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No Mention Here In the USA Of Haitians Forced to Flee Dominican Republic for Haiti

NB Commentary: Sometimes it is hard for me to wrap my head around the dichotomy that the US calls foreign policy. On one hand they support “freedom fighters” who want to dispose of an evil dictator, on the other hand they prop up evil dictators and guarantee them long life and protection.
In the case of immigration they want to take in Syrians, whom they have no idea what type of social ills they may bring to this country or how many of them may be disgruntled refugees ready to be radicalized, and yet, not far away to the south of the US are poor and starving people, not terrorist but folks who are suffering unfathomable obscenity due to their position on top of tremendous, gas, oil and various other mineral reserves. I am so struck by this and often find myself in a quandary to make sense of it.
Then like clockwork, the little voice inside my head reminds me of what the geopolitical priority of the US & NATO are really based on. And while these “facts” may give way to lesser confusion, it still boggles my mind.

Posted by El-Bull on December 14, 2015 at 5:04am

Along this arid strip of borderland, the river brings life. Its languid waters are used to cook the food, quench the thirst and bathe the bodies of thousands of Haitian migrants who have poured onto its banks from the Dominican Republic, fleeing threats of violence and deportation.
These days, the river also brings death. Horrid sanitation has led to a cholera outbreak in the camps, infecting and killing people who spilled over the border in recent months in hopes of finding refuge here. 
Nearly 3,000 people have arrived in the makeshift camps since the spring, leaving the Dominican Republic by force or by fear after its government began a crackdown on illegal migrants. Some, born in the Dominican Republic but unable to prove it, cannot even speak French or Creole, Haiti’s main languages, showing how wide a net the Dominican government has cast.

    Haitian officials have done almost nothing to support them. The population is scattered across the drought-racked southwest border, mostly barren plains. Families of eight sleep in tents fashioned from sticks and cardboard. They drink river water, struggle to find food, and make do without toilets or medical attention.

    Families wash clothes in the river that runs by Tête à l’Eau, Haiti, where many who fled the Dominican Republic have settled. CreditMeridith Kohut for The New York Times
    Now stateless, the refugees exist in the literal and figurative space between two nations that, along with their island, share a history steeped in hostility. Some of the camps were created decades ago, during another iteration of their troubled pasts, but had long since been abandoned. Now, in a new cycle of tension between the nations, they are packed to capacity once again.
    The plight along the border is reminiscent, on a smaller scale, of the devastating 2010 earthquake, which claimed the lives of 100,000 to 316,000 Haitians and summoned a wave of billions of dollars in aid. Even today, more than 60,000 displaced people still reside in tent cities around the country.
    Only this time, the upheaval is man-made, the result of the policies of the Dominican Republic and the seeming indifference of the Haitian government. The authorities in Haiti do not even formally recognize that the camps exist.
    “I haven’t felt normal since my son died,” said David Toussaint, 55, whose 9-year-old boy was one of at least 10 people in the camps to die of cholera. Officials say more than 100 people have been infected.
    He lifted himself from a bed his family built in their tent, covered with a frayed tarp. He spends his days there, immobilized by grief. An acrid smell filled the hot air as dust swirled into the tent, cloaking everything.
    “This is no way to live,” he said.
    When the Dominican government announced that all migrants in the country illegally had to register this June, mass deportations were feared. Those later rounded up were taken largely from remote areas, and bused quietly to border crossings. In total, more than 10,000 people were expelled officially, with nearly another 10,000 people claiming to have been kicked out as well, according to the International Organization for Migration.
    But in this climate of fear, an even bigger phenomenon emerged: Tens of thousands of people of Haitian descent decided to leave the Dominican Republic on their own, rather than risk deportation, including some who were born on Dominican soil and knew nothing of Haiti.  
    Why Is Haiti So Poor
    Published on Mar 5, 2013
    Hugo Chavez shares thoughts of why Haiti is poor. The following is a transcript of the speech given prior to Hugo Chavez’s death on March 05, 2013. Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías born on July 28, 1954 – passed away on March 5, 2013)


    Vive Haiti!
    Haiti, the Black Jacobins, that of Toussaint Louverture.
    Haiti that of Pétion.
    Haiti, from where Miranda arrived with our flag, it, and a dream of several years, and a project: the South American revolution.
    Haiti, that of Bolivar.
    Haiti, that of the expeditions of Los Cayos, sister Haiti, Haiti, painful reality.
    Fidel Castro, as always, continues to launch his thoughts, his ideas, his contributions to the world in which we live. And this afternoon I received – this morning, rather – the reflections of Fidel, his most recent.
    Fidel said, permit me to read some of these deep thoughts of our companion, comrade, commander.
    I read: “The tragedy excites, in good faith, a lot of people, specially because of its natural character. But very few of them stop and ask the question: why Haiti is a poor country?
    Why does the population depend almost 50% on orders sent from the outside by its families.
    Why not also analyze the realities that led to the current situation of Haiti and its enormous suffering? “
    I would add that this painful moment seems opportune to reflect and get to the bottom of things: why haiti is so poor?
    Why is there so much misery in Haiti?
    I continue reading Fidel:
    “The most curious in this story is that nobody said a word to remember that Haiti was the first country in which enslaved Africans 400,000 of them, trafficked by Europeans, rose against white owners 30,000 plantation sugar cane and coffee, fulfilling the first great social revolution of our hemisphere. Pages of unsurpassable glory could be written around the earth.
    The most eminent general was defeated, Napoleon, out there. Haiti is the net product colonialism. Haiti is the net product of colonialism and imperialism, of more than a century of use of its human resources in the hardest work, of military interventions and the extraction of its wealth.
    This historical oblivion is not so serious to the reality which is that Haiti is the shame for our time, in a world where those prevail on the exploitation and plundering of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the planet. “
    And then continues in Fidel and his reflections by launching rays of light that lives for this moment humanity. But it is by here we start:
    “Haiti is a net product of colonialism. Haiti is a product of imperialism. As not only will complete colonialism, as not only will complete imperialism, and I go further: as not only will complete capitalism, we have situations and people living the painful situation facing Haiti.”
    I confess my personal experience, when several years, for the first time, we visited Haiti. I confess, I wanted to cry myself. With one of my companions, I went to see these people in the street, with elation, hope, magic and misery, and I remembered a phrase that came out of the soul, I told my companion nearest the descent of a van – we wanted to walk for a while and we ended up running into a street – I told him: look, mate, the gates of hell, inhabited by black angels.
    Because it is a people full of it: this is an angelic people.
    I ratify what President Sylia has decreed: while our commitment to our people, all the people, the Venezuelan people are with Haiti, the Bolivarian revolution is with the people of Haiti, with its pain, with its tragedy, with its hope.
    — in Caracas, Distrito Federal.

    INTERNATIONAL COMMENTARY
    Border Tensions Are on the Rise Between Haiti and the Dominican Republic
    James M. Roberts / October 02, 2015 / 
    Excerpt: “This summer, officials in the Dominican Republic (DR) began deporting Haitian migrants and Dominican-born but undocumented people of Haitian descent.That decision has received wide attention, and the DR government of Danilo Medina has been criticized by human rights activists.
    For some Haitians, the deportation order invoked memories of the notoriousParsley Massacre of 1937, when Dominican President Trujillo ordered troops to kill thousands of Haitian migrants living along the border of the two countries.
    The rekindling of old racial conflicts under the new DR deportation policy may be a populist attempt to stoke support during stagnant economic times in advance of 2016 presidential election in the DR. The Obama administration has reportedly leaned heavily on Medina’s government to ease the deportation order.”

    Category:

    Caribbean, colonialism, Dominican Republic, earthquake, Fidel Castro, France, geopolitics, Haiti, Hispaniola, migrants, NATO, natural resources, Obama Administration, poverty, refugees, revolution

    Imperialism ‘Genocides the Poorest of the Poor’

    Imperialism ‘Genocides the Poorest of the Poor’

    ‘The war and its results have turned Yemen back a hundred years, due to the destruction of infrastructure . . . especially in the provinces of Oden, Dhalea and Taiz.’
    Izzedine al-Asbali
    Yemeni Human Rights Minister
    ‘Yemen is devastated. There are no roads, water or electricity. Nobody’s left but thieves.’
    A resident of Sana (Yemen)

    Introduction

    The Euro-American and Japanese ruling classes, as well as their collaborators in the Afro-Asian and Latin American countries, have accumulated vast profit. This has occurred through a complex stratified system re-concentrating the world’s wealth through:

    • 1. The exploitation of labor in the First World (North America and Western Europe)
    • 2. super-exploitation of labor in the Second World (China, ex-USSR)
    • 3. dispossession of peasants, native communities and urban dwellers to grab resources, land and real estate in the Third World
    • 4. wars of genocide against the poorest of the poor in the ‘Fourth World’

    Besides all the forms of brutal exploitation and dispossession, which enrich the Euro-US ruling classes, by far the most sinister and threatening to humanity is the concerted worldwide effort to literally exterminate the poorest-of-the poor, the hundreds of millions of people no longer essential for the accumulation and concentration of imperial capital today.
    This essay will begin by mapping the genocidal wars against ‘the wretched of the earth’, identifying the geography of genocide, the countries and subjects under attack, and the trajectory, which has been chosen and executed by the leaders of the Euro-American regimes.
    Then we will examine the reason for genocide within the dynamics and forms of contemporary capitalism. In particular, we will develop the genocide hypothesis: that imperial genocide of the poorest of the poor is a deliberate policy to reduce the growing surplus labor, which is no longer needed or wanted for wealth accumulation but is increasingly feared as a potential political threat.
    In the last section, we will discuss how the ‘wretched of the earth’ are responding to this policy of imperial genocide and what is to be done.

    Mapping Genocide Against the Poorest of the Poor

    It is no coincidence that the most violent assaults and invasions by the Euro-American powers have taken place against the poorest countries in each region of the world. In the Western hemisphere, the Euro-US regimes have repeatedly invaded the absolutely poorest country, Haiti, overthrowing the popularly elected Aristide government, decimating the population via a cholera epidemic spread by UN mercenary ‘peace-keepers’, killing tens of thousands of poor Haitians and rounding up thousands of protestors. The occupation continues. Honduras, the second poorest country in the region, experienced a US-backed coup d’état deposed their recently elected president and imposed a terrorist puppet regime, which regularly assassinates dissidents and landless rural workers. Peasants are dispossessed; the economy and society are in shambles with tens of thousands of Hondurans (especially children) fleeing the violence.
    Today, the Euro-American powers actively support the absolutist regime of Saudi Arabia as it bombs and slaughters thousands of Yemeni civilians and resistance fighters. Yemen is the poorest country in the Gulf region.
    Video Link
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3012403/Saudi-airstrikes-targeting-rebel-military-bases-Yemen.html#v-4135339495001

     
    In South Asia, the US invaded and occupied Afghanistan; its coalition of puppets and NATO allies have massacred and displaced millions of poor farmers and civilians. Afghanistan is the poorest of the poor countries in the region.
    In Africa, the Euro-American powers and their local collaborators have invaded, bombed and occupied Somalia, Chad and Mali – among the poorest of sub-Sahara countries.
    After the US-NATO campaign of destruction against Libya, 1.5 million sub-Saharan Africans and black citizens of Libya lost their stable employment and became the victims of ethnic slaughter. Their attempts to escape the violence and starvation by fleeing to Europe are blocked by the leading powers (the same powers that destroyed the Libyan economy and society). Those, who do not drown in their flight, are detained and returned to their devastated countries and early deaths.
    In Western Europe, millions of Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese, inhabiting the poorest countries in the region, have faced massive job losses, widespread impoverishment and spiraling suicides – all induced by austerity programs designed to pillage their economies and enrich their Euro-US creditors.
    In the United States, 1.5 million black (mostly male) Americans, are ‘missing’ – products of early death, industrial-scale incarceration and police assassinations. American Indian communities are subject to depredations and early death from the policies of the Federal and State governments. Their lands have been handed over to mining (and now fracking) to serve the interests of the mining and agro-business elite. Throughout the US Latino agricultural workers are increasingly viewed as ‘expendable’ with technology and the effects of global climate change (such as the severe drought in California) depriving them of livelihood.
    In the Levant, Palestinians, now the poorest of the poor and the most disenfranchised, face continued Israeli land grabs, pillage and violence in the West Bank and genocidal attacks in Gaza. Iraq and Syria have experienced millions of deaths and displacements, reducing previously prosperous, educated and sophisticated multi-ethnic populations into impoverished, uprooted and desperate people deliberately driven backwards to tribal loyalties.

    Why Imperialism ‘Genocides the Poorest of the Poor’

    With the exception of Iraq and Syria, all of the violated countries have been poor in resources and markets, and possess large unskilled labor. The people are targeted and savaged because they no longer serve as ‘labor reserves’ – they are now excess-surplus labor – in Nazi racial hygiene terminology, they have become ‘useless mouths to feed’. This has intensified as crisis engulfs the West and the least productive sectors of capitalism, finance, real estate and insurance (FIRE), have become the leading sectors of capital. ‘Cheap labor’ is less needed, least of all overseas labor from conflictual regions.
    The ‘poorest of the poor’ countries under attack lack rich resources ripe for plunder; their populations do not exist among the priorities of the multi-national bankers – except when seen as ‘obstacles’. In the colonial past, sectors of these populations would have been recruited by imperial countries to submit, obey and serve as imperial mercenaries or coolie labor. They would have been transported and employed by empire for ‘dirty’, dangerous and poorly paid jobs in other colonized countries – like the millions of Indians scattered throughout the former British Empire. Today, such coolies have no value.

    Debate on Globalization: Threat or Opportunity?

    The IMF’s stated mission is to “foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.” However, there are those who assert that the IMF is actually a destabilizing force within the global economy, while others believe that the countries themselves are to blame for poor economic choices. Africa Action, TransAfrica Forum, and IPS’ Foreign Policy In Focus will host this provocative contest of perspectives and analysis between Rick Rowden, a long-time critic of IMF policy, and Eugene Nyambal, former senior advisor to executive directors at the Board of Directors of the IMF. 

    The genocidal nature of the wars against the ‘poorest of the poor’ is best demonstrated by the actual targets and primary victims of these wars: Millions of civilians, families, women, children and heads of households have suffered the worst. These ‘targets’ represent the most stable and essential elements responsible for family reproduction and security. The ‘poorest of the poor’ communities are being destroyed. Genocidal bombing has overwhelmingly targeted the essential factors for survival: cohesive households, communal settings, subsistence food growing regions and access to clean water.
    Therefore, it should come as no surprise that marriage ceremonies and traditional social gatherings have been ‘mistaken targets’ of missiles and drone strikes. Despite the denials from the White House, the geographic extent and nauseating number of such attacks demonstrate that according to the ‘genocide hypothesis’ there is ‘nowhere to hide’: The targeted populations will have no marriage celebrations, no social life, no increase in children among the poorest of the poor, no protection for the elders, no social fabric and no communal organizations – there will be no survival networks left for the superfluous of empire.
    The ‘genocide hypothesis’ underlies the practice of ‘total war’. The practice includes massive attacks on non-military targets (‘Shock and Awe’) and the use of high tech weaponry to target collectives of the poorest of the poor – repeatedly, over long periods of time and wide geographic regions.
    If, as the apologists of genocidal wars claim, the bombings of weddings and slaughter of school children are ‘collateral’ in the ‘Global War on Terror’ why are they happening everywhere in the fourth world and virtually everyday?
    The genocide hypothesis best explains the data. Even the terminology and claims made by imperialist experts regarding their weapons systems support the genocide hypothesis. These weapons, we are told, are ‘intelligent, precise and highly accurate’ in targeting and destroying ‘the enemy’. By their own admission, then, the poorest of the poor have become ‘the enemy’, as imperial weapons makers support ‘intelligent’ genocide with ‘precision’.

    Georgia Guide Stones

     
    When liberals and leftists criticize how imperial drone strikes kill civilians, instead of ‘armed terrorists’, they are missing the essential point of the policy. The prime purpose of the wars and the imperial weapons of mass destruction is to kill the largest number of the very poorest in the shortest time.
    No member of the financial-high tech capitalist class has ever complained about the mass killing of the ‘poorest of the poor’ anywhere or at any time because the victims are, for the purpose of accumulating imperial profit and concentrating wealth superfluous. The poorest don’t figure into the formulae of profit and productivity; they don’t ‘make or take’ markets. On the other hand, their continued existence is a potential liability. They are aesthetically unappealing on the outskirts of luxury resorts.
    To the rich, they represent a desperate criminal element and they may pose a real or imagined ‘terrorist’ threat. For these reasons, the rich would ‘prefer’ that they would quietly cease to exist, or if the warlords have to dispose of them, the world will be a safer and more attractive place to accumulate wealth. ‘Let them kill each other, as they have done for millennia’, the empire piously opines and the bankers and their high tech allies can use their military and mercenaries without soiling their own hands. The elite ignore the mass emiseration while the militarists bomb ‘the problem’ out of existence.
    Today genocide occurs in once vibrant living and working communities, not hidden in ‘concentration camps’. The secret ovens and gas chambers have been replaced by an ‘open range’ of incendiary weapons that end lives, burn neighborhoods and workshops, devastate livestock and crops. Those who survive the bombing are starved, enclosed, malnourished and inflicted with disease. Eminent doctors tell us that the misery is ‘self-inflicted’ and that the poorest of the poor are ignorant and lack healthy habits. Recurrent epidemics from HIV to cholera to Ebola are quintessential ‘4th world diseases’. Even though the Caribbean had not seen cholera for over a century, its introduction into Haiti via the bowels of imperial mercenary troops (UN peacekeepers from Nepal) was blamed on the Haitians’ lack of access to clean water! Not since the small pox blankets passed out by the US Army to freezing Native Americans in their concentration camps of the 19th century have we heard such apologists for genocide!
    The truth about genocide is that all this is known, repeatedly documented and forgotten. White workers in the First World cannot even register these ‘facts’ under their own noses, let alone express any form of solidarity. Imperial genocide, committed by proactive militarists and ‘passive’ rich elites, are no secret even if they deny their complicity. The key word here is ‘mission’. ‘Mission Accomplished’ was the celebratory banner over the total destruction of Iraq. The warlords claim rewards for successfully completing ‘the mission’. Yemenis are dying under US-supplied Saudi bombs; Somalis are scattered in tens of thousands of tents to the four corners of the earth; Haitians continue to enjoy the ‘gift of cholera’ from UN ‘peacekeepers’ and rot in massive open air prison-slums – their leaders imprisoned or assassinated.

    The Poorest of the Poor Respond

    http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/leading-article/9501552/the-life-or-death-question-our-leaders-prefer-not-to-discuss/

     “One Friday, 28 people were rescued by the Italian coastguard when the boat on which they were fleeing Libya capsized in the Mediterranean. Arriving homeless and without prospects in a strange land, these were — relatively speaking — the lucky ones. As many as 700 are thought to have drowned. Add them to the tally. On Monday, another boat capsized with 400 souls feared lost. Last year more than 3,000 died in the Mediterranean trying to get to the West. It has become a phenomenon of our times.”

    In the face of genocide and their irrelevance to the profit motive of modern high tech and finance capital, the poorest of the poor have chosen multiple responses:
    (1) Mass out-migration, preferable to the First World, where they won’t be bombed, raped or starved as they had been at ‘home’;
    (2) Internal migration to the cities, under the illusion of an ‘urban safe haven’ when in fact their concentration in slums makes it easier for the bombers;
    (3) return to the countryside and subsistence farming or the mountains and subsistence herding, but the missiles and drones relentlessly follow them;
    (4) mass flight to a neighboring country where the local gendarmes will ‘herd’ them into camps to rot and
    (5) finally resistance. Resistance takes various forms: There are spontaneous upheavals when the scope of abuse exceeds all endurance. This form involves attacking the local collaborators and gendarmes and authorities and sacking food warehouses. Such action burns briefly and dies (many times literally). Some choose to join armed resistance bands, including gangs of brigands, political ethno-religious rivals and terrorists who retaliate against authors of their genocide and its collaborators with their own version of justice and material and celestial rewards.

    Total war from above and the outside breeds total war from the inside and below. The rebellion of the ‘wretched of the earth’ in the 21st century is far different from that portrayed by Franz Fanon in the middle of the last century. Fanon described a revolt against colonialism and neo-colonialism.
    Today the revolt is against deracination and genocide. During colonialism, the ‘wretched’ needed to be subdued to better exploit their labor and resources. Today, the ‘poorest of the poor’ are superfluous to empire and thus the policy of genocide. The current world war between the classes has become a war between exterminators and those who would fight to survive!

    Source:

    / 1 week ago

    By James PetrasLibya 360°

    Category:

    Afghanistan, Chad, complicity, elites, georgia guidestones, globalization, hegemony, IMF, imperialism, Iraq, labor, Libya, Mali, poor, poverty, Saharan Africa, Somalia, Syria, Yemen

    Anti-Police Organizing in the Wake of Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s Death

    Anti-Police Organizing in the Wake of Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s Death

    by MICHELLE MATISONS

    Cop Killer Ismaaiyl Brinsley Had Pocket Full of $100 Bills – But No Job or Home

    Remember how the 9/11 attack led people to cancel or pull back from anti-globalization protests?  It appears a similar dynamic could be at work as a shocking event challenges and divides a growing and effective movement making serious headway.  Like anti-globalization protests before it, the anti-police brutality/ policing movement is going through its own birth pangs as the tactics debate (when is property violence appropriate?) and issues such as how to foreground anti-black racism (#BlackLivesMatter vs. #AllLivesMatter) have taken center stage in the multifaceted and large scale resistance efforts underway.

    Saturday, December 20th, was a big day for movement news.  While Minnesota’s Mall of America protest had people occupying space in the US’s largest mall to demand an end to police violence, half way across the country in Brooklyn, two police officers were shot and killed by a young black man who had ostensibly posted on social media before the shootings about his intention to “put wings on pigs”, citing revenge for the deaths of Brown and Garner as motive.  The accused shooter, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, shot himself dead on a nearby subway platform after shooting the officers.  As of Sunday afternoon, there is little information and much speculation about the accused murderer’s life (including that the murders were part of a counter-intelligence plot to discredit the movement and justify extreme force).  Much is uncertain, but it’s certain that the NYPD is already using this to suppress protest, repress entire communities, and further foment divisive public relations–especially with NYC Mayor deBlasio.  How can recent police union behavior and statements be considered anything but a naked admission of a police force’s own extra-legal/ paramilitary ambitions?

    At this writing we do know a few things for certain: the corporate state’s policing apparatus will do everything in its power to use this event as a further call to arms against protesting U.S. residents and communities of color.  They will attempt not only to discredit a growing direct action-based movement, but also to aggressively attack protest groups and individuals they have been trying to get their hands on anyway.  If Ismaaiyl Brinsley had been arrested  and charged with the killing of two police officers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, clearly the anti-policing movement would be having very different debates and discussions.  Now, in his death, many people righteously struggle to contextualize his motives or opportunistically use his actions for their own political reasons.

    Not that probing Brinsley’s motives is entirely irrelevant–he shot a woman, possibly an ex-girlfriend, before the officers, for example– but the movement can hurt itself by participating in the posthumous quasi-legalistic media charade of “nailing down” his motives or state of mind.  (This activity already inculcates participants in the state’s judgmental logic of condemnation/ exoneration–echoing media character assassinations of murder by police victims like Brown and Martin.)   What if he was acting in concert with counter-intelligence forces? What if Mao’s little red book was in Brinsley’s pocket?  What if he was an active member of a local Cop Watch group?  What if he was a well-known local homeless man struggling with mental illness and addiction?

    Initial activist reactions offer a range of responses: some grapple with the delicate issue of expressing compassion about the shooter’s life, death, and family; some timidly, or not so timidly, tiptoe around self-defense concepts and a deep understanding of the extreme nature of “revolutionary suicide”; some routinely denounce Brinsley’s actions–acting as guardians of the “real non-violent movement” against  “unstable violent outsiders”; some have decided that was a police action he got entangled in.  Then there’s those (new to the issue white activists, I am talking to you) who may have been active and supportive of the anti-police brutality movement, but will use this as an excuse to pull back.  (Controversial events function as a movement’s filtering process, losing people who are too challenged to keep fighting and were just waiting for a chance to fold anyway.)

    If there’s anything I am reminded of by this event, it’s the power of social movements, and anti-racist struggles in particular.  For me, there is a connection between the cop murders and the movement.  Before you jump down my throat insisting that I am “feeding the cops’ ideology” by saying this–hear me out, please, and don’t take my statements out of context.  Since the drug war and mass incarceration/ deportation practices, many black and brown lives have been destroyed.  You don’t have to be a front lines long term activist to have strong opinions about policing and institutional racism in America, and feel hopeless in the face of it, too.  Frustration and anger is woven into the everyday fabric of people’s lives, and this includes individual consciousness, rhetoric, and self-understanding.  Add to this an endless flow of social media, news commentary, and live feeds of protests and demonstrations all over the U.S.  Some people may not be able to attend protests for various reasons (work, childcare, transportation, not living close to one, or a shy demeanor) but social media offers a strong way to feel emotionally connected to events since Ferguson began.

    This access and ability to connect is both reason for the movement’s effectiveness and a reason to prepare for more controversial actions taken up by individuals in the name of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, or against violent police generally. (And then there’s always police counterinsurgency activities…)  In a large, multifaceted, international movement such that the Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!/ anti-policing movement has become, no one can ultimately judge who’s a protestor or a non-protestor, who cares or doesn’t care, about “the issues”. (Who has an authentic political consciousness gauge and where can I get one?) We can only state if we support certain actions as part of strategies our organizations or ideologies endorse.

    I believe, from what I understand about Brinsley’s biographical facts and his presumed state of mind before the murders, he understood himself as a target of racist policing.  Go figure: young, black, and male in the U.S. A. But, As Dr. Johanna Fernandez wrote in CounterPunch, he could have also been acting in concert with authorities to execute a state plot to discredit the movement.  We will never know the facts here, and it shouldn’t deflect from our understanding of institutionalized racism, anyway.

    Whether or not Brinsley acted alone or in concert with the state, his life had a truly tragic end.  If we admit understanding or empathy with people espousing extreme tactics — even cop murder — to express oppositional feelings, are we only throwing the police state, and its rabid NYPD, another reason for street level preemptive attack? (As if it ever needed a reason.  We’ve clearly seen over the decades, if the state doesn’t have a reason to justify aggression it’ll make one up.)  What about attempts to understand how social pressures like racist policing and mass incarceration damage people–like Ismaaiyl Brinsley? If we deny a careful consideration of the incalculable impacts movements can have, which include tapping into very real frustrations/ psychological dynamics leading individuals to act alone or as police agents, we sacrifice any potential unity than can be derived in a process of self-reflection and greater political awareness. Collective analysis may not lead to the unity of a shared position, but it could lead to an “agree to disagree” unity or a commitment to explore unpopular perspectives.  Something beyond simple condemnation or exultation is called for here.

    It’s a daunting situation and the corporate state wins again if we play into the terms of engagement it always sets by the very nature of its power.  If Ismaaiyl Brinsley had survived and faced his accusers in court, we would see the movement split around “just” court procedures and outcomes.  Some would want him evaluated to qualify for mental health rehabilitation services, some would want him routinely punished, and some would call for his freedom, with an understanding his actions were committed under extreme duress due to the pernicious police state apparatus (a kind of “black rage” defense– if you will.)  From the looks of his social media posts, he knew he was probably going to die Saturday.

    I shudder to think about what the state would do to Brinsley, and how the movement would split around his “just” punishment and desirable “rehabilitation.” (How are we going to rehabilitate psychotic racist police?  Any ideas?)  We would have to painfully endure a real trial of the Left’s anti-policing/ abolitionist positions. Instead, we are left to grapple with three dead bodies, many unanswered questions, and a big question mark about our ability to buoy the turbulence of building and sustaining a mass movement, focused specifically on the deep and festering wound of racist police violence, in the age of social media activism.

     
     

    On Tuesday police Commissioner William Bratton said Ismaaiyl was carrying $100 bills in his pocket.
    But he had no job or home.    The Yeshiva World reported:

    If we are going to posthumously speculate on Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s life, dare I suggest we use the very commitment to institutional analysis and human compassion that has served as a foundation of the Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!/ anti-policing movement–and previous anti-racist movements– since its inception?  As the saying goes, let’s “keep our eyes on the prize.”

    Michelle Renee Matisons, Ph.D. has  written for Counterpunch, Black Agenda Report, Z Magazine, Mint News Press, the NJ Decarcerator, Rethinking Schools, Alternet, and other publications. She can be reached at michrenee@gmail.com.

    Anti-Police Organizing in the Wake of Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s Death » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

    Category:

    CIA, conspiracy, counterpunch, hands up don't shoot, Manchurian candidate, mike brown, police brutality, police state, poverty, prison industrial complex, racism, USA, violence, white supremacy

    The Africa they Never Show you!

    This video (see below)prompted several thoughts as I watched it. In fact, it actually created a kind of paradoxical thinking bordering on conflict of interest. Having been to Africa myself, and having many African friends my thoughts today, in view of the recent Aggression against Africa, West Africa, in particularly due to the Ebola virus that has been around since 1970 and whom some feel has been weaponized…. my thoughts spiraled into this blog post.

    Personally, I think it’s nice to have industry but I also am concerned about what industrialization means to the common people. Does it mean that everyone can reap the benefits? Does it mean that they have taken on the Western Mantle of Capitalism so despite the outward appearance of opulence, there is an insidious gap between the haves and the have-nots.
    I also wonder how much devastation had to happen to the pristine lands to create the metropolis.
    I wonder is there a middle ground. A way forward to a so called advanced civilization, a cooperation that respects the primitive (first) approach to nature and other human beings and the industrialization of indigenous lands. Can those tall buildings mean less pollution, less aggression, less poverty, and a more holistic lifestyle for all.
    Are indigenous people displaced from their home so that huge highways, factories and buildings can be placed there? Are animals rounded up and placed on reserves and zoos so that the land they lived on can be transformed into territory that can be used by big corporations? Or more horrifically, are/were they slaughtered?
    Did/does the leadership of these countries consider the original natural habitat of their country and the effect on the planet when they became part of the industrial revolution?
    Did/does the Universities, and lower schools teach the youth about their culture, spirituality and ancient history or is their culture and history replace, distorted or demonized with the invasion of Western education, spirituality and religion?
    Looking at the current tumbling of the Western economy, will the African economy collapse as well as it has become economically entrenched in the Western style of buying and selling, i.e. Capitalism?
     These and many other questions come to mind when I view this video.
     There are 53-55 countries that are part of the African continent. Each of these countries have their own way of life, traditional cultures and spirituality. Before colonization, they were thriving within their own borders. The imposition of arbitrary borders, religion, political and educational structures and languages of the colonizers have changed the face of Africa that I am sure would be quite unrecognizable to those who lived there 500 to 600 years ago.
    The Western model of civilization has dwarfed the ancient model that these people held. It has caused a schism in beliefs, systems and mental structures among the African people. They are divided in their ability to gather their people under One Banner of Nationhood. Even this idea is antipathetic to the Original African Mindset. The concept of Global reach while admirable, in the Ancient African’s way of thinking it did not mean the destruction of entire civilizations and creating homogenous civilizations in its wake. The unfortunate wars of conquest, and empire building that took place among the Africans still allowed for the intermingling, dissemination and cooperation among different peoples even though there may have been regional Chiefs. This is particularly notable by the fact that Africans tend to be multi-lingual speaking several dialects fluently to communicate among their home tribes and peoples as well as being able to fluently communicate with others in surrounding areas.
    The advent of the Western Model of dominance where everyone speaks the same language, has one religions and is politically yoked to the western idea of democracy, is foreign to the African/Indigenous mind. I can only imagine the amount of cultural shock it must/has caused the African who’s family values, appreciation for nature and others in the community is replaced with the competitive nature of the Western World View.
    The Western World view is that if every one wears the same garment, they all look alike, while the African World view is that if every one wears the same garment, they create and individuation by the fact that each person brings their own individual essence to the garment. So the difference is what brings uniformity, not uniformity is suppressed by difference. The African World view sees a Higher Power that expresses itself through every blade of grass as a different expression of itself. To the Western Mind, “In My Image.” means an exact replica. There for a One World Government means that everything has to be the same, homogenous, exact replicas. While the African engages in the Creativity of the various streams of expression. No two things need sound alike or be exactly alike.
    Looking at the African Industrial structures in this video, you see the modeling and patterning and replication of the concepts of duplication. Over and over, in this model, things are fabricated to “BE” the same. This leads me to see, these industrialized metropolises as replicas of the Western World View. It is as if industrializing Africa has created the Western “Franchise” results. Everything looks the same. Buildings, factories, highways are all build the same so when compared to the Western world they can be said to be comparable. And this is true around the world. Countries that move toward industrialization typically look like Western countries. Meanwhile, the rainforest and pristine lands that preceded the Western Ideology of what “civilization” meant is wiped away from the mental landscape.
    Having been born in the Western World, I have my own inner conflicts about this. I appreciate the comforts of running water, sanitation, a flushing toilet, refrigeration and heating. However, I also appreciate the so-called back-to-nature aspect of Indigenous living, before industrialization. I am also aware of how addictive these creature comforts can be when compared to having to use an outhouse to relieve oneself.
    I guess my biggest question is, how can industrialization take place without destroying the planet in its wake? Is there a way to make life a little easier to bear without destroying the very planet that gives us this life? Are there other options to building tall structures and creating metropolis that displace humans, animals and nature? Is there a middle ground where man and nature can live harmoniously together without destroying each other?
    These and many other questions come to mind when I view this video.

    Category:

    capitalism, cities, colonization, corporations, ebola, Education, Guinea, industry, leadership, Liberia, pollution, poverty, primitive, rainforests, Sierra Leon, Western Education

    STOP THE KILLING TRAIN!

    STOP THE KILLING TRAIN

    author unknown

    Published 8 August 2014

    The killing train transcends each separate war, inequity, and injustice, and ultimately, and this is, of course, the point – so must our opposition. The killing train is fueled by poverty, disease, starvation, indignity, death squads, racism, sexism, class division, bombs, and more bombs.

    Many years back, moved by the first Gulf War, I wrote a piece with the above title, Stop the Killing Train. I am revisiting the same subject because, regrettably, the topic remains at the forefront even if the precipitating violence is different.

    For the purpose of the exercise, please use your imagination.

    Suppose a hypothetical god got tired of what we humans do to one another and decided that from January 1, 1991 onward all corpses unnaturally created anywhere in or by the hand of the “free world” would cease to decompose. Anyone dying for want of food or medicine, anyone hung or garroted to death, shot or beaten to death, raped or bombed to death, anyone dying unjustly and inhumanely for want of clean air or water or other necessities of life, would, as a corpse, persist without decomposing. The permanent corpse would then automatically enter a glass-walled cattle car attached to an ethereal train traveling monotonously across the U.S., state by state, never stopping. The hypothetical God would tirelessly display our achievements for us all to see.

    One by one the corpses would divinely load onto the cattle cars. After every thousand corpses piled in a car, a new car would hitch up and begin filling in turn. Mile after mile the killing train would roll along, each corpse visible through the train’s transparent walls. We can suppose it fills at the rate of 200 new corpses a minute, or one new car every five minutes, day and night, without pause.

    By the end of 1991, on its first birthday, the killing train would easily measure over 2,500 miles long. Traveling at 20 miles an hour it would take about five days to pass any intersection across the U.S. Imagine you are sitting at a railroad crossing. You watch this horror go past, 24 hours a day, for five full days. Every car contains 1,000 corpses, all clearly visible. This hypothetical God knows how to communicate so we can’t ignore reality.

    By the year 2000, assuming no dramatic change in institutions and behavior, the train would stretch from coast to coast about seven times. It would take about six weeks from the time its engine passed the Statue of Liberty to when its caboose would go by. Would the God still wonder when pitiful, aspiring humanity would get the message?

    By 2014 – you can safely just double the ugly statistics. Deaths accelerate, unless, of course, we had gotten the message. So, coast to coast it would stretch, about 14 times. Every corpse an indictment.

    Think how a young child sometimes points to a picture in a book or magazine and asks for an explanation, “Tell me about a tree?” A car? A boat? Or a train? A big train? The killing train? Go ahead, try to answer that one. Perhaps that explains why this image isn’t, in fact, a common one on our TVs and in our never-ending streams of information.

    Bad enough, way worse than bad enough, it could even get worse. Consider that climate change will before long start to wrack up even larger kill lists. But, of course, those dead would pile into the killing train too, since with only modest exceptions they too are preventable.

    The killing train, in any event, no matter how each moribund commuter who need not have been on board got his or her ticket, is horrendous.

    Imagine the lost opportunity and lost love. Imagine as well the network of negative influences that radiate from the unnecessary deaths displayed by the killing train stretching from coast to coast and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Consider the horrendous impact, not only on those on board, but on every person that any of those corpses ever loved or would have loved, fed or would have fed, taught or would have taught.

    Who rides the killing train? 
    Certainly citizens of the “Third World,” selling their organs for food, selling their babies to save their families, suffering disappearances and starvation. They live in Brazil, the Philippines, El Salvador, but also New York. They enter the killing train, every day. It isn’t a peace train. It isn’t a justice train. It isn’t a love train. It is a killing train. Its current most bloody loading platform: Gaza. But don’t forget those who starve and die of preventable diseases in the Third World and in the first world too. All are onboard.

    Is the gigantic sprawling disgusting image exaggerated? 10 million kids die yearly for lack of basic medical aid that the U.S. could provide at almost no cost in countries whose economies Exxon and the Bank of America have looted. Preventable death fills the killing train. To the sane, it is mass murder. The grotesque image I offer is actually understated.

    Bloated diseased bodies are victims of murder just as surely as bullet-riddled bodies tossed into rivers by death squads, or shrapnel shredded bodies prone in the piles of blasted hospitals and homes. Denying medicine by out of reach pricing or preventable shortages is no less criminal than denying medicine by blowing up pharmacies and demolishing hospitals is no less criminal than supplying torture racks, stealing resources, and paving roads with bomblets. Bombing electric power stations and pulverizing hospitals enlarges the train. Deaths by starvation and disease are no less unnatural than those by bomblet and bullet, and enlarge the train.   

    Evolution has given humans the capacity to perceive, think, feel, and imagine. During war time—as now exists in so many places —if we get aroused to action we begin to see the whole train as it persists day in and day out. When this happens, what do we do about it? Do we become depressed? Cynical? Anguished? Cry? Daydream of Armageddon? Daydream of justice? Or do we hand out a leaflet?

    Once we begin to see the killing train, how do we face the killing train? Part of me says these crimes are so grotesque, so inhumane, that the perpetrators deserve to die, now. A little tiny killing train for the killers and no more big killing train for everyone else. An eye for a million eyes. What other step makes more sense? Was this the hypothetical God’s plan?

    But, of course, that’s not the way the world works. Yes, people give the orders. People wield the axes, withhold the food, pay the pitiful salaries, blow up the power stations, spew the garbage, lie, steal, cheat, obey – and produce corpses. But institutions create the pressures that mold the people.

    When an institutional cancer spreads through the human patient, what kind of surgeon can cut it away? Is the imprint of accumulated repression so deep it can never be excised.

    At first, becoming attuned to our country’s responsibility for the corpses stacked behind transparent cattle-car walls makes handing out leaflets, or writing essays, or arguing for peace with a co-worker, or urging a relative to think twice about paying taxes, or going to a demonstration, or sitting in, or doing civil disobedience, or even taking over a workplace, seem insignificant. But the fact is, these are the acts that the hypothetical God, tired of our behavior, would be calling for if she were to actually parade the “free world’s” corpses down our main streets in killing trains. These are the acts that can accumulate into a firestorm of informed protest that raises the cost of profiteering and domination, of war making and pollution so high that the institutions breeding such behavior start to buckle.   

    The fact is, when fighting a behemoth, “You lose, you lose, you lose, and then you win.” Every loss, understood properly to learn its lessons, is part of the process that leads to transforming institutions so that there can be no people as vile as Hussein or Bush, as Netanyahu or Obama. No more “Good Germans” or “Good Americans.” No more incinerated Jews or decapitated, starved, poisoned, starved, bulleted Palestinians.   

    War is invariably unjustly motivated. War is always horrendously harmful. War is an orchestrated atrocity that mandates our militant, unswerving opposition. But so too does exploitation, racism, sexism, the systematic deprivation of any one community at the hands of any other.

    But even after the Gaza crimes of the little thug Israel and of its guardian angel the big thug, America, ends, the on-going U.S. war against “free world” people who it has consigned to ride the killing train will, if it continues, remain a enormous crime against humanity. The killing train transcends each separate war, inequity, and injustice, and ultimately, and this is, of course, the point – so must our opposition. The killing train is fueled by poverty, disease, starvation, indignity, death squads, racism, sexism, class division, bombs, and more bombs. The power plant of the death, destruction, and generalized deprivation is our basic institutions.

    The institutions must become our target.

    Category:

    bombs, bombs deprivation, death, death squads, destruction, disease, Gaza, hospitals, institutions, Israel, killing, Obama, poverty, racism, schools, sexism, starvation, war, war crimes