The Anti-Empire Project

Samer Elatrash from Concordia University in Montreal wrote a funny satirical piece about some serious issues of terrorism and free speech that were raised by the local pro-Israel group’s attempt to bring Ehud Barak to campus to speak. Samer makes a modest proposal for consistency’s sake on rabble.ca.

The above is by the talented graphic artist Tyson Kingsbury, who is responsible for many of the banners of the ZNet Watch Pages. I think you’ll find that his work is quite special in that he really creates a mood, grabs the eye without sacrificing subtlety. Every once in a while I might put up a piece of art like this, if it’s original to the blog and can’t be found anywhere else. Tyson here is invoking the film “Citizen Kane”, casting George W. Bush in the title role. If Kerry wins in November, satire like this will cease to have political value for a few years, so now is the best time to put it out there.

Now on to content promised yesterday.

C. P. Pandya mentioned in the blog today about how mercenary companies are still making massive profits in Iraq. Bombings and massacres continue to happen on a daily basis in Iraq: today’s by insurgents killed 4 American DynCorp mercenaries and 6 Iraqis inside the famed “Green Zone”. Massacres by US are reported by Seymour Hersh in talks, as this one, which comes from A Tiny Revolution via underthesamesun.org.

Iraqis don’t want this.

Do Americans?

They’ve never been asked.

But I think it would be a very good test of the antiwar movement. In Brazil in 2002 they had a people’s referendum against the FTAA in which 10 million voted and 98% of them voted against FTAA. That referendum was organized by the incredibly large and popular Landless Peasant’s Movement (MST). We have nothing remotely like the MST in the United States. But we could have a referendum on the occupation. A simple question, like: “Do you believe the United States should leave Iraq and allow self-determination for the Iraqi people?” [That’s a rough cut — the question would have to be carefully done]. It is an idea with a lot of potential.

It could emphasize reaching people in communities that are actively being disenfranchised by the main parties and showcase the sham that “democracy” is in this country.

It could, by its simplicity, be a powerful demonstration of how convoluted and absurd the electoral college system is.

In campaigning for it, it could provide an opportunity to discuss democracy here and in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Venezuela, and Colombia.

It could provide an opportunity for the antiwar movement to organize for something other than another big demonstration that will be ignored (not that a people’s referendum wouldn’t be ignored, but if it did get big, it would be hard to repress) and have debates other than on the efficacy or morality of breaking windows.

It could provide an opportunity to showcase the immorality of the war, the illegality of it, the massive suffering imposed on Iraqis, the destruction of people’s aspirations there, the resultant insecurity and bankruptcy of the US arms race with itself and the “war on terror”.

It would be good regardless of who wins in November: if Bush wins, antiwar forces will need to do something big and creative quickly. If Kerry wins, antiwar forces need to demonstrate their power and their militancy. But in either case, it would be not only a demonstration in the real sense of the word to elites, but it would also be a demonstration to the world that (hopefully) the majority of Americans are against their country’s murderous foreign policy.

There are pitfalls.

First, such a thing would be a huge project and would take tremendous effort and resources to do properly (remember it was the MST who did it in Brazil, and we don’t have such a thing in the US). Liberal groups and unions have resources but they would inevitably try to water down the question (“Should the United States withdraw but only after we’ve fixed the country up and ensured that there won’t be a civil war or any terrorists coming from there to threaten us in the foreseeable future?”) and gut the whole project of all the things that would make it important.

Second, even if the resource question could be solved, it would be incredibly important to do it all in the right way — to use it to reach constituencies that radicals (and the mainstream parties) don’t reach, to use it to actually grow the movement.

Third, I have to wonder — what if the majority votes against an end to occupation? If it started to become clear that the initiative was going to be popular and lots of people were going to vote, the establishment would kick into high gear and try to stop or discredit the whole thing. Failing that, they would try to get people to vote against withdrawal. What if that worked — the antiwar movement would have organized a referendum against the occupation and wound up helping militarists politically.

Still, I think I’d be up for such a battle.

A few days back, Gary Jackson, the president of the one of the world’s largest private armies, Blackwater USA, said that since the U.S. invasion of Iraq (and the country’s ensuing descent into chaos), the mercenary firm’s business has grown over 600%.

Continue reading “Profitable Private Armies”

So I just finished watching the last debate between John Kerry and George Bush. This seemed the most scripted piece. Lots of spin, lots of posturing and rhetoric. Not really much that was spontaneous or interesting. So, for favourite phrases, I only have a few.

From Bush, it is definitely the business about “unleashing the Armies of Compassion to Heal the Hurt”. As I mentioned in the earlier post today, a lot of this language is code words for his own constituency, and doesn’t really have much meaning other than for that constituency.

From Kerry, there was a nasty little bit during the immigration debate where he said that he had heard there were people from the Middle East coming into the country illegally. That was it — he just wanted to point that out. Just straight pandering to racism to try to score points. Whenever liberal types do this, it is odd, because they will never be able to beat the right at racism. Whenever they try, they are just handing weapons to the other side.

As usual, lots of agreement from both sides. One thing about the illegal immigration issue. Bush said that if you make 50 cents in Mexico and 5.15 in the US (minimum wage which he doesn’t want to raise, though Kerry says he does) you will want to go to the US. Fair enough — but of course NAFTA led to major decreases in average wages in Mexico and the collapse of the agricultural economy there. The real solution to “immigration problems” is to stop plundering the poor countries so that there are opportunities and hopes for people there. That would be a major overhaul of the global economy though, and of course Bush and Kerry only care about Americans.

Bush also said that health care costs were rising because consumers don’t have a say. He wants to appoint Supreme Court judges who may repeal abortion rights because he doesn’t like “activist judges” (although “activist judges” got him the presidency in the first place) and wants the people to be able to decide. Sounds like he’s advocating participatory democracy. Maybe he’d be up for a referendum on the occupation?

More on this last tomorrow.

So, as the movements promised, Oct 12 was a day of mobilization against Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. Oct 12, I didn’t realize until the day itself, is the “Day of Indigenous, Black, and Popular Resistance” in the Americas. In Colombia there was a march of some 300,000 — in Medellin, Cali, Bucaramanga, Barranquilla, Cartagena, and other cities, there were large demonstrations. The platform was against bilateral “Free Trade” with the US, against Uribe’s re-election, and a for political solution to armed conflict.

In Peru, the main action of the 12th was the beginning of the collection of signatures to begin the process of an official referendum on Free Trade.

In Bolivia, thousands began on October 11 to march from Caracollo to the seat of government in La Paz (a distance of 190km, so the plan is to get to La Paz on the 18th). They want a new law regulating hydrocarbons and they want to sanction the President for human rights violations.

In Costa Rica, 30,000 marched against bilateral free trade with the US. There were other demonstrations all over Central America and the Caribbean: El Salvador, Panama, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.

On a personal note: While they were battling neoliberalism in Latin America, however, I was experiencing neoconservatism in the United States. It made me realize just how different these two killers of aspirations in the world really are.

I listened to a little talk radio, for example. All of the AM radio stations are talk radio. Local hosts. All deeply, profoundly right wing and taking repetitive, hateful aim not at the left (which doesn’t exist in any form which these guys think it’s worth attacking) but at “liberals” and “liberalism”, exemplified by Kerry.

I realize there’s been a ton written about this but I realized then that the difference between John Kerry and George W. Bush is not so much what they say or what they promise to do or what they will do once in office. The difference is that John Kerry is a slimy politician flailing around looking for a winning formula and George Bush is at the head of a massive, incredibly well organized, incredibly well disciplined, incredibly well resourced, truly revolutionary movement. And movements, radicals ought to understand, are serious business.

Movements can force governments out of power. Movements can constrain what elites can do even from a position of opposition. Movements can organize for the long haul and change the culture and context in which everyone has to operate. Movements can set the agenda even if they do not have majority support, compensating for that with ideological clarity, discipline, and organization. And that is exactly what the right has done in the US.

Its enemies, as I have said, are not the left — if, by the left, we mean people who want equality, solidarity, some radical notions of democracy, liberation for the third world and oppressed people. Those principles are not part of mainstream discourse, they are not part of the political culture, and the right doesn’t need to take them on in any serious way. Instead, the enemies of the right are the liberalism that people outside of the US have long believed defined the US: secularism, the separation of church and state, checks and balances in government, freedom of speech, journalistic independence, academic freedom, and indeed rational thought or debate itself. It is not any particular arguments about society or the future that is being undermined day by day in the US by the work of this movement. It is the possibility of having rational argument itself, the basis for having an argument — agreement on the rules of evidence, logic, and reasoning.

I just started reading Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the matter with Kansas” which this article by Serge Halimi about these issues cites. These pieces describe how all this came to pass.

I realize I’m coming to all this a little late in the game, but that’s part of the point — people outside of the US have very little idea what an important development the coming to power of this movement is. Partly because the movement itself is so oriented towards the US and part of its ideology is contempt for the rest of the world. Partly because radicals in the rest of the world are so focused on neoliberalism as the enemy.

But like many latecomers, once I notice something I start to see it everywhere. Like in Chomsky’s blog entry today:

Activists have quite different concerns. They are engaged with the public, and try to help in the growth and development of popular organizations that will become powerful enough so that they cannot be ignored by centers of power. If Pat Robertson says, as he recently did, that he’ll start a third party unless the Republicans are sufficiently extreme in “support of Israel,” that’s a threat, because he might be able to mobilize tens of millions of evangelical Christians who already form a significant political force, thanks to extensive work over decades from local levels and on, and on numerous issues apart from the political choices from school boards to presidents.

A lot of different ideas come up. In a book of interviews with David Barsamian called “Confronting Empire”, lifelong anti-imperialist activist Eqbal Ahmad said that one limitation on the US’s ability to be an empire was that the American people just “did not have the will to dominate”. His example? The American people’s reaction to the Clinton sex scandal — a society with a real will to dominate would have punished Clinton severely. I believe that things have changed in the years since Eqbal Ahmad said those words, and that things go further and further in the direction of domination each day. In the 1990s, Michael Albert described the United States as an “organizer’s paradise” because dissatisfaction with the status quo was so widespread. Well it was an organizer’s paradise, and then the right went to work, and now tens of millions of the poor are diehard and organized with the goals of destroying liberalism and, to use a phrase out of Thomas Frank’s book, “repealing the twentieth century”.

I’m about to watch the debate now, but I can already tell you that the liberals are not ready for this battle. They aren’t sure they want to fight it, and they definitely wouldn’t know what to do if they won. They want to try to convince the constituency of this movement that the fact that the Democrats would slow the slashing of what little economic programs still exist makes them the natural choice for the working people who are voting Republican. But it won’t work. Those people are not being duped by the Republicans. They are making moral choices — in their view, to defend America, to spite hypocritical and patronizing liberals, to stop the murder of foetuses, to keep the sacred right to bear arms. And, like radicals, they are willing to sacrifice for these moral choices. Sacrifice education for their children, maybe, sacrifice health care, maybe, sacrifice a whole world of opportunities and solidarity, even. Though, to be fair, no one is offering them any of these latter — certainly the Democrats are not, and radicals don’t really get the chance.

What’s important for radicals to understand though is that the enemy isn’t just elites and it isn’t just the business class or corporations or neoliberals. It is an organized mass movement, including a huge number of poor people. Bush is so effective because he concentrates on his constituency and ignores the rest — the majority of the population. Liberals might be more effective if they did the same: if they focused on blacks, latinos, women, unionists, immigrants — on cultural, social, and political issues. Making moral arguments and writing off the hard right movement’s constituencies the way the hard right has written off these constituencies. But they won’t do so. What’s left for them is to try to convince the elite that they can do the job better than the Republicans can. The trouble is that this movement is now a player in the game, perhaps every bit as powerful as the elite, and has to be taken into account in any equation of power. This is a new environment. Radicals have to understand this in order to figure out how to operate in the world.

Now I’m off to watch the third and final presidential debate.

Let’s summarize a little. Aristide was forced out of Haiti in a paramilitary coup because the US was arming the paramilitaries and Aristide had no force of his own. By all accounts, his people, the Lavalas activists and grassroots, were actually much more radical and had much more will to resist and fight for their country’s independence and against a return of the vicious dictatorship that plagued that country for decades (with a very brief and partial interruption under Aristide). But Aristide needed to take the lead, and Aristide did not, and so the coup happened.

There was some international sentiment against the coup, from South Africa, Venezuela, Jamaica, and a few other countries — but most of the countries who you might have hoped would defend the independence and democracy of a small weak country did not do so. Instead, countries like Brazil, Chile, and Argentina joined the UN occupation force that is effectively guaranteeing that neither Aristide nor democracy can be restored, while the forces of the Haitian dictatorship reconstitute themselves and return to their work of liquidating the social and activist base of the popular movements in the country.

It is early to tell. But there are beginning to be signs that the Haitian movements are engaging in armed resistance against the occupation and the Haitian police.

I’ve been republishing and reporting news from the Haiti Information Project here (get on their list by writing ot haitiinformationproject@yahoo.com). Today’s report says that the slum of Bel Air, a very poor part of the very poor city of Port Au Prince, is still being besieged by Haitian police and UN troops. Those forces have been raiding into the slum for days now, but people in the slum have been shooting back. It all started on September 30 with a set of killings and arrests against unarmed Lavalas demonstrators. They’ve been ‘sweeping’ the slums since, killing a few here, arresting a few dozen there. In Bel Air yesterday, the Haitian Police and Brazilian UN troops raided a slum, killed 5, and arrested 34, according to the HIP report, which uses testimony from residents. According to those same residents, one of the Brazilian soldiers was wounded in the foot by gunfire.

There was a story that crept into the mainstream media about Lavalas people beheading Haitian police and calling it “Operation Baghdad”. This is being used to justify the raids. I’m dubious. There’s very little real evidence. And in any case resistance movements don’t just start off by beheading people. They start off as this one might be — demonstrations, that are then repressed; firing back at vicious raids. It’s all very convenient too, a pretext to attack and do mass reprisals in the neighbourhoods and a chance to smear Haitians and Iraqis all at once.

The problem is that if this does become an insurgency/counterinsurgency dynamic, Haitians will have the same problem they always have had. The people they are fighting are the most powerful in the world or backed by them. They, by contrast, are almost completely alone and no one in the world seems to care at all.

Indymedia reports on this bizarre incident.

Dozens killed by simultaneous blasts at resorts in Egypt. 39 killed and hundreds injured at bombings of Sunni Muslim rallies in Pakistan.

Continue reading “Bombings and Bombings”

Stan Goff argued in a recent article that participation of countries like Brazil, Argentina, in Chile in the coup against Haiti is not only opportunistic and unprincipled, but unlikely to get those countries anything in the bargain. Here’s a quote from him:

This acquiescence — no, collaboration — with the diktat of the US will not loosen the parasitic grip of the Imperial Center on a single Latin American, nor will it ameliorate that Center’s intent to continue exploiting the entire region until it is used up and dead. This pious fantasy that cooperation will be rewarded has been the downfall of many a leader, including Aristide who was taken from his home after calling for “peaceful mobilization” even in the faced of murderous paramilitaries.

(Part of why I like Goff is that he doesn’t mince words). Many think all this is angling for a seat at the UN security council. Which, if that’s what Brazil is after, is a really pathetic goal. The US will still be able to veto whatever it wants and it will still continue to treat the UN with contempt.

For those who hoped for more when Lula was elected — in Brazil and out — there are more disappointments in Brazil’s recent foreign policy.

Not only are Brazilian troops ratifying the coup in Haiti, they are now helping the Haitian Police cleanse Haiti of Aristide supporters. On October 6, Reuters reported the following:

Clashes between police and criminal gangs and violence between the gangs have killed 45 people in recent days, including seven policemen. The military commander of the U.N. troops, Brazilian Gen. Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira, said Haitian authorities must act, but only on the basis of credible intelligence. “We cannot intervene without good intelligence. Otherwise if we go to the slums and start shooting on all that moves, it’s going to be a carnage,” Heleno said.

Take what Reuters says and add it to what the reporters of Haiti Information Project are putting out. This is from their report yesterday:

UN forces using Armored Personnel Vehicles (APV’s) and attack trained dogs are currently taking up positions around the pro-Aristide slum of Bel Air. They are joined by heavily armed units of the Haitian police following a statement by Minister of Justice Bernard Gousse that the U.S.-backed government would give a “muscular response” to opponents of the regime. This comes one day after the Haitian National Police (PNH) and UN officials held meetings to formulate a plan to end armed resistance that broke out after police fired on unarmed demonstrators on September 30th.

…

A UN helicopter could been seen circling overhead as APV’s manned by Brazilian troops took up positions around the slum. Unidentified UN troops could be seen handling what appeared to be special canine units as frightened residents ran for cover. A spokesperson for PNH announced the action involved 200 UN troops with 150 Haitian police and that more than 75 persons have been arrested in Bel Air this morning.

Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva met with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday where the deteriorating situation in Haiti topped the agenda. Brazil’s role in leading the UN mission was recently criticized by representatives of Aristide’s Lavalas party. They charged the UN forces did nothing to stop the Haitian police from provoking this latest crisis by firing on unarmed demonstrators on September 30th. Despite the destabilizing role played by the Haitian police, UN Special Representative Juan Gabriel Valdés reiterated “the U.S.-backed UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) will continue to work in support of the Haitian police in maintaining public order, thereby helping to ensure the security of Haiti’s citizens and respect for the rule of law.”

Could it be that the “criminal gangs” that the police are bravely battling with UN help are really Aristide supporters who have finally started in some small ways to resist getting liquidated all over the country by the dictatorship?

There is reason to believe that that kind of alchemy happens in the media. Take a look at this report, for example, from a tiny Canadian group called “Haiti News Watch”, “an independent organization dedicated to fact checking news sources related to coverage of events in Haiti. Our reports and analysis of news content is intended to provide readers with story context and the background of sources used in published articles related to Haiti.”

Haiti News Watch found in a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) story of October 6 titled “Aristide supporters threaten continued violence in Haiti”, a quotation that said:

“The pro-Aristide factions took machetes, guns, rocks and bottles and roamed through a Port-au-Prince slum, threatening to behead foreigners.”

They looked up the source. It was an AP story by Amy Bracken of the same day, October 6, 4:22pm ET: “One angry man in Bel Air thrust a gun into the face of an Associated Press reporter Wednesday, yelled expletives against President Bush and U.N. peacekeepers, then screamed: “We are going to kidnap some Americans and cut off their heads.”

And that, dear readers, is how “One angry man” with a gun becomes a “faction”
with “machetes, guns, rocks and bottles”.

The disappointments are not over yet, though.

In addition to this kind of behaviour in occupied Haiti, Brazil has decided that it is going to collaborate with Washington’s Drug War as well, sharing radar data about planes flying over the Amazon, according to a Reuters story of today. What happened to the Brazil that made the “small gesture of national dignity” those months ago? A lot of Brazilians are asking that question. The price of US scraps at the Security Council table seems far too high.