5/1/2024 More than four million Cubans, with the Revolution, in the squares of the country. By: Lianet RojasRead NowThis is how Cuba dawns today, made into a "sea" of people in avenues, towns and squares where the festival of the proletariat is celebrated, which is also a way of defending the reasons of our people to continue building the future, sovereignly CUBA'S PRESIDENT IS ALREADY ON THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST PLATFORM The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, is at the Anti-Imperialist Tribune to "celebrate with our beloved people the #1DeMayo," as he wrote on the social network X. Army General Raúl Ruz, leader of the Cuban Revolution, is also there, along with other leaders of the country. Ulises Guilarte de Nacimiento, member of the Political Bureau and general secretary of the Cuban Workers' Confederation (CTC), also participates in the traditional event. More than 1,000 people from 200 solidarity organizations around the world are present alongside the Cuban workers. Darian Oramas Campo, a young worker in the electricity sector, spoke during the central national event for International Workers' Day, in Havana. In his speech, he pointed out the challenges of the current context for our people, who are experiencing a tightening of the economic, commercial and financial blockade of the United States on the island. Photo: José.M. Weapons Strap The general secretary of the Central de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC), in the main speech of the event, pointed out that today thousands of workers demonstrate in rallies throughout the country that we remain firm and united around the Revolution, defending its ideals of independence, sovereignty and social justice. He also addressed the particularities of the Cuban socio-economic context, marked both by the U.S. blockade and by our own internal insufficiencies. All this has had an impact on food shortages, the loss of purchasing power of salaries and pensions, limits access to inputs and raw materials for industries and restricts trade and foreign investment... which, derived from the impact of the U.S. measures, has a reflection on the lives of the country's workers. We have dedicated this day, therefore, to the heroism of Cuban workers, he said. Guilarte de Nacimiento pointed out that there are good experiences in all territories of the country, demonstrating that it is possible to achieve productive efficiency, despite the limitations of material and financial resources. At the heart of these good experiences are the people, who show us that human material is the safest and most solid resource we have today and that we are not allowed to waste it. He emphasized the urgency of consolidating the socialist state enterprise, as well as ensuring the growth of the supply of goods and services, which allows reducing prices and ensuring investment efficiency, in a process of permanent linkage with the non-state sector of the economy, which requires us to pay greater attention to and protect the rights of the workers who make it up. We take on this urgent challenge, in the midst of the government's projections to correct distortions and reboost the economy in 2024, which coincides with the organic process to the XXII Congress of the CTC. The Cuban workers, in the conviction of owners of the fundamental means of production, must go to an ever greater control and inspection of resources, as well as an incessant fight against corruption, indiscipline and illegalities. International Workers' Day coincides with the persistence of the crime against the Palestinian people, from Israel. Cuban workers condemn the attacks against thousands of children and people from Palestine, he added. He also added that the global trade union movement can always count on Cuba's support in the battle against desinguality and for the establishment of a more just and equitable international order. The more complex the circumstances, the stronger the unity must be, Guilarte recalled, quoting the Army General, whose permanent call for social cohesion was the invitation with which he concluded his speech. CUBA MULTIPLIES IN THE SQUARES Once again, the dawn of the first day of May overflows the island with colors, joys and shared certainties. Once again, the date summons and unites, encourages and commits; It exalts the truth of a country. This is how Cuba dawns today, made into a "sea" of people in avenues, towns and squares where the festival of the proletariat is celebrated, which is also a way of defending the reasons of our people to continue building the future, sovereignly. In this beautiful landscape of multitudes that also include children, young people, grandparents and families, it is possible to see the greatness of a nation that has been forged in the stoicism and heroic resistance of its children in the face of the continuous imperial stumbles of those who oppose the existence of the Cuban Revolution. In order to maintain these gains and support the urgent need to revive the national economy from collective creation, this 1st. On May Day, the archipelago is once again lit up in every tribune full of posters, banners and slogans that say a lot about the commitment and drive of those who love and found, of those who do not give up, despite adversity. And in each parade that embellishes the horizon from one end of the country to the other, friends from other latitudes merge in the mass of the Cuban proletariat, who join their voices to ours, in just demands against the criminal blockade of the Greater Antilles, and the Zionist genocide that destroys thousands of lives in Palestine. To these motivations that embrace solidarity, in the midst of so much deep-rooted hatred, are added the essences of a working people who parade out of conviction and attachment to their history. That is why – which has become a benchmark for many countries in the world – our celebration of International Workers' Day is a living reflection of the Cuba we want; united and multiplied today, in every square. (Mailenys Oliva Ferrales) Archives May 2024
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5/1/2024 Labor Colonialism: The Imperialist Betrayel of U.S. Unions and the Urgent Call for Internationalism. By: Dailyn B.Read NowThe U.S. Labor movement has been making monumental strides in its “union boom” campaigns across the nation since its uptick in 2022 . As labor continues to gain a newfound momentum, it is important to critically analyze its ideological inconsistencies and the dire need for militant restructuring of national unions in principles and guidance. Unprincipled peace and corrosive liberalism has been the trend for union bureaucrats since the Cold War, and so far little to no change has been made to reverse this trend of upholding the inherent tenants of American exploitation. That is, no radical political struggle is being waged within union campaigns beyond temporary and arbitrary protections for the working-class. Of course, the dedicated work of the rank-and-file who have been the primary agitators in ushering this new wave of modern labor movements cannot go unrecognized. Yet, this era of election victories and historic contracts can easily dwindle without implementing strategic militancy in political education, organizational structure, and most importantly — international solidarity. This is for the overall purpose of upholding political consciousness amongst the poor in regards to class contradictions, its relation to capital, and its overarching exploitation of workers outside of the core imperialist countries. For the most part, rank-and-file members and their union leadership don’t grapple or internally connect their struggles with their boss in the international arena. They fail to make the connections between their local campaigns against their employer and the overall global struggle waged against the international bosses of the world: the capitalist class. Before I continue diving into this history —- this topic became apparent to me after I left my teaching job in Miami and moved to join the country’s largest public-sector collective bargaining campaign for educators and operational staff. Even though I am a relatively new union organizer, I’ve personally witnessed this philistine attitude and outright opportunism from the bureaucrats and leadership I’ve worked under. Ideology was incoherent (outside of the organizers), internationalism was non-existent — and in the midst of an anti-imperialist epoch amongst the American working-class — this particular national union was utterly spineless when it came to solidarity outside of the bargaining unit we were organizing. The history of colonialism by U.S. unions remains an ignorant and undisclosed topic among the working-class they allegedly represent. It is not the fault of the worker, but the history of colonialism and imperialism that was sown into national union leadership since the wake of McCarthyism in the 1950s. To this very day, national unions — a sector of American politics that is generally well-received amongst the working-class — are viciously and proudly contributing to the imperialist machinations of U.S. foreign policy. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), for example, has been one of the leading unions to push for privatization of education in Puerto Rico. The island’s working class have fought tirelessly for decades against both the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFT against their encroachment on la Federación De Maestros de P.R. (FMPR) since the 1970s, a conglomerate of one the most radical, rank-and-file centered teacher’s unions in the island’s history. The AFT and the SEIU have threatened increased educational privatization, complete overtake of local unions in the island, and engaged in several closed-door negotiations with La Junta to decimate pensions for Puerto Rican teachers. This is the work of a Colonial union — one that legitimizes the illegitimate debt of colonial subjects and risks the struggles of the actual working-class by putting their own neoliberal interests on a pedestal. This is especially severe to me, considering that the national union I work under is the AFT. Randi Weingarten, the current president of the AFT, is a smug and narcissistic zionist whose politics are nowhere near ideologically practical or for the benefit of the exploited — and this same critique is applicable to most union leadership across AFT’s locals. FMPR was founded in 1966 as a militant alternative to pro-management unions in PR — namely, the AMPR (Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico) —- which is an extended wing of the colonial government. Labor colonialism is real and thriving, and it is up to the rank-and-file to combat this. If teachers and workers represented by the AFT knew about the inner-workings of colonialism and AFT’s contribution towards it, such a betrayal would inevitably be reversed through an internal, popular struggle against leadership — but that is entirely dependent on the level of political education brought forth by this new labor movement. Another union in Puerto Rico — UTIER (Puerto Rico Electric and Irrigation Industry Workers Union) faced an eerily similar crackdown by none other than the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers). Prior to LUMA energy’s privatization contract in 2020, UTIER leadership met with IBEW leadership to discuss methods of solidarity and support against their fellow workers. This ask for solidarity was silent and unresponsive by U.S. unions and was met instead with a load of IBEW Local 222 Floridian scabs to break an UTIER strike. In fact, the scabs were actually guarded by private LUMA police when UTIER workers fought back against this clear attempt to side with colonialism. Why must the call for internationalism be met with hollow selfishness? Where is the comradery? Where is this alleged commitment to help the working-class? It seems that national unions are neither committed to the struggles in their own country or abroad — and these systemic policies and imperialist allyship exist as a way to appease the class divisions. Imagine if a strike against LUMA or the government encroachment on public education in the oldest colony of the world was met with international solidarity and coordinated movements by U.S. unions? Uncle Sam would never tolerate a global unification of workers, so it concentrates power in those that specialize in inoculation and political theater. The CIA and other intelligence sectors unsurprisingly has an ample history of sabotaging progressive labor movements, and the largest federation of unions in the U.S. (AFL-CIO) has contributed greatly to U.S. intervention schemes in Guyana, Brazil, Dominican-Republic, Haiti, and Venezuela. In fact, the AFL-CIO works closely under the policies of the National Endowment for Democracy, the monetary wing of U.S. foreign policy . The AFL-CIO actually operates under the American Center for International Labor Solidarity. The irony speaks for itself: one of the only constituencies for “international labor solidarity” that exists within national unions is indeed one that aims to overthrow democratic movements in the global south with the aim of replacing them with capitalist economies. The philosophy of U.S. unions rests upon the protection and acceptance of capitalism not only domestically, but internationally. Further proof of the colonial betrayal can be seen in the spineless stances regarding Palestine through the release of vague statements in support of a ceasefire but no clear position against the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli genocide. In fact, during the most recent Labor Notes conference that had over 4,000 attendees from unions all across the nation — I witnessed direct push-back from individuals against the spontaneous protest that was held in solidarity for Palestine and against Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson’s betrayal. In spite of its inherent progressiveness, these negative reactions serve as extended proof that labor in the U.S. has yet to answer the vital call for global struggle. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, the labor movement — its organizers, its rank-and-file, and its leadership — remain steadfast supporters of the colonial structures of their country. The labor movement must reconnect with its anti-imperialist roots and once and for all lock in arms with the working movements of the world — chiefly with the people being bombed by the same imperialist powers that economically exploit them. As organizers, we commend the leadership of FMPR and their continuous battle to take back complete representation of their people! May 1st will be a strategic date for a labor strike in the colony, and we must retain and amend the criticisms of U.S. unions by taking ownership in its decision-making. We combat liberalism by pressuring and overtaking ignorance, and I urge all rank-and-file members to take charge of the necessary militant political education and organizational structure to reverse the Mccarthyism of unions that expels international solidarity. Liberation is possible through a harmonious attempt of international demonstrations to combat the crisis of American imperialism — and as always, for the eventual downfall of the United States government and full sovereignty of her colonies. In Solidarity, Dailyn B. Author Dailyn B. Archives April 2024 In his early writings against censorship, Karl Marx proposed that it is insufficient to simply criticize censorship on the basis of how it depicts a limitation of our freedoms and rights. Far more important, he held, was the critical inquiry into the conditions for the possibility of censorship. Censorship, clearly, does not arrive out of thin air. It is produced by certain conditions which call it forth as a necessity for the dominant order. In our age, where censorship is the order of the day, and expresses itself in diverse forms, we too must ask – what are the conditions which make this censorship necessary? While it is, indeed, essential to call out the hypocrisy of the enunciated values of the capitalist ruling class and the violation of these in reality, simply doing this is insufficient to help us understand, explain, make sense of, why it is that that censorship is so prevalent in the first place. I think it is clear, when we observe the decaying trust in ruling institutions, in the media (which, for instance, only 11% of the population trusts), in politicians, etc., that the ruling elite have on their hands a crisis of legitimacy. Censorship is, then, a clear product of a failure of bourgeois ideology, a deterioration of their hegemonic control over the spontaneous worldviews of the mass of people. The narratives produced by the ruling institutions of the capitalist class are no longer uncritically and spontaneously accepted by the mass of people. Most regular Americans, especially the youth, intuitively understand that the media and other ideological apparatuses of the ruling class are not there to tell us the truth. Quite the opposite. Their whole purpose is to distort the world in such a way that it allows us to make sense of it through the narratives upheld by the ruling elite. To employ a technical term we use in the Marxist tradition, their whole purpose is to systematically reproduce a form of false consciousness – a consciousness which turns the world on its head on the basis of superficial one-sided facts, distortions, and lies. Somehow Israel is the victim, China the imperialist, and Cuba the state sponsor of terrorism. This is not simply a problem of epistemic hygiene, as the scholar Vannessa Wills has called it, but an objective social reality of the capitalist form of life. It is a system that, in order to reproduce itself and obtain the consent of the governed, requires that people understand the world in topsy-turvy ways. It is an order that requires a distorted refraction of itself in the realm of ideas, not an accurate, corresponsive reflection. Working class Americans, and even some dissidents from more privileged classes, are beginning to intuitively understand this reality – even if it is not, or at least not yet, comprehended with the concreteness and systematicity a Marxist worldview can provide. Nonetheless, even these spontaneous and often incoherent forms of dissent find themselves under the boot of censorship by a ruling elite too fragile to allow any form of dissent on the principal issues of empire. They much prefer, and frankly need, a compatible form of dissenters (whether from the right or left) who might criticize politicians, capitalism, ‘the matrix,’ etc. but who on issues of imperialism fall faithfully in line with the narratives of the ruling class. These issues of empire, corresponding to the Neo-imperialist stage of capitalism we find ourselves in, are the Achilles heel for the contemporary elite. The vast majority of those who have been censored over the last few years have been attacked and maligned precisely because of their challenges to the imperialist narratives. No one, that I know of, has been censored on the basis of calling for the raising of the minimum wage, for Medicare for all, or for loan forgiveness – important though these issues are for the vast majority of working-class Americans. The voices which are censored are those that have challenged the narratives of empire on key issues such as the proxy war against Russia, the New Cold War against China, the unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others, and of course, the most pivotal issue of our day, the genocide of the Palestinians by the fascist state of Israel, the U.S.’s colonial outpost in West Asia. I speak today not as an outsider simply interested in issues of censorship, but as the director of an institute that has had to battle tooth and nail against censorship for the last few years. Three years ago, when the July 11 color revolution “protests” in Cuba were occurring, we used our institute’s TikTok to dispel the imperialist myths aimed, as always, at regime change. Our following at the time was nearing 300 thousand, and the videos we were making were reaching millions of people. Within a couple videos discussing the situation our account would get temporarily suspended, a reality we faced throughout the whole summer. As is often the case, because they could not beat us at the level of ideas, their only option was censorship. Within months the special military operations would occur, representing a new moment in the imperialist West’s battle against Russia. At the time, we used our Institute’s TikTok platform to push back against the NATO imperialist narratives painting Putin simply as a blood thirsty maniac. We contextualized the SMO in the long history of U.S./NATO expansion towards Russia, the war on the people of the Donbass since 2014, the expansion, backed by the West, of Nazi-Banderism and its incorporation into the Ukrainian state amongst other factors necessary to properly access the actions that occurred in February 2022 – all factors which in previous years the imperialist media, and various U.S. officials, themselves accepted. For exposing these truths, challenging to the imperialist narrative, our account (this time nearing 400 thousand followers) would be permanently banned. In the subsequent year we would create seven new accounts, a few which also surpassed the 100 thousand follower mark, only to be banned as soon as we once again were capable of reaching millions. As the investigative work of Alan Macleod showed, the year the censorship against the Institute started the Biden administration would force ByteDance (the Chinese company with the people-centered algorithms that allowed us to grow) to hand over management of their U.S. servers to the Texas-based company ORACLE, a company with intimate ties to the CIA. It was revealed in Macleod’s report that Oracle had hired a litany of former US State Department and Intelligence Operatives to manage the content for Tik Tok, as well as a few NATO executives for good measure. TikTok said that they deleted 320,000 “Russian accounts” which included many American socialist who have never been associated with Russia in any way, such as our Institute. The censorship we have faced, however, has been far from limited to TikTok (an app that, although managed by the state department, has been unable to fully control the dissenting attitudes to imperialism the youth put out – the real reason why they have been moving to ban the app, and why, even though we’ve been banned more than seven times, we’ve been able to rebuild a new account with well over 200 thousand followers and with millions of views on various videos). In the middle of February of this year, while we were covering the death of the West’s beloved far-right racist Navalny, we received news that our YouTube was demonetized. This was one of the central sources of revenue for the Institute – a place people would donate through and ask questions in our live broadcasts. This, of course, was a unique form of censorship – a targeting of the financial foundation which allows us to do the work we do. This is merely the tip of the iceberg of censoring attacks we, and many others like us, have faced when our ideas not only challenge the dominant narrative, but do so in a way that reaches hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of people. Social media has, as I have tried to outline in my recent writings, become one of the central ideological fields where the war of position, i.e., the war of ideas for the hearts and minds of people, has to be waged. It is an area people spend 3-4 hours a day surfing, and which is central to spontaneously developing the views people come to hold on relevant political issues. Despite its tubular character and the leakages of dissenting views that spring up here and there, it has become the most important apparatus of narrative control for the ruling class – a space where they can boost their narratives (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly through bots) and shut down the dissenting ones (again, sometimes directly through bans, sometimes indirectly through demonetization, and sometimes more insidiously, through shadowbans, as has occurred to various other directors at our Institute). In the face of this censorship, it is the duty of Marxists to contextualize its emergence in the crisis of legitimacy and empire we have before us. It is also our duty, if we wish to win the war of positions, to use to our favor the gap between the lofty enunciated values of the ruling class (most of which are accepted in the common sense of our people) and the reality their order creates. The fact that, on one hand, the elite proclaim the right to free speech, media, etc., and that on the other, they censor all voices which challenge the dominant narrative (especially on issues of war and peace) is an objective contradiction we must explain to the American people, and exploit in our favor. We must help them achieve coherence in the dissenting attitudes they already hold – aid them in understanding why the ruling class and its institutions ought to be distrusted and challenged. Lenin’s question – freedom (or freedom of speech) for whom and to do what? – must always be asked. Freedom, of speech or of any other kind, is an abstraction that contains an obscured class content. Freedom of speech for the elite is the freedom of their speech, their freedom to distort reality and keep us ignorant cogs in a machine they own, profit off of, and hope to continue to keep running. Freedom of speech for us, the vast majority of people, is fundamentally rooted in the ability to speak truth to power, to challenge the narratives of those who cloak themselves under the auspices of ‘fighting misinformation’ while it is they who are the great liars, deceivers, and misinformers. This requires that we stand against censorship of all kinds, not just of those who already hold our Marxist worldview. Anyone challenging empire, regardless of how anachronistic their views might be, ought to have their rights to free speech and media protected. As Marxists, that is, as the ultimate enemies of the ruling order, we cannot stand in favor of the state’s cracking down of dissenting voices on issues of empire, even if, outside of those issues, we find some of these dissenters’ views abhorrent. In our era of blatant censorship, us Marxists ought to defend the right to free speech endowed to us in our bourgeois constitution – even if we are able to understand, and explain to others, the systematic reasons why the capitalist ruling class will always, in times of crisis, have to violate the democratic rights it enunciates with its emergence on the historical scene. Watch Full Panel Here:Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives April 2024 4/29/2024 How Africa’s National Liberation Struggles Brought Democracy to Europe: The Seventeenth Newsletter (2024). By: Vijay PrashadRead NowDear friends, Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Fifty years ago, on 25 April 1974, the people of Portugal took to the streets of their cities and towns in enormous numbers to overthrow the fascist dictatorship of the Estado Novo (‘New State’), formally established in 1926. Fascist Portugal – led first by António de Oliveira Salazar until 1968 and then by Marcelo Caetano – was welcomed into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1949, the United Nations in 1955, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1961 and signed a pact with the European Economic Community in 1972. The United States and Europe worked closely with the Salazar and Caetano governments, turning a blind eye to their atrocities. Over a decade ago, I visited Lisbon’s Aljube Museum – Resistance and Freedom, which was a torture site for political prisoners from 1928 to 1965. During this time, tens of thousands of trade unionists, student activists, communists, and rebels of all kinds were brought there to be tortured, and many were killed – often with great cruelty. The ordinariness of this brutality permeates the hundreds of stories preserved in the museum. For instance, on 31 July 1958, torturers took the welder Raúl Alves from Aljube Prison to the third floor of the secret police’s headquarters and threw him to his death. Heloísa Ramos Lins, the wife of Brazil’s ambassador to Portugal at the time, Álvaro Lins, drove by at that moment, saw Alves’ fatal fall, and told her husband. When the Brazilian embassy approached the Portuguese Interior Ministry to ask what had happened, the Estado Novo dictatorship responded, ‘There is no reason to be so shocked. It is merely an unimportant communist’. It was ‘unimportant communists’ like Raúl Alves who initiated the revolution of 25 April, which built on a wave of workers’ actions across 1973, beginning with the airport workers in Lisbon and then spreading to textile workers’ strikes in Braga and Covilha, engineering workers’ strikes in Aveiro and Porto, and glass workers’ strike in Marinha Grande. Around this time, the dictator Caetano read Portugal and the Future, written by General António de Spínola who was trained by commanders of the fascist General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War, led a military campaign in Angola, and was formerly the Estado Novo’s governor in Guinea-Bissau. Spínola’s book argued that Portugal should end its colonial occupation since it was losing its grip on Portuguese-controlled Africa. In his memoirs, Caetano wrote that when he finished the book, he understood ‘that the military coup, which I could sense had been coming, was now inevitable’. What Caetano did not foresee was the unity between workers and soldiers (who themselves were part of the working class) that burst through in April 1974. The soldiers were fed up with the colonial wars, which – despite the great brutality of the Estado Novo – had failed to quell the ambitions of the people of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The advances made by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), and People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) were considerable, with Portugal’s army losing more soldiers than at any time since the eighteenth century. Several of these formations received assistance from the USSR and East Germany (DDR), but it was through their own strength and initiative that they ultimately won the battles against colonialism (as our colleagues at the International Research Centre on the DDR have documented). On 9 September 1973, soldiers who had been sent to Guinea-Bissau met in Portugal to form the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). In March 1974, the MFA approved its programme Democracy, Development, and Decolonisation, drafted by the Marxist soldier Ernesto Melo Antunes. When the revolution erupted in April, Antunes explained, ‘A few hours after the start of the coup, on the same day, the mass movement began. This immediately transformed it into a revolution. When I wrote the programme of the MFA, I had not predicted this, but the fact that it happened showed that the military was in tune with the Portuguese people’. When Antunes said the ‘military’, he meant the soldiers, because those who formed the MFA were not more senior than captains and remained rooted in the working class from which they had come. In December 1960, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the ‘necessity of bringing to a speedy and unconditional end colonialism in all its forms and manifestation’. This position was rejected by the Estado Novo regime. On 3 August 1959, Portuguese colonial soldiers fired on sailors and dockworkers at Pidjiguiti at the Port of Bissau, killing over fifty people. On 16 June 1960, in the town of Mueda (Mozambique), the Estado Novo colonialists fired on a small, unarmed demonstration of national liberation advocates who had been invited by the district administrator to present their views. It is still not known how many people were killed. Then, on 4 January 1961, a strike at Baixa do Cassange (Angola) was met with Portuguese repression, killing somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 Angolans. These three incidents showed that the Portuguese colonialists were unwilling to tolerate any civic movement for independence. It was the Estado Novo that imposed the armed struggle on these parts of Africa, moving the PAIGC, MPLA, and FRELIMO to take up guns. Agostinho Neto (1922–1979) was a communist poet, a leader of the MPLA, and the first president of independent Angola. In a poem called ‘Massacre of São Tomé’, Neto captured the feeling of the revolts against Portuguese colonialism: It was then that in eyes on fire now with blood, now with life, now with death, we buried our dead victoriously and on the graves recognised the reason for these men’s sacrifice for love, and for harmony, and for our freedom even while facing death, through the force of time in blood-stained waters even in the small defeats that accumulate towards victory Within us the green land of São Tomé will also be the island of love. That island of love was not just to be built across Africa, from Praia to Luanda, but also across Portugal. On 25 April 1974, Celeste Caeiro, a forty-year-old waitress, was working at a self-service restaurant called Sir in the Franjinhas building on Braancamp Street in Lisbon. Since it was the restaurant’s one-year anniversary, the owner decided to hand out red carnations to the customers. When Celeste told him about the revolution, he decided to shut down Sir for the day, give employees the carnations, and encourage the employees to take the carnations home. Instead, Celeste headed to the city centre, where events were unfolding. On the way, some soldiers asked her for a cigarette, but instead, she put a few carnations into the barrels of their guns. This caught on, and the florists of Baixa decided to give away their in-season red carnations to be the emblem of the revolution. That is why the 1974 revolution was called the Carnation Revolution, a revolution of flowers against guns. Portugal’s social revolution of 1974–1975 swept large majorities of people into a new sensibility, but the state refused to capitulate. It inaugurated the Third Republic, whose presidents all came from the ranks of the military and the National Salvation Junta: António de Spínola (April–September 1974), Francisco da Costa Gomes (September 1974–July 1976), and António Ramalho Eanes (July 1976–March 1986). These were not men from the ranks, but the old generals. Nonetheless, they were eventually forced to surrender the old structures of Estado Novo colonialism and withdraw from their colonies in Africa. Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973), who was born one hundred years ago this September and who did more than many to build the African formations against Estado Novo colonialism, did not live to see the independence of Portugal’s African colonies. At the 1966 Tricontinental conference in Havana, Cuba, Cabral warned that it was not enough to get rid of the old regime, and that even more difficult than overthrowing the regime itself would be to build the new world out of the old, from Portugal to Angola, Cape Verde to Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique to São Tomé and Príncipe. The main struggle after decolonisation, Cabral said, is the ‘struggle against our own weaknesses’. This ‘battle against ourselves’, he continued, ‘is the most difficult of all’ because it is a battle against the ‘internal contradictions’ of our societies, the poverty borne of colonialism, and the wretched hierarchies in our complex cultural formations. Led by people like Cabral, liberation struggles in Africa not only won independence in their own countries; they also defeated Estado Novo colonialism and helped bring democracy to Europe. But that was not the end of the struggle. It opened new contradictions, many of which linger today in different forms. As Cabral often said as the closing words to his speeches, a luta continua. The struggle continues. Warmly, Vijay Author Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power. Republished from Tricontinental Institute Archives April 2024 Achinthya Sivalingam, a graduate student in Public Affairs at Princeton University did not know when she woke up this morning that shortly after 7 am she would join hundreds of students across the country who have been arrested, evicted and banned from campus for protesting the genocide in Gaza. She wears a blue sweatshirt, sometimes fighting back tears, when I speak to her. We are seated at a small table in the Small World Coffee shop on Witherspoon Street, half a block away from the university she can no longer enter, from the apartment she can no longer live in and from the campus where in a few weeks she was scheduled to graduate. She wonders where she will spend the night. The police gave her five minutes to collect items from her apartment. “I grabbed really random things,” she says. “I grabbed oatmeal for whatever reason. I was really confused.” Student protesters across the country exhibit a moral and physical courage—many are facing suspension and expulsion—that shames every major institution in the country. They are dangerous not because they disrupt campus life or engage in attacks on Jewish students—many of those protesting are Jewish—but because they expose the abject failure by the ruling elites and their institutions to halt genocide, the crime of crimes. These students watch, like most of us, Israel’s live-streamed slaughter of the Palestinian people. But unlike most of us, they act. Their voices and protests are a potent counterpoint to the moral bankruptcy that surrounds them. Not one university president has denounced Israel’s destruction of every university in Gaza. Not one university president has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Not one university president has used the words “apartheid” or “genocide.” Not one university president has called for sanctions and divestment from Israel. Instead, heads of these academic institutions grovel supinely before wealthy donors, corporations—including weapons manufacturers—and rabid right-wing politicians. They reframe the debate around harm to Jews rather than the daily slaughter of Palestinians, including thousands of children. They have allowed the abusers—the Zionist state and its supporters—to paint themselves as victims. This false narrative, which focuses on anti-Semitism, allows the centers of power, including the media, to block out the real issue—genocide. It contaminates the debate. It is a classic case of “reactive abuse.” Raise your voice to decry injustice, react to prolonged abuse, attempt to resist, and the abuser suddenly transforms themself into the aggrieved. Princeton University, like other universities across the country, is determined to halt encampments calling for an end to the genocide. This, it appears, is a coordinated effort by universities across the country. The university knew about the proposed encampment in advance. When the students reached the five staging sites this morning, they were met by large numbers from the university’s Department of Public Safety and the Princeton Police Department. The site of the proposed encampment in front of Firestone Library was filled with police. This is despite the fact that students kept their plans off of university emails and confined to what they thought were secure apps. Standing among the police this morning was Rabbi Eitan Webb, who founded and heads Princeton’s Chabad House. He has attended university events to vocally attack those who call for an end to the genocide as antisemites, according to student activists. As the some 100 protesters listened to speakers, a helicopter circled noisily overhead. A banner, hanging from a tree, read: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.” The students said they would continue their protest until Princeton divests from firms that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s ongoing military campaign” in Gaza, ends university research “on weapons of war” funded by the Department of Defense, enacts an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions, supports Palestinian academic and cultural institutions and advocates for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. But if the students again attempt to erect tents—they took down 14 tents once the two arrests were made this morning—it seems certain they will all be arrested. “It is far beyond what I expected to happen,” says Aditi Rao, a doctoral student in classics. “They started arresting people seven minutes into the encampment.” Princeton Vice President of Campus Life Rochelle Calhoun sent out a mass email on Wednesday warning students they could be arrested and thrown off campus if they erected an encampment. “Any individual involved in an encampment, occupation, or other unlawful disruptive conduct who refuses to stop after a warning will be arrested and immediately barred from campus,” she wrote. “For students, such exclusion from campus would jeopardize their ability to complete the semester.” These students, she added, could be suspended or expelled. Sivalingam ran into one of her professors and pleaded with him for faculty support for the protest. He informed her he was coming up for tenure and could not participate. The course he teaches is called “Ecological Marxism.” “It was a bizarre moment,” she says. “I spent last semester thinking about ideas and evolution and civil change, like social change. It was a crazy moment.” She starts to cry. A few minutes after 7 am, police distributed a leaflet to the students erecting tents with the headline “Princeton University Warning and No Trespass Notice.” The leaflet stated that the students were “engaged in conduct on Princeton University property that violates University rules and regulations, poses a threat to the safety and property of others, and disrupts the regular operations of the University: such conduct includes participating in an encampment and/or disrupting a University event.” The leaflet said those who engaged in the “prohibited conduct” would be considered a “Defiant Trespasser under New Jersey criminal law (N.J.S.A. 2C:18-3) and subject to immediate arrest.” A few seconds later Sivalingam heard a police officer say “Get those two.” Hassan Sayed, a doctoral student in economics who is of Pakistani descent, was working with Sivalingam to erect one of tents. He was handcuffed. Sivalingam was zip tied so tightly it cut off circulation to her hands. There are dark bruises circling her wrists. “There was an initial warning from cops about ‘You are trespassing’ or something like that, ‘This is your first warning,’” Sayed says. “It was kind of loud. I didn’t hear too much. Suddenly, hands were thrust behind my back. As this happened, my right arm tensed a bit and they said ‘You are resisting arrest if you do that.’ They put the handcuffs on.” He was asked by one of the arresting officers if he was a student. When he said he was, they immediately informed him that he was banned from campus. “No mention of what charges are as far as I could hear,” he says. “I get taken to one car. They pat me down a bit. They ask for my student ID.” Sayed was placed in the back of a campus police car with Sivalingam, who was in agony from the zip ties. He asked the police to loosen the zip ties on Sivalingam, a process that took several minutes as they had to remove her from the vehicle and the scissors were unable to cut through the plastic. They had to find wire cutters. They were taken to the university’s police station. Sayed was stripped of his phone, keys, clothes, backpack and AirPods and placed in a holding cell. No one read him his Miranda rights. He was again told he was banned from the campus. “Is this an eviction?” he asked the campus police. The police did not answer. He asked to call a lawyer. He was told he could call a lawyer when the police were ready. “They may have mentioned something about trespassing but I don’t remember clearly,” he says. “It certainly was not made salient to me.” He was told to fill out forms about his mental health and if he was on medication. Then he was informed he was being charged with “defiant trespassing.” “I say, ‘I’m a student, how is that trespassing? I attend school here,’” he says. “They really don’t seem to have a good answer. I reiterate, asking whether me being banned from campus constitutes eviction, because I live on campus. They just say, ‘ban from campus.’ I said something like that doesn’t answer the question. They say it will all be explained in the letter. I’m like, ‘Who is writing the letter?’ ‘Dean of grad school’ they respond.” Sayed was driven to his campus housing. The campus police did not let him have his keys. He was given a few minutes to grab items like his phone charger. They locked his apartment door. He, too, is seeking shelter in the Small World Coffee shop. Sivalingam often returned to Tamil Nadu in southern India, where she was born, for her summer vacations. The poverty and daily struggle of those around her, to survive, she says, was “sobering.” “The disparity of my life and theirs, how to reconcile how those things exist in the same world,” she says, her voice quivering with emotion. “It was always very bizarre to me. I think that’s where a lot of my interest in addressing inequality, in being able to think about people outside of the United States as humans, as people who deserve lives and dignity, comes from.” She must adjust now to being exiled from campus. “I gotta find somewhere to sleep,” she says, “tell my parents, but that’s going to be a little bit of a conversation, and find ways to engage in jail support and communications because I can’t be there, but I can continue to mobilize.” There are many shameful periods in American history. The genocide we carried out against Indigenous peoples. Slavery. The violent suppression of the labour movement that saw hundreds of workers killed. Lynching. Jim and Jane Crow. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. The genocide in Gaza, which we fund and support, is of such monstrous proportions that it will achieve a prominent place in this pantheon of crimes. History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students. Author Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers University, and an ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 12 books, including the New York Times best-seller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. His other books include “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” (2015) “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best-selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His latest book is “America: The Farewell Tour” (2018). His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and has sold over 400,000 copies. He writes a weekly column for the website ScheerPost. Republished from CP Maine Archives April 2024 4/21/2024 ON THE GENERAL DISCUSSION DOCUMENT FOR THE CPUSA’S 2024 NATIONAL CONVENTION. PART THREE: THE FASCIST DANGER. By: Thomas RigginsRead NowGDD 3 Part Three— THE FASCIST DANGER [part one here, part 2 here] First, what is fascism? According to THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY it is ‘’A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.” Trump, MAGA, and Republicans are often called ‘’fascists.’’ It would seem that, under this definition, that’s not quite the right word. The last thing the MAGA folks/ Republicans are advocating are ‘’stringent government controls’’ of the capitalist economy — it’s just the opposite. We Communists are the ones who advocate that to control and eventually, one fine day, to abolish capitalism. As far as ‘’violent suppression of the opposition’’ is concerned, THE PEOPLE’S WORLD (the advocate of Bill of Rights Socialism), maintains that Trump, MAGA, and Republicans are part of the Fascist Danger and quotes approvingly from the Communist leader Dimitrov ‘’the creation and fortification of a united front, one determined to ‘resist and smash fascist bands’ and motivate government, even a bourgeois one, ‘to adopt measures of defense against fascism.’ As he advocated: ‘Arrest the fascist leaders. Close down their press, confiscate their material resources and the resources of the capitalists who were financing the fascist movement’.’’PW 11-7-2022 This is certainly PC as far as dealing with fascists is concerned. The PW was lamenting the perceived leniency the January 6, 2021 Capitol rioters were receiving. But we have to be sure that we are dealing with actual fascists and not just crying wolf over the actions of typical American right-wing extremists and racists that appear to be endemic to the US bourgeois version of liberal democracy. There were certainly fascist elements at the Capitol but the majority were seemingly opportunistic rioters and people milling around outside watching. It was definitely a Trump inspired riot but it was too amorphous and ill planned to qualify as an ‘’insurrection.’’ Marxists have their own definition of ‘’fascism’’ given in the same PW article—‘’Fascism, as described by Dimitrov, is ‘the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital’.’’ It is highly unlikely, if Trump becomes President again since not only the Pentagon as well as ‘’the deep state’’—i.e., the FBI, CIA, and the intelligence community in general, consider him an incompetent and many states will be under control of the Democrats, more importantly the vast government bureaucracy is hostile to him, that the next four years will see ‘’an open terrorist dictatorship’’ as capitalism is doing just fine without one [so far]. Even the PW recognizes this— ‘’there will likely come a time when the ossified ruling class will be unable to rule in the old way, and when the enlightened ruled masses no longer wish to be ruled in the old way. Should that revolutionary moment arrive, capital may openly resort to fascism to save itself.’’ The CPUSA should be spending its time trying to bring about that mass enlightenment that both major parties are infected with the virus that causes fascism and we need a viable workers party, not telling us Genocide Joe has our backs. Anyway, the GDD, plays down Trump and company as the major fascist threat. “Rather, the threat stems from a mass neo-fascist movement organized by the most reactionary sections of the billionaire class. It’s been nurtured over decades, first in the evangelical right’s Moral Majority, then in the Tea Party, and now in the MAGA movement.” MAGA is just the tip of the iceberg of a mass neo-fascist movement fomented by elements of the “billionaire class (sic).” Again, it is a bourgeois, not a Marxist, view of class to view it as based on wealth rather than its relation to the means of production. So, where does the source of neo-fascism come from? The answer of the GDD is based on the aforementioned PW article. It turns out to be practically every private and public entity listed on any of the stock markets or conducting business of any sort in the country, as well major educational institutions, everything from the local chamber of commerce to the Fortune 500. In other words, almost the entire American economy and its supporters are behind, or part of, this faction of the billionaire pseudo-class. Since the overwhelming majority of voters identify with and/or vote for one of the two major parties which are controlled by the ruling class which controls the economy, the whole frigging country logically, willing or unwilling, is part of this neo-fascist movement. It appears that the author(s) of the GDD is too extreme in the description of the fascist threat. There is a serious neo-fascist movement at work in the country but it will not take over as a result of the 2024 election. We have time to organize against it, but not by advocating electoral support for one of the two leading parties which follow de facto neo-fascist lines of thought. The GDD paints a picture of both parties following a bipartisan neo-fascist foreign policy but domestically the GDD sees a difference, but it obfuscates what it is. It’s basically Good Cop versus Bad Cop and all the revisionist BS in the world won’t change the nature of monopoly capitalism’s ruling parties. Good Cop will not (most of the time) use sticks and stones to break your bones, but you are still going to jail. Well, let the GDD and its class collaborationist position speak for itself. As U.S. imperialism strives to adjust to an increasingly multi-polar world, their positions [ the DP & RP] may coincide to some degree on foreign policy, but governing domestically is another issue. Coincidence of position in one arena does not necessarily imply convergence in others. Understanding why positions at times correlate and in other instances diverge is key to learning how to exploit these contradictions in the course of ongoing democratic struggles over policy. And it’s the ongoing struggles over policy that are key to advancing the cause of the working-class and people’s movement. It’s also key to defeating the fascist threat. The role of the Communist Party is to bring these issues forward and organize around them. The role of a CP is just the opposite. Here the role is seen as concerning itself with the squabbles between the leaders of the DP and RP over which policies better reflect the interests of the ruling class and using the contradictions between them to further the ‘’democratic struggle’’ — we will see shortly that this consists in de facto support for the DP and, pari passu, whether we like its or not, support for the genocide in Gaza because, like love and marriage (so they say) with Genocide Joe and the DP, you can’t have one without the other. The CP is supposed to advance the cause of working people and defeat the fascist threat by exploiting the differences between two groups of fascists to see which one will throw us more crumbs from the table. The real role of the CP is to denounce and expose both imperialist parties and have others join with us to build a working class alternative party not muck around with some mythical ‘’all peoples front’’ full of self-styled socialists, progressives and also various centrists and even anti Communist liberals all working at cross purposes with the only common denominator being they are anti-Trump. Here is what the GDD is worried about. Millions on the left are disgusted with Biden and the DP and their wholehearted support for the apartheid Zionist state and its genocide waged against the people of GAZA. Many people will vote against Biden and the DP or just stay home on Election Day. Nevertheless, they shouldn’t allow their distaste for genocide and the murdering of thousands of innocent and helpless children stand in the way of their civic duty of electing Genocide Joe as president for four more years (inshallah). Because of all this Genocide stuff ‘’the election’s outcome may now be in serious jeopardy.’’ Yes, indeed it is. ‘’A significant part of the anti-fascist coalition is in danger of splintering off, precipitating a serious crisis.’’ Not to worry. The ‘’anti-fascist coalition’’ is a fiction of the Webbite revisionists. There is no such coalition, i.e., an alliance entered into for joint action e.g., a coalition government, or an alliance of unions. Talk of our coalition or our coalition partners, save for one or two tiny groups, is pure rubbish to give the membership the illusion the leadership is actually doing something. In reality there are many large and small organizations and civil society groups that are, for their own many and manifold reasons, opposed to Trump and the RP and want to see them defeated in November. But they have not created any sort of official coalition to work together for this common end. They may support each other’s marches and demonstrations but that’s about it. Most of them wouldn’t know what you were talking about if you asked them, ‘’Are you in a coalition with the CPUSA?” after you explained to them what the letters CPUSA stood for. Nevertheless, yet again like the Emperor in his new clothes, the leadership will continue to refer to ‘’our’’ coalition. Anyway, the next part of the GDD deals with how the party should meet ‘’the serious jeopardy.’’ Coming up Part 4, and last, WHAT IS TO BE DONE Author Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Tom is the Counseling Director for the Midwestern Marx Institute. He is the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism (2022), Eurocommunism: A Critical Reading of Santiago Carrillo and Eurocommunist Revisionism (2022), The Outcome of Classical German Philosophy: Friedrich Engels on G. W. F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach (2023), On Lenin's Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (2023), and Early Christianity and Marxism (2024) all of which can be purchased in the Midwestern Marx Institute book store HERE. Archives April 2024 Within just 24 hours of the horrific mass shooting in Moscow’s Crocus City Hall on March 22nd, which left at least 137 innocent people dead and 60 more critically wounded, US officials blamed the slaughter on ISIS-K, Daesh’s South-Central Asian branch. For many, the attribution’s celerity raised suspicions Washington was seeking to decisively shift Western public and Russian government focus away from the actual culprits - be that Ukraine, and/or Britain, Kiev’s foremost proxy sponsor. Full details of how the four shooters were recruited, directed, armed, and financed, and who by, are yet to emerge. The savage interrogation methods to which they have been, and no doubt continue to be subjected are concerned with prising this and other vital information from them. The killers may end up making false confessions as a result. In any event, they themselves likely have no clue who or what truly sponsored their monstrous actions. Contrary to their mainstream portrayal, as inspired purely by religious fundamentalism, Daesh are primarily guns for hire. At any given time, they act at the behest of an array of international donors, bound by common interests. Funding, weapons, and orders reach its fighters circuitously, and opaquely. There is almost invariably layer upon layer of cutouts between the perpetrators of an attack claimed by the group, and its ultimate orchestrators and financiers. Given ISIS-K is currently arrayed against China, Iran, and Russia - in other words, the US Empire’s primary adversaries - it is incumbent to revisit Daesh’s origins. Emerging seemingly out of nowhere just over a decade ago, before dominating mainstream media headlines and Western public consciousness for several years before vanishing, at one stage the group occupied vast swaths of Iraqi and Syrian territory, declaring an “Islamic State”, which issued its own currency, passports, and vehicle registration plates. Devastating military interventions independently launched by the US and Russia wiped out that demonic construct in 2017. The CIA and MI6 were no doubt immensely relieved. After all, extremely awkward questions about how Daesh were comprehensively extinguished. As we shall see, the terror group and its caliphate did not emerge in the manner of lightning on a dark night, but due to dedicated, determined policy hatched in London and Washington, implemented by their spying agencies. ‘Continuingly Hostile’RAND is a highly influential, Washington DC-headquartered “think tank”. Bankrolled to the tune of almost $100 million annually by the Pentagon and other US government entities, it regularly disseminates recommendations on national security, foreign affairs, military strategy, and covert and overt actions overseas. These pronouncements are more often than not subsequently adopted as policy. For example, a July 2016 RAND paper on the prospect of “war with China” forecast a need to fill Eastern Europe with US soldiers in advance of a “hot” conflict with Beijing, as Russia would undoubtedly side with its neighbour and ally in such a dispute. It was therefore necessary to tie down Moscow’s forces at its borders. Six months later, scores of NATO troops duly arrived in the region, ostensibly to counter “Russian aggression”. Similarly, in April 2019 RAND published Extending Russia. It set out “a range of possible means” to “bait Russia into overextending itself,” so as to “undermine the regime’s stability.” These methods included; providing lethal aid to Ukraine; increasing US support for the Syrian rebels; promoting “regime change in Belarus”; exploiting “tensions” in the Caucasus; neutralising “Russian influence in Central Asia” and Moldova. Most of that came to pass thereafter. In this context, RAND’s November 2008 Unfolding The Long War makes for disquieting reading. It explored ways the US Global War on Terror could be prosecuted once coalition forces formally left Iraq, under the terms of a withdrawal agreement inked by Baghdad and Washington that same month. This development by definition threatened Anglo dominion over Persian Gulf oil and gas resources, which would remain “a strategic priority” when the occupation was officially over. “This priority will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war,” RAND declared. The think tank went on to propose a “divide and rule” strategy to maintain US hegemony in Iraq, despite the power vacuum created by withdrawal. Under its auspices, Washington would exploit “fault lines between [Iraq’s] various Salafi-jihadist groups to turn them against each other and dissipate their energy on internal conflicts”, while “supporting authoritative Sunni governments against a continuingly hostile Iran”: “This strategy relies heavily on covert action, information operations, unconventional warfare, and support to indigenous security forces…The US and its local allies could use nationalist jihadists to launch proxy campaigns to discredit transnational jihadists in the eyes of the local populace…This would be an inexpensive way of buying time…until the US can return its full attention to the [region]. US leaders could also choose to capitalize on the sustained Shia-Sunni Conflict…by taking the side of conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world.” ‘Great Danger’So it was that the CIA and MI6 began supporting “nationalist jihadists” throughout West Asia. The next year, Bashar Assad rejected a Qatari proposal to route Doha’s vast gas reserves directly to Europe, via a $10 billion, 1,500 kilometre-long pipeline spanning Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. As extensively documented by WikiLeaks-released diplomatic cables, US, Israeli and Saudi intelligence immediately decided to overthrow Assad by fomenting a local rebellion, and started financing opposition groups for the purpose. This effort became turbocharged in October 2011, with MI6 redirecting weapons and extremist fighters from Libya to Syria, in the wake of Muammar Gaddafi’s televised murder. The CIA oversaw that operation, using the British as an arm’s length cutout to avoid notifying Congress of its machinations. Only in June 2013, with then-President Barack Obama’s official authorisation, did the Agency’s cloak-and-dagger connivances in Damascus become formalised - and later admitted - under the title “Timber Sycamore”. At this time, Western officials universally referred to their Syrian proxies as “moderate rebels”. Yet, Washington was well-aware its surrogates were dangerous extremists, seeking to carve a fundamentalist caliphate out of the territory they occupied. An August 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report released under Freedom of Information laws observes that events in Baghdad were “taking a clear sectarian direction,” with radical Salafist groups “the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” These factions included Al Qaeda’s Iraqi wing (AQI), and its umbrella offshoot, Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). The pair went on to form Daesh, a prospect the DIA report not only predicted, but seemingly endorsed: “If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria…This is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime…ISI could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create great danger.” Despite such grave concerns, the CIA inexorably dispatched unaccountably vast shipments of weapons and money to Syria’s “moderate rebels”, well-knowing this “aid” would almost inevitably end up in Daesh’s hands. Moreover, Britain concurrently ran secret programs costing millions to train opposition paramilitaries in the art of killing, while providing medical assistance to wounded jihadists. London also donated multiple ambulances, purchased from Qatar, to armed groups in the country. Leaked documents indicate the risk of equipment and trained personnel from these efforts being lost to Al-Nusra, Daesh, and other extremist groups in West Asia was judged unavoidably “high” by British intelligence. Yet, there was no concomitant strategy for countering this hazard at all, and the illicit programs continued apace. Almost as if training and arming Daesh was precisely the desired outcome. Archives April 2024 United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) conference, “Decolonization and the Fight Against Imperialism”. April 5 – April 7, 2024 The recent 2024 United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) conference, brought together an international group of activists from member organizations who are mobilizing against imperialism, racism, and neo-liberal policies around the world. What did people say at the UNAC? They said: “Stop the wars at home and abroad.” The conference spent a weekend talking about war - a war waged by capitalists, racists, and imperialists against humanity. These people are the modern-day class descendants of those who had ravaged the continent, themselves, for hundreds of years. Here in Mankato, Minnesota, the largest public execution in US history took place December 26, 1862, during which 38 Lakota men were hanged. They were killed for resisting the genocide against their people in the so-called Lakota War. Outside the window of the conference’s venue, the Mississippi River is in full view, flowing all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi was one of the largest means of transit in the domestic, internal slave trade, as human beings were sold along this route in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Everything that was discussed over this weekend has its origins in these stories of stolen land, stolen human beings, and wars against humanity. More recently, it was here in Minnesota in 2020 that a man named George Floyd was murdered by the police. His killing sparked the mobilization of activists across the country and around the world! The capitalists, the imperialists, and the racists are in the process of killing all life on the planet with money forced out of our hands in the form of government subsidies. A few days the media featured a headline, “Greenland's glaciers are melting 100 times faster than estimated.” Every month in the past year has been the warmest month since records were kept. March 2024 was the warmest March in history, and February 2024 was the hottest in history, and so on. Of course, a country with 800 military bases around the world plays a primary role. What quantity of fossil fuels is needed to fly jets, operate ships, and run military bases? We talked about that issue here at this conference. Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people was also on the agenda. Life in the belly of the beast is more apparent than ever looking at Gaza, as the same Joe Biden who says he is defending democracy has given Tel Aviv a blank check to kill thousands of people with the help and support of Congress. Even after tens of thousands of dead civilians, including aid workers like those of the World Central Kitchen, Israel will continue to receive weapons. And their deaths would not even have been brought to the public’s attention without grassroots resistance. To their great credit, the Palestinian people have shown us their dead – no trigger warnings whatsoever. They have shown the world these victims and accelerated the political crisis necessary to end these war crimes. UNAC understands the importance of bringing people together from all over this country and the world, as exemplified by the two ambassadors we had for the conference, from Nicaragua and the Western Sahara, the Polisario front. The US government and its allies in corporate media hide the rest of the world from us. The UNAC attempts to do the opposite and bring the information we need to see to light. Specifically, the same people who fight against the sovereignty of African nations and who want to destroy the Nicaraguan revolution are the same people who build police-state cities. The same people who speak of “collateral damage” committed by the IDF are the same people who dismiss the around 1,000 police killings that take place in the country as mistakes. Yes, 1,000, an average of 3 people have been killed every day by police in the US for at least the past 5 years. Everyone who attended the conference knows that they are a revolutionary. The word revolutionary used to scare me. I felt it was a word I could not live up to. But sharing information about these issues and working on them - these are revolutionary acts. By taking part in UNAC member organizations, we know who our enemies are and we know that wishful thinking reformism is a road to failure. Gatherings like this give us renewed focus and concentrate our efforts. It is also important to acknowledge what we are doing ourselves and for one another when we come together like this. The ruling capitalist class wants us to be atomized, to be separate, to feel estranged from one another. We’re always told nobody wants to listen to us – that nobody believes what we believe. Sometimes when attempting to engage with people it can be difficult, especially for those who are in denial or are susceptible to propaganda. This can be very frustrating, but the worst thing we can do is to believe that we are alone when we’re not. Millions around the world do not want the public’s resources to be used for war. They know that their needs aren’t being met precisely because of the violence of war-mongers and the greed of profit-grubbing capitalists. People know that they are not living well. They know they are struggling. The worst thing we can do is to think that we are special people in a unique bubble. There are plenty of people who understand what we have been talking about and others who are desperate to hear from us, which is why they marginalize and censor us. They know that people do want to hear what we say. So, I will close by saying, “Power to the people!” and by calling on the European Appeal to the World community, the UN, the BRICS Alliance, the multipolar World, and the Global South to convene a Global Peace Conference! The current conflicts in the world tend to escalate and expand geographically. The countries of the capitalist/imperialist center (USA, Great Britain and the British Commonwealth, France, the FRG, in general, the EU) are participating in these wars. The essence of the escalation and expansion of these conflicts (Ukraine-Russia, Palestine-Israel, Yemen) is an attempt to overcome stagnation in the imperialist world, revive the economy of global capitalism as a whole, and in particular to bring super-profits to the main arms manufacturers – the USA, Great Britain, France and the EU as a whole. Also, when employing modern weapons systems in conflict zones, highly qualified personnel specialists for the maintenance of such machines are necessary. This applies primarily to personnel who manage and operate air defense systems, missile defense systems, and missile weapons. Thus, many local personnel in Ukraine cannot properly operate the latest Western weapons systems, which are different from Soviet weapons. Due to this difference, there is a need to perform service to these systems by representatives of the supplying countries, sometimes with whole crews. In the course of the Ukraine conflict, personnel working with new Western weapons have become legitimate and priority targets for the influence of opponents of the Kiev authorities. It should also be emphasized that by attracting the latest weapons and trained personnel from the weapons-supplying countries, the Kiev regime is not able to ensure the safety of these personnel. It is already quite apparent that not only volunteers or mercenaries but also active officers (and maybe soldiers and officers) of the NATO armies and civilian specialists of weapons companies are among the employees of the latest weapons systems being sent to Ukraine. Therefore, these persons were sent to the conflict zone solely out of their official duty. On January 16 of this year, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation reported an attack on the temporary transfer points of the foreign military in Kharkov, in which 60 people were killed, presumably mostly French. This tragic example shows the full extent of the irresponsibility not only of the Kiev authorities but also of the French authorities, who send their citizens to the conflict zone because of the excess profits of arms corporations. The French leadership is also trying to deny these facts. Not only mercenaries, but also personnel and civilian experts from the USA, Great Britain, Germany, and other EU countries could have just as easily stood in the place of the dead French. French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent statement calling for the deployment of troops from European countries to the conflict zone in Ukraine is extremely alarming, as expressed by the French ruling circles' intention to draw their citizens into the fire of the conflict and thus resolve part of France’s internal contradictions. In this regard, we, the peace-loving peoples of the world, turn to the UN, the European Parliament, the US Congress, the parliaments of the EU, and the United Kingdom to call for: A. Immediate and unconditional ceasefires in the existing conflict zones – Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen! B. Stop the practice of sending soldiers and civilian specialists from the USA, France, Great Britain, Germany, and other EU countries to conflict areas to generate the super profits of large arms manufacturers! C. Stop arms deliveries to Israel and Ukraine from the EU! Europe should not be dragged into a spiral of conflict, sacrificing its citizens for the benefit of partners from abroad! D. To achieve a comprehensive peace, a Global Peace Conference should be convened as soon as possible! Japan being drawn into any conflict over Taiwan is essential for the US ability to maintain Combat Air Patrol capabilities over Taiwan. Control over the skies is imperative for any US military operation near there.The US carrier fleet, while the strongest in the world, is still incapable of contending with the land based air power that China can bring to bear over Taiwan, especially since China continues to invest in the research and development of stronger long range anti-ship missiles, and is building more and more of them. Therefore, the US will always choose to strengthen Japanese military capabilities and give Japan whatever it asks in a desire to maintain the 85 military facilities that it currently has within their territory. But this is all a given for anyone who’s been keeping track. The real question that we should ask about this move is if it was explicitly an ask of the Japanese Government, or if it came as a result of American political pressure. A deeper question still is if this is the genuine desire of the Japanese people or if this shift has been fostered by a bloc of interests solely within the military industrial complex’s section of the ruling class. We know for Japanese citizens living in Okinawa the public sentiment for decades has been against the US military bases on their island. On the core islands of Japan, however, public opinion towards a more expansive/defensive military has grown. According to the official press release, the weapons systems being delivered are “defensive in nature” but we should realize that American military bases in Japan are already an aggressive act from the United States, aimed at other sovereign states in the region, such as China and the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea. Due to this, any attempt by the US to arm Japan, even with defensive armament, is a further entrenchment of Japan as a military air strip for the US empire. We should also remember that the Japanese government is only putting its own citizens at risk by accepting this deal. As we have seen in Ukraine, the U.S. ruling class has no issue with sacrificing an entire generation of other countries’ young men in order to pursue its foreign policy goals. Ironically, the Japanese purchase of defensive armaments emboldens that same ruling class in the theater and may lead to open conflict over Chinese territorial waters and Taiwan. Therefore, if Japan truly wants to ensure that its people are protected it should first remove the American military presence from its own nation and end its relationship as a lackey for US imperialism. Only in this way can Japan ensure its own safety, which would also go a long way towards ensuring a more peaceful planet, in general, in the long run. Author Kyle Pettis is a Teamsters Steward and the Chief Labor Analyst for the Midwestern Marx Institute. Archives April 2024 Today I visited the Lincoln memorial and felt a genuine sadness at the fact that our country has totally failed to live up to the ideals that it was founded upon. Consider the last words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address which are carved into the walls of the Lincoln memorial: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Far from creating a lasting peace among nations, the United States has become a world imperialist hegemon, which acts as the number one threat to world peace. Or consider the much simpler quote from George Washington plastered all over the Washington monument’s gift store. “Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth." Perhaps old George would have been more correct to say, Capital, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth, concentration, and accumulation. Because the U.S. is now a country which prioritizes the profits of capitalists and bankers far above the liberty of its citizens. The words that most affected me though were from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which like the second inaugural address, have been immortalized on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial. “[T]his nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." How far we have strayed from a Government of by and for the people that these American leaders of the past dreamed of, and that hundreds of thousands of union soldiers fought to create. We now live in a so called Democracy where 92% of elections are determined by the candidate who raises the most money, where the Supreme Court has completely legalized political bribery through passing Citizens United, and where bills are literally written by corporate lobbying firms. Right across from the Lincoln Memorial is the Federal Reserve, which is one of many tools that the U.S. Government uses to control currency, and maintain unprecedented dominance over the global economy. Ironic that such a building is placed right across from a memorial dedicated to preserving a Government “of, by, and for the people.” So while my trip to the Lincoln memorial slightly disturbed me, it also inspired me. Visiting the memorial that day were busses of young schoolchildren on a field trip around Washington D.C. It got me thinking about what kind of country we are going to leave the youth? It is fully possible to create an economy and political system that works of, by, and for the people. It is called socialism. The only way to actually live up to the ideals that the country was founded upon is for working people to stand up and fight, to stand up and take this country back from the cretinous Wall Street parasites who have completely captured it. Just like our ancestors in the Union army stood up against slavery and tyranny not so long ago. Author Edward Liger Smith is an American Political Scientist and specialist in anti-imperialist and socialist projects, especially Venezuela and China. He also has research interests in the role southern slavery played in the development of American and European capitalism. He is a wrestling coach at Loras College. Archives April 2024 4/2/2024 On the General Discussion Document of the CPUSA's 2024 National Convention. Part 1. By: Thomas RigginsRead NowPREFACE This is the first in a series of opinion pieces on the upcoming CPUSA convention based on the main general discussion document (GDD). It is not my claim that the positions taken by the CP leadership are not consistent with their premises. My claim is that their premises are not Marxist and/or not sound. PART 1 GDD-1 Having postponed its mandated 2023 National Convention for a year in order to consolidate its control of the party, the current leadership has scheduled a National Convention for June 2024. Since the end of the Gus Hall era in 2000 the party leadership appears to have fallen into the hands of a right leaning Eurocommunist, Bernstein-inspired revisionist leadership cadre that under consecutive top leaders Sam Webb, John Bachtell and Joe Sims has followed a liquidationist policy [Webbism] which has seen the abolition of the print edition of the party newspaper and its replacement with a saccharine left liberal social-democratic internet version devoid of a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary working terminology, the abolition of the existing YCL and the creation of a new youth organization more in the form of The Sims Youth than an independent YCL affiliated with the party, a turnover of the party archives to a bourgeois affiliated labor library associated with NYU, the abolition of the party’s theoretical journal and a decline in Marxist class consciousness as reflected in party literature. Webb has himself left the party to support the Democrats, Bachtell resigned as top leader and has said he no longer considers himself a Leninist but he remains in control of the party press. Joe Sims was put in his place as a top leader (or ‘’co-leader’’) and prefers the term ‘’scientific socialism’’ to ‘’Marxism’’— although now as the putative leader of the party he uses Marxist terminology pro forma that he had abandoned previously. Well, I need to provide some justification for the above remarks. I hope my analysis of the General Discussion Document [GDD] the leadership has put out as the guide to the upcoming convention will do this. CPUSA conventions are usually well choreographed to end up exactly as the leadership wants and the GDD will give a good idea of what kind of program is in store for the membership [hint: it has something to do with making revisionism look orthodox and getting out the vote for Biden.] This, of course, is just my opinion of the post-Hall era, after 50+ years of seeing the party in action, and I could be wrong. The document opens with a general description of the effects today of the general crisis of capitalism, more or less similar to the effects that have characterized it for the last 50 or 60 years. The GDD also points out that ‘’fascism is increasingly promoted as an alternative by the most reactionary sections of the billionaire class.” It should be pointed out that Marxist theory doesn’t refer to a ‘’billionaire’ class.’’ The class in question is the monopoly capitalist (le gran bourgeoisie) class which owns and controls the financial and industrial means of production in the US— I.e., the ruling class which controls the Republican and Democratic parties as well. We are next told ‘’The crisis has its origins in the U.S.’ incomplete bourgeois democratic revolution that granted freedom to those with property, but subjected those without to bonded labor, slavery, and genocide, systems of exploitation that not only contributed to the country’s development but also laid the basis for a united struggle against such exploitation.’’ This is historically incorrect. The bourgeois democratic revolution was completed in the US in the 19th century after the Civil War. The bourgeois democratic revolution’s goal was to replace one ruling class with another— i.e., to make the capital class, the bourgeoisie, the ruling class and replace the feudal class which has no positive role to play in the new economic system of capitalism. At the end of the Civil War, with the downfall of the slave owning section of the capitalists (free independent workers not slaves or serfs are the theoretical exploited class under capitalism) the industrial bourgeoisie consolidated itself as the ruling class and completed the bourgeois democratic revolution in the US. The political struggle today is confined within the limits of this revolution. There is, however, a higher form of democracy that Marxists are fighting for— i.e., proletarian or working class democracy which will replace bourgeois democracy. How to conduct this fight will be determined by whether or not Marxists decide to build a revolutionary movement to bring about this higher form or confine themselves to trying to improve by reforms the already basically completed bourgeois revolution by which the capitalist class maintains its power. PART 2 coming up AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Archives April 2024 3/28/2024 A Portrait of Love in a City at War: Who Assassinated Haitian Community Leader Tchadenksy Jean Baptiste? By: Danny ShawRead NowLast year, on Tuesday, March 21st, a sniper’s bullet from an Israeli-made Galil ripped through the flesh of 24-year-old Haitian community leader and writer Tchadenksy Jean Baptiste. The war in Port-au-Prince counts among its victims hundreds of thousands of children and families who have been burnt out of their homes, raped and murdered. In Sniper City, death squads battle each other, the organized and unorganized masses and the police for territory and power. The police are among the favorite targets of the mercenaries, with on average 15 officers murdered every month in the capital. Amidst the imperial maelstrom, despite the bullets, gangs and hunger, community and resistance leaders continue their work, steadfast and confident in their people, their ancestors and their spiritual way of life. Armed with his perennial smile and poetry, Tchad was one such example of a determined militan (member of the organized protest movement) who never ceased to believe in and fight for Haiti’s unfinished second revolution. “Pa Gen Moun Pase Moun” (No one is better than anyone else) To walk with Tchadensky in the korido yo (alleyways) of Belè, Fò Nasyonal and Port-au-Prince’s many sprawling, perilous slums was to walk shoulder to shoulder with revolutionary royalty. In neighborhoods where the battle for hegemony plays out between criminal, paramilitary organizations and the masses, every neighbor, every elder and youth knew him and looked up to him. He didn’t believe in eating alone. Children gathered around cement blocks or big boulders that served as makeshift tables eagerly waiting to see what their big brother had cooked up for them. His habit of always sharing his hot plate worried his mother who perennially wondered if her oldest son had eaten enough. The elders reminded younger generations that this collective approach flowed from lespri aysyen (the Haitian way or soul). Squatting in front of a ripped poster of Jan Jak Dessalin, on a side alleyway off John Brown Avenue, the 24-year-old speaks to a group of Rasta youth: “We fight for everyone to be treated like the dignified human beings that they are.” He stopped mid breath and mid sentence and pleaded with his political family: “Why are we losing this battle? How do we take our neighborhoods back?” Despite fleeing from home to makeshift shacks and then sleeping in the streets, in stadiums, abandoned buildings and in public parks alongside hundreds of families displaced by the proxy death squads, Tchadensky never stopped reading and writing. He cited Soviet leader Mikhail Kalinin who taught that it was important to find time to read and write even if it was on the battlefield. Tedina, his life partner, remembered him as a prankster, a chef, a perfectionist, a scholar, an indefatigable fighter and lover of life. “I don’t have time for hate. I only have time for love.” A year after his death, the university where Tchadensky studied and performed has yet to come to terms with their loss. His close friend and colleague James Junior Jean Rolph offered his own eulogy, reminiscing that this youthful renaissance man did not “have a big head, constantly motivated his peers, worked and progressed without complaining and always had his head in the books.” Tchadenksy, like so many in this city of 2.5 million, lived on the run. He remained a light in Port-au-Prince’s most infamous neighborhoods 一 Matisan, Delma 2, Kafou Fèy and Belè. These are the bidonvils (ghettos) that provide the canvas for the clips of unrestrained violence that circulate on Haitian whatsapp. Tchad and the movement rejected the sensationalism of the media. Internally within MOLEGHAF and other socialist organizations, they discouraged the sharing of what they saw as “Black Death Pornography.” Tchad and others cautioned against the sharing on Whatsapp of grizzly images of heads cut off, sexual violence against the most vulnerable, bodies tortured and massacres. After a deep breath, he patiently explained to a crowd that they and their self-esteem had been brutalized and traumatized enough. The insurgent’s responsibility was to re-instill hope and love in the masses. And this is what our protagonist did until he was again run out and his home, alongside thousands of others, was burnt down. How many poems, memories, dreams, libraries and futures have disappeared in the flames, smoke and ashes of imperialism? For some militan, what they most lamented after the loss of life, was the loss of memories. How many bookshelves of fresh literature and newly-written poems have been sacrificed at the altar of the U.S. government’s obsession with guns, violence and plunder? Haiti’s top newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, published the poet’s last words “Running, Always Running” which has survived the author and the hybrid war[3]: “Running, Always Running" I am always on the run Until I am out of breath I am not an athlete I am no type of sportsman But I am always running I am fleeing and hiding from stuff I did not do After Lasalin I am in Aviyasyon I sprint through Dèlma 2 All I know how to do these days is run Drenched in sweat I am running out of breath I’m not running To get in better shape Or to impress anyone with a 6-pack I run because I am on the run I have my backpack on My baby is in my hands I have blankets wrapped around me I grab any last memories I can I drop my passport in the fury I search for a corner A nook and cranny To rest my weary head My exhausted body To think of the life I completely lost. We all run We run together Our grandmothers Little ones Everyone United Running Some of us are burnt Others are on fire All of us running shoulder to shoulder with the trauma To see who will cross the line of death first. After Kanaran I run through Divivye Then Site Solèy We are all running Drenched in sweat We are running out of breath We search for a hiding spot A refuge Where we can maroon the bullets So the stray bullets Do not Swallow us whole On the path where we are running” David vs Goliath And on a Tuesday, like any other, surrounded by one of his usual extended families, Tchadensky suddenly went quiet and crumbled underneath his own weight. The children saw the bleeding wound on the side of his stomach and screamed out “Amwey! Tchadenksy pran bal.” “Help! Tchandenksy was shot.” Amidst the shock, his comrades scrambled to gather the money necessary to pay a motorcycle to bring him to The Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) hospital. According to Domini Resain, Coordinator of Mobilization for MOLEGHAF, (Movement for the Equality and Liberation of All Haitians ), the student leader was organizing a community meal and a workshop for children displaced by the gang war when a sniper blasted a bullet from an IMI Galil into his abdomen. Everyone speculated: “the sniper who shot Tchad, was he a police officer, a paid assassin or a gang member from the G9 or G-Pèp paramilitaries who have know reconstituted themselves under the command of Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier as the Viv Ansanm alliance (Live Together)?” Domini intervened before a crowd who gathered to express their condolences: “Does it matter who killed Tchad? They are all the same. These are not stray bullets as they claim. They are state bullets. These are PHTK bullets. These are police bullets. These are Washington bullets .” In the “Confessions of a Haitian kidnapper ,” police officer Arnel Joseph unpacks the secret connections that exist between political and economic power elites, the Haitian National Police and the gangs. While the dominant narrative carried by telejòl (television or media reports carried by mouth or through rumors) stated that a stray bullet struck the popular leader, the militan were quick to point out that these were state bullets and Washington bullets. As Peter Hallward’s classic book , Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment, on the rise and repression of the Lavalas movement shows, all of modern Haitian history is a contest for power between the desperately poor 99.9 percent and the fabulously opulent 0.1 percent of the Petyonvil mountain enclave. In this asymmetrical war, Tchad mobilized poems, smiles and flowers as his class enemies hired professional assassins for a cheap day’s pay. How many tens of thousands of Lavalas organizers and fighters from the broad social movement have been disappeared, exiled, imprisoned and assassinated?The oligarchy disappears the expression, art and leadership they deem to be an obstacle to their rule. If anything remains clear in Haiti, it is the fact that a handful of elite families hide behind their heavily-fortified castles and the carefully curated media they own and manage. There are more private security guards than public police in the most unequal country in the Western hemisphere. It was an entire system that murdered Thadensky, like so many others from his generation. Washington Bullets and Resistans Ayisyen (Haitian Resistance) The average life expectancy in France is over 82 years. The average life expectancy in The Dominican Republic is 73 years. In Haiti , it is 10 years less. For a revolutionary in Haiti, the statistic drops several more decades. Tchadenksy joined a growing list of community leaders liquidated under the rule of the PHTK, the Haitian Bald Headed Party, named so because their first dictator, Michel Martelly was bald. The party's rule is especially sinister because they hide behind their hired mercenaries, denying any involvement. Paramilitaries are more effective in Haiti, just as they were in Colombia, Argentina, El Salvador and other U.S. neocolonies because they are not accountable to anyone. The modern makouts (thugs and assassins) are loyal to Izo, Kempès Sanon, Barbecue, Vitalhom or whoever the local warlord is. Three survivors of a kidnapping in Mon Kabrit, who do not want to be named, explained: “The young recruits didn’t have money to eat that day but they gripped AR15s and AK47s worth over $10,000 on the streets of Haiti. We know they are involved with the drug trade. How can they get such expensive weapons when most of us are hungry? When they divided the men from the women (the speaker looked down), the kidnappers screamed allegiance to their leader Lanmò San Jou (Death without a day announced). They asked us who we were loyal to…which political party or gang? Refusing the debate, we looked away. They hit us and reminded us that their president and the president of all of Haiti was their boss, the paramilitary gang leader, Lanmò San Jou.” This anecdote is telling and sheds light on the highly localized reality of gang bosses who preside over their own fiefdoms of looting, raping and destruction. This is the colonial Haiti run by guns for fire that Tchadensky resisted, and the one that ultimately consumed him and thousands of other innocents. Our protagonist never hesitated to denounce the powers that be, “the gangsters in ties ” and foreign forces who fanned the flames of the fratricidal war. The griot articulates what so many know but cannot express or are deathly afraid to express – the chaos in Haiti has its origins faraway in the palaces and boardrooms of Washington D.C., New York, Miami, Ottawa, Montreal and Paris. While CNN, Fox and the New York Times deceitfully portray Haiti as isolated, the Caribbean nation of over 11.5 million has for centuries been integrated into the international capitalist machinery .[4] And if the maroon nation ever steps out of line, U.S. Marines are not far off to remind them of their place in the global pecking order. Washington now prefers mercenaries from Brazil, Kenya, Chile, Chad, Nepal or Benin to carry out their fourth invasion and occupation of Haiti in the past 100 years. Regardless of the historical odds, there is an abundance of leaders and organizations who trained with Tchadensky and are fighting to elevate their homeland out of the neoliberal quagmire. They too are survivors of this hybrid war. Highly conscious of the ideological and media war against them, MOLEGHAF, the Black Panthers of Haiti , model another brand of leadership, honest, self-sacrificing and anti-imperialist.[5] For this reason, they have been targeted by state and paramilitary bullets. Many political demonstrations and protests in Haiti are in front of the U.S. embassy precisely because of this anti-imperialist awareness. Dahoud Andre, a spokesperson of KOMOKODA, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti, and host of "Haiti Our Revolution Continues" on WBAI analyzed the ins-and-outs of the struggle today for Haiti’s definitive self-determination on Black Agenda Radio. On the anniversary of the death of a Haitian Fred Hampton, take time to resist the mainstream clichés against Haiti and share the memories of our Haitian saints. The Gregory Saint-Hillaires , Jean Anil Louis Justes and Tchadenskys gave everything for everyone, while awaiting nothing for themselves in return, as they fought and fell in combat in order to guarantee all the homeland’s children an abundance of water, food, peace, liberty, dignity and joy. Fanmi Lavalas (Sali Piblik) KRÒS Kowòdinasyon Rejyonal Òganizasyon Sidès yo MOLEGHAF: Mouvman pou Libète Egalite sou Chimen Fratènize Tout Ayisyen OTR: Òganizasyon Travayè Revolisyonè Radyo Resistans SOFA: Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen Rasin Kanpèp Konbit Òganizasyon Politik ak Sendikal yo Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan MPP Movman Peyizan Papay Movman Popilè Revolusyonè (Sitè Soley) Sèk Gramsci Sèk Jean Annil Louis-Juste KOMOKODA (Komite Mobilizasyon kont Diktati an Ayiti Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti) Jounal revolisyonè: La Voix des Travailleus Revolutionaire Platfòm Ayisyen Pledwaye pou yon Devlopman Altènatif SROD'H: Syndicat pour la Rénovation des Ouvriers d'Haïti ROPA: Regwoupman Ouvriye Pwogresis Ayisyen OFDOA :Oganizasyon Fanm Djanm Ouvriye Ayisyen Altènativ Sosyalis Fwon Popilè e Patriotik JCH Jeunesse communiste haïtien Notes [1] All spellings are in the national language of Haiti, Kreyòl, not the colonial language, French. [2] Translation: “Your smile opens up a new path for Haiti. Your poetry lived and died for Haiti. See you again soon comrade God bless!” [3] For the original version of the poem in Kreyòl see the embedded link. With permission from Tchadensky’s family, I translated the poem into English. [4] The Haitian state last conducted a census in 2003 under the leadership of Jean Bertrand Aristide so the population is probably much higher than 12,000,000. [5] Partial List of Leftist, Anti-Imperialist Organizations in Haiti Author Danny Shaw teaches Latin American and Caribbean Studies and International Relations at the City University of New York. He holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. As the Director and professor of the International Affairs Department at the Midwestern Marx Institute, he works to build unity and anti-imperialist consciousness. He is fluent in Spanish, Haitian Kreyol, Portuguese, Cape Verdean Kreolu and has a fair command of French, and works as an International Affairs Analyst for TeleSUR, HispanTV, RT and other international news networks. He has worked and organized in eighty-one countries, opening his spirit to countless testimonies about the inhumanity of the international economic system. He is a Golden Gloves boxer, fighting twice in Madison Square Garden for the NYC heavyweight championship. He teaches boxing, yoga and nutrition and works as a Sober Coach. He is a mentor to many, guiding them through the nutritional, ideological, social and emotional landmines that surround us. He is the father of Ernesto Dessalines and Cauã Amaru. He has also authored articles on Latin American history, boxing and nutrition, among other topics. You can follow his work at @profdannyshaw Republished from Black Agenda Report Archives March 2024 This past Sunday, a group of Cubans took to the streets of Santiago de Cuba, in the east of the island, to show their dissatisfaction with the economic situation in the country. In recent weeks, fuel shortages have caused long hours of scheduled blackouts, especially in that city, which, along with food shortages and salaries strongly affected by inflation, have turned the daily life of Cubans into an odyssey of frustration. Immediately after the news broke, the hegemonic media of the North and some sectors of the ultra-right-wing in Florida and other parts of the world tried to take advantage of the circumstances to bring about a change of regime in the country. They hoped that what began as a peaceful protest amid a painful economic situation would multiply throughout the island and turn into a social outburst that would lead Cubans to confront one another. It hurts how they dismiss the real causes of the economic crisis in Cuba, which includes, above so many other reasons, the U.S economic blockade that has continued non stop against the island for over 64 years, preventing us from establishing trade relations with the rest of the world and, therefore, our own development. The opportunists look at us from a distance with hamburgers in hand and want us to get heated up, with sticks in hand against the government, as if they were attending one of the battles of the U.S. bestseller The Hunger Games. This Sunday, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged on the social network X that people had expressed dissatisfaction with the current situation. He warned that this context is being taken advantage of by the enemies of the Revolution “for destabilizing purposes.” Their objective has nothing to do with the needs of the Cuban people. Diaz-Canel denounced that terrorists based in the United States are encouraging actions against the internal order of the country. The president also reiterated the willingness of the Cuban authorities of the Communist Party, the State, and the Government, to attend to the demands of the Cuban people. “We are willing to listen, dialogue, and explain the many steps taken to improve the situation, always in an atmosphere of tranquility,” he said and reaffirmed the government’s commitment to “work in peace to overcome the current situation, despite the blockade that seeks to suffocate the nation.” While the president took the podium to assure the people that they are not alone and that the government understands, listens, and acts, the U.S. embassy took to social media to speak about “human rights.” On the official X account, the diplomatic headquarters in Havana posted, “We are aware of reports of peaceful protests in Santiago, Bayamo, Granma, and elsewhere in Cuba, with citizens protesting the lack of food and electricity. We urge the Cuban government to respect the human rights of the protestors and address the legitimate needs of the Cuban people.” Spoken like they are innocent concerned bystanders. On Monday, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Benjamin Ziff was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Deputy Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío, who formally expressed Cuba’s firm rejection of the U.S. government’s and its embassy in Cuba’s interference and slanderous messages regarding internal affairs of the Cuban reality. “How cynical and despicable to ask the government of Cuba to satisfy the needs of its people, when your government has been applying a brutal siege for +60 years to deprive my people of the essentials and cause its suffocation,” Cuba’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Josefina Vidal, denounced. The destabilizing plan and its execution are obvious for all to see. It rests on the reinforcement of a ruthless economic war to provoke and exploit the natural irritation of the population. It is financed with tens of millions of dollars from the U.S. federal budget every year. According to a statement issued by the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the plans have a powerful technological infrastructure to exploit digital networks from U.S. territory for aggressive purposes. They enjoy the complicity of important U.S. and international mainstream media and the mercenary support of people based mainly in South Florida, in the United States, whose only livelihood is the industry of aggression against the island. What do Cubans need? To reject the suffocation to which we are subjected to, the lack of access to food, inflation, bureaucracy, corruption, and internal problems that can be solved but we will do that. And above all, we condemn the determination of the U.S. Government to limit and hinder every effort of the Cuban State to find solutions and provide answers to the economic and social needs of the country. It is actually quite simple, as a sovereign country we are resolute in our insistence that we will build our society without the dictates of any country. Archives March 2024 3/19/2024 A Common Struggle Against Imperialism: A History of Solidarity Between Palestine and Puerto Rico. By: Benjamin Pérez González.Read NowThe first resistance warriors against Western imperialism in the Americas, were the Taíno nation, a people which once inhabited the Caribbean Islands, including the land which we now know as Puerto Rico. Scholars now agree, what the natives knew all along, Christopher Columbus did not discover anything, rather he was discovered himself. Contrary to the lies perpetrated throughout official history, Columbus was lost. Or as James Baldwin puts it: “Columbus was discovered by what he found''.[1] Columbus believed he arrived in Asia and died swearing that Cuba was mainland Japan. In fact, Columbus' ship wrecked and it was the Taíno people who rescued him and brought him ashore. The Europeans were shown mercy, gentleness, trust and were welcomed with gifts and open arms. In return, the invaders made them slaves, destroyed their culture, slaughtered the people, burned their history, and took the land.[2] Ever since 1492, Western Imperialism has dominated the world;centuries ago it was Spain, a few decades ago it was Britain, and today it is led by the United States of America, the world’s biggest empire. The People of the World have fallen victims to the first true global empire. With some, of course, defeating it and in the process achieving liberation. The ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Natives of the Americas at the hands of European imperialism, distinctively parallels with the ongoing slaughtered and destruction of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel. However, we cannot overlook the fact that Israel would not be able to act with such impunity and have such military, political and economic power without the massive support of the world’s most powerful empire, the United States; the same empire that continues to occupy and colonize Puerto Rico. Yet, however, today we see two nations struggling against a common enemy: Palestine and Puerto Rico, a struggle against imperialism and for liberation. The State of Israel, as Yasser Arafat famously stated in an interview with a British reporter, is the baby of Western imperialism, namely Britain and the United States.[3] After all, it was Britain who ushered the creation of the State of Israel with the notorious Belfort Declaration of 1917.[4] Today, the UK and the United States, are the biggest political, economic and military supporters of Israel. The United States alone has provided Israel with hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid, along with its fundamentally corrupt support in the International arena.[5] The United States corporate media have displayed unrelenting support for the genocide being committed by Israel in Palestine. The fundamental motives of the United States empire in its involvement in the ongoing Palestinian genocide, are best expressed by president Joe Biden, which once stated in 1986, in front of Congress: “Were there not an Israel the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region”. [6] What are the interests of the United States, one may ask; the answer is to continue the over 500 years legacy of Western imperialism, that being to exploit, plunder and pillage the peoples of the world, for the enrichment of the international bourgeoisie. The Palestinian people, like the Taino people, are today facing the possibility of undergoing ethnic cleansing at the hands of the savagery enforced by Israel. Ethnic cleansing has come to be defined as a crime against humanity, punishable by International Law. [7]The atrocities committed by the Israeli government have sent shock waves throughout the international community, with the United Nations 15-member Security Council voting 13-1 in favor of a ceasefire with the United States being the only country voting against it, and the UK abstaining its vote. [8]Furthermore, South Africa presented their case in the International Court, accusing Israel of crimes against humanity, including genocide, with other countries taking the United States to court for their complicity in this genocide. The bombs dropped today in Palestine were tested in Puerto Rico. The United States Navy, for decades, experimented in Puerto Rico with chemically dangerous explosives which destroyed the ecosystem of Vieques, a small municipality east of the Island(s). The remnants of this continue to haunt the people of Vieques, which today have the highest rate of cancer in the archipelago.[9]Furthermore, today the United States military occupies 13% of the land of Puerto Rico, occupying the Puerto Rican nation since 1898, using it as a military base and as a giant laboratory for its multinational chemical corporations like Dupont ,the pharmaceutical industry, and those of the Military Industrial Complex, like Lockheed Martin. [10]The same claws covered with the blood of the Puerto Rican people have Palestinian blood as well. [11]Lockheed Martin is a giant profiteer from the war in Palestine, which also made great wealth from the invasion of Iraq and other imperial wars throughout the world.[12] Ever since, the State of Israel ramped up its vicious military attacks against the Palestinian people, the People of Puerto Rico ,and its diaspora, and have been conducting demonstrations and protests in solidarity with Palestine.[13] Yet, the solidarity between Palestine and Puerto Rico has not begun recently. Rather, Puerto Ricans have expressed for decades clear support for Palestine with the late great Puerto Rican lawyer and social justice activist, Juan Marís Bras, declaring in front of the United Nations in 1982 that, “Puerto Rico is the Palestine of the Americas'' and that the “Palestinian people who fight together with us, are leading one of the most heroic struggles of our contemporary times”.[14] Like the Palestinian people, the Puerto Rican people are resisting the horrors of colonialism and imperialism. Edwin Cortés, political activist for the liberation of Puerto Rico once wrote in the 1980s: “Within the past two months renewed resistance in the Middle East has once again captured world attention. This time it is not the tragic Iran-Iraq war but Palestine, a nation in struggle that represents a vital threat to the existence of Zionism, Arab reaction, and US imperialism in the Israeli occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.”[15] Furthermore, in 2001, as a clear sign of solidarity between the two occupied nations, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition marched during the National Puerto Rican Day Parade in Manhattan. [16] The acts of the State of Israel have been conceived by some as the most documented genocide in history, and perhaps they are right. There are clear similarities in the vicious acts of Israel with those committed by the Spanish empire against the Taíno people. Israel, like Spain, has dehumanized the people which terrorizes, often demonizing them, showing no mercy or common humanity, engaging in the most atrocious crimes imaginable. Since the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, over 2 million Palestinian have been displayed from their ancestral land, with Israel now occupying over 80% of Palestinian land, and those who refuse to leave, are facing annihilation. [17]These acts will be remembered in history and those who are responsible will be compared to the horrors committed by Nazi Germany. For there is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people. Yet, we cannot overlook the fact that Israel would not be able to conduct this display of force and might, without the support of the United States, the empire that today occupies and colonizes Puerto Rico. Notes [1] Baldwin, J. (1990). Jimmy’s blues: Selected poems. St. Martin’s Press. [2] Clarke, J. H. (2014). Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan holocaust slavery and the rise of European capitalism. Lushena Books. [3] Counter Narrative News. (2023, October 30). Yasser Arafat: Israel is the west’s baby. Counter Narrative News YouTube. https://youtu.be/nXvLsl17mHM?si=x_jGW_CTb0QTMKOQ [4] Khalidi, R. (2022). The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A history of settler colonialism and resistance, 1917-2017. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company. [5] Masters, J. (2024, January 23). U.S. aid to Israel in four charts. Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts [6] Kestler-D’Amours, J., & Stepansky, J. (2024, January 30). “defies logic”: The makings of Joe Biden’s “blank cheque” to Israel. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2024/1/30/defies-logic-the-makings-of-joe-bidens-blank-cheque-to-israel#:~:text=“Were%20there%20not%20an%20Israel,decades%20away%20from%20becoming%20president. [7] Pappé, I. (2023). The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld. [8] Lederer, E. M. (2024, February 21). The US vetoes an Arab-backed UN resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/un-israel-palestinians-gaza-ceasefire-resolution-vote-350c86ef261bf1a00a2515cf22764de5 [9] Chan, W. (2023, May 1). “I thought they’d kill us”: How the US navy devastated a tiny Puerto Rican Island. The Guardian. [10] Hofstaedter, E. (2022, October 12). Big Pharma is flooding Puerto Rico with toxic waste. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/10/big-pharma-is-flooding-puerto-rico-with-toxic-waste/ [11]Power, M. (1989, July 27). Time to end U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico. The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/27/opinion/l-time-to-end-us-occupation-of-puerto-rico787489.html [12] War profiteer of the Month: Lockheed Martin. War Resisters’ International. (2006, August). https://wri-irg.org/en/story/2006/war-profiteer-month-lockheed-martin [13] Florido, A. (2024, January 19). Why Puerto Rico has such deep support for the Palestinian cause. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/19/1225722287/why-puerto-rico-has-such-deep-support-for-the-palestinian-cause [14] Hevesi, D. (2010, September 11). Juan Mari Bras, voice for separate Puerto Rico, dies at 82. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/us/politics/11bras.html [15] Ramos-Zayas, A. Y., & Rúa, M. M. (2021). Critical dialogues in Latinx Studies a reader. New York University Press. [16] Ibid. [17] Khalidi, R. (2022). The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A history of settler colonialism and resistance, 1917-2017. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company. Author Benjamin Perez Gonzalez graduated in Sociology and Political Science from Florida International University and is current a graduate student at the University of Puerto Rico. They are also a teacher, writer and activist. Archives March 2024 "In the midst of a blockade that intends to suffocate us, we will continue working in peace to overcome this situation". This was stated, through the social network X, by the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, while denouncing the propagandistic and instigating articulation of the enemies of the Revolution to provoke destabilization and chaos, based on the tensions generated by the current limitations of the electric service in the country, due to fuel deficit, and other daily shortages, mainly as a result of the relentless policy of economic suffocation of the United States Government against Cuba. "In the last few hours we have seen how terrorists based in the U.S., whom we have repeatedly denounced, encourage actions against the internal order of the country," the president accused, referring to the growing counterrevolutionary campaign that, through the artificial multiplication of hate messages and subversive content disseminated on social networks and anti-Cuban sites, distort and manipulate the claim that groups of citizens have expressed, due to logical disagreements with the electricity service and food distribution. "The disposition of the authorities of the Party, the State and the Government is to attend to the claims of our people, to listen, to dialogue, to explain the numerous steps being taken to improve the situation, always in an atmosphere of tranquility," Díaz-Canel argued. A clear example of this was the honest and open dialogue held yesterday by the first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Party in Santiago de Cuba, Beatriz Johnson Urrutia, with a group of people who complained about the unbalanced schedule in the supply of electricity and the effects on products such as milk for children. According to statements in X, Johnson Urrutia explained that "the population of Santiago de Cuba was respectful and listened attentively to the information provided by the municipality's management regarding the distribution of the food basket", and added that "they also talked about the supply of electric energy, due to the effects on the National Electro-energy System, because of the problems of the thermoelectric power plants and the availability of fuel". "The premise will always be the attention and explanation to the people, in an atmosphere of peace and tranquility, in the face of the persistent attempts of counterrevolutionaries and terrorists abroad to destabilize the country", stressed, also through X, the member of the Political Bureau and Secretary of Organization of the Central Committee of the Party, Roberto Morales Ojeda. That the traditional enemy of the Cuban Revolution and its chorus of mercenaries associate for the strangulation of the Island has nothing spontaneous about it. "They seek asphyxiation with the genocidal blockade and, on the shortages and daily difficulties they impose on us, they articulate their other war from the platforms they dominate and usufruct," denounced Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, also a member of the Political Bureau, when he pointed out the interferenceist conspiracy of the diplomatic representation of the Northern power in our country. "The direct and cruel responsibility of the U.S. in the acute economic situation that weighs on the well-being of the Cuban people is well known. The U.S. Government, especially its Embassy in Cuba, must refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of the country and inciting social disorder," he demanded. Archives March 2024 |
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