200 Years of Anglo-American Invasions of Afghanistan

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A destroyed Afghanistan has been an imperialist priority for 200 years

As the British before them, US imperial propaganda treats itself as the victim and those they invaded and occupied as the criminal

[Hello friends and welcome to new subscribers. I am assuming that most of the new subscribers got here via the two twitter threads about Afghanistan – the one about the long imperial history and the other on How to Write About Afghanistan. If you’ve looked around a bit on the site, you’ve seen I write about a lot of stuff besides Afghanistan. But I wanted the first email to you all to be about Afghanistan and it’s basically an expansion of the first twitter thread. Now that the US is out of Afghanistan (for now), it’s a good time to revisit the imperialist history. I’ll send out some other recent writing in the coming weeks, but for now… here goes. -Justin]

On August 18th, shortly after the Taliban took Kabul, former British Prime Minister Theresa May stood up in the British House of Commons and asked: “Where is global Britain on the streets of Kabul?” The rhetorical question, as well as the concept of “global Britain” itself, sounds like pandering to a bygone era of imperial glories. But a survey of what it looked like when “global Britain” first showed up on the streets of Kabul, and the nearly two centuries since, could help clear up some muddled thinking about Afghanistan today.

Imperialist designs on Afghanistan

While they were about halfway into their 180 years of plundering $45 trillion from India, the British always knew that an alliance of neighbouring states – the Persian Empire, the Sikh Empire, Afghanistan – could pry their claws off of their prize.

As the British completed the destruction of their rivals and the absorption of territory, Afghanistan came under their hungry gaze. Initially the plan was to install a friendly monarch on the throne and turn him into a pensioner, along the Indian pattern.

The opportunity came in the form of an exiled monarch, Shah Shuja, who the British hoped to install on the throne in Kabul. After elaborate preparation, the British invaded from India in a momentous year for imperialism – 1839. That very same year, they launched the first Opium War on China and began what that country calls its ‘Century of Humiliation’. The army the British sent into Afghanistan consisted mostly of Indian troops, who were treated according to a strict racist hierarchy. “Rather strangely”, writes Farrukh Husain, author of Afghanistan in the Age of Empires, “the British Indian army operated an apartheid system for provision of food. British soldiers received more food rations than Indian troops and the camp followers received less still.” When food ran low, all of it went to the white soldiers while the native troops starved.

British forces raped, slaughtered, and looted their way through Afghanistan. They kidnapped the wives of their allies. They blew Afghans out of cannons (a move they made more famous in 1857 India). They destroyed the economies of the cities they seized. One British agent, a Kashmiri named Mohan Lal, wrote: “I heard both the men and the women saying that the English enriched the grain and grass sellers…while they reduced the Chiefs to poverty, and killed the poor by starvation.” Upon occupying Kabul, the British raised taxes on the locals – unleashing an army of collectors on Afghans, who had to borrow the money to pay the taxes, and then proceeded to lose their houses and other assets, in a standard pattern repeated throughout the colonized world.

Even centuries ago, the imperialists were interested in Afghan minerals. One held the “opinion that a good geologist would be very useful in Afghanistan as the country is said to abound in minerals of every description.”

But after abusing both their allies and their enemies, the British lost control of Kabul and were driven into retreat. The king they put on the throne, Shah Shuja, was assassinated in 1842.

A less vindictive power might have ended it there, but “teaching the natives a lesson” through extreme violence has also always been a pattern of the imperialists. After their loss the British re-grouped and created an “Army of Revenge” against the Afghans for having the temerity to drive them out. The British destroyed Ghazni, an important city which has never recovered: “Ghazni was lost in the darkness of the night to be forgotten by history.” They also looted the gates at the 800-year old tomb of Mahmood of Ghazni and brought the gates back to the Agra Fort. After Indian independence, the Indian government created an official inscription stating that the gates are “lying here either as a war trophy of the British campaign of 1842, or as a sad reminder of the historic lies of the East India Co.”

The Army of Revenge sought to destroy the agricultural and ecological basis of life in Afghanistan: “Our way of destroying the country is very simple, merely cutting a ring through the bark of every tree. This ruins the country completely as the trees die directly and the inhabitants live principally on dried fruit and flour made from the dried mulberry.” There was no other purpose to this army than destruction: “every house was destroyed, every tree barked or cut down”. Neville Chamberlain reported of a village where all males over puberty were bayoneted, the women were raped and their goods plundered: “This is one of the most beautiful valleys in Affghanistan, but we left it a scene of desolation;” At one fort that the British destroyed, Reverend Allen described the scene: “One woman was the only live thing in the fort. She was sitting, the picture of despair, with her father, brother, husband and children lying dead around her.”

Still the imperial bloodlust was unsatisfied. Upon reaching the capital the British debated whether to destroy Kabul or not (one British commander said “not one stone should have been left standing upon another”), and also whether or not to kidnap the king’s child and bring him up as a Christian in London (which they did to Prince Duleep Singh after the Anglo-Sikh wars). The British finally settled for destroying the most spectacular building in Kabul, the Char Chatta market, described by Farrukh Husain as “the greatest covered bazaar of all Central Asia, a veritable regional trade centre if not world trade centre from whence Afghan lapis, dried fruits and rugs went to far off lands on the silk road.” In his own book about the 1839-1842 war, William Dalrymple described it as “superb structure with its painted wooden vaulting and intricate tilework, said by some to be the single most beautiful building in Afghanistan… originally built during the reign of Shah Jahan and renowned not just as one of the supreme wonders of Mughal architecture but as one of the greatest buildings in all Central Asia.”

The dynamiting of Char Chatta bazaar was part of a general carnage enacted by the British in Kabul: “the city was pillaged, and fired in a hundred different places. Numbers of the European soldiers… and crowds of sepoys and followers from both camps, poured in, through many unwalled spaces, and with little interference from the troops on duty, who indeed, to a certain extent aided and abetted, the work of plunder and destruction was carried on, and the few remaining inhabitants were exposed to outrage.” “Outrage” itself was a euphemism for rape, murder, indiscriminate killing, enslaving and trading of women, burning of wounded people alive. “Many a hiding mother hen and newborn infant died. But such things like these you know must be at every famous victorie.” Murder and loot went together: “All day the sack went on, and great booty did the captors get, rich dresses, shawls, carpets, silks, horse trappings, arms, emblazoned Korans, etc”

The engineered demolition of the most magnificent building in Central Asia was not an accident or a crime of passion. Imperialists always try to destroy the cultural heritage of their targets. The same way that Iraq’s National Museum was looted immediately after the US occupation began in 2003, the destruction of Afghanistan’s culture has been an objective of the imperialists for centuries.

On their way back to their base in their Indian colony, the British destroyed other cities, including Jalalabad, which they left “a smoking mass of ruins”. When the British left Afghanistan, one officer writes in 1843: “The work of retribution was now deemed accomplished, and, indeed, it was severe…nor will years repair the damage and evils inflicted”. Another writer, Roebuck, summarized it: “Ghuznee, Cabul, Istalif and Jalalabad have shared a common doom; havoc and desolation have marked the path of our conquered armies, and as fell a revenge has been inflicted on our foes as the warmest advocate of retaliation could desire.”

One British Minister of Parliament, William Hutt, lamented the loss of business opportunities: “We had destroyed every town which could afford us a market, and centuries would elapse before Affghanistan recovered from the misery and desolation in which it had been plunged.”

Having failed to subjugate Afghans, the British imperialists decided the country was to be a buffer zone and dedicated themselves to ensuring it would remain divided, undeveloped, and ideally controlled by compliant rulers. But even this arrangement could not be accomplished without additional wars.

Modernization efforts clash with imperialist designs

The decades after the 1839-1842 war on Afghanistan were decisive in the history of imperialism.

On the North American continent, the United States took all of northern Mexico in the Mexican American war of 1846-8 and followed it with a series of wars and genocides against Indigenous nations. Most of what is now Canada was stolen from First Nations at the same time.

Having devastated Afghanistan, the British next put an end to the Sikh Empire in 1849. In 1852, the British took more territory in Burma. I’ve already mentioned the war of 1857, during which the British faced a powerful challenge to their rule in India. Diminished as a “mutiny”, the uprising was multi-religious, multi-caste, across much of the country, and nearly succeeded in ousting the British, who suppressed it by killing millions. In the decades that followed, documented by Mike Davis in Late Victorian Holocausts, imperialists broke down China’s and India’s sophisticated agricultural systems and tens of millions of Asians died in the resulting famines.

Enjoying years of calm left behind after the mass slaughter of 1857, the British decided in the 1870s to try again to annex Afghanistan. The propaganda of “avenging” the losses of the first round was revved up, including a famous painting of a lone survivor of the 1842 retreat. The horrible cliche of invincible savage Afghans is less the product of multiple wars and more the product of multiple rounds of war propaganda.

In the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1878-9, Britain imposed the humiliating treaty of Gandamak on Afghanistan, which gave Britain control over Afghanistan’s foreign policy (this was a time when successive humiliating treaties were also foisted on China and Indigenous nations in North America). In 1893, Mortimer Durand – whose father had helped destroy Afghanistan in the 1839-1842 war – went to Kabul and imposed a division of the Pashtun lands into the British India side and the Afghanistan side, seeding a century of conflict with the stroke of a pen.

The British invaded Afghanistan again in 1897 to suppress what they called the Malakand Uprising, with the same vindictive imperial purpose. Winston Churchill was there, and what he told a friend was representative: “After today we begin to burn villages. Every one. And all who resist will be killed without quarter. The Mohmands need a lesson, and there is no doubt we are a very cruel people.”

On the Afghan side, though, the drive to modernize (chronicled in Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire) was strong – inspired by Turkey, Japan, and the Russian Revolution, the courts of the Afghan monarchs debated ideas and envisioned building a state capable of withstanding imperial pressure. In February 1919, the young king Amanullah Khan took the throne. The new Soviet Union, itself desperately fighting off an invasion by the imperialists, quickly extended recognition to the new monarch. A short war with the British followed in May, which ended with Afghanistan winning foreign policy independence. Having just slaughtered 1,000 Indians at Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar in April, The British may have been concerned about the morale and reliability of their Indian troops – these were the men who, after all, fought the British Empire’s wars.

Afghan history has had many twists and turns since Amanullah won its independence in 1919. One under-appreciated theme: it has been a century of nationalists struggling to modernize their country in the face of imperialism. If it is rarely understood this way, it could be, among other reasons, because many of the nationalists killed each other.

In 1929, Amanullah was overthrown in a British backed regime-change operation and a series of short-lived rulers followed, until king Zahir Shah, who ruled from 1933-1973. Zahir Shah was also a modernizer, who tried to develop the country under growing pressure from the new US empire.

When the CIA overthrew neighbouring Iran’s elected government and installed the pro-US Shah in 1953, the US gained its own independent military foothold in the region. Taking over the British imperial role, the US injected a new ideology of “development”, as well as “democracy and human rights”, to compete with the socialism and independent national development desired in the colonies. US Historian Nick Cullather wrote in 2002: “The confrontation between colonizer and colonized, rich and poor, was with a rhetorical gesture replaced by a world order in which all nations were either developed or developing.” And in this scheme, Afghanistan “suddenly became ‘underdeveloped’”. Daud Khan, the king’s cousin, said succinctly: “Afghanistan is a backward country. We must do something about it or die as a nation.”

And much was done about it, with help from both Cold War blocs. The USSR built highways linking Kabul to the Central Asian Republics, including the engineering feat of cutting the 2.67km Salang Tunnel through the Hindu Kush mountains in 1964. Germany and Japan built factories and radio towers.

The flagship US project was the Helmand Valley Authority, which historian Arnold Toynbee described as “a piece of America inserted into the Afghan landscape.” Through the Helmand Valley Authority, which ran from 1946-1979, America engaged Morrison-Knudson – builders of Hoover Dam and the San Francisco Bay Bridge, active all over the world – to build a network of dams. Agricultural fields – which now grow opium – in Helmand were improved and made capable of multicropping. In Afghanistan in this period, Cullather notes, the Cold War was “fought with money and technicians instead of spies and bombs.”

In fact the spies and bombs were well on their way. From 1964-1973, there was a famous “democratic opening”, during which the US exercised influence over pro-US Afghan politicians to try to exclude the left. In 1973, Daud Khan, another modernizer, took over in a coup. There is evidence in the Wikileaks Kissinger Cables that the US were themselves planning a coup that year to counter the growing influence of left-wing politics. The first mujahadeen uprising occurred against Daud’s modernizing efforts in 1975 – led by Ahmad Shah Masoud of the Panjshir Valley, it failed to win any popular support and was easily crushed. In 1977, Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was overthrown by General Zia ul-Haq. Bhutto had offered a degree of support to the mujahadeen: Zia-ul-Haq radically stepped that support up. In 1978, Daud himself was overthrown by the left-wing, and Muhammad Taraki became president. A co-founder of what was called the Saur Revolution was Hafizullah Amin. Taraki was president from April 1978-September 1979. He was killed (maybe by Amin). Then Amin took over from September 1979-December 1979.

During the Taraki/Amin year and a half, there was a land reform, which was very popular with farmers and very unpopular with landlords. A number of these disaffected elites went to Pakistan to organize a revolt. The US supported these exiles, in a pattern familiar across the world of the US supporting right-wing insurgencies against left-wing governments. With an open border with Pakistan and virtually unlimited financial resources and weapons from the US, Saudi Arabia, and China, the mujahadeen quickly became a viable threat to the Afghan government, which asked the USSR for military support in 1979. When Soviet troops arrived, the Afghan leader who had invited them, Hafizullah Amin, was himself killed in still-unclear circumstances. Babrak Karmal – a former student leader and parliamentarian with a stronger relationship to Moscow – took over leadership.

The controversial post-1979 period

History is always contentious, but historical consensus on interpretations, or even facts, of an ongoing civil war is impossible. How to interpret the history of the past forty years? The standard interpretation argues that reformers from Amanullah to Zahir Shah, Daud, Taraki, Amin, and Karmal all tried to do too much too fast, failing to respect the deep conservatism of the Afghan people. But that is too shallow of an analysis. Every reform faces a conservative backlash and if the backlash succeeds, the reform itself can always be blamed for provoking it.

What we can say is: From 1979-1987, Afghanistan became the epicenter of a US-supported insurgency against the Afghan government and its Russian ally. The war devastated the country but the government’s modernization efforts continued. From when the Soviets arrived in 1979 until the end, the mujahadeen never again would pose a strong enough military threat to overthrow the government. Media commentators of all viewpoints in the 1980s admonished readers that “there was no military solution in Afghanistan” for either side. Yet Afghan’s government did fall: its demise was negotiated by Gorbechev and then Yeltsin. Hoping to appease the US, the Russian leaders agreed to abandon their allies in Afghanistan – and kept their word. Meanwhile the US, having made the same agreement, blithely continued to support the overthrow of the Afghan government and reject the reconciliation efforts of Afghanistan’s last modernizer, Mohammad Najibullah, who had succeeded Karmal in 1986. Even when Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, Najibullah’s government held on until 1992, when airlifts from Russia were halted altogether.

From 1992-2021: what the imperialists built

So it was in 1992 the US-sponsored insurgents finally toppled the Afghan government and proceeded to cleanse the country of communism and the idea of modernizing, nationalist reforms.

The mujahadeen then applied their skills in state destruction on the whole of the country. While some warlords were content to contain their depredations to their own base areas, two warlords in particular wanted control of Kabul and couldn’t agree – one was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the other was Burnuhuddin Rabbani (and Ahmad Shah Massoud). Hekmatyar was kicked out and proceeded to shell Kabul from outside. The 1992-1996 war destroyed much of what little development had survived the previous decade.

Into this context were born the Taliban, a group of young men raised entirely during war and by the Islamists with no influence from nationalism or communism (which had been cleansed from public memory). They repudiated the atrocities and chaos of the warlords and promised to bring them to an end. Starting in the refugee camps of Pakistan where they grew up, they took Kandahar, advancing quickly from 1994-1996 until they took Kabul. From 1996 to 2001, the Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan from Kabul (though several warlords continued to control northern areas and maintained an anti-Taliban alliance). In 2001, the US invaded, re-organized the warlords, and overthrew the Taliban, who retreated to Pakistan.

The US imposed their own candidate, Hamid Karzai as president under an Afghan-American viceroy, Zalmay Khalilzad. For the next 20 years, Karzai and then his successor, Ghani, ruled over the warlords; the US, through Khalilzad, ruled over Karzai and Ghani. Called ‘indirect rule’ in the 19th century, this arrangement would have been familiar to the British imperialists of that era. So, too, would the US’s geopolitical imperative: having lost its Iranian bases in 1979, the US had gained a covert new foothold in Pakistan that same year, but didn’t get the full power conferred by military occupation and multiple bases in Afghanistan until 2001.

For the next 20 years, the US treated Afghanistan as a video gameworld for practicing drone warfare, protected the opium trade, and committed continuous atrocities, including hunting Afghans for sport, while making it a playground for private contractors and NGOs. US bombs and night raids, which probably killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans, and the indifference to these deaths shown by the US-sponsored government, made support for the Taliban inevitable.

The 1996-2001 Taliban destroyed Afghanistan’s cultural heritage, massacred minorities, and subjugated women as severely as the mujahadeen. Will they be worse, better, or the same as the US-backed mujahadeen? It is too soon to tell, but here are two anecdotes.

First, the mujahadeen and the CIA turned Afghanistan into the world’s leading opium producer from the 1980s. The Taliban taxed opium but discouraged production, and in 2000 – whether for reasons of market manipulation or earnest principle – reduced opium production in Afghanistan to nearly zero. In 2001 they were overthrown and opium cultivation returned to even higher levels than before under US protection.

Second, like the mujahadeen among whom they grew up, the Taliban built almost nothing, but they did complete one infrastructure project. Cullather reported it in 2002: “During its five years in power, the Taliban government invested in the dams and finished one project begun but not completed by the Americans: linking the Kajakai Dam’s hydroelectric plant to the city of Kandahar. Work was finished in early 2001, just a few months before American bombers destroyed the plant.”

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and co-host of the Civilizations historical podcast. You can find him on his website at podur.org and on Twitter @justinpodur.

A destroyed Afghanistan has been an imperialist priority for 200 years

As the British before them, US imperial propaganda treats itself as the victim and those they invaded and occupied as the criminal

Imperialist designs on Afghanistan

But after abusing both their allies and their enemies, the British lost control of Kabul and were driven into retreat. The king they put on the throne, Shah Shuja, was assassinated in 1842.

Modernization efforts clash with imperialist designs

The decades after the 1839-1842 war on Afghanistan were decisive in the history of imperialism.

The controversial post-1979 period

From 1992-2021: what the imperialists built

So it was in 1992 the US-sponsored insurgents finally toppled the Afghan government and proceeded to cleanse the country of communism and the idea of modernizing, nationalist reforms.

New article: Canada is Waging an All-Front Legal War Against Indigenous People

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Dear friends, here’s my latest article for the IMI’s Globetrotter project. That Canada has many lawsuits fighting First Nations, but I found the details surprisingly hard to dig up. They are shared here.

Canada is Waging an All-Front Legal War Against Indigenous People

By Justin Podur for Globetrotter. August 3, 2021

Canada is developing a new image: one of burning churches, toppling statues, and mass graves. There are thousands more unmarked graves, thousands more Indigenous children killed at residential schools, remaining to be unearthed. There can be no denying that this is Canada, and it has to change. But can Canada transform itself for the better? If the revelation of the mass killing of Indigenous children is to lead to any actual soul-searching and any meaningful change, the first order of business is for Canada to stop its all-front war against First Nations. Much of that war is taking place through the legal system.

Canadian politicians have said as much, adopting a motion in June calling for the government to stop fighting residential school survivors in court. A long-standing demand, it has been repeated by Indigenous advocates who have expressed amazement in the face of these horrific revelations that the Canadian government would nonetheless continue to fight Indigenous survivors of systematic child abuse by the state.

To get a sense of the scope of Canada’s legal war on First Nations, I looked at a Canadian legal database containing decisions (case law) pertaining to First Nations. I also looked at the hearing lists of the Federal Court of Canada for ongoing cases. My initial goal was to identify where Canada could easily settle or abandon cases, bringing about a harmonious solution to these conflicts. Two things surprised me.

The first was the volume and diversity of lawsuits Canada is fighting. Canada is fighting First Nations everywhere, on an astoundingly wide range of issues.

The second thing: Canada is losing.

The Attack on Indigenous Children and Women

In his 1984 essay “‘Pioneering’ in the Nuclear Age,” political theorist Eqbal Ahmad argued that the “four fundamental elements… without which an indigenous community cannot survive” were “land, water, leaders and culture.” Canada fights Indigenous people over land, water, fishing rights, mining projects, freedom of movement, and more. The assault on Indigenous nations is also a war against Indigenous children and women.

In the high-profile case of First Nations Child & Family Caring Society of Canada et al. v. Attorney General of Canada, laid out in detail by Cindy Blackstock, “the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada and the Assembly of First Nations filed a complaint under the Canadian Human Rights Act alleging” in 2007 “that the Government of Canada had a longstanding pattern of providing less government funding for child welfare services to First Nations children on reserves than is provided to non-Aboriginal children.” The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) found in favor of the First Nations complainants in 2016.

Note that this isn’t about the history of residential schools. It’s about discrimination against Indigenous kids in the present day. “In fact, the problem might be getting worse,” writes Blackstock, compared to “the height of residential school operations.” As evidence, she refers to a 2005 study of three sample provinces showing a wide gap between the percent of First Nations children in child welfare care (10.23 percent) compared to a much lower rate for non-First Nations children (0.67 percent). In 2006, following the Canadian government’s repeated failures to act on the inequity described in this report (which also included comprehensive suggested reforms that had both moral and economic appeal), Blackstock writes, “the Caring Society and the Assembly of First Nations agreed that legal action was required.” The CHRT was very clear in its 2019 decision that the federal government should compensate each victim the maximum amount, which addressed the victims as follows:

“No amount of compensation can ever recover what you have lost, the scars that are left on your souls or the suffering that you have gone through as a result of racism, colonial practices and discrimination.”

In May 2021, Canada, which has spent millions of dollars fighting this case, tried to overturn the CHRT’s ruling.

Canada’s war on Indigenous children is also a war on Indigenous women. The sterilization of Indigenous women, beginning with Canada’s eugenics program around 1900, is another act of genocide, as scholar Karen Stote has argued. Indigenous women who had tubal ligation without their consent as part of this eugenics program have brought a class-action suit against the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, both of which had Sexual Sterilization Acts in their provincial laws from the 1920s in Alberta and 1930s in British Columbia until the early 1970s, and Saskatchewan, where sexual sterilization legislation was proposed but failed by one vote in 1930. A Senate committee found a case of forced sterilization of an Indigenous woman as recently as 2019.

The Legal-Financial War on First Nations Organizations

As Bob Joseph outlines in his 2018 book 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, Canada first gave itself the right to decide Indian status in the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857, which created a process by which Indigenous people could give up their Indian status and so become “enfranchised”—which they would have to do if they wanted to attend higher education or become professionals. The apartheid system was updated through the Indian Act of 1876, from which sprang many evils including both the residential schools and the assertion of Canadian control over the way First Nations govern themselves. In 1927, when Indigenous veterans of World War I began to hold meetings with one another to discuss their situation, Canada passed laws forbidding Indigenous people from political organization and from raising funds to hire legal counsel (and from playing billiards, among other things). The Indian Act—which is still in effect today with amendments, despite multiple attempts to repeal it—outlawed traditional governance structures and gave Canada the power to intervene to remove and install Indigenous governance authorities at will—which Canada did continuously, from Six Nations in 1924 to Barriere Lake in 1995. As a result, at any given moment, many First Nations are still embroiled in lawsuits over control of their own governments.

Canada controls the resources available to First Nations, including drinking water. In another national embarrassment, Canada has found itself able to provision drinking water to diamond mines but not First Nations. This battle too has entered the courts, with a class-action suit by Tataskweyak Cree Nation, Curve Lake First Nation, and Neskantaga First Nation demanding that Canada not only compensate their nations, but also work with them to build the necessary water systems.

Canada dribbles out humiliating application processes by which Indigenous people can try to exercise their human right to housing. When combined with the housing crisis on reserves, these application processes have attracted swindlers like consultant Jerry Paulin, who sued Cat Lake First Nation for $1.2 million, claiming that his efforts were the reason the First Nation received federal funds for urgent housing repairs.

Canada uses the threat of withdrawal of these funds to impose stringent financial “transparency” conditions on First Nations—the subject of legal struggle, in which Cold Lake First Nations has argued that the financial transparency provisions violate their rights. Canada has used financial transparency claims to put First Nations finances under third-party management, withholding and misusing the funds in a not-very-transparent way, as the Algonquins of Barriere Lake charged in another lawsuit. An insistence on transparency is astounding for a country that buried massive numbers of Indigenous children in unmarked graves.

Win or lose, the lawsuits themselves impose high costs on First Nations whose finances are, for the most part, controlled by Canada. The result is situations like the one where the Beaver Lake Cree are suing Canada for costs because they ran out of money suing Canada for their land. When First Nations are winning in court, Canada tries to bankrupt them before they get there.

Land and Resources Are the Core of the Struggle

The core issue between Canada and First Nations is land. Most battles are over the land on which the state of Canada sits, all of which was stolen and much of which was swindled through legal processes that couldn’t hold up to scrutiny and are now unraveling. “[I]n simple acreage,” the late Indigenous leader Arthur Manuel wrote in the 2017 book The Reconciliation Manifesto, this was “the biggest land theft in the history of mankind,” reducing Indigenous people from holding 100 percent of the landmass to 0.2 percent. One of the most economically important pieces of land is the Haldimand tract in southern Ontario, which generates billions of dollars in revenue that belongs, by right, to the Six Nations, as Phil Monture has extensively documented. Six Nations submitted ever-more detailed land claims, until Canada simply stopped accepting them. But in July, their sustained resistance led to the cancellation of a planned suburban development (read: settlement) on Six Nations land.

Many of the First Nations court battles are defensive. Namgis, Ahousaht, Dzawada’enuxw, and Gwa’sala-’Nakwaxda’xw First Nations have tried to defend their wild fisheries against encroachment and pollution by settler fish farms. West Moberly, Long Plain, Peguis, Roseau River Anishinabe, Aroland, Ginoogaming, Squamish, Coldwater, Tsleil-Waututh, Aitchelitz, Skowkale, and Shxwha:y Village First Nations challenged dams and pipelines. Canada has a history of “pouring big money” into these court battles to the tune of tens of millions—small money compared to its tens of billions subsidizing and taking over financially unviable pipelines running through Indigenous lands—including that of the Wet’suwet’en, whose resistance sparked mass protests across Canada in 2020. The duty to consult First Nations on such projects is itself the outcome of a legal struggle, won in the 2004 decision in Haida Nation v. British Columbia.

First Nations who were swindled or coerced out of their lands (or water, as with Iskatewizaagegan No. 39 Independent First Nation’s case against Winnipeg and Ontario for illegally taking their water from Shoal Lake for use by the city of Winnipeg starting in 1913) fight for their land back, for compensation, or both. The Specific Claims Tribunal has 132 ongoing cases. In Saskatchewan in May, the tribunal awarded Mosquito Grizzly Bear’s Head Lean Man First Nation $141 million and recognition that they never surrendered their land as Canada had claimed they had in 1905. In June, Heiltsuk First Nation won a part of their land back.

First Nations also fight for their fishing rights in courts and out on the water, as settler fishers have physically attacked and tried to intimidate Mi’kmaw fishers on Canada’s east coast. In June, on the west coast, after the British Columbia Court of Appeals found against Canada, the federal government announced it wouldn’t appeal, dropping a 15-year litigation that restricted Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations fishing quotas.

Decolonization Just Might Be Inevitable

Why does Canada keep fighting (and losing) even as its legitimacy as a state built on theft and genocide crumbles? It’s not merely the habits of centuries. It’s also the absence of any project besides the displacement of First Nations and the plunder of the land. Canada could take the first step to ending all this by declaring a unilateral ceasefire in the legal war. Too few Canadians understand that this would actually be a very good thing. First Nations lived sustainably for thousands of years in these extraordinary northern ecosystems. Then the European empires arrived, bringing smallpox and tuberculosis among other scourges. Local extinctions of beaver and buffalo quickly followed, as well as the total extinction of the passenger pigeon. Today’s settler state has poisoned pristine lakes with mine tailings, denuded the country’s spectacular forests, and gifted the atmosphere some of the world’s highest per capita carbon emissions (seventh in the world in 2018—more than Saudi Arabia, which was 10th, and the U.S., which was 11th). Indigenous visionaries have better ideas, such as those presented by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Arthur Manuel, or for that matter the Red Deal and the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba.

Under Indigenous sovereignty, Canadians could truly be guests of the First Nations, capable of fulfilling their obligations to their hosts and their hosts’ lands, rather than the pawns of the settler state’s war against those from whom the land was stolen.

This article was produced by Globetrotter. Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and a writing fellow at Globetrotter. You can find him on his website at podur.org and on Twitter @justinpodur. He teaches at York University in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.

Dan’s new article on Israel’s Antisemitism Ruse: When Racists Claim Victimhood

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Dear friends, I’m sending along Dan Freeman-Maloy’s latest article, originally published in Spectre. Check out the podcast as well – on Civilizations we’re wrapping up a multipart series on Yankee Imperialism, and on the regular AEP we’ve been covering Palestine, Haiti, and Cuba as always. Dan’s article is his usual historically deep discussion of imperial propaganda, in the case of Israel/Palestine. Dan has also updated his own website, now called The Puzzle, and I expect he’ll have his own mailing list as well before long – at which point you’ll have to join that list to find out about his new work, as opposed to finding it here 🙂 Hope you are all well in these times.

Israel’s Antisemitism Ruse: When Racists Claim Victimhood

By Dan Freeman-Maloy, Originally for Spectre Journal

Bruised-fist grievance politics as an old imperial ruse

Malcolm X was neither the first nor the last to spot this pattern. The fact is that even the worst racists try to appropriate the cause of self-defense, since it is easier to attack from moral high ground.

The pattern is plain. In his book The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin linked it with “what is truly bizarre about conservatism: a ruling class resting its claim to power upon its sense of victimhood.”2 This is a well-developed ruse. Reinhold Niebuhr, the classical moralist of US power, saw this ruse as a pillar of what he described as “the imperial supremacy of the white races in the contemporary world.” To Niebuhr’s eyes, racism was strongest where it blurred the line between “the will-to-live and the will-to-power.” Where this line blurs, the moral fervor of a fight for survival can be enlisted in support of imperial domination: “So inextricably are the two intertwined, that the one may always be used to justify the other in conscious and unconscious deception.”

This ruse is standard. In the language of the Euro–American far right, the ruse is packaged in the slogans of “white genocide” or “white replacement.” The attempted white-power putsch of January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. was motivated by this falsified narrative of self-defense.3 The story, as told by the neo-Nazis of our time, is that Indigenous, African, and Asian people are preparing to do to Europeans what Europeans did to them. It follows that further white violence is necessary for white survival.

This is hateful nonsense – but it is also typical, understandable nonsense. No oppressor, however brutal, has ever conceded the moral high ground without a fight. False victimhood is one of the most common ways that this ground is claimed. As Domenico Losurdo reminds us: “In the USA, the more ruthlessly the erasure of Native Americans from the face of the earth proceeded, the more repugnantly they were depicted. Discriminatory wars and wars of annihilation against colonial populations, whether external or internal to the metropolis, were justified by dehumanizing them; and this was achieved by sheer invention of ‘atrocities’ or by an inflation and one-sided reading of atrocities actually committed.”4 Europe’s classical fascists read from the same script when they attacked Jews as the spearhead of “Judeo-Bolshevist” aggression.5

In other words, the anti-Palestinian smears of 2021 are twisted, but they are not original. In fact, the smears cannot accurately be understood in isolation. They are as imperial in origin as the warplanes that have terrorized Gaza. As Malcolm X insisted, “it’s the same game going all the time.”

Historically, one of Israel’s services to empire was to make the false victimhood of the powerful sound persuasive – to lend the “reverse racism” ruse legitimacy. In a cruel irony, pro-Israel smear campaigns thus played into some of the most dangerous themes of holocaust “revisionism.” One of the main objectives of holocaust “revisionists” is to disavow Western responsibility for Nazi antisemitism by projecting responsibility for it onto the traditional targets of Western hate. For the notorious German revisionist Eric Nolte, the Nazi holocaust, since it was evil, could not have been Western; it must have been an “Asiatic deed.”6 White supremacy emerges from this narrative all but unscathed. Pro-Israel attempts to depict the targets of Israeli racism as the real antisemites play into this game.7

They displace antisemitism onto Palestinians, Black-led social movements, and the Third World, twisting the legacy and reality of antisemitism into a moral mandate for Western power.

In 2021, this ruse is finally losing its social force. The links are just too obvious. In the United States, the most prominent spokesperson for classical white supremacy is Tucker Carlson of Fox News. Like Ayelet Shaked in Israel, Carlson has played around with using the term “fascism” in the first person.8 This April, Carlson made a point of justifying white nationalism in the US by celebrating Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians. It did not take much imagination, since Benjamin Netanyahu had drawn the same parallel. On a 2002 sympathy tour of Texas, Netanyahu argued that a dominant group should expel others with confidence. “You know about this,” he said in Dallas. “This is the reason you have an INS.”9 Extending this parallel in defense of “white replacement” theory, Carlson argued that US white nationalism is as justifiable as Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians.10

At this point, those who fail to see the overlap between “new antisemitism” and “white replacement” sloganry have not been looking closely. In recent years, Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism has become so extreme as to produce startling comparisons in surprising quarters. Even ardent supporters of Israel have compared the politics of Israel’s parliamentary far right to the politics of the Ku Klux Klan and of Nazi Germany. Increasingly, the only way for Israel’s apologists to shut down criticism of Israeli racism is to shut down anti-racism of any kind. The anti-racist scholar David Theo Goldberg warns that wider efforts to do this are underway.11 Historically, however, “new antisemitism” slogans offered a stronger line of attack, in part because Israel kept its anti-Palestinian violence quiet. That era is now over. The power of pro-Israel bullying persists; but we are already witnessing, and must hasten, the collapse of its moral credibility.

The nature and extent of Israeli racism in 2021

One of the worst contemporary contributors to holocaust revisionism is a pro-Israel smear outfit known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA). For the IHRA, anti-racism is antisemitism. So too is basic honest thought. We can start, then, with one of the IHRA’s falsified examples of antisemitism: “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”12 For the IHRA, an early purveyor of the scourge of “new antisemitism” was Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.

Traditionally, Israel’s main political parties were Labor and Likud. Ben-Gurion led the Labor Party; the forerunner of the Likud Party was a certain Vladimir Jabotinsky. Ben-Gurion often likened Jabotinsky’s politics to fascism and called him “Vladimir Hitler.”13 Now, this should not obscure the fact that it was Ben-Gurion who organized the main expulsions of Palestinians in 1948. But to highlight the utter incoherence of IHRA revisionism, let us turn from Labor to Likud. Not even Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud Party was sufficiently anti-Palestinian to escape the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The right wing of the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, of 2021, celebrates a racist doctrine known as Kahanism. Within Shamir’s Likud Party, right-wing Zionists compared Kahanism to Nazism as a matter of course.

Historically grounded anti-racists can interpret the lineage of Kahanism in various ways. Meir Kahane, after whom Kahanism is named, was an anti-Black, white-backlash activist in the United States before he moved to organizing Israeli hate squads to attack Palestinians. Word for word, his program replicates Puritan doctrines of anti-Indigenous hate. In Israel, however, memories of Nazism overshadow other anti-Black and anti-Indigenous histories, so Israelis more often compare Kahanism with Nazi antisemitism. Whatever parallel one chooses, Kahanist racism is second to none.

In 2019, then Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought Kahanism into Israel’s governing mainstream. Old comparisons with the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Germany immediately spread among hardline supporters of Israel.14 In the United States, Batya Ungar-Sargon, the opinion editor of the Forward, warned that “Israel’s equivalent of the KKK” had entered government.15 In Israel, Rabbi Benny Lau – “a pillar of religious Zionism,” as the New York Times stressed – repeated the old comparison of Kahanist with Nazi politics. Rabbi Lau reminded Israelis that even Likud under Shamir made this comparison, and he urged that “the public review the comparison MK Michael Eitan made in the 1980s between the Nuremberg Laws and those Kahane sought to enact.”16

Eitan, a Likud MK under Shamir, had simply detailed the similarity between the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws and the Kahanist program. To get a feel for this parallel, one can track Kahane’s rhetoric. In 1985, Kahane delivered the following speech in Haifa. First, he attacked Palestinian citizens of Israel as “roaches,” sanctifying genocidal violence: “We shall either cut their throats or throw them out.” Then he decreed that he would massacre Palestinians as soon as he had control of the Israeli army: “they will come to me, bow to me, lick my feet, and I will be merciful and will allow them to leave. Whoever does not leave will be slaughtered.”17 Time and again, Kahane signed his name to words like these. In books that Kahanist hate networks still proudly distribute, Kahane urged genocide, or in his words, “total extermination.”18

These politics have swept into the Israeli mainstream. In April 2021, MK Itamar Ben-Gvir took the occasion of his first speech to the Knesset to praise Kahane by name.19 Ben-Gvir was elected by Israeli voters who knew that he attended a wedding where “dancing participants stabbed a picture of Ali Dawabshe[h], a Palestinian toddler who had been killed in a settler firebombing attack.”20 What followed, like a train that is never late, was a move from rhetoric to action. Ben-Gvir’s Klanist squads punctuated his speech with firebombing attacks on Palestinians in Jerusalem. “We’re burning Arabs today,” read one Israeli headline, reporting the April 2021 work of Ben-Gvir’s pogromchiks.21 In their turn, Israeli state forces raided al-Aqsa Mosque and bombarded the Gaza Strip. Ben-Gvir has established himself as a central figure in Israeli media coverage and debates.

Most strikingly, where Ayelet Shaked and Tucker Carlson have played around with identifying with fascism, Kahanists have played around with identifying with Nazism. Jewish Israeli writers have long documented the identification of a settler fringe with Nazi politics.22 In 2018, Israel’s leading daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, reported the scene when the grandfather of Ali Dawabsheh, the Palestinian toddler murdered by Ben-Gvir’s constituents, attended a court date for one of the smiling suspects: “‘Where is Ali? Burned! No more Ali! Dead, burned! On the grill, on fire!’ were the jubilant jeers that welcomed Hussein Dawabsheh this week as he was heading into the Lod District Court.” Startled, Yedioth argued that “‘Ali is burned, on the grill’ is a sort of Jewish reclaiming of the furnace.”23 Then came the Kahanist lynchings of spring 2021. “We are no longer Jews today,” wrote one Israeli Telegram user: “Today we are Nazis.”24 Ben-Gvir resists the Nazi label, but it seems that not all of his constituents do.25

Yet the real horror this spring was how the firebombs of Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit were followed by the artillery shells of the Israel Defense [sic] Forces (IDF). At the level of language, this can be tracked with Kahanism into Israel’s mainstream. How, Kahane once asked, could he be faulted for saying that “the Arabs in our midst are a spreading cancer”? Kahane wrote that it was enough to “quote Binyamin Netanyahu, who warned the Galilee Arabs of the danger of their becoming part of the ‘cancer of the intifada.’”26 These hateful tropes now align with the politics of the IDF command. The “centrist” Moshe Ya’alon announced as much in 2002 during his tenure as IDF chief of staff. He told the press that Kahane and Netanyahu had been right about Palestinian politics: “I maintain it is a cancer,” he said. He then summarized the IDF command’s disagreement with Kahanism: “Some will say it is necessary to amputate organs. But at the moment, I am applying chemotherapy.”27

Once again, the trope of “self-defense” is limitless in application. We can read it in the original US attack on “merciless Indian savages.” We can read it in the original fascist attack on democracy as “a war of the hand against the brain.”28 More recently, we read it from the killer behind the white nationalist massacre of 2019 in El Paso, Texas, who “maintained that his attack was a preemptive action against Hispanic invaders and that ‘they are the instigators, not me.’”29

How is anti-Palestinian racism any different? Israel’s current “defense” minister, Benny Gantz, oversaw the killing of 2,251 Palestinians in Gaza in 2014. He has advertised his killings as a point of pride.30 On May 11, 2021, Gantz even sent a video message to Palestinians in Gaza, boasting about “the last time that we met on Eid al-Fitr” and threatening: “Gaza will burn.”

Once upon a time, US diplomats could celebrate Israel’s false victimhood. In 1976, Daniel Patrick Moynihan took the occasion of the bicentennial of US independence to praise Israel as the loveliest symbol of Western power on earth. “In its mortal peril,” Moynihan said, Israel “has become a metaphor for the condition of democracy in the world today.”31 Now as then, Israel does embody the false moralism of its most powerful sponsors. But as the hatreds of Ben-Gvir and Gantz are exposed for the world to see, what was once a point of imperial strength has increasingly become a liability.

The “new antisemitism” as reverse-racism misdirection

The actual history of antisemitism is also a history of racism.

Classical antisemitism presumed an anti-Black and imperial worldview. For the proto-Nazi antisemite Houston Stewart Chamberlain, “the Jew” was “a cross between negro and white man,” a “Semite” who emerged “from the deserts of Arabia” to infiltrate Western civilization.32The whole point was to attack European Jews as racial fifth columnists. Spinning off of the standard attack on Jews as “Asiatic,” France’s Louis-Ferdinand Céline urged white supremacist attacks on European Jews precisely because they were “Negroid Jews.”33 In Germany, meanwhile, the Journal of Racial and Social Biology focused on anti-Black racism for decades before adding anti-Jewish racism to its pages in 1935.34 In other words, actual antisemitism is multi-issue hatred, targeting Jews as allies of the imagined barbarians at the gates of Western civilization. It is to this heritage that the enemy Sieg Heiled in Charlottesville with chants of, “Jews will not replace us.”35

The phrase “new antisemitism” – in sharp contrast – refers to anti-racism. It is a classical example of what Frantz Fanon called “verbal mystification,” the wordsmithery with which racism lies its way into virtue.36 It is also a declaration of war on anti-racist memory. In Germany, the attempt to rewrite the history of antisemitism to Western advantage led to the revisionism of Eric Nolte, who argued that Nazi violence was not a Western but an “Asiatic deed.”37 The “new antisemitism” ruse is subtler. But as Peter Novick has shown in his study The Holocaust in American Life, it has nothing to do with principled anti-Nazi memory.38 And it pushes in Nolte’s direction. Even admirers of the ruse stress that its political function is to “dramatize the ideology of the West.”39

As anti-Palestinian racism consumes Israeli politics, the “new antisemitism” ruse is radicalizing. Netanyahu was so single-minded in his anti-Palestinian hate that he embraced holocaust revisionism of the crudest sort. It was a spectacular disgrace. Netanyahu literally fabricated evidence in an attempt to shift blame for the Nazi holocaust from Germany onto the Palestinians, earning neo-Nazi praise and a dishonorable mention in Federico Finchelstein’s Brief History of Fascist Lies.40 But this is an extreme example. More often, “new antisemitism” means something roughly equivalent to “reverse racism.”

This line of attack can be dated to the US legitimacy crisis of the late 1960s. White-backlash specialists like Daniel Patrick Moynihan led the way, attacking affirmative action as antisemitic.41 The basic outlines of this verbal mystification are as follows. While actual antisemitism attacks Jews as non-Western outsiders, “new antisemitism” theory flips the script. It represents Jews as timelessly white and Western, then attacks challenges to white or Western power as anti-Jewish. Generations of anti-racists have exposed this for what it is: a bullying product of what one US Jewish leader denounced as “[t]he white (including, God help us, the Jewish) backlash.”42

The line was that “anti-whitism” was the real problem, and that “anti-Semitism” was just one form that this problem took. I am quoting Nathan Glazer, Moynihan’s longtime collaborator. Glazer blamed racial justice movements: “In every black neighborhood of every city, there have arisen spokesmen who have been intemperate in their attacks on whites, on the ‘power structure,’ on policemen, teachers, social workers, landlords, businessmen, and – where these are Jews – on Jews.”43 In this story, the US “power structure” had to suppress an “anti-whitism” that was persecuting police.44

It was in this context that Kahane learned his first lines. He pushed forward with the “white replacement” logic detectable in the work of Moynihan and Glazer. His story was that Black migration to northern US cities from the former Confederacy was racially invasive. This is how the story sounded: “‘People used to sit on stoops and benches at all times of the day and night,’ said Allan Mallenbaum, a childhood friend of Kahane. ‘Nobody was afraid of crime. You never saw a Black face.’”45 Kahane thus preached composite white power as a matter of self-defense. Significantly, Kahane presented his program in celebration of racial whiteness. He said: “The Jew is the weakest link in the white chain and the black militant knows that few non-Jews are concerned with the Jew’s plight. The Jew has always been more liberal than other white ethnic groups. So now most Jewish neighborhoods are integrated and the militant blacks there practice terror.”46

This story was tailored to fit the needs of the dominant US culture. This is plain in Glazer’s denunciation of Black anti-police racism.47 But more than this, Novick shows that US patriots saw their own pioneer history in European Jewish settlement in Palestine. Just before the Palestine expulsions of 1948, the editor of the Boston Herald could liken the dispossession of the Palestinians to the “conquest of the Indians and the inevitable giving way of a backward people before a more modern and practical one.”48 The doctrine of “anti-whitism” as “new antisemitism” was thus versatile. It offered a means of celebrating both anti-Black racism and the pioneer mystique.

The pseudo-religious flair of Israeli racism should not obscure how closely it was modeled on the US example. For its part, US white supremacy also focused on a pseudo-Biblical disparagement of Black people as descendants of Ham.49 But it was the anti-Indigenous example of the United States that cut deepest in Palestine. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz records how the Puritans pioneered anti-Indigenous demonization in the literal sense. No sooner had English settlers arrived in North America than they “identified the Indigenous population as inherently children of Satan and ‘servants of the devil’ who deserved to be killed.”50

The result was a distinctive colonial theology. First in New England and then in Palestine, settlers seized upon a line from the Book of Samuel: “Now go, attack Amalek . . . Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!”51 While this line is inherently troubling, most religious traditions navigate such lines with extreme caution. The association of “Amalek” with living people is opportunistic viciousness. This settler reading of scripture is foreign to traditional Jewish thought, as is Zionism more generally.52 Yet its transposition from New England to Palestine came easily. One reason is that Protestant white supremacy was framed around the claim that Protestant Christendom was itself the Israel of which the Bible spoke. By 1871, the US magazine Living Age could still celebrate anti-Indigenous violence with this theme: “As the Israelites slew the Amalekites, so did the Pilgrims slay the Pequot.”53

In turn, the post-1948 Israel – a settler knock-off par excellence – absorbed US settler theology almost as readily as it absorbed US weapons. By 1956, David Ben-Gurion could refer to the Palestinians whom his militias had expelled into the Gaza Strip as “hosts of Amalek.”54 This was violent enough from Ben-Gurion. But when Kahane arrived from New York, he helped Israelis sharpen this theme with the worst exterminism imaginable. If Palestinians are Amalekites, Kahane preached, then Palestinian adults and children should alike be killed as “Hamans, large and small,” by hate squads confident in the knowledge that “the All Mighty decrees that they be cruel.”55

At first glance, it seems ludicrous to claim that opposition to anti-Palestinian cruelty shows insensitivity to the oppression of European Jews. Here too, however, the template had already been drawn. Anglo–American power was second to none in spinning cruelty as compassion. And it had developed a powerful tradition of moral misdirection. This point is flagged by Gerald Horne, one of the leading anti-racist historians in the United States. How, Horne asks, was it possible to whitewash the anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence endemic to US history? The racism was barely concealed. How could it be brushed aside in celebration of US liberty? Horne proposes that one “explanation for this abject hypocrisy is that too many could not see beyond the deliverance of poorer Europeans from the barbarism they endured on their home continent to a sympathy with those victimized in the process.”56 This ruse is a classical feature of settler moralism.

It starts with a truth. Europeans did endure barbarism on their home continent, from English sweatshops to the starving Irish countryside. The ruse then moves to a falsehood: that this justifies violence against Black and Indigenous people in order to deliver Europeans from oppression. Moving from the truth to the falsehood is the work of racist moralism, and making the move sound persuasive is the work of verbal mystification.

Two early examples illustrate how this worked. The first is British. One of the worst outbursts of anti-Black violence from Britain was the massacre of Jamaican laborers in punishment for their rebellion of 1865. The killings were horrific.57 Covering for them, distinguished Englishmen alleged that to oppose anti-Black violence was to show disrespect for the English poor. “Carlyle and Ruskin, Kingsley, and Dickens all insisted that it was not worth considering the injustices perpetrated against Jamaican ‘n*****s’ as long as English working men continued to groan under the oppression of the factory system.”’58 The second example is American. In the US, leaders presented the westward assault on Indigenous life as a quest to secure land for the European poor. In the words of another conservative historian, “the concept of America as asylum for the ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ was made to serve this muscular version of the national destiny.”59

In this historical light, the moralizing logic of Western support for Israel snaps into focus. Imperial moralists were already whitewashing colonial violence by presenting it as a way to help Europeans escape “the barbarism they endured on their home continent.” Then, as Aimé Césaire described it, along came the Nazis and inflicted upon Europe the “crowning barbarism” of modern Western history.60 The spectacular viciousness of Nazi racism helped push white supremacy into a legitimacy crisis on a planetary scale.61 As racism’s legitimacy crisis deepened in the 1960s, US moralists found in Palestine a means of twisting Nazi horrors into colonial frames of reference.62

Within a US frame, the story of Palestine became a tale of colonial redemption, featuring Palestinians as new “Amalekites” and European Jews as new “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It was a powerful allegory for Western virtue. Construing Israel as a moral force vindicated the entire logic of settler colonialism. Justice once more demanded the brutalization of Indigenous people by settlers yearning to breathe free. The opportunistic benefits were plain. Since the entire Third World supported the Palestinians, anti-colonialism could itself be attacked as a “new antisemitism,” affirming Western tolerance against the foil of Afro-Asian bigotry.63

Such deception is traditional colonial fare. As Aimé Césaire warned, when it comes to colonialism, “the commonest curse is to be the dupe in good faith of a collective hypocrisy that cleverly misrepresents problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided for them.”64 But the “new antisemitism” ruse has now been in use for half a century. Where once it seemed clever, it now seems bizarre. A white liberalism that hides its own deceptive moralizing behind Israeli racism is increasingly not hiding at all. Phyllis Chesler once celebrated the symbolism of Israel by declaring on behalf of the United States: “we are all Israelis.”65 At this stage, such a message can only further plunge US power into a deepening legitimacy crisis.

A McCarthyism in crisis versus the Palestinian freedom struggle

After the neo-Nazi rally of 2017 in Charlottesville, Catherine Squires reflected on the gaslighting lies with which we are constantly flooded. One is pushed to doubt oneself, Squires wrote, “when each new headline or tweet makes one want to rub her eyes to test if it’s just a trick of the light . . . Was it just my imagination that they were marching with tiki torches and making Nazi salutes?”66

Charlottesville, at least, was hard to whitewash. The slogans of “white replacement” fooled no one. Squires continued: “I don’t know if it was scarier when racism was insisting it didn’t exist anymore or when the racists held the tiki torches high to spotlight their faces and they proclaimed their faith in the full glare of CNN cameras.”67 The same question arises in Palestine, as Israel openly embraces the politics of hate. After Charlottesville, it was impossible to deny the racism of the Trump White House. The bogus tale of Israeli self-defense will take more work to dislodge.

But these things always take time. By the 1960s, it was still possible for US racists to attack anti-Klan activists on the old grounds. “This is how they psycho you,” Malcolm X warned, time and again. “You say, ‘Well, I don’t want to be a Ku Klux Klan in reverse.’”68 In the years ahead, pro-Israel smears of antisemitism will stand exposed as more of the same. The anti-Palestinian tropes will sound just like it sounds when we hear Tucker Carlson agree that racism is, of course, a terrible problem, a problem of “anti-white racism, which is now the only acceptable form of racism in the West,” etc., etc.69 Carlson, Netanyahu, and the rest are singing in harmony. Amid the Kahanist carnage of May 2021 in “mixed cities,” Israeli president Reuvin Rivlin accused Palestinian citizens of Israel of antisemitic aggression.70 In US Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke of “an Islamic invasion into our government offices.”71 In Britain, the notorious Islamophobe Tommy Robinson meanwhile celebrated Israeli atrocities to the noise of chants including, “may your village burn.”72

These types deserve each other.

Meanwhile, the plain fact is that the Palestinian freedom struggle stands on the frontlines of the international struggle against the rising politics of hate. So the lies will continue to come. But the lies are losing their capacity to deceive, and those who continue to reproduce them will only help people of conscience to distinguish friend from foe. The people of Palestine have shown the world what bravery means – it should take more than stale smears to make anyone else flinch. McCarthyisms can only last for so long. It is time to make this one collapse.

AEP 90: Cuba demonstrations and Cuba blockade, with Reed Lindsay

The US embargo on Cuba is the problem

Joe Emersberger and I talk to Reed Lindsay, journalist and filmmaker with Belly of the Beast, a media organization focusing on Cuba and Cuba-US relations. Among their films is a 3-part series called the War on Cuba available on YouTube. Reed was at the recent demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in Havana and talks about how the scarcities and difficulties of life have everything to do with the 60-year, ever-intensifying economic blockade against Cuba imposed by the United States.

My latest article for Globetrotter on Militarized Environmental “Conservation” in Colombia

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Is Colombia’s Military Displacing Peasants to Protect the Environment or Sell Off Natural Resources?

[Friends – if you’ve visited the site you know we’ve been working on materials about Palestine, but you also rightly expect the Anti-Empire Project to keep you informed about events in Colombia. This story is just one of the many depredations against people and the environment that go on with the militarization of everything. -Justin]

Colombia witnessed a series of mass protests at the end of April following a call for a national strike in the city of Cali. Still ongoing, the protests have many causes: an apparent “tax reform” that was going to transfer even more wealth to the 1 percent in Colombia; the failure of the most recent peace accords; and the inability of Colombia’s privatized health care system to contain the COVID-19 crisis. In response to these ongoing protests, the government has killed dozens, disappeared hundreds, imposed curfews on multiple cities, and called in the army. But the protests continue—because they are, at least in part, a repudiation of the militarization of everything in the country.

In the background of the uprising in Colombia is the question of land. A multi-decade civil war has led to millions of peasants being thrown off of their land, which ended up in the hands of large landowners or was used for corporate megaprojects. In the ongoing corporate land grab that has been taking place in Colombia for the last few years, there is a new and frightening weapon: the militarization of environmental conservation. In a countrywide series of military operations beginning in February, involving a large number of soldiers and police, the army captured 40 people, whom the attorney general accused of deforestation and illegal mining, in six different locations in the country. In an earlier operation, the army captured four people for crimes against the environment, who have been labeled as “dissidents of the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)” by Colombia’s President Iván Duque, according to an article in Mongabay. In another operation in March 2020, soldiers trying to capture illegal ranchers in national parks picked up 20 people, 16 of whom turned out to be peasants who did not own land or cattle, according to Mongabay. According to the Colombian military, eight operations were carried out in 2020, through which it had “recovered more than 9,000 hectares of forest,” while capturing 68 people, 20 of whom were minors, stated the article in Mongabay.

What the military calls “recovered” forest is a territory emptied of its people. The overall initiative, which began in 2019, is labeled “Operation Artemis.” It deploys what one article in the City Paper (Bogotá) calls “Colombia’s full-metal eco-warriors” in an effort to reduce deforestation by 50 percent, as President Duque told Reuters.

With so much military defense of the forest taking place, the question that arises is, is deforestation a problem that can be solved with the use of weapons? Can the forest be saved through mass arrests? Can the same military that killed thousands of innocent people, including peasants, in an attempt to inflate their body count statistics, be trusted to protect the environment?

The Amazon Threatened

The deforestation of the Amazon is a real problem. The Colombian Amazon comprises about 42 percent of Colombia’s land area and 6 percent of the total area of the Amazon, with Bolivia and Venezuela each making up another 6 percent, Peru 9 percent, and Brazil 66 percent of the total Amazon area.

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil campaigned on the promise to “develop” the Amazon and has taken rapid steps toward doing so. In Colombia too, deforestation has taken place rapidly, at a rate of between about 100,000 and 200,000 hectares per year as of 2018. The biggest motors of deforestation are ranching, burning, cultivation of coca and poppy, and road and mining expansion. If the “recovery” rate—which is defined as clearing people out of the area by military force—follows 2020’s pattern of 9,000 hectares in a year, the army’s “full-metal eco-warriors” are working at least 11 times too slow to stop deforestation. This raises questions about what is really happening in Colombia and why.

The Amazon is protected under the Colombian constitution, as are the territorial rights of Indigenous peoples. Among these rights is the right to free, prior, and informed consent in the event of any development scheme. A number of forums exist through which Indigenous people are theoretically able to exercise these rights. These include the mesa permanente, the comisión nacional and the Mesa Regional Amazónica. A very important portion of the Colombian Amazon—more than half—is, by law, under Indigenous jurisdiction.

These lands are coveted by corporate interests.

Investor Rights Challenged in Courts

The most powerful tool of the corporate land grab makes no pretense of protecting the environment: it is the framework of “free trade,” enshrined in international agreements, which noted linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky has argued would be better termed as “investor rights agreements.” But this framework is always under challenge by Indigenous people and by courts that have even a modicum of independence.

There are many examples of when Indigenous people have taken to court to uphold their rights over their land. When Canadian mining company Cosigo Resources Ltd. was discovered carrying out illegal activities in an Amazon national park and was investigated by Colombia’s Constitutional Court, the company took Colombia to arbitration in Texas, where the matter is to be conducted as per the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITL) rules. Cosigo Resources Ltd. claimed that the Colombian constitutional protections in the Yaigojé-Apaporis National Natural Park violate Colombia’s obligations to protect investor rights under the U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement. That battle is ongoing.

Another Canadian mining company, Auxico Resources, is trying to extract the gold and coltan (a key ingredient in cell phones) under the Amazon. Auxico Resources signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the governor of Guainía, Javier Zapata, for the “production of minerals,” according to Minería Pan-Americana. In 2018, Zapata announced that 80 percent of the land had been conceded to Auxico Resources. Zapata is now in prison for corruption. But Auxico is still working in the area. In 2019, President Duque announced the creation of the new municipality of Barrancominas in Guainía, pre-empting an initiative by Indigenous communities (85 percent of the people in Guainía are Indigenous) in the region to establish their land rights.

A third company, Amerisur Resources (now GeoPark), won a license to conduct petroleum exploration in Siona Indigenous territory in Putumayo in southern Colombia (on its borders with Ecuador and Peru), a community of 2,600 people who have been under attack by paramilitaries and narcotraffickers for decades—police records show 23 separate massacres in Putumayo between 1993 and 2014. The community swore in 2014 not to allow petroleum exploitation in their territory. In 2018, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights “ordered precautionary measures to protect” the Siona, and a Colombian judge also declared that this “sent a clear message” and ordered that Amerisur Resources cease their project of oil exploration there, according to an article in El Espectador. The judge ordered a suspension of licenses for exploration in one of the reserves. Amerisur Resources quickly announced that it would continue mining because “prior consultation,” a right under Colombia’s constitution, had apparently been completed. The battle continues to this day, with the company continuing to insist that it had fulfilled the constitutional requirement for prior consent sometime in the past.

In 2010 in Ecuador, the military proposed creating an army-controlled “protected” forest on Siona territory—the Siona refused. In July 2020, Siona Governor Sandro Piaguaje announced to GeoPark that “[Y]ou are going to lose, because you will not be able to get a drop of oil from our territory.” But now deforestation alerts are popping up all over Siona land along with reports of narcotrafficking. The Siona fear that these alerts will provide a pretext for the military to enter the zone and will start a process that will culminate in handing over the territory to GeoPark.

When discussing corporate interests in the Amazon, the case of Steven Donziger and Chevron in Ecuador shouldn’t be forgotten. In 1993, Donziger took on a historic claim against oil giant Chevron, which had polluted the Amazon in Ecuador and devastated the Indigenous communities there. In 2011, a court in Ecuador ordered that Chevron pay $9.5 billion in damages. Chevron didn’t pay—and then proceeded to use the U.S. court system to persecute Donziger, who is currently living in his second year of house arrest in New York.

Environmental Bubbles Deployed Against Peasants

However high the cost of court battles, Indigenous people have proven that their struggle inside and outside the courts to protect the environment can often succeed. To land-hungry corporations, militarized conservation has emerged as a strategic alternative to risky court battles. Along with Operation Artemis, Colombia has rolled out a strategy of “Environmental Bubbles,” which started in 2016. In 2017, the Colombian military participated in a series of military exercises in the Amazon called “Operation United America,” jointly with the governments of Peru, Brazil, Canada, Panama, Argentina and, of course, the United States—but not Bolivia (then-president Evo Morales refused).

The Environmental Bubbles are surprise operations, which are made public knowledge after the military has carried out an operation to protect some area against illegal activity. Each state (department) in Colombia gets a “rapid reaction force to carry out monitoring, prevention, control and surveillance tasks against the causes of deforestation.”

In 2018, campesino (peasant) organizations testified before the #JuicioALaDeforestación (deforestation trial) tribunal about what the authorities have done to them in the name of conservation. In the La Paya National Natural Park, a peasant delegate from the Leguízamo Peasant Workers Association while reporting on the “alleged abuses against the civilian population by the authorities in the areas” said, “All their belongings, houses and animals were burned during the intervention.” He continued, “We peasants are not the reason for deforestation. The big landowner, who seized one thousand hectares from the park, is walking around freely with no trouble.” Four other military operations of the same type were conducted throughout 2018-19.

The case of Labarce, in the Colombian department of Sucre, is also instructive. Afro-Colombians, some of whose families had arrived in the area as early as 1916, saw their lands become part of a national park—the Santuario de Flora y Fauna el Corchal—in 2002. Their territories suddenly became “terra nullius,” “empty” lands—the same doctrine used to usurp Indigenous people from their lands throughout the Americas, including the United States and Canada where mining corporations are headquartered. The peasants came forward in good faith to cooperate with the process and had rights under the law. In their decades living there, they had protected the biodiversity of the area and maintained a circumscribed territory without expanding further into the forest. All the same, they were classified as illegal occupants of their own land. There are many other cases of peasants being suddenly declared interlopers, generations after their ancestors were encouraged to “colonize” lands.

Environmentalism Must Be Demilitarized

The takeover of conservation by military forces is not unique to Colombia—Kenyan scholar Mordecai Ogada has written about the same dynamics in many countries in Africa. He writes on his website, “A foreigner’s love for our wildlife is usually a measure of their hatred for Indigenous people.” If “conservation” can be appropriated as a slogan for displacing Indigenous people, it is time to rethink the concept. It is time to discard Malthusianism, the fantasy of “empty lands,” and the apocalypticism that underlies too much environmental thinking.

The Amazon is estimated to be 13,000 years old, and the region has been inhabited for 19,000 years or more—there is a reason, in other words, to consider the possibility that the wildest rainforest imaginable is in fact a cultural landscape co-created by human beings and other species working together. In the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, author Charles Mann gives several estimates as to what fraction of the Amazon was created by Indigenous people; one cautious estimate is that “about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest was of anthropogenic origin—directly or indirectly created by human beings”; another researcher tells him “it’s all human-created”; and according to another researcher, “The phrase ‘built environment… applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes.”

With the authority of the National Natural Parks of Colombia being used to displace peasants, one proposal for a breakthrough in this conflict is the “Parques con Campesinos” (Parks with Peasants) concept—which would make peasants partners in conservation, rather than setting them up as enemies of the environment.

The greatest weapon against deforestation is no weapon at all. It is to give peasants security of land tenure, to resume the sustainable practices that have preserved the vast and glorious Amazon. The current National Development Plan under Operation Artemis purporting to serve “conservation” goals would see it reduced to a set of disconnected protected areas, cut by roads, surrounded by petroleum blocs, hydroelectric dams, fumigated zones, and mines, as maps presented by the activists at the Amazon Forest Protection Program show. The presence of communities and caretakers on the land—not “full-metal eco-warriors”—is the only reliable way to stop deforestation.The way to save the planet is not to have the world’s most destructive institution—the modern military—create “bubbles” empty of humans, only to then reassign that land to oil and mineral companies. The way to save the planet is to give the land back to the people whose practices assured the astounding biodiversity we have enjoyed for millennia.

This article was produced by Globetrotter on May 20, 2021.

Monsters in our Midst 3: What is the Gaza Strip? Why Support the Resistance?

Short imperialist history of the Gaza Strip

The focus on Hamas is a product of the rolling amnesia of empire, as if the history of Israeli attacks on Palestinians can be narrowed to the last few decades, then distorted further. Against this tendency, this episode reviews the basic historical and geographic background to this crisis, showing the place of Palestine and the Gaza Strip in the history of imperial expansion, and placing the current horrors in their essential context.

Racism, irony, and a lawsuit against medical students – a blog post by Dr. Tarek Loubani

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Dear Zachary Kuehner: If you’re not a white supremacist, you sure fooled us

Dear friends: I am sharing a guest post by Dr.Tarek Loubani about a lawsuit against Canadian medical students. I’m sure many of you know who Tarek is. This incident will be playing out in the Canadian medical community for some time, and it will be important for people to understand its context. Take a look at the research on the case presented by Tarek here. Hope you are all well and hope to hear from some of you about how you are coping with the global medical emergency we continue to live under. Best, Justin.

Original article on medium: https://trklou.medium.com/dear-zachary-kuehner-if-youre-not-a-white-supremacist-you-sure-fooled-us-e68bc92db1d5

Dr. Zachary Kuehner, MD, writes, talks and behaves like modern white supremacists —all while wearing the doctor’s white coat to veneer his ideology in respectability. Zach has not apologized or retracted any of his positions or statements. When he faced consequences for them, instead he sued and went with the “it’s just a prank bro” defence.

A brief history

According to his Statement of Claim against the CBC and journalist Ryan Cooke, Zach’s woes began on June 2, 2020, when he posted a series of inflammatory messages downplaying the legitimacy of the Black Lives Matter movement and concerns about systemic racism that was driving it, calling them “pity propaganda” and asserting that it’s based on a “false premise.” This was presumably done under the pretense of not being ‘sheeple’ or maybe to ‘own the libs’ or some similarly faux-enlightened shit. Though Zach was inflammatory, dismissive and degrading, he claims that readers “misunderstood and misconstrued the nature of [his] comments.” Nah bruh. We read you loud and clear.

From there, it was a short stop to his now-deleted Twitter page in which Zach “used the word ‘islamophobe’ [to describe himself] in his bio.” Opinion pieces he previously published were also unearthed (1, 2, 3) and seem like classic dog-whistle racism / white supremacy, complete with White Man’s Burden undertones. In one part, he unironically refers to Indigenous people travelling to Thunder Bay for “entertainment, school, prison, and aimlessness” as its “cross … to bear.”

Since Zach himself invited those who objected to “feel free to talk to Eastern Health, PGME [postgraduate medical education], faculty of medicine [and] whatever suits,” several organizations and a few courageous medical students did.

Medical students at Memorial University push back

Four medical students at Memorial University wrote a strong letter of complaint to the Faculty of Medicine. The letter cited Zach’s writings as examples of how he “interacts with the public in a disrespectful, belittling, and condescending manner.” These brave students and the three other students who supported their letter in writing made a “call to action for [the Undergraduate Medical Education and Postgraduate Medical Education offices] to address such abhorrent behaviour.”

It is heartening that our future doctors came together to push back against behaviour that is unprofessional and unbecoming, just like we advocate in ethics classes. Instead of immediately responding to disgusting behaviour by one of its resident physicians, medical school dean Dr. Margaret Steele elected to throw red tape at the problem, claiming that “the students did not file a proper complaint with their letter.”

I looked for Memorial University’s Faculty of Medicine complaint process using common search terms a student might use. Even though the homepage highlights “Professionalism and mistreatment” in a block on the main page, I had to dig through two more pages to find a six page document with a link at the bottom to an eleven page document of jargon on policies and procedures.

This exact problem was noted in an 85-page 2018 report the school commissioned on intimidation, bullying, harassment and sexual harassment. The report highlighted the “lack of knowledge about what policies and resources exist” for complaints, as well as noting that “confidence in the organization is eroded when incidents are reported but no action is seen to be taken and the offensive behaviour does not change.” That report also found that bullying and harassment were frequent and tolerated at the school.

I could find no evidence that Dr. Margaret Steele or the medical school implemented the report’s findings that they must “develop mechanisms of ‘safe’ reporting that encourages people to come forward without fear of retribution” or that they tried to “develop mechanisms to detect recurrent patterns of behaviour by specific individuals over time, even when victims are unwilling to file a formal complaint that would trigger a formal investigation.”

After trying their best to ignore the issue, the medical school was finally forced to act after pressure from students, faculty and physicians.

Consequences make Zach feel butt-hurt

Zach has not commented publicly on the consequences of the complaints against him. However, looking at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Newfoundland and Labrador’s (CPSNL) records, and his statement of claim (SOC) against the CBC and Ryan Cooke gives us some hints.

According to the SOC, “MUN temporarily suspended [Zach] pending its investigation into his social media activity. […] As a result of this, [his] license to practice medicine was automatically suspended by the CPSNL.” The suspension “deferred his [Emergency] Fellowship training” and delayed his graduation from residency. This suspension was from June 10, 2020 until November 2, 2020.

According to the CPSNL, Zach was “counselled to comply with s. 32 and s. 33 of the CMA Code of Ethics and Professionalism.” He was also “counselled to participate in the academic remediation program which has been developed for him by the Memorial University Faculty of Medicine, Residential Training Committee.”

In case you wondered, s. 32 and s. 33 of the CMA Code of Ethics and Professionalism are to “engage in respectful communications in all media,” and “take responsibility for promoting civility, and confronting incivility, within and beyond the profession. Avoid impugning the reputation of colleagues for personal motives; however, report to the appropriate authority any unprofessional conduct by colleagues” respectively. I could find no report from the Residential Training Committee about Zach, though confidentiality is the standard for most training committees, so this is usual.

Instead of apologizing for his actions, Zach filed suit against the CBC and the journalist who covered the story, Ryan Cooke.

Plot-twist: supposedly pro-free expression asshole trying to silence journalistic free expression

People like Zach will often defend themselves by claiming the right to free expression, including the right to express bigoted, racist or discredited views. Often they present these ideas as ‘nuance’, ‘asking questions’, or ‘debating in the marketplace of ideas’. In fact, Zach previously donated to PEN Canada, an organization explicitly committed to free expression in the context of journalism and other writing.

So why is “I put my money where my mouth is” pro-free expression Zach suing the CBC and journalist Ryan Cooke for fact-based reporting on him?

What people like this usually mean when they talk about free expression is that they want the freedom to spout off their bullshit, while using any available tools to silence critics and evade consequences.

White supremacists still wear hoods

While we cannot know what’s inside Zach’s heart, his actions, writings and behaviour are classically islamophobic and white supremacist. He literally called himself an islamophobe. In one opinion piece, he called Islam a “racket.” He posted an inflammatory anti-Muslim cartoon saying that “Islam is dangerous and, as such, deserves our virulent disrespect,” though he added a few weasel words there so he could blame the reader for “misconstruing” his post if he were ever confronted on the subject.

Canadian Women in Medicine’s complaint commented on Zach’s impact on indigenous communities and communities of colour too, saying that he “has shown himself to be unsafe to provide health care to Muslim or Indigenous patients.”

If Zach accidentally and innocently veered into this territory, one would expect him to respond to the massive public backlash by human rights organizations and advocates by reflecting, publicly acknowledging and apologizing for his actions. He has not. In my opinion, the only conclusion I can draw is that Zach is a bigot, an islamophobe and a racist.

It is a testament to our work that most bigots feel they cannot directly espouse racist views. A lively anti-racist response creates a deterrent, especially in sectors where people’s lives are in play. However, even when white supremacy was at its peak, its members wore hoods because they were afraid of being linked to their ideas.

In modern times, the ‘hood’ is coded language and the “it’s just a prank bro” defence. They try to redefine white supremacy as a caricature so they can deny their views are racist, while accusing anti-racists of misunderstanding them. Take a look at John Oliver’s takedown of Tucker Carlson and you’ll see lots of themes common to the way Zach operates.

The problems of systemic racism in medicine and society are big. But what scares the bigots and racists out there is this one undeniable fact:

We are so much bigger.

Episode 46 of In the Context of Empire

Matt McKenna from In the Context of Empire interviewing… me.

I was a guest on the fantastic podcast, In the Context of Empire, where I spoke with co-host Matt McKenna about lots of things, but mainly about how imperialist propaganda works.

AEP 80: My comments on The Arrest of Meng Wanzhou and the New Cold War on China

Canada’s history of racism

On March 1, I was on a panel hosted by the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War, the Canadian Peace Congress, World Beyond War, the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, and Just Peace Associates. The topic was “the Arrest of Meng Wanzhou and the New Cold War on China”. Other panelists were Radhika Desai, William Ging Wee Dere, and John Ross – all of whom covered different aspects of the situation. I focused my remarks on Canada’s own record of genocide and racism, summarizing some of what we’ve been talking about in recent Civilizations episodes. The whole panel is out there on youtube – this audio is just my talk, 17 minutes long.