Upsurge

When analysing and comparing the ferment of America’s political landscape during the sixties and seventies, the years of the anti-Vietnam war and Black civil rights movements, to the political landscape of today, perhaps the most striking thing is the absence of militant Black voices.

Back then it seemed that America was on the verge of a social explosion which threatened to overturn society and bring down at long last a white establishment dripping in the blood of innocents both at home and abroad.

The Black Power, Black Liberation, movement arose in tandem with the civil rights and antiwar movements, comprising those who believed, and who’ve since been vindicated by history, that the non-violent and reformist civil rights movement, led by Dr Martin Luther King, would effect no meaningful social change in the plight of America’s black population, which at that time numbered around 22 millions (11 percent of the population). Blacks occupied the bottom rung of the economic ladder, as they had done since slavery was formally abolished in 1865; they comprised the majority of the nation’s prison population, occupied the worst housing, comprised the lowest number of college graduates, had the lowest life expectancy, the highest rate of infant mortality - in general scored worst in every social indicator.

Today, in the year 2007, the black population of the United States is around 35 millions (13 percent of the population). Blacks occupy the bottom rung of the economic ladder, as they have done since slavery was formally abolished in 1865; they comprise the majority of the nation’s prison population, occupy the worst housing, comprise the lowest number of college graduates, have the lowest life expectancy, the highest rate of infant mortality – in general Blacks in America today score worst in every social indicator (The Poor In Developed Countries – 2007).

Yet, whilst the social conditions of Blacks in America remains virtually the same today as a generation ago, no militant Black movement has grown in response. In fact, to all intents and purposes the Black Liberation movement, indeed the very idea of Black liberation, would appear to be extinct.

Looking back, that generation of young Black militant leaders who blazed a trail across America’s political and social landscape in the sixties and seventies were giants. Men like Malcolm X; Kwame Toure (Stokley Carmichael); Huey Newton; Fred Hampton; Bobby Seale; George Jackson – they gave voice to the indignity, injustice, and despair suffered by generation after generation of Black men and women, who despite enjoying equal rights under the law continued to be treated as unwelcome guests at the lavish banquet that was US economic prosperity. Not for them words of conciliation and reform; not for them appeals to White liberal opinion for succour. No, these men and women (for who could ever forget Angela Davis?) asserted that to be Black was to be equal, and in fact more than equal given the history of slavery, oppression and indignity suffered at the hands of a system racist to the very last stone of every grand building and monument in every American town and city..

Think of Malcolm X and his courageous stand against the government of the day, exposing its hypocrisy and venality, in speech after speech verbally uprooting the moral foundations upon which the nation’s institutions were built. In his Ballot or the Bullet speech in 1964, he said:

‘No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanisation. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-waver – no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see and American nightmare.’

Any victim of Hurricane Katrina, any young Black man currently incarcerated in an American gulag, any Black family struggling to keep body and soul together in the projects today would read this or any of Malcolm’s speeches and be hard pressed to disagree with his words given their own experiences of America, today, in the year 2007.

Kwame Toure (Stokley Carmichael) rose to prominence in the mid-sixties as a militant activist with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which spread onto college and university campuses across America demanding civil rights for America’s black population. Carmichael left SNCC in 1967 and joined the Black Panther Party, an avowedly Black Nationalist organisation. He was made honorary prime minister of the Panthers in 1968. He became a fierce critic of the Vietnam War and soon began to draw links between the oppression suffered by Blacks in America and the anti-colonial struggles being waged throughout the developing world. He was an admirer and supporter of the Cuban Revolution, and he sought to internationalise the struggle for Black liberation in America with struggles against American and Western colonialism taking place around the globe. In this role he travelled extensively, visiting revolutionary leaders in Africa, North Vietnam, Cuba, and China, offering solidarity with them and receiving the same against a common enemy – US Imperialism.

He moved to Africa in 1969, where he became an aide to the then Guinean prime minister, Sekou Toure, and a staunch supporter of exiled Ghanian President, Kwame Nkrumah. It was in honour of both men that he changed his name to Kwame Toure. During his African years, Toure was an ardent supporter of the Pan-Africanist movement, Marxist in orientation, and it was a cause he espoused right up until the time of his death in 1998.
It was Carmichael, as he was known then, who first coined the phrase ‘Black Power’. In a later speech, he explained what he meant.

‘It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognise their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organisations.’
The Black Panther Party which Stokley Carmichael joined in 1967 was formed by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966. Their aim was to build an organisation to promote civil rights and self defenso against the police, who for so long had brutalised and terrorised Black communities. The Panthers devised what they called their Ten-Point Program outlining their beliefs. A progressive manifesto designed to deepen the consciousness of the poor and the dispossessed in poor Black ghettos across the United States, its demands included land, bread, housing, clothing, justice, and equality for America’s Blacks.

However, it was the seventh point in their program, demanding an end to police brutality and calling for Black people to arm themselves in self-defence against the police in their communities that brought them to national and international attention. In his article, In Defense of Self-Defense, written in 1970, Newton revealed the theoretical depth which made him a threat to the status quo.

‘Men were not created to obey laws. Laws are created to obey men. They are established by men and should serve men. The laws and rules which officials inflict upon poor people prevent them from functioning harmoniously.’

In the same article, he writes:

‘Penned up in the ghettos of America, surrounded by his factories and all the physical components of his economic system, we have been made into the ‘wretched of the earth,’ relegated to the position of spectators while the White racists run their international con game on the suffering peoples. We have been brainwashed to believe that we are powerless and that there is nothing we can do for ourselves to bring about a speedy liberation for our people.’

Though the Panthers originally began as a Black Nationalist movement, their doctrine and their politics evolved in line with the wave of revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles taking place throughout the developing world, and by the early seventies Newton and the Black Panther Party were calling themselves Marxists. Newton wrote extensively and was an important thinker, but the Panthers are best known for their courage in daring to challenge the police in Black communities. This along with their breakfast clubs and other community programs earned them popularity and affection in poor Black communities.

In 1968 the then director of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, described the Panthers as, ‘the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,’ and using COINTELPRO, the program devised by the FBI in the sixties to investigate and destroy dissident organisations within the United States, the Bureau set about effecting their destruction with gusto. This campaign reached its peak with the murder of leading Panther, Fred Hampton, in his bed in Chicago in 1969. However, the Panthers were able to continue, and in 1973 Bobby Seale ran for mayor of Oakland and came second of nine candidates with 43,170 votes.

As for Huey Newton, thinker, scholar and revolutionary leader, he met a sad end on the streets of Oakland in 1989, when he was shot and killed. An attempt to smear Huey Newton’s name and legacy was undertaken by the FBI in the aftermath of his death. It is perhaps in this attempt that we get a full measure of Newton’s impact and the threat he and the organisation he co-founded posed. By confronting police brutality, by organising social programs to help the poor, the Panthers helped to radicalise a generation of Black youth.

Soledad Brother, George Jackson, joined the Black Panther Party whilst in prison, where he was sent to serve from one year to life for the theft of $70 at gunpoint from a gas station at the age of 18. It was while in prison that Jackson was radicalised. A book of his prison letters, Soledad Brother, was published in 1970 to international acclaim. The anger, passion, humanity, and intellectual depth contained in them reveal a young man who had the potential to become a militant Black leader of the first rank. A letter to his mother in 1968 reveals the despair of incarceration. He writes:

‘Try to remember how you felt at the most depressing moment of your life, the moment of your deepest dejection. You no doubt have had many. That is how I feel all the time, no matter what my level of consciousness may be – asleep, awake, in-between.’

In a letter written in 1970, Jackson analysed the economic and social condition of Blacks in America.

‘The new slavery, the modern variety of chattel slavery updated to disguise itself, places the victim in a factory or in the case of most blacks in support roles inside and around the factory system (service trades), working for a wage. However, if work cannot be found in or around the factory complex, today’s neoslavery does not allow even for a modicum of food and shelter. You are free – to starve.’

Further on in the same letter, he writes:

‘I am an extremist. I call for extreme measures to solve extreme problems….The entire colonial world is watching the blacks inside the U.S., wondering and waiting for us to come to our senses….We are on the inside. We are the only ones (besides the very small white minority left) who can get at the monster’s heart without subjecting the world to nuclear fire. We have a momentous historical role to act out if we will.’

Soledad Brother is not so much a compilation of letters as a scream from the bowels of the American ‘injustice’ system, a call to action and the assertion by a young man of his humanity amongst so much inhumanity. George Jackson died in prison in 1971 of gunshot wounds after prison guards fired on prisoners during an uprising in the yard. Allegations that Jackson was purposely assassinated have never been satisfactorily refuted.

The concept of Black Power once inspired a significant section of the Black youth of America, producing great thinkers and courageous leaders such as those described. But there were others too – in particular from the world of sports. A young Muhammed Ali, for example, dared stand up and defy the establishment in refusing to be drafted for Vietnam with the immortal words, ‘No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.’ In so doing he refused to go the same way as other Black sportsmen and celebrities, forever grateful to the establishment for allowing them to escape poverty and the degradation of Jim Crow and unwittingly becoming patsies of the system, held up as false proof that no racial barriers existed in America.

During the Mexico Olympics of 1968, two Black American athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gave the clenched fist, Black Power salute during the medals ceremony. It was a gesture of defiance and militancy that shocked and shook the world. And while it may have destroyed any future they might have had in their home country as athletes, it assured them of something far more valuable and long lasting - a proud place in the history of struggle waged by their people against the inequality, racism, and oppression which so defined their existence.

Now, looking back at this period of American history, to when young Black men and women rose up against the warmongers and plutocrats not only responsible for the devastation of their communities at home, but who were also engaged in the destruction of countries and cultures abroad, we are forced to ask the question: where is their like today?

After all, the economic and social oppression suffered back then by Blacks in America continues today. If anyone was in any doubt of that they only need to be reminded of Hurricane Katrina – an irrefutable example of the contempt in which poor Blacks are held in the US by the government and the corporate elite which controls the country.

Yet where were the Black voices raised in anger in response? Where were the Black athletes, men and women of the substance of a young Ali, Tommie Smith and John Carlos? Where were the militant Black voices? Has the concept of Black Power come to be embodied in the super-capitalism promoted by the gangsta-rap, bling culture?

Surely the hopes of Black people in America today don’t depend solely on the ‘fortunes’ of Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey?

Perhaps, and fittingly, the last word should go to Soledad Brother, George Jackson:

‘The people who run this country will never let us succeed to power. Everything in history that was ever of value was taken by force. We must organize our thoughts, get behind the revolutionary vanguard….We must fall on our enemies, the enemies of all righteousness, with a ruthless relentless will to win! History sweeps on, we must not let is escape our influence this time!’

END.

The Crisis Of Imperialism

Counterpunch - 5 July 2007

www.counterpunch.org

The U.S. occupation of Iraq has spawned the reemergence of the word imperialism into the lexicon of everyday language, after an absence of five decades stretching back to the end of Second World War. U.S. military adventures since then - particularly in Korea, Vietnam and Central America - were dressed up as defensive operations against the spread and threat posed by Communism and all its evil manifestations, namely, national liberation, self determination, and social and economic justice.

The truth is, however, that imperialism has remained as constant and ever present as the changing of the seasons. The only thing which has changed is its packaging, which could be described, to paraphrase James Connolly, as old wine in a new bottle.

The U.S. ruling class emerged from the Second World War as the new imperial masters of the world. As such, they quickly recognized that the plethora of national liberation movements which had sprung up across the globe after the war, determined to shake off the yoke of colonialism, demanded new methods of control than the ones which had been utilized previously by the European powers.

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund's stated aim, when formed by a small coterie of international financiers and bankers (mainly British and American, with the British by now accepting their role as junior partners in the new order of things) at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944, was to rebuild Europe and stabilize the world's financial markets after the turmoil of the Second World War.

In line with those aims, the newly independent former colonies in the Third World, which had gradually won their freedom, had to be brought to heel and controlled - for they possessed the natural and human resources necessary for expansion under this new global empire.

After suffering the ravages of colonialism, and after the hard struggle for liberation, nations of the African continent in particular were left with devastated and moribund economies which placed them at the mercy of vultures in the shape of the big international banks and financial institutions.

These banks and institutions loaned enormous sums at predatory interest rates, making it impossible for the Third World to rebuild, develop and repay their loans at the same time.

It had to be one or the other.

Things reached a crisis in the mid 1980's when, to stave off the prospect of a world depression due to the bad debts incurred by Third World countries, the IMF and WB stepped in and took over responsibility for those debts from the big private banks like Barclays, Credit Lyons, Chase Manhattan, etc., which were threatened with collapse.

It was a move which put the IMF and WB into an unassailable position of power which they have never relinquished since.

Since that time nearly 70 countries in the world have been forced to adopt Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP's) designed and developed by the IMF and WB. These SAPs are intended to restructure the economies of said nations in order to best meet the repayment needs of aid or loans provided by the First World, represented by the IMF and WB.

This requires them to impose severe austerity programs on their already beleaguered economies, which translates into the eradication of much needed public spending on social programs in health, education, transport, agriculture, and so on.

These austerity programs pave the way for transnational corporations, always looking to reduce costs and access cheap sources of raw materials, to come in and set up their manufacturing operations, driving people, including children in many cases, from the land into factories, where they are forced to labour long hours under horrendous conditions for starvation wages.

This serves two purposes: it destroys the agro-economies of the Third World, which are now required to import their food from the First World, and ensures the outward flow of wealth to First World transnational corporations and their international investors.

The case of Nigeria is typical. Today, life expectancy in this oil-rich, aid-dependent nation is 47 years for males and 52 years for females. Of a population of 120 million, 89 million people live on less than a dollar a day, this despite the fact that the Niger Delta region contains large deposits of oil.

One IMF loan of $12 billion has become a continuous unpaid debt of $27 billion.

The people of Nigeria do not see a dollar of the wealth produced by their oil, which flows unchecked out of their country into the pockets of a consortium of British, Dutch and U.S. oil companies. Theirs are lives reduced to a daily struggle for survival.

Six million children under the age of 5 die each year in the Third World as a whole due to hunger and preventable disease.

This year by year genocide against the children of the poor is the net result of the IMF and World Bank's rape and theft of the Third World's natural and human resources on behalf of the ruling classes in the First World.

It is imperialism by any other name, soft imperialism which arrives disguised as aid but with its real aim indistinguishable to that of the hard imperialism we see now in Iraq with military occupation.

Both are embarked upon in order to feed the insatiable appetite of the free market capitalist powers.

Both spell misery and death for millions.

Both constitute an evil which is inimical to human progress.

END.

The Ongoing Tragedy Of Afghanistan

Counterpunch - 23 August 2007

The tragedy which is the history of Afghanistan was lost in the wake of 9/11. From that moment, in the eyes of a West now baying for revenge, it was a country reduced to nothing more than a terrorist base and training camp run with the blessing of a regime that gave new meaning to the word evil. Yet before 9/11 those same terrorists had won the paternal affection of government apparatchiks in Washington as a band of courageous liberation fighters who, with ‘our’ help, had successfully forced the Soviet Union to abandon a country it had invaded in order to add to is evil empire – at least according to Reagan and the coterie of right wing zealots who formed his administration back then.

But to understand why Afghanistan was and remains so important to US strategic interests is to understand the role it has played throughout its history in the global struggle for empire and hegemony waged by the great powers. This mystical land, occupying a strategic location along the ancient Silk Route between the Middle East, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, has been the subject of fierce rivalry between global empires since the 19th century, when the then British and Russian Empires vied for control of the lucrative spoils to be found in the subcontinent of India and in Central Asia in what came to be known as the ‘Great Game.’

The British desired to control Afghanistan as a buffer against Russian influence in Persia (Iran) in order protect its own interests in India, which at that time was the jewel in the crown of an empire that covered a full third of the globe. Two Anglo-Afghan wars were fought during this period. The first saw the complete annihilation of a 16,000-strong British army in 1842, the second resulted in the withdrawal of British forces in 1880, though the British retained nominal control over Afghanistan's foreign affairs. This control lasted through to 1919, when after a third Anglo-Afghan war the British signed the Treaty of Rawalpindi, heralding the beginning of complete Afghan independence from Britain.

In terms of its development, Afghanistan remained untouched by the industrialisation that swept through the subcontinent at the time, as the British mercantile class set about the wholesale plunder and exploitation of India's human and natural resources. By contrast, Afghanistan's value to both the British and Russian Empires was solely strategic. Along with a paucity of natural resources and rough, mountainous terrain difficult to traverse, this combined to retard the country's economic development. A primitive agrarian economy predominated in Afghanistan, supporting a feudal system of control that has continued in the countryside in one form or another right up to the present day, with self-styled warlords currently wielding power of life and death over those under their control.

That said, there was a point in Afghanistan's tortured history when the future looked bright, when a determined effort to lift the country and its people out of backward agrarian feudalism almost succeeded.

It began with the formation of the communist Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PAPA) back in the sixties, which opposed the autocratic rule of King Zahir Shar. The growth in popularity of the PDPA eventually led to them taking control of the country in 1978, after a coup removed the former Kings’ cousin, Mohammed Daud, from power.

The coup enjoyed popular support in the towns and cities, evidenced in reports carried in US newspapers. The Wall Street Journal, no friend of revolutionary movements, reported at the time "150,000 persons marched to honour the new flag…the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic." The Washington Post reported "Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned."

Upon taking power, the new government introduced a program of reforms designed to abolish feudal power in the countryside, guarantee freedom of religion, along with equal rights for women and ethnic minorities. Thousands of prisoners under the old regime were set free and police files burned in a gesture designed to emphasise an end to repression. In the poorest parts of Afghanistan, where life expectancy was 35 years, where infant mortality was one in three, free medical care was provided. In addition, a mass literacy campaign was undertaken, desperately needed in a society in which ninety percent of the population could neither read nor write.

The resulting rate of progress was staggering. By the late 1980s half of all university students in Afghanistan were women, and women made up 40 percent of the country's doctors, 70 percent of its teachers, and 30 percent of its civil servants. In John Pilger's ‘New Rulers Of The World’ (Verso, 2002), he relates the memory of the period through the eyes of an Afghan woman, Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who escaped the Taliban in 2001. She said: “Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian movies. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. It was sad to think that these were the people the West had supported.”

Under the pretext that the Afghan government was a Soviet puppet, which was false, the then Carter Administration authorised the covert funding of opposition tribal groups, whose traditional feudal existence had come under attack with these reforms. An initial $500 million
was allocated, money used to arm and train the rebels in secret camps set up specifically for the task across the border in Pakistan. This opposition came to be known as the mujaheddin, and so began a campaign of murder and terror which, six months later, resulted in the Afghan government in Kabul requesting the help of the Soviet Union. The Soviet government duly obliged and Soviet military forces entered the country in 1979, where they remained for ten years before pulling out. Afghanistan descended thereafter into the abyss of religious intolerance, abject poverty, warlordism and violence that has plagued the country ever since.

It is a point worth emphasising, however. Contrary to the ‘official’ history of the period, the mujaheddin did not arise in response to a hostile Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The truth is that the Soviet Union intervened at the request of the Afghan government in response to the instability being wrought by a US funded and armed insurgency.

To the question of why the US would arm, fund and train an insurgency comprising religious fanatics in Afghanistan, the answer is simple: for the same reason successive US administrations have armed, funded and trained insurgents and death squads in any part of the world where progressive, secular and left-leaning governments and movements have attempted to institute social and economic justice: to halt the spread of a good example.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, three years after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, the US began a reach for global hegemony which continues to this day and which lies at the root of the occupations of both Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, the entire world knows by now that what Iraq has that the US needs and covets is huge, easily accessible deposits of oil.
With regard to Afghanistan, just like the British and the Russians back in the 19th century, its strategic location provides the answer. The demise of the Soviet Union meant that the huge deposits of crude oil located in the Caspian Basin were now up for grabs. What US energy corporations required was a pipeline to transport this crude to the nearest ‘friendly’ port from where it could be shipped out. Iran wasn't an option, which left Afghanistan as the only viable alternative; with the proposed pipeline passing through Afghanistan and on into Pakistan to the port of Karachi on the coast of the Arabia Sea.

In 1996 a high level Taliban delegation flew over to meet with Unocal executives at their headquarters in Houston, Texas, to discuss this very plan. The Governor of Texas at the time was none other than George W Bush. Despite ruling a country in which women were stoned to death for adultery, in which men were tortured and had their limbs amputated for misdemeanour crimes, in which music and television was banned, in which it was illegal for girls to attend school, these high-ranking representatives of the Taliban were given the red-carpet treatment – put up in a five-star hotel and even accorded a VIP visit to Disneyworld in Florida. However, after they left it was felt that they could not be trusted and the plan for the pipeline was shelved.

With 9/11 came the opportunity the US Oilocracy was waiting for, and their long-held desire for a pipeline through Afghanistan undoubtedly added impetus to an invasion mounted to clear the country of former US allies like the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. Four years on and Afghanistan's onerous distinction as the largest producer of heroin in the world is all that has been achieved, with the remit of the beleaguered and US-installed Kharzai government running no further than Kabul.
Ultimately, the swamp of hatred, obscurantism and religious fanaticism out of which Osama Bin laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban emerged in Afghanistan was a US creation. The US armed, funded and trained large numbers of men as a proxy army during the Cold War. In their eyes the barbarity and savagery inflicted on the people of Afghanistan as a result was a price worth paying, just as the savagery and barbarity being inflicted on Iraq is a price worth paying.

The tragedy for Afghanistan, for its people, is that the future could have been oh so different.

END.