June 2021, calling for reparations for victims of systemic racist police violence. She wrote, “Reparatory justice requires a multipronged approach that is grounded in international human rights law,” noting that reparations include not only monetary compensation, but also formal apologies, institutional and educational reforms, and memorialization “linked to truth, justice and guarantees of non-recurrence.”

    Bachelet cited the April 2021 report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States, for which I served as a rapporteur.

    Ultimately, as Margaret A. Burnham says in her forthcoming book, By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners, the collective call for a system of reparations must go beyond efforts toward individual healing. It must also engage wide-ranging social transformation and expose the historical underpinnings of racial violence in this country.

    Real change requires not just reforms, but also tackling the entire system of white supremacy.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Caribbean Asks For Reparations

    Despite the COVID-19 pandemic on September 26, 2020 during the General Debate of the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly the Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves said that […] the international campaign for reparatory justice, widely promoted by governments across our Caribbean Community and by social activists within the industrialized metropoles, must form part of any serious efforts to achieve the sustainable development agenda […].

    On November 3, 2020 during the “Peacebuilding and sustaining peace” debate organized by the United Nations Security Council the President of the “CARICOM Reparations Commission” Hilary Beckles […] called on the Council to acknowledge the global reparatory movement, adding that while most crimes against humanity were committed in past, the current century will be one of peace and justice […].

    The post Caribbean Asks For Reparations appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Is Europe Really More Civilized? Ukraine Conflict a Platform for Racism and Rewriting History

    When a gruesome six-minute video of Ukrainian soldiers shooting and torturing handcuffed and tied up Russian soldiers circulated online, outraged people on social media and elsewhere compared this barbaric behavior to that of Daesh.

    In a rare admission of moral responsibility, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian President, quickly reminded Ukrainian fighters of their responsibility under international law. “I would like to remind all our military, civilian and defense forces, once again, that the abuse of prisoners is a war crime that has no amnesty under military law and has no statute of limitations,” he said, asserting that “We are a European army”, as if the latter is synonymous with civilized behavior.

    Even that supposed claim of responsibility conveyed subtle racism, as if to suggest that non-westerners, non-Europeans, may carry out such grisly and cowardly violence, but certainly not the more rational, humane and intellectually superior Europeans.

    The comment, though less obvious, reminds one of the racist remarks by CBS’ foreign correspondent, Charlie D’Agata, on February 26, when he shamelessly compared Middle Eastern cities with the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, stating that “Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, (…) this is a relatively civilized, relatively European city”.

    The Russia-Ukraine war has been a stage of racist comments and behavior, some explicit and obvious, others implicit and indirect. Far from being implicit, however, Bulgarian Prime Minister, Kiril Petkov, did not mince words when, last February, he addressed the issue of Ukrainian refugees. Europe can benefit from Ukrainian refugees, he said, because “these people are Europeans. (…) These people are intelligent, they are educated people. This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.”

    One of many other telling episodes that highlight western racism, but also continued denial of its grim reality, was an interview conducted by the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, with the Ukrainian Azov Battalion Commander, Dmytro Kuharchuck. The latter’s militia is known for its far-right politics, outright racism and horrific acts of violence. Yet, the newspaper described Kuharchuck as “the kind of fighter you don’t expect. He reads Kant and he doesn’t only use his bazooka.” If this is not the very definition of denial, what is?

    That said, our proud European friends must be careful before supplanting the word ‘European’ with ‘civilization’ and respect for human rights. They ought not to forget their past or rewrite their history because, after all, racially-based slavery is a European and western brand. The slave trade, as a result of which millions of slaves were shipped from Africa during the course of four centuries, was very much European. According to Encyclopedia Virginia, 1.8 million people “died on the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade”. Other estimations put the number much higher.

    Colonialism is another European quality. Starting in the 15th century, and lasting for centuries afterward, colonialism ravaged the entire Global South. Unlike the slave trade, colonialism enslaved entire peoples and divided whole continents, like Africa, among European spheres of influence.

    The nation of Congo was literally owned by one person, Belgian King Leopold II. India was effectively controlled and colonized by the British East India Company and, later, by the British government. The fate of South America was largely determined by the US-imposed Monroe Doctrines of 1823. For nearly 200 years, this continent has paid – and continues to pay – an extremely heavy price of US colonialism and neocolonialism. No numbers or figures can possibly express the destruction and death toll inflicted by Western-European colonialism on the rest of the world, simply because the victims are still being counted. But for the sake of illustration, according to American historian, Adam Hochschild, ten million people have died in Congo alone from 1885 to 1908.

    And how can we forget that World War I and II are also entirely European, leaving behind around 40 million and 75 million dead, respectively. (Other estimations are significantly higher). The gruesomeness of these European wars can only be compared to the atrocities committed, also by Europeans, throughout the South, for hundreds of years prior.

    Mere months after The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in 1949, the eager western partners were quick to flex their muscles in Korea in 1950, instigating a war that lasted for three years, resulting in the death of nearly 5 million people. The Korean war, like many other NATO-instigated conflicts, remains an unhealed wound to this day.

    The list goes on and on, from the disgraceful Opium Wars on China, starting in 1839, to the nuclear bombings of Japan in 1945, to the destruction of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, in 1954, 1959 and 1970 respectively, to the political meddling, military interventions and regime change in numerous countries around the world. They are all the work of the West, of the US and its ever-willing ‘European partners’, all done in the name of spreading democracy, freedom and human rights.

    If it were not for the Europeans, Palestine would have gained its independence decades ago, and its people, this writer included, would have not been made refugees, suffering under the yoke of Zionist Israel. If it were not for the US and the Europeans, Iraq would have remained a sovereign country and millions of lives would have been spared in one of the world’s oldest civilizations; and Afghanistan would have not endured this untold hardship. Even when the US and its European friends finally relented and left Afghanistan last year, they continue to hold the country hostage, by blocking the release of its funds, leading to actual starvation among the people of that war-torn country.

    So before bragging about the virtues of Europe, and the demeaning of everyone else, the likes of Arestovych, D’Agata, and Petkov should take a look at themselves in the mirror and reconsider their unsubstantiated ethnocentric view of the world and of history. In fact, if anyone deserves bragging rights it is those colonized nations that resisted colonialism, the slaves that fought for their freedom, and the oppressed nations that resisted their European oppressors, despite the pain and suffering that such struggles entailed.

    Sadly, for Europe, however, instead of using the Russia-Ukraine war as an opportunity to reflect on the future of the European project, whatever that is, it is being used as an opportunity to score cheap points against the very victims of Europe everywhere. Once more, valuable lessons remain unlearned.

    The post Is Europe Really More Civilized? Ukraine Conflict a Platform for Racism and Rewriting History first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Palestine is a Loud Echo of Britain’s Colonial Past and a Warning of the Future

    [This is the transcript of a talk I gave to Bath Friends of Palestine on 25 February 2022.]

    Since I arrived with my family in the UK last summer, I have been repeatedly asked: “Why choose Bristol as your new home?”

    Well, it certainly wasn’t for the weather. Now more than ever I miss Nazareth’s warmth and sunshine.

    It wasn’t for the food either.

    My family do have a minor connection to Bristol. My great-grandparents on my mother’s side (one from Cornwall, the other from South Wales) apparently met in Bristol – a coincidental stopping point on their separate journeys to London. They married and started a family whose line led to me.

    But that distant link wasn’t the reason for coming to Bristol either.

    In fact, it was only in Nazareth that Bristol began occupying a more prominent place in my family’s life.

    When I was not doing journalism, I spent many years leading political tours of the Galilee, while my wife, Sally, hosted and fed many of the participants in her cultural café in Nazareth, called Liwan.

    It was soon clear that a disproportionate number of our guests hailed from Bristol and the south-west. Some of you here tonight may have been among them.

    But my world – like everyone else’s – started to shrink as the pandemic took hold in early 2020. As we lost visitors and the chance to directly engage with them about Palestine, Bristol began to reach out to me.

    Toppled statue

    It did so just as Sally and I were beginning discussions about whether it was time to leave Nazareth – 20 years after I had arrived – and head to the UK.

    Even from thousands of miles away, a momentous event – the sound of Edward Colston’s statue being toppled – reverberated loudly with me.

    Ordinary people had decided they were no longer willing to be forced to venerate a slave trader, one of the most conspicious criminals of Britain’s colonial past. Even if briefly, the people of Bristol took back control of their city’s public space for themselves, and for humanity.

    In doing so, they firmly thrust Britain’s sordid past – the unexamined background to most of our lives – into the light of day. It is because of their defiance that buildings and institutions that for centuries bore Colston’s name as a badge of honour are finally being forced to confront that past and make amends.

    Bath, of course, was built no less on the profits of the slave trade. When visitors come to Bath simply to admire its grand Georgian architecture, its Royal Crescent, we assent – if only through ignorance – to the crimes that paid for all that splendour.

    Weeks after the Colston statue was toppled, Bristol made headlines again. Crowds protested efforts to transfer yet more powers to the police to curb our already savagely diminished right to protest – the most fundamental of all democratic rights. Bristol made more noise against that bill than possibly anywhere else in the UK.

    I ended up writing about both events from Nazareth.

    Blind to history

    Since my arrival, old and new friends alike have started to educate me about Bristol. Early on I attended a slavery tour in the city centre – one that connected those historic crimes with the current troubles faced by asylum seekers in Bristol, even as Bristol lays claim to the title of “city of sanctuary”.

    For once I was being guided rather than the guide, the pupil rather than the teacher – so long my role on those tours in and around Nazareth. And I could not but help notice, as we wandered through Bristol’s streets, echoes of my own tours.

    Over the years I have taken many hundreds of groups around the ruins of Saffuriya, one of the largest of the Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel in its ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948, the Nakba or Catastrophe.

    What disturbed me most in Saffuriya was how blind its new inhabitants were to the very recent history of the place they call home.

    New Jewish immigrants were moved on to the lands of Saffuriya weeks after the Israeli army destroyed the village and chased out the native Palestinian population at gunpoint. A new community built in its place was given a similar Hebrew name, Tzipori. These events were repeated across historic Palestine. Hundreds of villages were razed, and 80 per cent of the Palestinian population were expelled from what became the new state of Israel.

    Troubling clues

    Even today, evidence of the crimes committed in the name of these newcomers is visible everywhere. The hillsides are littered with the rubble of the hundreds of Palestinian homes that were levelled by the new Israeli army to stop their residents from returning. And there are neglected grave-stones all around – pointers to the community that was disappeared.

    And yet almost no one in Jewish Tzipori asks questions about the remnants of Palestinian Saffuriya, about these clues to a troubling past. Brainwashed by reassuring state narratives, they have averted their gaze for fear of what might become visible if they looked any closer.

    Tzipori’s residents never ask why there are only Jews like themselves allowed in their community, when half of the population in the surrounding area of the Galilee are Palestinian by heritage.

    Instead, the people of Tzipori misleadingly refer to their Palestinian neighbours – forced to live apart from them as second and third-class citizens of a self-declared Jewish state – as “Israeli Arabs”. The purpose is to obscure, both to themselves and the outside world, the connection of these so-called Arabs to the Palestinian people.

    To acknowledge the crimes Tzipori has inflicted on Saffuriya would also be to acknowledge a bigger story: of the crimes inflicted by Israel on the Palestinian people as a whole.

    Shroud of silence

    Most of us in Britain do something very similar.

    In young Israel, Jews still venerate the criminals of their recent past because they and their loved ones are so intimately and freshly implicated in the crimes.

    In Britain, with its much longer colonial past, the same result is often achieved not, as in Israel, through open cheerleading and glorification – though there is some of that too – but chiefly through a complicit silence. Colston surveyed his city from up on his plinth. He stood above us, superior, paternal, authoritative. His crimes did not need denying because they had been effectively shrouded in silence.

    Until Colston was toppled, slavery for most Britons was entirely absent from the narrative of Britain’s past – it was something to do with racist plantation owners in the United States’ Deep South more than a century ago. It was an issue we thought about only when Hollywood raised it.

    After the Colston statue came down, he became an exhibit – flat on his back – in Bristol’s harbourside museum, the M Shed. His black robes had been smeared with red paint, and scuffed and grazed from being dragged through the streets. He became a relic of the past, and one denied his grandeur. We were able to observe him variously with curiousity, contempt or amusement.

    Those are far better responses than reverence or silence. But they are not enough. Because Colston isn’t just a relic. He is a living, breathing reminder that we are still complicit in colonial crimes, even if now they are invariably better disguised.

    Nowadays, we usually interfere in the name of fiscal responsibility or humanitarianism, rather than the white man’s burden.

    We return to the countries we formerly colonised and asset-stripped, and drive them back into permanent debt slavery through western-controlled monetary agencies like the IMF.

    Or in the case of those that refuse to submit, we more often than not invade or subvert them – countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Iran – tearing apart the colonial fabric we imposed on them, wrecking their societies in ways that invariably lead to mass death and the dispersion of the population.

    We have supplied the bombs and planes to Saudi Arabia that are killing untold numbers of civilians in Yemen. We funded and trained the Islamic extremists who terrorise and behead civilians in Syria. The list is too long for me to recount here.

    Right now, we see the consequences of the west’s neo-colonialism – and a predictable countervailing reaction, in the resurgence of a Russian nationalism that President Putin has harnessed to his own ends – in NATO’s relentless, decades-long expansion towards Russia’s borders.

    And of course, we are still deeply invested in the settler colonial project of Israel, and the crimes it systematically inflicts on the Palestinian people.

    Divine plan

    Through the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Britain gave licence for the creation of a militarised ethnic, Jewish state in the Middle East. Later, we helped supply it with atomic material in the full knowledge that Israel would build nuclear bombs. We gave Israel diplomatic cover so that it could evade its obligations under the international treaty to stop nuclear proliferation and become the only nuclear power in the region. We have had Israel’s back through more than five decades of occupation and illegal settlement building.

    And significantly, we have endlessly indulged Zionism as it has evolved from its sordid origins nearly two centuries ago, as an antisemitic movement among fundamentalist Christians. Those Christian Zonists – who at the time served as the power brokers in European governments like Britain’s – viewed Jews as mere instruments in a divine plan.

    According to this plan, Jews were to be denied the chance to properly integrate into the countries to which they assumed they belonged.

    Instead the Christian Zionists wanted to herd Jews into an imagined ancient, Biblical land of Israel, to speed up the arrival of the end times, when mankind would be judged and only good Christians would rise up to be with God.

    Until Hitler took this western antisemitism to another level, few Jews subscribed to the idea that they were doomed forever to be a people apart, that their fate was inextricably tied to a small piece of territory in a far-off region they had never visited, and that their political allies should be millenarian racists.

    But after the Holocaust, things changed. Christian Zionists looked like much kinder antisemites than the exterminationist Nazis. Christian Zionism won by default and was reborn as Jewish Zionism, claiming to be a national liberation movement rather than the dregs of a white European nationalism Hitler had intensified.

    Today, we are presented with polls showing that most British Jews subscribe to the ugly ideas of Zionism – ideas their great-great-grandparents abhorred. Jews who dissent, who believe that we are all the same, that we all share a common fate as humans not as tribes, are ignored or dismissed as self-haters. In an inversion of reality these humanist Jews, rather than Jewish Zionists, are seen as the pawns of the antisemites.

    Perverse ideology

    Zionism as a political movement is so pampered, so embedded within European and American political establishments that those Jews who rally behind this ethnic nationalism no longer consider their beliefs to be abnormal or abhorrent – as their views would have been judged by most Jews only a few generations ago.

    No, today Jewish Zionists think of their views as so self-evident, so vitally important to Jewish self-preservation that anyone who opposes them must be either a self-hating Jew or an antisemite.

    And because non-Jews so little understand their own culpability in fomenting this perverse ideology of Jewish Zionism, we join in the ritual defaming of those brave Jews who point out how far we have stepped through the looking glass.

    As a result, we unthinkingly give our backing to the Zionists as they weaponise antisemitism against those – Jews and non-Jews alike – who stand in solidarity with the native Palestinian people so long oppressed by western colonialism.

    Thoughtlessly, too many of us have drifted once again into a sympathy for the oppressor – this time, Zonism’s barely veiled anti-Palestinian racism.

    Nonetheless, our attitudes towards modern Israel, given British history, can be complex. On the one hand, there are good reasons to avert our gaze. Israel’s crimes today are an echo and reminder of our own crimes yesterday. Western governments subsidise Israel’s crimes through trade agreements, they provide the weapons for Israel to commit those crimes, and they profit from the new arms and cyber-weapons Israel has developed by testing them out on Palestinians. Like the now-defunct apartheid South Africa, Israel is a central ally in the west’s neo-colonialism.

    So, yes, Israel is tied to us by an umbilical cord. We are its parent. But at the same time it is also not exactly like us either – more a bastard progeny. And that difference, that distance can help us gain a little perspective on ourselves. It can make Israel a teaching aid. An eye-opener. A place that can bring clarity, elucidate not only what Israel is doing but what countries like Britain have done and are still doing to this day.

    Trade in bodies

    The difference between Britain and Israel is to be found in the distinction between a colonial and a settler-colonial state.

    Britain is a classic example of the former. It sent the entitled sons of its elite private schools, men like Colston, to parts of the globe rich in resources in order to steal those resources and bring the wealth back to the motherland to further enrich the establishment. That was the purpose of the tea and sugar plantations.

    But it was not just a trade in inanimate objects. Britain also traded in bodies – mostly black bodies. Labour and muscle were a resource as vital to the British empire as silk and saffron.

    The trafficking in goods and people lasted more than four centuries until liberation movements among the native populations began to throw off – at least partially – the yoke of British and European colonialism. The story since the Second World War has been one of Europe and the United States’ efforts to reinvent colonialism, conducting their rape and pillage at a distance, through the hands of others.

    This is the dissembling, modern brand of colonialism: a “humanitarian” neocolonialism we should by now be familiar with. Global corporations, monetary
    agencies like the IMF and the military alliance of NATO have each played a key role in the reinvention of colonialism – as has Israel.

    Elimination strategies

    Israel inherited Britain’s colonial tradition, and permanently adopted many of its emergency orders for use against the Palestinians. Like traditional colonialism, settler colonialism is determined to appropriate the resources of the natives. But it does so in an even more conspicuous, uncompromising way. It does not just exploit the natives. It seeks to replace or eliminate them. That way, they can never be in a position to liberate themselves and their homeland.

    There is nothing new about this approach. It was adopted by European colonists across much of the globe: in North America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand, as well as belatedly in the Middle East.

    There are advantages and disadvantages to the settler colonial strategy, as Israel illustrates only too clearly. In their struggle to replace the natives, Israel’s settlers had to craft a narrative – a rationalisation – that they were the victims rather than the victimisers. They were, of course, fleeing persecution in Europe, but only to become persecutors themselves outside Europe. They were supposedly in a battle for survival against those they came to replace, the Palestinians. The natives were cast as irredeemably, and irrationally, hostile. God was invoked, more or less explicitly.

    In the Zionist story, the ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians – the Nakba – becomes a War of Independence, celebrated to this day. The Zionist colonisers thereby transformed themselves into another national liberation movement, like the ones in Africa that were fighting after the Second World War for independence. Israel claimed to be fighting oppressive British rule, as Africans were, rather than inheriting the colonisers’ mantle.

    But there is a disadvantage for settler colonial projects too, especially in an era of better communications. In a time of more democratic media, as we are currently enjoying – even if briefly – the colonisers’ elimination strategies are much harder to veil or airbrush. The ugliness is on show. The reality of the oppression is more visceral, more obviously offensive.

    Apartheid named

    The settlers’ elimination strategies are limited in number, and difficult to conceal whichever is adopted. In the United States, elimination took the form of genocide – the simplest and neatest of settler-colonialism’s solutions.

    In the post-war era of human rights, however, Israel was denied that route. It adopted settler colonialism’s fall-back position: mass expulsion, or ethnic cleansing. Some 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and outside the new borders of Israel in 1948.

    But genocide and ethnic cleansing are invariably projects that cannot be completed. Some 90 per cent of Native Americans died from the violence and diseases brought by European incomers, but a small proportion survived. In South Africa, the white immigrants lacked the numbers and capacity either to eradicate the native population or to exploit such a vast territory.

    Israel managed to expel only 80 per cent of the Palestinians living inside its new borders before the international community called time. And then Israel sabotaged its initial success in 1948 by seizing yet more Palestinian territory – and more Palestinians – in 1967.

    When settler populations cannot eradicate the native population completely, they must impose harsh, visible segregation policies against those that remain.

    Resources and rights are differentiated on the basis of race or ethnicity. Such regimes institute apartheid – or as Israel calls its version “hafrada” – to maintain the privileges of their own, superior or chosen population.

    Colonial mentality

    Many decades on, human rights groups have finally named Israel’s apartheid. Amnesty International got round to it only this month – 74 years after the Nakba and 55 years after the occupation began.

    It has taken so long because even our understanding of human rights continues to be shaped by a European colonial mentality. Human rights groups have documented Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians – the “what” of their oppression – but refused to understand the “why” of that oppression. These watchdogs did not truly listen to Palestinians. They listened to, they excused, Israel even as they were criticising it. They indulged its endless security rationales for its crimes against Palestinians.

    The reluctance to name Israeli apartheid derives in large part from a reluctance to face our part in its creation. To identify Israel’s apartheid is to recognise both our role in sustaining it, and Israel’s crucial place in the west’s reinvented neocolonialism.

    Being ‘offensive’

    The difficulty of facing up to what Israel is and what it represents is, of course, particularly stark for many Jews – not only in Israel but in countries like Britain. Through no choice of their own, Jews are more deeply implicated in Israel’s crimes because those crimes are carried out in the name of all Jews. As a result, for Zionist Jews, protecting the settler colonial project of Israel is identical to protecting their own sense of virtue.

    In the zero-sum imaginings of the Zionist movement, the stakes are too high to doubt or to equivocate. As Zionists, their duty is to support, dissemble and propagandise on Israel’s behalf at all costs.

    Nowadays Zionism has become such a normalised part of our western culture that those who call themselves Zionists are appalled at the idea anyone could dare to point out that their ideology is rooted in an ugly ethnic nationalism and in apartheid. Those who make them feel uncomfortable by highlighting the reality of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – and their blindness to it – are accused of being “offensive”.

    That supposed offensiveness is now conflated with antisemitism, as the treatment of Ken Loach, the respected film-maker of this parish, attests. Disgust at Israel’s racism towards Palestinians is malevolently confused with racism towards Jews. The truth is inverted.

    This confusion has also become the basis for a new definition of antisemitism – one aggressively advanced by Israel and its apologists – designed to mislead casual onlookers. The more we, as anti-racists and opponents of colonialism, try to focus attention and opprobrium on Israel’s crimes, the more we are accused of covertly attacking Jews.

    Into the fire

    Arriving in the UK from Nazareth at this very moment is like stepping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

    Here the battle over Zionism – defining it, understanding it, confronting it, refusing to be silenced by it – is in full flood. The Labour party, under Jeremy Corbyn, was politically eviscerated by a redefined antisemitism. Now the party’s ranks are being purged by his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, on the same phony grounds.

    Professors are being threatened and losing their jobs, as happened to David Miller at Bristol university, with the goal of intensifying pressure on the academy to keep silent about Israel and its lobbyists. Exhibitions are taken down, speakers cancelled.

    And all the while, the current western obsession with redefining antisemitism – the latest cover story for apartheid Israel – moves us ever further from sensitivity to real racism, whether it be genuine prejudice against Jews or rampant Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism.

    The fight for justice for Palestinians resonates with so many of us precisely because it is not simply a struggle to help Palestinians. It is a fight to end colonialism in all its forms, to end our inhumanity towards those we live alongside, to remember that we are all equally human and all equally entitled to respect and dignity.

    The story of Palestine is a loud echo from our past. Maybe the loudest. If we cannot hear it, then we cannot learn – and we cannot take the first steps on the path towards real change.

    The post Palestine is a Loud Echo of Britain’s Colonial Past and a Warning of the Future first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • As the government’s anti-slavery chair, I see the Home Office failing – and victims suffering | Sara Thornton

    We’re sending back far too many victims of modern slavery to unsafe countries. Change is overdue

    Modern slavery is a violation of human rights, affecting millions of men, women and children across the world and in the UK. People who are vulnerable due to circumstances of poverty, instability or forced migration are taken advantage of and exploited in situations of unfree labour, trafficking and abuse. Women and girls fleeing war are particularly at risk and I am concerned about the possibility of trafficking for migrants as the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine unfolds.

    Given all of this, you might expect that the UK government and the Home Office were doing all they could to help victims of modern slavery in Britain. You would be wrong.

    Dame Sara Thornton is the government’s independent anti-slavery commissioner

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Ministers ‘failing to protect’ people trafficked to UK as modern slaves

    Anti-slavery commissioner says change in law needed so that victims are more likely to be allowed to stay in UK

    Ministers are failing to protect people trafficked to Britain as modern slaves, the government’s own expert has said.

    Sara Thornton, the UK’s independent anti-slavery commissioner, said the law needed changing so those established as victims of traffickers would be more likely to be granted protection and allowed to stay in the UK.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Forgive Thyself and Others: Reparations Now!

    The question of Reparations for the historical crime of slavery is not primarily about money. Rather it is about spiritual cleansing and healing. It is about recognizing the fact that systemic physical and mental torture have long hands that stretch out across time and space. It is about acknowledging the attempted physical and spiritual destruction of a people and the prolonged pain and suffering that followed in its wake. It is time that the question of Reparations be put in its proper light; the light of recognition, forgiveness, and making whole.

    When my grandmother received “compensation” from the German government for her time spent in a labor camp she didn’t claim the relatively small amount given to her purely out of financial need (although that too played a part). No, she claimed it as a recognition of the part played by the German people in her own personal story of extreme suffering and human degradation. She claimed her small monthly check as a symbol that great wrongs were committed and that they should be publicly acknowledged as such. No amount of money could dilute her individual experience of the camps and the loss of her parents, but the fact of symbolic redress by those, who even though they might not have been directly responsible for her anguish, was a significant act of historical and spiritual closure.

    The money given to her was a complex exchange of memory, truthfulness, expiation, and guilt. It was a testament that what was done to her and her family members was outside the arc of common humanity and needed to begin to be set straight. And so it is too with the descendants of slaves in America.

    Reparations shall serve as a symbol of setting straight the crooked, hypocritical, and evil path of the imperfect history of American democracy. Of a path littered with millions of bodies and souls who served as tools rather than women and men to be respected as such. It is an act that will symbolically negate the actualness of history with something more powerful: the moral imagination of the present.

    We can never bring back the lives of the tortured and the terrified. We can never give them the joys, pleasures, and freedom of life that we know today is the birthright of every human being. But that is not the point; for what we can do today is bring forth some sort of collective forgiveness from every side, both for the descendants of perpetrators and of persecuted alike. For it is not only ex-slaves that are in need of forgiveness here; a nation stands perpetually bent over a dark stain which consequences haunt and hurt till the present day. In giving reparations we both give to those who once were and bequeath to those who are the sweet righteousness of a thing well done.

    The Germans have spent more than three generations agonizing over their guilt and examining ways to create new humane paths in the world and this is to their credit and rightly so. The Americans, both in the case of the Native American Genocide and African Slavery, have examined their conscience to a lesser degree and committed far less resources to the causes of redress and redemption. It is never too late to do a gracious act. It is never too little to commit something presently valuable to correct past wrongs, no matter how distant. It is never too humiliating for a great nation to get on its knees and say “Forgive me”.

    The post Forgive Thyself and Others: Reparations Now! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On Contact: John Brown, Abolitionist

    The painter Jacob Lawrence, in his 22-piece series ‘The Legend of John Brown’, first exhibited in 1941, chronicles in each of his panels a seminal stage in the life of the abolitionist John Brown. The first panel depicts Brown as Christ nailed to a cross, blood flowing from his nailed feet to the ground. The next scenes portray Brown as a man of exceptional religious conviction, willing to suffer financial failure and hardship in his fight for abolition. The middle compositions tell the story of Brown’s plans to free slaves, including his raids that massacred pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, his failed attack on the US arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and the final panels portray his capture, with his head bent, covered by long hair, and holding a cross, his sentencing and hanging.

    The post On Contact: John Brown, Abolitionist appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • I’m Craving the Sweetness of Ancestral Love on Valentine’s Day

    Alexis Pauline Gumbs sits with her father in Edison, New Jersey, in 1986.

    My father raised me to love Assata Shakur, to critique every institution and to love apple pie. Yes. The man who raised me on Black Panthers for Beginners, Pan-Africanism for Beginners, Malcolm X for Beginners and the protest poetry of Sonia Sanchez also had a lifetime love affair with the symbolic pastry of American traditionalism.

    The story is that my father so loved apple pie as a little boy that my grandmother got sick of him asking her to make it and taught him to slice, spice and sugar the apples, add lemon juice and butter and put it in a store-bought crust himself. Over the years, he perfected his cinnamon-to-nutmeg ratio, his McIntosh apple selection standards so deliciously that at every extended family function, people asked after and waited for his pies. The demand grew so great that, of course, he had to bring on unpaid workers. How American.

    My sister and I didn’t feel exploited, though, when he enlisted our help. We loved the apple-laden wooden table. The big metal mixing bowl, the juice of the stirred apples, brown with spice, tart with lemon. Rigorous taste-testers, we stole samples out of that bowl at every stage of the process. Between holidays, we would do a quick weekday version. Dad would buy all-natural sugar free apple sauce and we would add cinnamon, nutmeg and so much sugar that it ended up sweeter than anything they sold in the store. When I moved into my dorm room for college, my mother and aunties helped me set up and decorate. And my father brought his own nurturing offering: a giant case of organic instant oatmeal from the health food store, cinnamon apple flavored, of course. Perfect for a girl who could barely cook. Just add boiling water to the fill-line in the sturdy paper cup, and go.

    These days, I still start the day with oatmeal. Every morning when I shake cinnamon and nutmeg into simmering coconut milk before I add the oats, the kitchen air brings me back to that sweet man who nurtured my militant critique. When I miss him the most, I add apples on top. On holidays, on my father’s birthday, or the anniversary of the day he passed away, my sister will invite her daughters into the sacred ceremony: a mostly homemade apple pie.

    Do you have a story like this? I could write this tribute to my father all over again with pancakes, his other specialty. On my father’s first birthday after he passed, we went to his favorite diner and ordered what he would order, the Belgian waffle. When I can’t see his smile, when I can’t hear his voice, when he’s not there to celebrate a new victory with me, edible sweetness seems like the available proxy for how I want to feel.

    My father died because he lacked access to health care. And so, recently I got a new doctor who taught me how to read the lab reports they get when they test your blood at a physical check-up. Guess what? There is a lot of sugar in my blood. Not quite diabetic, not quite pre-diabetic, but if there was a pre-pre-diabetic … I would be in that range. And now I am thinking about the emotional work sugar does in my life — the place-holding work that a sweet treat does for me when I can’t experience the comfort of a hug from a loved one.

    “Give me some sugar,” the elder women say, and I gratefully give them a kiss on the cheek. But now, because of the pandemic, I don’t even remember the last time I kissed an elder. We are missing so much sweetness. But this year, like every year, the Valentine’s Day industry is churning out its own version of sweetness, conveniently available for same-day delivery.

    I have been as complicit as anyone in this Valentine’s Day conspiracy. When I was in high school, my mom would gift me my favorite chocolates on Valentine’s Day morning — the ones with messages inside the foil wrappers — and I would share them with my friends at school, giggling as if the love messages were our fortunes. In college, I would buy bags of individually wrapped “fun-sized” candy bars and hand them out to strangers on and around the campus, savoring the sweetness of people’s surprised smiles. Sweetness should be portable, shareable, well-packaged. It should be available and easy, right?

    But remember how I told you my dad raised me to critique everything? My father would remind us that on a capitalist planet, sweetness is war. Just like everything else. North American corporations ignore Indigenous land rights to tap maple syrup. The United States sent the contras to terrorize Central America to control the fruit industry. The extractive practices of corporate honey producers are part of a pollinator crisis that threatens the entire food supply. The Dutch East India company committed a whole genocide against the Bandanese to get a monopoly on nutmeg. And sugarcane itself?

    The first plantation that used the forced labor of Africans kidnapped into chattel slavery was a sugarcane plantation in a place called Boca de Nigua on the island of Ay-ti (the Indigenous Taíno word for the island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Dictator Rafael Trujillo established the batey system to exploit Haitian workers under conditions too similar to plantation histories. According to the Batey Foundation, this system creates an underclass with “no public services, no legal protections, and no economic opportunities.”

    In the early 20th century, when Dominican sugar workers rose up, led by Mamá Tingó, plantation owners sent scouts to the small islands of the Caribbean and recruited the poorest of the poor, including starving children, to do the work instead of improving the conditions. They carried these replacement workers to Santo Domingo in the airless hold of a ship.

    My grandfather was one of those starving children.

    He told me about being sick in the boat the whole way over. He almost died from overwork and a wound from a bull on a Dominican sugar plantation at the age of 11. If two other workers — a husband and wife he had never met — had not decided to save his life, I would not be writing this. We would not exist. The decision of two exploited adult workers to brew herbs for a child, to provide him shelter and safety, to value his life in a context of expendability, is that sweetness, or the safety underneath what we call sweetness. The possibility of generosity, dignity, life-saving care. That couple became my grandfather’s health care system under impossible conditions.

    On a Black Feminist Delegation to the Dominican Republic organized by Ana-Maurine Lara, I went to that first sugar plantation at Boca de Nigua. As I stood there, a black bull walked slowly out of a grove of trees, stepping on the remnants of sugar stalks. This wise animal may have been doing his own ancestral work, but as I looked into his eyes, the story of my grandfather came back to me and a message clear as these printed words: Do not eat any sugar for a full year, starting today.

    And so, I did it. A year-long cleanse from the sugar cane economy in my blood. Every time someone offered me a sweet treat or asked me why I was eating differently, I had to tell a story as old as the origins of slavery, as close as my own blood. I told hundreds of people that year about how slavery started on a sugar plantation, but how it was also the site of the first rebellion of enslaved Africans in the Americas. I shared what Black feminist anthropologist Fatima Portorreal told me about how a woman from the Congo named Ana Maria led a historic revolt there, establishing the first Black communal government in the Americas. I told people how the Haitian revolutionaries so revered that site that they came to announce the end of slavery right there, on the spot where I stood. I learned something about my capacity that year. About how if you can find the beginning of something, you can find the end. I learned the feeling if not the name of something I want more than sweetness.

    That cleanse was years ago, and I am still in the process of defining what exactly it is that I crave, with my mouth, with my hands, in my heart. But I know this much — I want to see the end of slavery in my lifetime. I want a love that can save your impossible life and mine. I want all our ancestors with us in their full dignity. I want solidarity and care through whatever comes. And I suddenly remember that before he taught me to sugar the apples, my father showed me the proper way to hold a knife.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump’s Post-Election Vengeance Campaign Has Split the Republican Party in Two

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks during a news conference after a lunch meeting with Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill on February 1, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

    The Trump wing of the Republican Party (and by “wing” I mean three-quarters of the bird) has continued its post-election vengeance tour apace, stopping recently at the Republican National Committee (RNC) to pummel two of the party’s far right congresspeople for being insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger have been dealing with this Trumpian agita for a while now, but the RNC forcefully took it to a whole new gear.

    “Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger crossed a line,” RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement denouncing the recalcitrant duo. “They chose to join Nancy Pelosi in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”

    …and all manner of cats came blasting from the bag. That 1/6 horror show, the one that killed five people, is “legitimate political discourse?” Starting now, or is this retroactive back to, say, Appomattox? The RNC issued a non-reversing reversal — “We didn’t mean the violent protesters!” — while no lesser light than Minority Leader Mitch McConnell came down with both feet on the idea that the attack on the Capitol was anything other than “a violent insurrection.”

    So it came to pass that the violence at the heart of Trump’s crusade has finally split the party most visibly in two. The most powerful Republican congressman and the most powerful Republican, period, are at each other’s throats while partisans of each side line up to denounce the other. If the Republican Party splits for real, not just cosmetically or in a momentary fit of pique, the ultimate irony will be the fact that McConnell and his ilk are primarily responsible for the creation, care and feeding of the violently racist horde at his gate.

    Faced with this context, I can’t help but be surprised to hear those I keep company with describe the Republican Party as “anti-American.” “Really?” I ask myself. “Since when, exactly?” Because while some immigration activists and many others within the big tent of the left have valiantly sought to stake a claim to the word “American” and give it a positive meaning rooted in democracy and inclusion, the cynic in me always returns to the fundamentally violent and racist roots of the United States, which was formed through a crucible of genocide and slavery by white supremacists who more often than not believed God put them there to plunder and conquer. Leave out the God part, and the butchery was still exceedingly and attractively lucrative.

    At its peak, slavery was this continent’s first billion-dollar industry, containing the original nucleotides of American-style capitalism, right down to the concept of a thoroughly fungible, eternally replaceable and therefore cost-efficient workforce. This peerless crime — still bereft of justice save for the easy cracking of statues — is the banner to which the modern Republican Party has flocked to.

    The party has embraced brazen racism and its right-wing militant banner-carriers with the kind of gusto not seen since George Wallace stood in front of the Alabama State House bleating about, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” It is no accident that the scaled heart of the party burns brightest in the presence of its father/king, an egotistical cartoon caricature who would happily put half the country to the torch if it garnered positive coverage from Fox News.

    People want to know what Donald Trump was doing while his minions violently sacked the Capitol, seeking to murder his vice president. I imagine he was laughing. On the inside, the outside and everywhere between, laughing fit to split. January 6, 2021, was the best day of his life.

    Simultaneously, in 20 years the Republicans have never missed a chance — by way of war, legislation or both — to loot the Treasury and enrich their wealthy friends. Trump pulled it off in December of 2017, to the tune of almost $2 trillion. Speaking of history, some of the people who get a slice of that Treasury pie go on to fund increasingly violent right-wing groups and their protests, which like Trump’s rallies serve to make “the movement” seem larger and more menacing than it actually is.

    Case in point: The Ottawa truck strike, which was originally focused on vaccine mandates but has devolved into a seething cauldron of every galaxy-brained conspiracy theorist who can find their way there. It is supposed to look organic, this truck protest, sui generis and therefore troubling to the status quo… except for the fact of the millions of dollars flowing into the protest across Canada’s southern border. Expect very similar protests to start popping off on this side of the lakes, and soon. Ottawa, I strongly suspect and fear, was a testing ground for a new level of right-wing hostility. Cops do fine against unarmed protesters. Facing down a wall of snarling Macks and Peterbilts? I mean, assuming they don’t agree with the ones behind the wheel.

    So, some boxes to check. Racist? Yes. Violent? Yes. Organized? Yes. Funded by wealth? Yes. Shock troops (i.e. analogous to KKK cells spread nationally)? Yes.

    Anti-American?

    Well… one may sugarcoat history until the cake collapses on itself. This country was forged in violence; that even a garbled Second Amendment exists at all speaks to the passion with which some hold to a right to deal death as they please and choose. Violence is and has always been the “American” way, a truth that has inspired millions of others to oppose it and its racist peddlers at all available turns.

    It’s all out there now; a majority of Republicans aren’t interested in even pretending to be anything other than exactly what they are. The racism, the mob mentality, the denial of bare-faced fact: The Republican Party has been actively feeding this beast since the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, when the North and South exchanged political parties over the basic question of human worth and dignity. A reckoning for all those years spent stoking the simmering flames of hate to keep the party base engaged could prove to be the cul-de-sac where final ownership of the party is decided once and for all.

    And that’s the best part of all: This is Mitch’s Republican Party as much as it is Trump’s. Racism, violence, plunder and fear: In the end, they both believe in fundamentally the same things, and that is as American as an 18-wheel Freightliner gleaming in the conquered desert sun. Call them “anti-American” if you need the sugar, but the taste of it won’t change.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Amnesty seeks tighter control of palm oil industry after ‘human cage’ finding

    Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

    Amnesty International Indonesia is urging the government — and the police in particular — to tighten supervision of the palm oil industry following the finding of a human cage with at least 27 people living there at the home of non-active Langkat Regent Terbit Rencana Perangin Angin, reports CNN Indonesia.

    Amnesty International executive director Usman Hamid said that greater supervision of the palm oil industry was needed because the business sector was prone to exploitation of workers, traditional communities and the environment.

    “Moreover this is not the first time that the exploitation of workers has occurred in Indonesia’s palm oil industry. In 2016, Amnesty International found serious human rights violations at several palm oil plantations in Indonesia,” he said in a media release.

    “The findings included forced labour, the use of child labour, gender discrimination and labour practices which were exploitative and endangered workers.”

    Amnesty said that the human cage found at the Langkat regent’s house was of great concern.

    Hamid said that he could not imagine how the practice of human slavery could have gone on for years.

    “Law enforcement officials must fully investigate this case and ensure that all of the people involved are brought before the courts in hearings which meet international standards on justice and not end with the application of the death penalty,” said Hamid.

    UN convention against torture
    Amnesty also reminded the state about the United Nations convention against torture, which Indonesia had ratified.

    “The UN Convention on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishments also prohibits all forms of torture and inhuman treatment,” Hamid said.

    In addition to this, he noted that Article 8 of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) — which has been ratified by Indonesia — stated that no person could be treated as a slave or enslaved.

    “All forms of torture are explicitly prohibited in a number of instruments on the protection of human rights, such as under Article 7 of the ICCPR for example,” Hamid said.

    The finding of the human cage came to the fore after Migrant Care reported it to the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) on January 24. In its report, Migrant Care reported that there were seven alleged cases of slavery.

    The human cage was found when a Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) team arrived at the Langkat regent’s house during a sting operation on January 18. At the time, the KPK team, which was backed by the police, found at least 27 people inhabiting a cage when it was conducting the raid.

    Based on the results of a preliminary examination, the North Sumatra regional police said that it was claimed that the cage was used for narcotics rehabilitation and had been there since 2012 or around 10 years.

    Dwelling had no licence
    The dwelling referred to as a rehabilitation facility had no licence even though it had been known about by the Langkat National Narcotics Agency (BNN) since 2017.

    National police spokesperson Brigadier General Ahmad Ramadhan said that the dozens of people occupying the cage at the regent’s house were also employed as palm oil factory workers, although they were not paid.

    He said that they had recorded at least 48 people occupying the cage on the pretext of narcotics rehabilitation.

    “Some were employed at the palm oil factory owned by the Langkat regent. [But] they were not paid a wage like [ordinary] workers,” Ramadhan told journalists.

    Translated by James Balowski of IndoLeft News. The original title of the article was “Kerangkeng Manusia, Amnesty Minta Polisi Ketat Awasi Industri Sawit”.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The British Empire’s dirty secret

    Alex Salmon reviews a new book by historian and author Graham Seal that documents how the British government shipped more than 376,000 men, women and children across the oceans to provide slave labour in its colonies.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Jurors see the bigger picture: activists who were cleared in court

    Cases have included climate, environment, human rights and anti-war protests where damage to property was not denied

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘Heroic’ Colston topplers receive boost from Banksy ahead of trial

    Street artist Banksy will be selling T-shirts to support four people facing trial accused of criminal damage in relation to the toppling of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston.

    Toppled

    The anonymous artist posted on Instagram pictures of limited edition grey souvenir T-shirts. They’ll go on sale on 11 December in Bristol. The shirts have a picture of Colston’s empty plinth with a rope hanging off, with debris and a discarded sign nearby and ‘BRISTOL’ written above.

    Banksy said proceeds from the sale will be given to the four people facing trial next week in Bristol for criminal damage. The topplers have previously been called “heroic”:

    Milo Ponsford, Rhian Graham and Jake Skuse
    Milo Ponsford, Rhian Graham, and Jake Skuse (Ben Birchall/PA)

    A gift from the Bristol-based artist

    In a post on social media, Banksy said:

    Next week the four people charged with pulling down Colston’s statue in Bristol are going on trial.

    I’ve made some souvenir shirts to mark the occasion. Available from various outlets in the city from tomorrow. All proceeds to the defendants so they can go for a pint.

    Bristol-based Banksy said sales would be limited to one per person and each T-shirt would cost £25 plus VAT.

    Sage Willoughby
    Sage Willoughby (Ben Birchall/PA)

    Rhian Graham, Milo Ponsford, Jake Skuse and Sage Willoughby face trial at Bristol Crown Court from 13 December.

    The bronze memorial to the 17th century slave merchant was pulled down during a Black Lives Matter protest on 7 June 2020. It was then dumped in Bristol Harbour and later recovered by Bristol City Council.

    Charges allege that the four defendants damaged the statue without lawful excuse, jointly and with others. The statue of the slave trader is a listed monument belonging to the city council.

    The defendants are accused of committing the offence “intending to destroy or damage such property or being reckless as to whether such property would be destroyed or damaged”.

    A long time coming

    Despite the moral and ethical case for slavery being long-since settled, the statue of Colston remained standing until 2020. It’s unclear how long it would have remained standing if not for the intervention set to be put on trial.

    The Canary has covered the saga of the statue toppling since it first went into the harbour. In June 2021, Eliza Egret wrote:

    “The toppling of the statue came after years of campaigning and protests by Countering Colston and its supporters. The group had previously achieved a number of significant concessions, including the decision by Bristol Music Trust to change the name of the Colston Hall. And after the events in June 2020, a number of buildings and landmarks around Bristol named after the slave-trader finally bowed under pressure to change their names.

    “Glad Colston’s Gone released a statement on the anniversary, saying:

    We…support the anti-racist aims of the protests throughout the summer 2020. We abhor the legacies of institutional and structural racism arising from European colonisation and the trafficking, enslavement and transportation of African men, women and children into plantation slavery in the Caribbean and Americas.”

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • China must answer serious questions about tennis star Peng Shuai, Australia says

    Human rights activists step up calls for diplomatic boycott of Beijing Winter Olympics

    Chinese authorities must answer serious concerns about the tennis star Peng Shuai’s welfare, the Australian government has said.

    The intervention comes as human rights activists and an independent senator step up calls for Australia to join a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics over broader allegations of rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

    Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • US Past and Present

    Recently there has been much discussion about the teaching of US history. In the past and perhaps slightly less so in the present, the full story of our history and of the founding fathers hasn’t been presented. The founders’ inspirational and impressive accomplishments have been highlighted. The fact that many of the founders were slave owners was downplayed or ignored. In addition, the truly horrific evils of slavery and the mistreatment of Blacks under Jim Crow laws received very limited coverage. Moreover, the genocide of Native Americans received little mention. This biased presentation of US history set the stage for white supremacy ideas to grow and thrive and for the continued shameful abuse of minorities.

    Of late, criticism of many founders over their being slave owners has attracted widespread attention and created controversy. Some believe that pointing out this fact is unfair to the founders. Many who believe this way think the founders are being judged by standards of today instead of those of their time.

    I believe that the founding fathers, particularly Jefferson with his words in the Declaration of Independence, inspired people the world over and across time. Despite the founders establishing a new country where some people had a voice in government, they were human beings with their own failings. These failings, including continuing the practice of slavery and the slave trade, don’t mean that their accomplishments didn’t occur. However, the results of their failings must also be recognized and corrected.

    I dispute that the founders are being held to the standards of today instead of those of their time. I believe that this claim is an insult to the founders’ intelligence. For example, this claim implies the founders and their society didn’t know that slavery was wrong. I think that the support for slavery was due to political expediency of keeping the colonies/states together and to putting profit over human rights. Slavery allowed the economy to grow and for the country to thrive economically while condemning about 18% of the population and their offspring to a brutal form of slavery and the killing of the nation’s soul.

    The compromises necessary for the Constitution to be approved show that many opposed slavery. In addition, the opposition of many well known individuals during the 18th century is on record. This site is the source for most of the following material.

    One of the most ardent opponents of slavery was Abigail Adams, supported by her husband, the second US President, John Adams. For example, in a 1774 letter to John she wrote: “I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in this province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me — to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.” She considered slavery a sin and an evil. Although her husband privately agreed, he was more cautious politically as he feared the results of complete abolition would lead to a division of the new country. Sam Adams was another Adams who was also a staunch opponent of slavery.

    Others who were against slavery included Benjamin Franklin who became a public abolitionist in 1787 and President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. John Jay, the first Chief Justice, and Marquis de Lafayette were also committed opponents of the brutal US form of slavery.

    John Laurens, a close friend of George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette and Alexander Hamilton, also was an ardent public advocate for ending slavery. In a letter to a friend in 1776 he wrote: “I think we Americans at least in the Southern Colonies, cannot contend with a good Grace, for Liberty, until we shall have enfranchised our Slaves. How can we whose Jealousy has been alarm’d more at the Name of Oppression sometimes than at the Reality, reconcile to our spirited Assertions of the Rights of Mankind, the galling abject Slavery of our negroes…If as some pretend, but I am persuaded more thro’ intrested, than from Conviction, the Culture of the Ground with us cannot be carried on without African Slaves, Let us fly it as a hateful Country, and say ubi Libertas ibi Patria [where Liberty is there is my Country].”

    An outstanding article, “African Slavery in America”, was published in March, 1775 in the Pennsylvania Journal by a contributor signed Justice and Humanity. The article begins: “TO Americans: That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of justice and humanity, and even good policy…”

    This whitewashing of US history has downplayed the genocide of Native Americans and the brutal US form of slavery. As a result, it has created a badly misinformed population. Many of our population don’t understand the terrible crimes against humanity the US has committed that are part and parcel of our history. Many also don’t realize how much we owe to those we have horrifically mistreated. If we don’t begin teaching our real history, the idea of white supremacy will continue to strengthen and that does not bode well for our future.

    The post US Past and Present first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Officials Outrageously Claim Black Men Fleeing Slavery Lack “Credible Fear”

    Demonstrators protesting against the imprisonment of anti-slavery activists in Mauritania hold a banner which translates to: “No to slavery and racism” on August 3, 2016, in Dakar, Senegal.

    Less than two months after U.S. border patrol agents were caught on video flogging Haitian asylum seekers with riding crops, the Biden administration is continuing its pursuit of deportation of Black asylum seekers with a seemingly banal but still devastating instrument: boilerplate form letters.

    Truthout recently gained access to two of these letters via the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative. On their face, they don’t seem noteworthy — they are identical, standard-issue form letters informing two asylum seekers from Mauritania that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has denied their asylum claims on the basis that they have not demonstrated a “credible fear” of returning to Mauritania if deported back there by the U.S., despite the fact that they are fleeing enslavement and brutality.

    Under U.S. law, asylum seekers may not be deported to their home countries while their asylum cases are waiting to be processed if they demonstrate “credible fear” of persecution or violence.

    It’s unfathomable and outrageous that DHS is denying the credible fear claims of these Mauritanian asylum seekers after everything they have endured and escaped, including enslavement, beatings, stalking, murder threats, multiple arrests and incarceration in nightmarish holding pens without beds or sanitation.

    Mauritania is an African country which is 90 percent desert and whose economy can barely sustain its 4.7 million people. An estimated 500,000 Black Mauritanians are mercilessly exploited via formal and informal systems of slavery and enforced servitude by the light-skinned Berber and Bidhan (locally called “white Arab”) ruling class, according to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. However, absent any governmental or international action, Black Mauritanians must flee their oppression relying only on help from family and village members already abroad.

    Asylum seekers I.C. and I.W. were among the daring few who have risked the harrowing journey across the Atlantic, through South and Central America, and who made it to Mexico to submit themselves to Biden’s asylum process at one of the port of entries along the U.S.-Mexico border. (To protect them from retaliation, Truthout has refrained from using the men’s full names and has obscured other potentially identifying details in this report.)

    I.C.’s sworn declaration chronicles the harms he’s suffered and the traumas he’s already borne:

    In Mauritania I was forced to work for white Arabs without pay. When I would demand payment for my labor, they would throw me in a jail … until I was willing to return to work without pay. This happened to me twice. The first time I was wrongfully imprisoned for about two weeks. The second time my confinement lasted for about a month.

    The prison where they threw me for refusing to work without pay is disgusting and the guards are abusive … they woke us up every morning by throwing cold water on us, kicking us and yelling at us.… We are forced to defecate in a hole three men at a time while the guards stand watch over us like we are animals….

    A third man, M.A., who had also endured enslavement and survived torture, has passed the hurdle of his credible fear interview, and can meet all the other conditions needed for release. Nonetheless, he is yet to be freed from Richwood Correctional Center, a for-profit prison in Louisiana. When the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative attorneys complained to DHS headquarters in D.C. that the two release requests they’d submitted on M.A.’s behalf were being wholly ignored by the New Orleans ICE Field Office, D.C. kicked it back to New Orleans. This is the same field office that oversaw the brutal mass deportations of Black Africans in the waning days of the Trump administration, and against whom Cameroonians in the Pine Prairie detention facility conducted a desperate hunger strike to protest their lengthy detentions, measured in years, not months or weeks.

    “It’s a dystopian reality,” says Mich González, associate director of advocacy for the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative, one of several attorneys handling their cases. “Coming off the heels of the prior administration, I was really hopeful and excited for an administration that cared about humanitarian issues, cared about restoring our asylum process that was all but destroyed,” he told Truthout. Instead, he says, that care seems to exist only in theory.

    I.C. and I.W. are living in a paroxysm of anxiety. Because their credible fear claims were denied, at any moment, they could potentially be plucked out of the Richwood Correctional Center and Stewart Detention Centers in Georgia, respectively, where they have been languishing for months, and forced, shackled, onto dangerous ICE Air charter flights back to Mauritania — and back to enslavement.

    Photos smuggled out of a Mauritanian prison were provided to Truthout by Lynn Tramonte, director of Ohio Immigrant Alliance, who received them from another nonprofit, which received them directly from a Black Mauritanian man deported from the U.S. in January 2021. They are confirmation of just how credible I.C. and I.W.’s fears actually are: incarceration to enforce enslavement is not a farfetched or abnormal condition in Mauritania.

    Mauritanians deported from the U.S. in January 2021 were taken to this jail directly from the airport.
    Mauritanians deported from the U.S. in January 2021 were taken to this jail directly from the airport.

    Stephen J. King, professor of government at Georgetown University, estimates that of the half-a-million Black Mauritanians who are subjected to slavery or forced servitude, about 90,000 are born slaves into a hereditary system of chattel slavery, wherein “white Arab” and Berber families own Black families as private property. The remainder have been tricked or trapped into servitude because they are denied IDs, which are an impediment to employment. As King explains in an August 2021 white paper published by Arab Reform Initiative:

    Slavery in Mauritania is also a racial slavery. In a country that has a largely destitute population, Mauritania’s Arabic-speaking Arab-Berber elite, an exclusionary and predatory group that self-identifies as White (Bidan), ruthlessly dominates the country’s state and economy. They represent, at most, 30% of the population. The enslaved are Blacks from within Mauritania’s Arab-Islamic linguistic and cultural sphere (Black Arabs or Sudan).

    What this means is that if higher-ups in the Biden administration do not meaningfully intervene, I.C. and I.W. may soon be reinserted into the catastrophe that pushed them to U.S. shores in the first place. Their quest will have been in vain, other than to have added to the coffers of for-profit prison operators extracting billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers every year that immigrant detention is allowed to exist.

    Maryam Sy is an organizer in the Ohio Immigrant Alliance’s ReuniteUS campaign working to bring back those with cases pending who were illegally deported under Trump. Of Senegalese heritage, she’s married to a Mauritanian man whose family was slaughtered in what they refer to as the 1989 genocide.

    “I love America, it’s a great country with many opportunities,” she told Truthout. “But I feel pain about what’s still happening in Mauritania.”

    Sy’s advocacy began in earnest in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, in 2020 after her husband’s nephew escaped slavery. He traveled though Brazil, through the jungle, to the southern U.S. border. A nationwide fundraiser on social media raised his $8,000 release bond in 24 hours. “When he got released,” Sy recalled, “I said I need to do more for the Mauritanian people.”

    She has interviewed 253 people, 75 percent of whom are Mauritanians who were deported by the Trump and previous administrations, plus 20 who fled to Canada in fear of deportation. Sy describes an expedient relationship between DHS and officials in Mauritania, in which the quid pro quo runs along these lines: In order to deport Mauritanians back to Mauritania, DHS must get a laissez-passer document stating that those being deported are citizens, which is routinely provided by the Mauritanian consulate. But, she says, ICE officials only bring the men to the tarmac.

    Inside the airport, the returning men, who themselves have no identifying documentation, are not able to prove their citizenship and are taken to the prisons (like the one pictured) where they are trapped until they can bribe or otherwise finagle their way out. Once free, they are harassed and sometimes hounded by authorities (one man was arrested 15 times) for being undocumented, and are ineligible to work. Free to starve, free to be unsheltered, the desperate circumstances imposed on them by a cunning and treacherous state force them to capitulate to servitude; and if they eventually protest their exploitation, there’s hell to pay.

    In a forthcoming documentary Sy’s group is producing to advocate for temporary protected status (TPS) for Mauritanian migrants, one man sums up the tragedy he’s fallen prey to, saying he has his diplomas, he is a doctor in sociology, but he is enslaved. He goes on to say that when he asks for money, those who have enslaved him say they won’t pay and threaten to call the police, or they beat him up. “This is a form of modern slavery,” he says.

    Sy further describes a cynical and antiquated judicial bureaucracy in which U.S. immigration judges rely on the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices like this one from 2019, which are widely understood to be inaccurate. Earlier this year The Mauritanian Network for Human Rights in the U.S. issued a statement decrying the false picture of human rights advances made in Mauritania presented by Washington. Rather than the free elections claimed by our diplomatic corps, they say “Mauritanians witnessed one of the most contested non-transparent elections in Mauritanian history,” which were followed by kidnappings of opposition leaders and prominent journalists who were detained without charge; some were sentenced to prison terms and most were beaten and tortured “in the most horrible ways.”

    And while DHS will meet with advocates about designating TPS for Mauritanians, when the meeting concludes, immigration judges continue pretending that overly optimistic United Nations reports on Mauritania from 1996, written when the situation after the 1989 massacres and expulsions to Senegal had improved, and later in 2012, when a fraction of the Mauritanians violently driven across the border to Senegal were allowed to return, are somehow relevant to 2021.

    In an email to Truthout, Tramonte condemned the UN’s assessments, saying:

    There is so much wrong with the content of these, it’s impossible to do justice. But a few things jump out: Haratines are the SLAVE caste of the [White Arabs]. They are not empowered. The Black African ethnic groups (Fulani, Wolof, Soninke, Bambara, a few others) have ALL been and are still being harmed by the ongoing repression against Black ethnic groups in Mauritania and they do not have the same rights or privileges as the [White Arabs]. The idea that people who returned from Senegal all got their land and cattle back would be laughable if the issues were not so serious. People were murdered to take that land, women raped, dissidents tortured in jail. This is gaslighting of the highest order.

    But U.S. officials deliberately burying their heads in the convenient sand does not change the reality on the ground. “There is slavery in Mauritania,” Sy says. “Black Mauritanians are not being recognized as citizens. They can’t get IDs because all the archives have been destroyed. They can’t register on the current census that’s happening right now. So, they are stateless.”

    Tramonte says that despite all the attempts to disempower and dehumanize them, the Mauritanian migrants she works with inspire her with their compassion, smarts and humanity every single day.

    “They have been on the run for 30 years,” Tramonte told Truthout. “They have the strength to get here … they came to our doorstep [men like M.A.] and said ‘Will you help me?’ and we said, ‘Sure, here’s a jail cell.’ And still they organize and know what their rights are, and find a way to use their voices.”

    She fondly remembers the Mauritanian men detained in Ohio from 2017-2019 who banded together and created a nucleus where they would all look out for each other.

    “If someone’s commissary funds got frozen, oh no, is he going to be deported or moved? Who’s got money on their books? So the person calls us, we call their attorney, their attorney files last-minute stays, sometimes they pull people off the plane. They knew the law, they were looking at the time frames for appeals. There were three men who wanted habeas corpus petitions filed. We raised some money, found some lawyers, and their strategy worked: they got out.”

    But if there is strength in numbers, there is also vulnerability in isolation. Tramonte is currently working on a case of a sole Black Mauritanian man incarcerated in a remote rural county in Michigan.

    “DHS will put Black Muslim men in a county jail where the county is 99 percent white, no immigration lawyers live there, and there’s active white supremacist groups,” she explained. “It’s all about breaking their spirits. It can’t be overstated how inhumane it is.”

    Zeinabou Sall, an advocate working with Mauritanian Network for Human Rights in the US for the past two years, says it’s hard not to see DHS’s practices as blatant anti-Blackness. “We’ve had a lot of problems in Louisiana,” Sall told Truthout. “When they call me — whether they’re from Cameroon, Kenya, Haiti or Mauritania — they all tell me the same things: We, Blacks are being mistreated.”

    One case was especially upsetting. “ICE dragged this boy, used force to take him out of his cell, to the airport; but he was lucky because the airline would not take him without his COVD test,” Sall said.

    In another, DHS released a Black Mauritanian man from detention in Louisiana, but ICE agents drove him deep into Mississippi where officials dropped him off at a Greyhound bus station “without any documents, where no one speaks the language.” He contacted Sall, and she made arrangements through an aid group in Louisiana to get him to safety.

    Born and raised in Mauritania, Sall’s family fled “because of the discrimination and killing,” and were refugees in Senegal for 10 years before they were brought by the United Nations to Texas in 2001. Among many other duties, she helps the lawyers with translation — she can speak French, English, Fula, Wolof, a few dialects of Fulani, and some Arabic. She’s heard many stories and is certain of one commonality: “Black Mauritanians are leaving for fear of our lives, and it’s an ongoing situation for over 30 years. They need help to get access to language services to get access to freedom. I’m here for them. I’m their voice; they cannot talk for themselves.”

    On that point, I.C. is scheduled to have a second chance today (November 17) at his credible fear interview because it came to light that the first one had been seriously botched by a translator who did not speak the same dialect and omitted or fudged crucial details. González had to fight hard even for this concession.

    “And there is no guarantee he will get a different result,” he said.

    As for M.A., a torture victim for whom every day spent imprisoned is a day he cannot heal from the trauma he carries, his advocates want him released from Richwood and reunited with his cousin before Thanksgiving.

    “When you think about the cases of the Mauritanians, it’s horrifying,” says González. “They’re fleeing conditions of slavery which include being incarcerated if they don’t agree to indentured servitude. Then we incarcerate them the moment they seek help. It’s really disgusting.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Liberal Anti-Racism Is Fixated on Symbolic Gestures. We Need Concrete Action.

    A mural of George Floyd peers over the heads of people walking on the sidewalk

    We often hear from politicians that slavery is “America’s original sin.” This phrase has become a cliché, thoughtlessly intoned mostly by Democrats, though occasionally also deployed by Republicans in a bid to look like they are taking racism seriously. In most cases, it seems like little more than a way of gesturing at the unique gravity of racism. Nevertheless, if we take this bromide at its word — that grappling with racial oppression is not just a social or political problem, but also downright theological — it reveals the inherent deadlocks in liberal anti-racism.

    The Historical Roots of “Original Sin”

    In Christian theology, “original sin” has two basic meanings. On one level, it refers to Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God in the Garden of Eden — the first or “original” sin committed by the “founding” members of the human race. More importantly, though, it denotes the consequences of that initial sin for subsequent generations of humans. According to a theological tradition that runs from St. Augustine to Martin Luther and John Calvin and beyond, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they did more than commit a single offense. They knocked their will, their capacity for making moral decisions, permanently off-kilter. Where Adam and Eve had previously been in harmony with God’s righteousness, they were now out of tune in a way that they could never fix. Even worse, they passed this moral incapacity on to their children, who passed it on to theirs, and so forth. Thus, according to this view, we are afflicted with the consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin from birth, our individual “origin.”

    The apparently trivial decision to eat a certain piece of fruit against God’s orders thus carried unimaginably tragic consequences. Every single human being was now morally damaged from birth, incapable of fulfilling God’s moral standards. Thankfully, the story goes, God arranged for us to be saved by becoming incarnate as a human being. By living a perfect life and freely sacrificing himself, Christ created an infinite store of righteousness on behalf of his fellow human beings, which we can access through the sacraments administered by the Church. But although the rite of baptism allows us to be “forgiven” for our inborn state of moral incapacity, the underlying problem is unfixable in this life. In our fallen world, every human being must struggle with their inclination to do the wrong thing, an inclination that will inevitably prevail over our good intentions at least some of the time. Only death and resurrection can bring true healing and allow us to conform fully to God’s moral demands.

    This theological story is in many ways strange and convoluted, but it is familiar. It is the teaching of essentially every mainstream Christian denomination in the U.S., and given that most politicians are still practicing Christians, we have to assume that those lamenting “America’s original sin” are familiar with, as it were, the original original sin. And the connection is fairly clear: In its founding moment, the U.S. accepted a wicked compromise on slavery, which infected all subsequent generations of white Americans with the stain of racism. This stain is so durable that it may never be fully repaired.

    The Empty Ritual of Liberal Anti-Racism

    Surely that minimal parallel is what most politicians have in mind when they deplore “America’s original sin.” But I believe we can push further. Even if original sin can never be cured — in the sense of allowing us to consistently do the right thing — it can be forgiven, through vicarious sacrifice and ritual action. While Abraham Lincoln may have declared the deaths of Union and Confederation soldiers to be the necessary sacrifice in his second inaugural address, it is most often the sacrifice of Black people on behalf of true American ideals that is in view. This is why we hear so often that Martin Luther King Jr. “gave his life” for justice, when in reality he was assassinated and had no say in the matter. Similarly obscene was when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared her gratitude to George Floyd, who supposedly “gave his life” in service of the quest for greater racial justice in the U.S. In both cases, their lives were taken, not given. Nevertheless, their ostensible “sacrifice” creates a fund of righteousness that somehow makes up for white America’s intractable racism.

    The way white, liberal America exploits Black suffering is through ritual actions. We can think here of the infamous shot of congressional Democrats kneeling in commemoration of George Floyd, decked out in Kente cloth. This ritual reenactment of Floyd’s death, in ceremonial garb connected to African culture, bears obvious parallels to Christian rites that seek to reenact and identify with Christ’s sacrifice. Most responses to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 have been just as purely symbolic: more television programming on Black themes, greater attention to Black History Month, the declaration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday. Meanwhile, police funding has actually gone up, and another high-profile police murder happened literally at the same time as the guilty verdict against Floyd’s killer was being announced.

    In short, the notion of racism as “America’s original sin” underwrites a cycle of performative guilt and ritual repentance among white liberals, as a substitute for any concrete action. After all, who could presume to fix a problem of such theological proportions? And it is becoming increasingly clear that no one, perhaps apart from those kneeling in Kente cloth, is satisfied with this theological approach to race. On the left, there has been a groundswell of radical and yet clear and practical demands that aim to concretely dismantle the institutions — above all the police — that forcibly preserve the racial hierarchy.

    Meanwhile, the right has taken aim at even the most minimal symbolic anti-racist gestures while attempting to roll back the gains of the Civil Rights era. The crusade against critical race theory is above all an attempt to push back against the idea of racism as “America’s original sin.” The bills specify that any instruction presupposing that white people are “inherently racist” should be disallowed. They also take aim at the first sense of original sin by denying that the founding of the U.S. involved any sin at all. In place of liberal guilt, textbooks in conservative states — as well as in private religious schools elsewhere — often elide the history of slavery and racism and sometimes openly valorize it, claiming that slaves were well-treated and even implying slavery was a voluntary condition.

    Overcoming Racism Requires Breaking With the Frame of “Original Sin”

    The conservative backlash is dangerous and cynical, but there is a moment of truth in their objection to liberal anti-racism. What conservatives are implicitly asking is: If racism is so unavoidable and unfixable, why should we be made to feel guilty about it? The same question could be asked of the Christian doctrine of original sin: What sense does it make for God to demand the impossible of us?

    The obvious solution here is to abandon the theological frame altogether. Yet I believe the Christian tradition does offer us some resources for rethinking the problem of “America’s original sin.” Even though Augustine’s view has largely prevailed in the Western world, it is far from the only interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden and its implications for us. Many of Augustine’s predecessors held that when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and instead followed the devil’s misleading advice, they were tricked into accepting the devil as their ruler. The consequences of their action were passed down, not biologically, but as the status of slavery or citizenship is passed down. In becoming a member of the human race, God was trying to overthrow the devil’s social contract from within, allowing humanity to imagine a new form of life together.

    To draw a parallel with this alternative theological view, the founding of the U.S. did not irreversibly infect all white people with the ineradicable stain of racism — it trapped us in a bad social contract. If we want to escape the negative consequences of that social contract, we need to withdraw from it and join a new, better one. In place of individual guilt, we would get a structural analysis of the mechanisms of racial oppression. Instead of blaming racist outcomes on individual attitudes, we would note that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the institutional structures designed to accommodate race-based chattel slavery for life continue to produce racist results by giving racists control over powerful veto points. And one solution could be to do something seen as a heresy in the United States: draft and ratify a constitution that was not designed by slavers.

    In other words — and here both theological views agree — the U.S. must die and be resurrected as something new and better. It must be born again.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A Mother Alone

    Jon Henry’s photography offers the hope that remembrance can spark political change.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Racial Metaphors

    If colorblindness rests on the claim that the civil rights movement changed everything, the idea that racism is in our DNA borders on a fatalistic proposition that it changed little or nothing.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Lingering Peculiarities: Slavery and Manumission in the Roman Empire

    The question does not bear asking, but in a global economy greased by what has been termed disposable people, the past’s previous examples of the same may be a country worth visiting.  The prod along for such a journey came with the discovery of yet another gem from the ruins of Pompeii.  The news headlines were ravenous in consuming the details about the history of an individual who, having been a slave, obviously went on to do rather well for himself.  It read like a tale of social mobility, and would have sent the likes of those who spoke about the paralysis of social death spinning in the grave.

    First, the fanfare.  The skull of one Marcus Venerius Secundio was praised as “the best-preserved human remains ever discovered in Pompeii”.  They were found in an ancient tomb in the necropolis of Porta Sarno.  The marble slab found at the pediment of his tomb had an inscription that sent the news outlets into states of excitement.

    The Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini, was so enthusiastic as to be insufferable.  “Pompeii never ceases to amaze, and has confirmed her place as a story of redemption, as an international role model, and a place where research and new archaeological excavations are taking place once more, thanks to the many professionals in the field of cultural heritage, who with their work never cease to produce extraordinary results for the world which are a source of pride for Italy.”

    Then, the career aspect of Secundio. The gravestone’s inscription, in the nature of such etchings, is filled with many achievements.  He had been a slave.  Post-liberation, he became a custodian of the Temple of Venus.  He was admitted to a college of priests, the Augustales, and organised ludi, entertainment events run in Greek and Latin.

    The director of Pompeii’s archaeological park, Gabriel Zuchtriegel drew the logical conclusion from the finding.  “So here we see evidence of a transformation of social ranking … he is showing that he became a different person, that he made it in life.”  Admittedly, the status of the slave was “humiliating” but it was clear that Secundio had come good.

    Such finds are impressive, but stories about manumitted slaves who went on to become social climbers and society achievers in the Roman Empire are far from unusual.  Mary Beard has made a habit of reading Roman gravestones full of conversational detail, many showing an empire filled with go-getting types and bounders.  Indeed, she has made referring to tombstones fundamental to understanding an empire not interpreted purely through the records of the great, foolish and sadistic.

    The institution of Roman slavery was, more broadly, a strange beast.  The living standards of those in bondage ranged from the atrocious and vulnerable to luxurious and cosseted.  Ethnically, they hailed from all corners of the imperium.

    During periods of the empire, notably the Imperial phase, slaves were in shorter supply given fewer wars.  Wars presented opportunities for enslavement and an addition to the labour pool.  The diminished supply meant an appreciation in value and a focus on “home breeding”.  Excessively cruel treatment was discouraged, even prohibited by some regulations.  None of this ever overcame that most evident of realities: that a slave lacked self-possession, subject to an owner who could exercise violence when he chose to do so.

    Beard notes that most baffling of tendencies in Ancient Rome: to generously manumit those in bondage.  Such individuals were granted citizenship, a point grandly illustrated by the emperor Caracalla’s decision in AD 212 to grant Roman citizenship to all free persons in the empire.  This was in stark opposition to other powers such as Athens, which could never be accused of that same tendency, let alone dolling out citizenships.   The result was a political entity of stunning ethnic diversity that served to cause a good deal of anxiety and self-questioning.

    The reasons for such emancipation are not clear.  Doing so might have arisen from “coldly practical considerations”, as Beard calls them. Older slaves would be granted freedom because of a lack of productivity and cost of retention.  Slaves might also purchase their own freedom through their savings.  For those working in domestic conditions rather than the harsher conditions of agriculture, slavery would not be a station for life.

    In Pompeii, Secundio’s body proved enthralling for its preserved state, with skeleton generally intact, white hair and even some remains of an ear.  Unusually for adult Pompeiians, he was not cremated but partially mummified and entombed.  Zuchtriegel speculates that, as tomb burial was reserved for children and infants, Secundio’s importance must have been quite something though Llorenç Alapont, an archaeologist based at Universidad Europea de Valencia advances a hypothesis: that Pompeii, at that time, permitted a certain freedom in such matters.  The list of questions merely grows.

    The post Lingering Peculiarities: Slavery and Manumission in the Roman Empire first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Australian Senate passes bill banning imports made using forced labour

    Independent Rex Patrick says the onus is now on the Coalition to allow the bill to clear the House of Representatives

    The Morrison government faces growing pressure to tighten Australia’s customs laws after the Senate passed a bill to ban anyone from importing products made using forced labour.

    On Monday the Senate passed a bill proposed by the independent senator, Rex Patrick, but for the measure to come into effect it would also have to clear the government-controlled lower house.

    Related: ‘We will respond in kind’: China’s ambassador warns Australia not to join Xinjiang sanctions

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    Related: Unions join call for Australian anti-slavery law to prevent profiting from forced labour, including in Xinjiang

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    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Descendants Sue County To Stop The Human Trafficking Of Black Bodies

    The unthinkable, unconscionable, immoral, racist, and illegal is occurring in Bethesda, Maryland located in Montgomery County. For those who thought the buying and selling of Black bodies was made illegal by the 13th amendment, Montgomery County, Maryland is challenging that notion. To paraphrase Frederick Douglas, the 21st century selling and buying of Black flesh in Montgomery County, Maryland should “disgrace a nation of savages.”

    For more than 350 years, Montgomery County has displayed a history of kidnapping, raping, and murdering of Africans. The County, in collusion with a private investor, has placed Black people back on the auction block and plans to sell over 500 Black remains along with a high-rise building to Charger Ventures.

    The post Descendants Sue County To Stop The Human Trafficking Of Black Bodies appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.