Force Breeds Counterforce: On the Legitimacy of Resistance and its Methods

By Youssef Shawky

The widespread saying “to throw Israel into the sea” resonates with critics before advocates, and despite its unreasonableness in light of the current circumstances and arrangements, it carries within it a legitimate and logical right because Israel, since it has been invented, has been the one who always wants to throw the Palestinians into the sea. It seizes their land by implementing a depopulatory/substitutionary settler colonialism supported by a racist, religious ideology. As a result, resistance with a religious inclination is not only legitimate, but also a necessity in light of the cultural and historical characteristics of the Arab peoples and the ideological methods used by the occupation.

There is no escape from ideology; As it is the standard that classifies things and gives them different definitions and meanings. Humans, throughout their lives, indirectly interact with “reality,” resulting in a world of their own. That world is not the real world, but rather a world within which two types of relationships merge: imaginary relationships and real ones. If the individual is the first party in those relationships, the second party is the real material conditions of existence, which in turn consist of forces and relations of production, class, political and national power balances, etc. Thus, ideology is the expression of the relationship between the individual and her “world.”

Louis Althusser wrote that ideology is an imaginary representation of the imaginary relationships that a person gets into with the real conditions of her existence. Ideology is not an illusion, or a negative false consciousness, rather it effectively engages with real conditions.

This affirms that each conflicting party in any society formulates its own ideology in a way that serves the interests of the party in its conflict with the rest of the parties. The capitalists have their ideology, just as the proletariat has its ideology… and the two are in contradiction with each other. The same applies to the relationship of the colonizer with the colonized.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza and the explicit call for the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai, or as the Zionist Finance Minister called, “dispersing them throughout the world,” has reminded many Arab writers of the term “depopulatory settler colonialism,” a colonialism which does not aim to exploit the local population in a system that appropriates surplus value and natural resources, as happened in South Africa and Algeria. Rather, it aims to seize the land of the indigenous people and displace or exterminate them to make space for settlers. Through this path, Zionist colonialism and the emergence of the State of Israel are similar to the emergence of the United States of America, with a clear historical difference that is not just several centuries separating the two events, but that Zionist colonialism occurred during the rise of national liberation movements, the awareness of the oppressed peoples about their rights including the Palestinian people, and the solidarity of the peoples of the Third World with them, especially the Arab peoples, who always emphasize the unity of their fate (and also their structural problems) with the fate of the Palestinian people. All of this created a strong ground for resistance, with which it is impossible for the fate of the Palestinians to be similar to that of native americans.

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The substitutionary nature of Zionist colonialism is the general framework within which the occupation operates from its beginning until now. It is the method that appears clearly in the defining moments in the history of the occupation. The first, of course, is the beginning of the Zionist gangs immigrating to Palestine and planning to gradually acquire the lands before eventually launching a war to establish a colonial state on 78% of Palestinian land. In 1967, the occupation adopted the method of displacement in the West Bank and the canal cities in Sinai and the Syrian Golan and, over the years, has gradually been fragmenting the West Bank with new settlements, aiming to finally annex it to the Jewish state.

This is what is happening today after the real threat that the occupation faced on October 7th. It is now trying to pressure the Palestinians of Gaza to migrate to Sinai or face the risk of genocide.

This does not cancel other frameworks of occupation that depend on the historical stage and the strategic goals implemented by the occupation towards the Palestinians and Arabs. There is an apartheid system within the occupied land of 1948, where the so-called “Israeli Arabs” are exploited and deprived of land and professional and social opportunities. There are also neo-colonial relations that include exploiting the natural resources of neighboring Arab countries and forcing them to open up to Israeli goods in a process of Unequal exchange through unfair economic agreements signed by local compradors.

As colonial methods diversify, ideologies accompanying them also diversify; from neoliberal ideology to pacification ones. This makes us wonder about the general ideology governing the course of occupation. Based on its depopulationary nature, this ideology is supposed to reject the existence of the Other, fundamentally. It does not just claim that the Other is less important or that she does not have the same rights, or is less intelligent, strong, civilized or beautiful...etc. All of this justifies subjecting the Other, exploiting her and denying her rights, but it does not stipulate the annihilation of the other or ending her existence. Rather, the “substitutionary ideology” necessarily rejects the existence of the Other because her existence constitutes a threat to the depopulationary entity.

The greatest representative of this tendency is the racist religious ideology that the Jewish state has espoused since its invention and is evident in all of its internal and external practices, laws, demographics, popular literature, daily conversations, and colonial ambitions, even in the state’s name, flag, and national anthem.

In fact, when Zionists kill Palestinians, they do not consciously believe that they are doing these actions “because they are substitutionary colonizers,” as this thought would reflect objective, concrete reality. They believe in something like: “We are defending our land, which is our right, based on the divine promise,” or “We are expanding our possession of more lands based on the same promise,” or “We must depopulate these Muslim Arabs who hate us so that we can protect ourselves” or that “we are God’s chosen people” and other religious racist ideas that are not just illusions but illusions that transform zionists into depopulatory colonizers.

While the diversification of colonial methods induce a parallel diversification in resistance methods, an armed resistance with military planning will always remain the most important and influential resistance. The other forms integrate with it, support it, and increase its strength and influence. When the general form of occupation is the genocidal substitutionary form that always and forever seeks displacement, settlement, and even mass murder, the only effective form of resistance to it is the military form.

Regarding the ideology of resistance, any party or group does not create its own ideology consciously and freely or choose from many alternatives. Rather, the ideology is formed simultaneously with the formation of the group. The nature and content of the ideology emerge due to several factors, the most important of which are the goals of the group, its cultural and social history, and the ideologies, goals, and strategies adopted by the surrounding groups (maybe conflicting ones). 

On this basis, we can understand why global Zionism has adopted Jewish racism as an ideological façade, and we can also understand the ideological nature of the resistance and its religious component. Just as substitutionary colonialism has a racist, religious face, it is not strange for the resistance to have a religious  “national liberation” face. This is not identity politics, as the religious aspect of the resistance did not discourage it from its liberation tasks, but rather an increased commitment to the tasks. The success of national liberation relies on formulating an ideology stemming from the characteristics and way of thinking of the resisting masses, and not in a condescending manner with imposing ideas on them, but rather by discovering the “special/local” way for the masses to be liberated so we, or they, can discover their own path of modernity.

This does not negate the attempts of islamists (originated from Al-Qaeda terrorist organization supported by US) to empty the Palestinian cause of its liberation content through the use of religion… but these attempts have so-far failed. The resistance axes, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, have engaged in armed conflicts with such Takfiri terrorists (ISIS, Al-Nusra Front, and Islamic State – Sinai Province). Hamas has officially separated from the Muslim Brotherhood since 2017 according to its charter, and much evidence supports that the religious-faced resistance has no relationship with political islamism, whatever its form.

Thus, the arab liberal intellectuals and some arab leftists who do not support the resistance under the pretext of its religious tendency suffer from a lack of understanding of the historical characteristics of their people, the way they think and feel, the time and manner of their movement and revolution, and the time of their latency and indifference. In doing so, many of them, who resemblr elitists rather than revolutionaries, play the role of cultural compradors hindering the organization of the Arab masses to liberate themselves from colonial and neo-colonial powers.

Rock-A-Bye Baby: On the State's Legitimation of Juneteenth and Liberal Concessions as Political Anesthetization In Slavery's Afterlives

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

By Joshua Briond

“Everything has changed on the surface and nothing else has been touched[...] In a way, the state is more powerful than ever, because it has given us so many tokens.”

—James Baldwin

On Thursday, June 17th, President Joe Biden signed a bill establishing June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a US federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. According to CNN, the holiday will become the first federal law holiday established since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was signed into law in 1983. Ultimately, the bill will allow a fragment of the nations’ surplus populations —excluding much of the largely racialized lumpenproletariat and underclass— a day ‘free’ from the capitalist exploitation and alienation that comes with the traditional day-to-day of the laboring class. The timing of the implementation of the national holiday—amidst rebellions, particularly in Minneapolis, in the aftermath of Winston Smith’s clearly politically-motivated, state-sanctioned assassination—cannot be understood as anything other than yet another attempt at anesthetizing the captive Black colonies in sentimentality and symbolic gestures. 

"this is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. i, too, am the afterlife of slavery."

—saidiya hartman, lose your mother: a journey along the atlantic slave route (2006)

The institution of Black slavery, that rendered Black captives as chattel, capital, productive property, was economically, culturally, and politically ubiquitous. Yet, despite its legacies and afterlives, there has been no material reckoning, or atonement for its anti-Black psychosexual and physical terror and violence. In fact, the ghosts of what is largely understood as slavery’s past, have continued to manifest in the economic polity, modern policing and prisons, and social, cultural, and ideological underpinnings, etc. Descendants of Black captives whom, in many ways, remain hyper-surveilled, overpoliced, hyper-exploited, underpaid, alienated, and often succumbed to occupation of our communities and premature death, have little-to-nothing to show for being major instruments in assembling and maintaining the global capitalist economy since we were trafficked to the Euro-Americas. But you are damn sure we have one month per year, and now an extra day, to learn about and hashtag-celebrate the most whitewashed and bleak articulations of Black historical events—events that have largely only taken place because of Black resistance to white terror, violence, and domination. 

“A critical genealogy of White Reconstruction requires close examination of the non-normative—nonwhite, queer, non-Christian, and so on—iterations of white supremacy within contemporary institutionalizations of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism. Such non-normativities are constitutive of (rather than incidental or exceptional to) the protocols, planning, and statecraft of contemporary counterinsurgency/domestic war, extending and complicating rather than disrupting or abolishing the historical ensembles of anti-Black and racial-colonial state violence.” 

—Dylan Rodriguez, White Reconstruction 

Since 1776 and the founding of the United States of America, the white power structure has been in a constant state of attempting to—arguably, at times, successfully—ideologically and politically sedate the most wretched, particularly the Black colonies, through incremental concessions and symbolic gestures while ultimately supplementing white rule. As Gerald Horne has taught us, this founding itself was brought into being after a successful power struggle against the British rulers to preserve the institution of Black slavery. As noted by Dylan Rodriguez in the epigraph above, and throughout his book White Reconstruction, the white settler-colonial state has had to “undergo substantive reform to remain politically and institutionally viable.” This includes, but is not limited to, incremental (neo)liberal reform as sedation and the multicultural diversification of settler-colonial, surveillance-capitalist, and imperialist apparatuses.

If we are to understand the American project itself as a consequence of intra-European counterrevolution to preserve the institution of slavery. The civil war as described by Frederick Douglass, “[starting] in the interest of slavery on both sides[...]both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro.” The Reconstruction era as an attempt to establish a workers-democracy—in the aftermath of the countless slave revolts across North America and the Civil War ultimately ending chattel slavery—only to be defeated by ruling class forces. Jim Crow as an inevitability of the settler state and its individual deputized upholders’ idiosyncratic anxieties surrounding the collapsing synonymity of Blackness and the slave positionality. The Civil Rights Movement as an understandably decentralized reformist effort toward Black freedom, through attempts to expand the civil liberties of Black people within the American colony, co-existence with whites within the white power structure that became co-opted by the state ordained Black bourgeoisie and US intelligence leading to mild concessions. Then, we—as Black people—have to understand that we have been in an outright war of attrition with the white power structure for nearly half a millennium.

It is important to recontextualize major historical events — from the Civil War, to the crushing of the Reconstruction era, to Jim Crow, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the rise of neoliberalism and the expansion of the carceral regimes posited as the solution to Black rebellion in the 1980s, to modern policing and prisons, etc. — are all distinct types of “reforms” to politically sedate Black surplus populations and sustain white settler-capitalist hegemony. 

In an interview at Howard University, Gerald Horne discusses the weakening and marginalization of Black radical independent institutions, publications, and leaders, such as Shirley Graham, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, as a trade-off to disintegrate Jim Crow in return for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and “other examples of legislation meant to chip away at Jim Crow.” Horne goes on to question whether the price for political “freedom,” in the electoral arena (which many Black radicals would argue, in the age of neocolonialism and pseudo-independence was never actually freedom) was substantial enough to warrant celebration as a form of Black progress without the economic infrastructure and self-determination needed for true liberation and justice. Just like in the 60s, as Horne notes, we are still performing uneven trade-offs with white power. We demand an end to police terror with Defunding the Police at the outset; they give us painted Black Lives Matter streets, while celebritizing, commodifying, and cannibalizing the names and faces of Black martyrs like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. We demand healthcare, living wages, and erased student loans; they give us a federal holiday. In the post-Civil Rights era, and the state’s crushing of Black Power, there has been a depoliticization, if not outright assassination, of Black politics: all symbolism, uneven trade-offs, bare-minimum concessions, and identity reductionist representation as a substitute for actual Black power and self-determination. In the era of neo-colonialism, with the expansion and symbolic inclusion into the plantation economy through our coerced [lumpen]proletarization, we have been anesthetized to our continued exploitation, alienation, destruction, and genocide. Liberal multiculturalism, reform, or as I would call it, political anesthetization, at the very least, temporarily, has been able to halt the “problem” of black resistance.

“The understanding that modern policing has emerged out of the dreadful history of Black enslavement brings with it an urgent need to acknowledge what is not yet behind us. The plantation isn’t, as so many of us, Black and otherwise, think or at least wish to believe, a thing of the past; rather, the plantation persists as a largely unseen superstructure shaping modern, everyday life and many of its practices, attitudes, and assumptions, even if some of these have been, over time, transformed.”

- Rinaldo Walcott, “On Property” 

Though there has been a virtual erasing of our chains and the physical plantation (at least for those of us who are not “legally” incarcerated), the plantation economy has expanded and the mere logics and ideological production have remained the same: keep the slave(s) in check. The white power structure has always been concerned with keeping its thumb on the pulse of its slave population. There has been a non-stop, coordinated counterinsurgent effort by the white power apparatus to divert energy away from the inevitable radical potentialities of the slave, colonized, dispossessed, and superexploited classes—especially as capitalism’s contradictions become far too blatant to disguise. The marking of Juneteenth National Independence Day is just a continuation of the settler society’s legacy of empty promises and symbolic gestures to supplant material gains and maintain their hegemony. 

The United States is incapable of bringing about true justice or accountability for the crimes of its psychosexual and political economy beyond these hauntingly insulting and psychopathic attempts at state recognition of its own historical aberrations through moral symbolism. True justice and accountability must be avoided at all costs by this power structure, as this would inevitably expand the political imaginations of people, leading to the incrimination of every cop, soldier, politician, wall street hack, ceo, etc., and exposing itself for what it is: illegitimate and obsolete. Once you realize that all of the violence being exported everyday in and around the US are not individual aberrations that could be changed with a shift in political leadership, but an inevitable and continual outcome of superstructures built on and sustained through anti-Black slavery, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, everything begins to make sense. It is liberatory. Heartbreaking. Infuriating, even. Because the solution becomes clear. It is the solution that everyone—whether subconsciously or not—is doing everything in their power to avoid coming to. It is the solution the United States and its propaganda networks spend billions of dollars every year to shield from the psyches of its captives. It is what Black captives in Haiti realized circa 1791, and are still being punished for ‘till this day. 

There is a special, psychopathic irony in the legitimation of Juneteenth through the colonial-capitalist state’s immortalizing of the liberation of the slaves through the very structural foundations in which said slaves were rendered productive property as captives, in which the legacies of slavery remain pervasive across social, cultural, political, and economic lineages. Not to mention the colonial and imperialist technologies inspired largely by the events of (anti-)Black slavery and colonialism, exported across the imperialized world for the purposes of land, capital, and resources—under the guise of (white) freedom and democracy. To paraphrase Frederick Douglass, what is the state’s recognition of Juneteenth to its Black captives? To the Afro-Palestinians living under the world’s largest open-air prison on the United States’ dime? Or the slave-labor of mineral miners in the Congo supplying the U.S. resources? How can visualizations of Nancy Pelosi and Black lawmakers singing Lift Every Voice and Sing in ceremony for the bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday—while actively rejecting Black organizers’ rallying cries that could improve Black people’s material conditions and save lives, such as Defunding the Police— signal anything other than yet another colonial lullaby to anaesthetize our dreams and efforts toward Black liberation and self-determination? While openly and unapologetically pledging their allegiance to multiculturalist white supremacy in the age of neocolonialism? 

“Let me put it this way, that from a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports, and the railroads of the country, the economy, especially of the southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become, if they had not had and do not still have, indeed, for so long and for so many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing[...] This, in the land of the free, and the home of the brave. And no one can challenge that statement, it is a matter of a historical record. In another way, this dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”

—James Baldwin, 1965

Race Reductionism: Neocolonialism and the Ruse of “Chinese Privilege”

[Photo: Singapore circa 1941, taken by Harrison Forman]

By QIAO Collective

Republished from QIAO Collective.

Recent discourse within the U.S. and Singaporean liberal-left has championed “Chinese privilege” as an analytic of power within Singapore and Asia at large. By invoking a Chinese equivalence to whiteness, analyses of “Chinese privilege” not only disavow the material history of racial capitalism in Asia, but appropriate Black and Indigenous critiques of white supremacy to bolster a long history of Singaporean anticommunism in service of U.S. military and ideological supremacy over Asia.

Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: of a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained, group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery.

—Kwame Anthony Appiah

Neocolonialism, like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries.

—Kwame Nkrumah

Since 2015, Singapore has seen the rise of a new discourse arguing the existence of Chinese racial supremacy. Influenced by U.S. cultural theories of race, critics of so-called “Chinese privilege” sought to formulate a theoretical framework for thinking about inequality in Singapore. Yet short of interrogating the material specificities of Singapore, these critics—composed not insignificantly of Western-educated cultural elites—found inspiration from transposing U.S. frameworks of racial antagonism directly onto Singapore. “I performed a simple experiment,” admitted the self-professed founding theorist of “Chinese privilege”: “I took a paragraph [from bell hooks’ ‘Beloved Community’] and I substituted the words ‘Chinese’ for ‘white.’” So “Chinese privilege” was born.

In Singapore, the terminology of “Chinese privilege” spread like wildfire within the networks of the cultural elite, circulating abundantly in the capital of “woke” discourse, Yale-NUS College (a liberal arts school jointly established by Yale and the Singaporean government). Soon it became more than just an analysis of “privilege”: suggestions of “Chinese racism,” “Chinese supremacy,” and “Chinese settler colonialism” all began to float in the air, plastered together by their plagiarism from North American Black and Indigenous critique.

When pressed, however, the loosely cobbled Singaporean copies began to fall apart: given the geographic, cultural, and political variation amongst Chinese people, who are implicated in the broad idea of the “Chinese”? What does “Chinese privilege” in Singapore mean, against the existence of more than 200,000 mainland Chinese migrant workers who, along with their predominantly Bangladeshi peers, toil daily in Singapore, with no minimum wage, to build the city’s high-rises, wash its public toilets, and serve in its hawker centers? Finally, given the material histories of race under Euro-American colonization, in which white supremacy actualized itself through racial enslavement, indentured servitude, and Indigenous genocide, how can white privilege be commensurable to anything else—in the world?

As Cedric Robinson wrote, modern capitalism is an extension of European feudalism, built from the very beginning on primitive accumulation established through racial slavery and colonization. Any project that seeks to understand racial capitalism in Asia cannot disentangle capitalism from its definition as a globalized system of value built on and by white supremacy. In Singapore, which for centuries existed both as part of the Indian Ocean world and the Malay archipelago, modern capitalism was ushered in by the British East India Company. From 1819 onward, Singapore became one node in the vast operation of the British Empire, connected by subjugated labor and trade to India, China, Hong Kong, and Britain’s many other colonies in the West Indies and Eastern and Southern Africa.

The history of race in Singapore, then, is a history of racial capitalism. The British colonial government played a key role in facilitating early discourses of race and racial difference in Singapore, producing the racial classificatory system that in Singapore today is known as CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Other). Interestingly, the British never elevated the Chinese as a superior class—rather, its initial interests were in cultivating a Malay indigenous elite through whom they could rule by proxy. During the century and a half of colonial rule, the Chinese were most useful for the British as primarily as a cheap labor force extending British empire’s labor imperialism (“coolies”), and secondarily, as a middleman merchant class that facilitated the empire’s trade imperialism (opium, rubber, tea). Though Singapore has been both a British and Japanese colony, it has never been a Chinese one—on the contrary, under British rule, the Chinese population in Singapore was alternately disciplined and neglected, and under Japanese rule, subject to ethnic genocide. In this light, there is no historical ground supporting claims of “Chinese supremacy” in Singapore. To argue for it is to mount a deceit that contradicts the very histories of race and capitalism as they were forged during Singapore’s colonial era.

Since its independence in 1965, Singapore has been ruled by the People’s Action Party (PAP), led for 38 years by former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, under whose tenure Singaporean “Chineseness” was transformed into an essentialist cultural project in concert with what Lee championed as “Confucian capitalism.” Refigured as a depoliticized, homogenous, and agreeable alternative to the geopolitical and racial Chineseness represented by “Red China,” the Singaporean Chineseness installed by Lee posited itself as a proxy to Weberian Protestant capitalism. Functioning in contrast against the racial and political threat of “90 million Chinese communists in China,” Lee’s carefully-pruned Confucian Chineseness marked Singapore, a Chinese-majority island, as a capable partner to U.S. empire—and Lee himself as a trusted native informant to generations of U.S. imperial architects.In his prolific public statements, Lee was unabashed about what he believed to be the essentialist characteristics of each “racial” group, and the disciplinary mechanisms supposedly required to harness them into a stable “multiracial meritocracy” that would make Singapore an ideal site of investment for Euro-American capital. In other words, officialized discourses of race in Singapore take on a primarily economic function, shaded by the backdrop of neocolonial U.S.-Singapore relations. In this light, to speak of race in Singapore is to speak of a highly localized phenomenon held in taut relation with historical British rule and contemporary U.S. domination—including the ongoing Cold War of anticommunist containment in Asia.

Yet recently, discourses of “Chinese privilege” have escalated, alighting on a new strategy of manufacturing imperialist antipathy against China and justifying continued U.S. military domination in Asia. Moving beyond Singapore, Singaporean critics of “Chinese privilege” argue that Asia at large is threatened by the looming specter of a “rising China.” Proposing that Chineseness is a universalizing racial category, these critics conclude that “Chinese privilege” and “Chinese supremacy” in Singapore may be extrapolated to Asia-at-large, in which the PRC plots a supposedly imperialist takeover. Of particular vexation to these critics is what they call the “Chinese tankie,” a slur which refers, through a mish-mash of McCarthyite euphemism and garbled identity politic jargon, to anti-imperialist internationalists who oppose U.S. military supremacy in Asia and the ongoing informational war against China.If the vague, anti-China fear mongering of “Chinese supremacy” discourse feels familiar, it’s because it sounds strikingly similar to talking points of the U.S.-led Cold War on China, and increasingly, the discourse of the Singaporean state. While Singapore has historically framed its foreign policy as a balancing act between the U.S. and PRC, since 2018, a series of secretive arrests authorized by Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, working in tandem with the U.S. Pentagon, have signaled the island nation’s shift toward a more diplomatically offensive position against China.

In a speech given to the public in 2019, former Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Bilahari Kausikan urged Singaporeans to stand guard against what he called China’s “sophisticated and flexible instrument[s] of influence,” which threaten Singapore’s “foundation of multiracial meritocracy.” Of note, Kausikan pressed, was China’s civilizational threat against Singapore: “China’s identity as a civilizational state,” he said, “finds expression in the work of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office… In plain language, overseas Chinese should identify their interests with China’s interests and work to advance China’s interests. And this represents a deliberate blurring of the distinction made between the hua ren (ethnic Chinese) and the hua qiao (overseas citizen of the PRC).”

By suggesting the always already latent possibility of “ethnic Chinese” being turned into spies for the PRC, Kausikan not only taps into a long history of conjoined anti-Chinese, anti-PRC, and anticommunist villainization in Southeast Asia, but also rehashes the “China creep” discourse of the U.S. and its “Five Eyes” alliance. Case in point, Kausikan’s declarations of “Chinese espionage” startlingly echo the propaganda of such warmongering luminaries as the weapons industry-funded Australia Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Lauding Kausikan’s speech, the conservative U.S. policy think tank Jamestown Foundation (on whose board sits Trumpian architect Robert Spalding) noted: “Singapore has long been a target of CCP united front attention, and the city authorities have a history of combatting CCP propaganda that dates back to the 1950s and 70s, when PRC leaders sought to export communist revolution to Southeast Asia.”

This would certainly be an impressive feat, were it true. While evidence of actual “CCP infiltration” is all but nonexistent, what is abundantly clear is that the United States has spent extraordinary effort covertly manufacturing anticommunist, anti-Chinese propaganda across Asia throughout the last seventy years. Drawing from a dense archive of declassified CIA reports, Operating Coordinating Board (OCB) communiques, and U.S. Information Agency (USIA) documents, historian Wen-qing Ngoei concludes,

[T]he key principle of U.S. Cold War policy toward [Asia] was to harness the interconnectedness of Southeast Asia’s Chinese so that Beijing could not. From mid-1954, U.S. planners began seeking ways to ‘encourage the overseas Chinese’ to ‘organize and activate anticommunist groups and activities within their own communities.’ Beyond this, Washington aspired to ‘cultivate’ overseas Chinese ‘sympathy and support’ for the GMD [Kuomintang]-dominated Taiwan as a ‘symbol of Chinese political resistance,’ to forge one more ‘link’ within the United States’ broader ‘defense against Communist expansion in Asia.’ (9)

Within Singapore itself, accusations of “Chinese communist influence” have served as an expedient lie leveraged by both the British colonial government and the British-backed Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first Prime Minister, to effectively rid the country of leftist organizing. In what became known as the 1963 Operation Coldstore, Lee convinced the British colonial government to invoke the secretive Internal Security Act (ISA) to detain some 113 left-leaning politicians of the opposition party, Barisan Socialis. This effective annihilation of Singapore’s popular leftist movement in turn gave Lee, the British heir apparent, a virtually unopposed path to political power in Singapore’s first general election in 1965.1 In 1987, Lee’s government once again leveraged charges of a “Marxist conspiracy” to detain 22 leftist organizers, holding them for up to three years under alleged torture. Reflecting on the arc of anticommunist fervor that has defined post-independence Singapore, historian T.N. Harper writes that since independence, “the PAP government worked resolutely to depoliticize national struggle, to shed it of its old internationalist connections, and to tear Singapore from its alternative pasts” (48).

Given both the history of U.S. covert operations in Southeast Asia and Singapore’s own virulently anticommunist post-independence history, it should be no surprise that the low-hanging fruit of a “Chinese communist conspiracy” and its pseudo-leftist “Chinese privilege” corollary appear so enticing to both Singapore’s cultural elite and its ruling party. Moreover, their naked antipathy toward China is undergirded by Singapore’s deep economic and geopolitical ties to the United States. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, like South Korea and Japan, the U.S.’s client states in East Asia, Singapore’s economic “miracle” has been largely predicated on industrialization via U.S. militarization during the Cold War. After a visit to the United States in 1967, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew wrote to Lyndon B. Johnson, expressing his “unequivocal” support of the Vietnam War. Lee argued, as historian Daniel Chua recounts, that

The United States, by holding the line in Vietnam, was buying time for the rest of Southeast Asia to develop stable economies and governments. The American military involvement in Vietnam[, Lee believed,] helped in maintaining political stability of the non-communist regimes in Southeast Asia and also provided them with the years that were necessary to build their economies. (5)

More than providing Southeast Asian nations like Singapore “with the years that were necessary to build their economies,” the U.S. invasion of Vietnam directly contributed to the economic growth of its neo-colonies in Asia, including Singapore. Just as the U.S. war in Vietnam was critical to “South Korea’s compressed development under military dictator Park Chung-hee,” as Christine Hong has written, so too was it instrumental in developing Singapore’s post-independence economy. This developmental trajectory allowed the U.S. to continue where the British had left off: in 1967, the same year the British formally withdrew its bases from Singapore, “a full 15 percent of Singapore’s national income derived from U.S. military procurements for Vietnam.” Prior to the U.S. entrance into Singapore, British bases on the island had contributed $200 million per year to the Singaporean economy, amounting to 20 percent of Singapore’s then-national income. As the U.S. replaced the British as the guest power in Singapore and escalated its invasion of Vietnam, U.S. private investment in Singapore increased at exponential rates, growing at a rate of $100 million a year by 1971.

In 1990, following the Philippine Senate’s closure of the U.S. and military bases in Clark and Subic Bay, Singapore stepped up to the bat as the U.S. military’s newest and most steadfast dependency south of Seoul. Through a series of “memorandums of understanding” (MOUs), Singapore not only opened its Paya Lebar air base and the port of Sembawang to U.S. forces, but in 1998, built a state of the art naval base in Changi for express shared usage with the U.S. Navy. As a 2016 Brookings Institute white paper acknowledges, Changi Naval Base “is currently the only naval facility in Southeast Asia purpose-built to accommodate an aircraft carrier and was constructed (entirely at Singapore’s cost), despite Singapore having no aircraft carrier of its own.”

In 2020, as the U.S. entertained regime change ambitions in Bolivia, tightened sanctions against Venezuela, Iran, and the DPRK, and waged a hybrid war against China, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong wrote, in a feature article for Foreign Affairs, “Asian countries see the United States as a resident power that has vital interest in the region…. What made Asia’s stability and prosperity possible was the United States.” In other words, Singapore’s supposedly “exceptional” economic achievements, when held under the magnifying glass of historical analysis, reveal a profound entrenchment in the U.S. orbit, as a client state whose imperialist geopolitical, political, and economic orientations were meticulously cultivated during the Cold War. Insofar as Singapore holds the title of being one of the most prosperous nations in the world, its national “privilege” has been built off its role as launch pad for U.S. aggression on Vietnam, Korea, China, and most recently, Afghanistan.

In the face of what can only be understood as blatant, aggressive, and ongoing U.S. imperialization of both Singapore and the Southeast Asian region, both the Singaporean state and its comprador class prefer to harp on a supposed “Chinese communist conspiracy” instead of facing the hegemon literally crouching in their own backyard. Of course, scapegoating China has its perks as well: for the Singaporean state, fervent anticommunism and blithe disdain of China has won it the right to become a vassal state of the U.S. empire; for the Singaporean comprador class, armed with degrees from the imperial core and a taste for “speaking for Global South Asians,” the work of obfuscating U.S. imperialism offers a surefire way to propel oneself to political authority as a model minority in the Global North.

By delocalizing and decontextualizing a U.S.-based identitarian politics of race, discourses of “Chinese privilege” assiduously delink race from its material conditions, and ethnic formation in Singapore from the complex geopolitical and colonial history of the region. In short, “Chinese privilege” performs a crude racial reductionism that, in its easy recourse to analogy, propels what literary historian Jodi Melamed calls a “race-liberal order” that “fatally limit[s] the possibility of overcoming racism to the mechanisms of U.S.-led global [imperialist] capitalism, even as they have enabled new kinds of normalizing and rationalizing violences.” The comprador class stands most to gain from the discourse of “Chinese privilege,” which, as sociologists Daniel P.S. Goh and Terrence Chong remind us, allows them to partake in a “pleasurable act of Foucauldian confession…to reinforce their feelings of goodness and purity” while cementing their position as intellectual and moral gatekeepers in Singapore’s neocolonial production of knowledge.

Without regard to the historic, geographic, and political dissonances implied within the term “Chinese,” theories of Chinese privilege disavow both the material conditions of British colonialism and contemporary U.S. imperialism which have shaped Singapore’s present, while insisting that Singapore, and postcolonial Asia at-large, appear a historical vacuum through which appears a new regime of racial domination by the ambiguously perilous, yet ever-present “Chinese.”

The race reductionism of “Chinese privilege” is dangerous not only for essentializing, de-historicizing, and dematerializing the workings of race in Asia. In this political moment—as the military encirclement of China sees its domestic parallel in anti-Asian violence in the West—uncritical deployments of “Chinese privilege” are dangerous precisely because they fit snugly into a propagandized Cold War redux which paints China as duplicitous, conniving, and invasive. Contributing to U.S. efforts of informational warfare, the depoliticized and ahistorical fallacy of “Chinese supremacy”—sold, largely, to North American and Singaporean audiences—appropriates the specificity of white supremacy while bolstering the long history of neocolonial Singaporean anticommunism. Ultimately, it seeks to naturalize U.S. hegemony as a benevolent force in the face of impending Chinese “invasion,” manufacturing consent for the further militarization of Asia while obscuring the structuring force of U.S. imperialism in Singapore, Asia, and beyond to the detriment of true anti-imperial struggle.

Notes:

1. Political prisoners, including Said Zahari, Lim Chin Siong, Lim Chin Joo, Poh Soo Kai, and Tan Jing Quee, have written about their time in captivity, noting both Lee’s strategic collaboration with the British colonial government and his role in engineering anticommunist persecution throughout the 1950s and 60s. In particular, they unanimously agree, Lee was frightened by the popular support of Lim Chin Siong, leader of the Barisan Socialis, who was projected to win the first election prior to his arrest by Lee in Operation Coldstore. In a posthumously-published excerpt from his memoir, Lim Chin Siong was explicit about Lee’s political motives:

Lee Kuan Yew soon became worried about the left-wing within the party because it enjoyed tremendous grassroots support. He was fearful of being replaced or overtaken. In his calculations, the most ideal constitutional arrangement was to let the British continue to provide a safety net for him and to give him time to build up his own base. He would play the role of a moderate while the British could wield the big stick. On this score, Lee Kuan Yew and the British were hand-in-glove in that ‘the British must keep the final say in order to block the communists out.’ (316)

Frantz Fanon: A Personal Tribute to the Philosopher of the Colossal Mass

By Alieu Bah

Originally published at Red Voice.

"The colonized intellectual you so much detest has come to become the so-called guardian of your name. I hope you come into the whirlwind and destroy that myth... But in the end, I guess that’s our battle to fight."

The wretched of the earth, the damned of humanity are still here. Still clamoring, still caught in a thousand many battles with themselves and the world built to keep them in their place. Their fate signed, sealed, and packaged for the consumption of the rich and wealthy few of the earth — buffets where the flesh, blood and tears of the poor are served to a greedy, barbaric, capitalist horde are even more sumptuous. Their feasting is the stuff of legend and their belch a recognition of a satisfied bunch of heartless thieves who rejoice more in their heist than any sort of remorse or regret thereof. The proverbial cocktail party list that was supposed to be changed at the dawn of decolonization remains the same even as it is inherited and one family name supplanted for another in a vicious circle of inheritance.

(Un)fortunately your book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ is still relevant to us. It was supposed to be an artifact of history, forever to rest in the museums of liberated territories. But fact is, it remains this living, breathing, painful reminder to us the colonized of the earth. We still study it because it’s more relevant than ever in this colonial continuity. From the favelas of Brazil, the hoodlands of America, the jungles of Chiapas, from the townships of Johannesburg to the slums of Nairobi, this masterpiece continues to shine in the eyes of a new generation whose parents were sold nothing but dreams.

The shantytown, the medinas, the slums of the world still persist. The compartmentalization of the world continues unabated. However, the divide gets deeper and more cancerous, the line, the border isn’t in the same town or neighborhood anymore, but between the geography of the oppressed — the third world — and the center of the oppressor, the colonist. With the ever-increasing globalized configuration of capital, the choke hold of a staggering market to the expansion of “soft” imperialism in the form of intergovernmental organizations and NGOs from the colonizer, the metropolis has exceeded all expectations of a shared analysis between our generations; the chasm deepened as Hannibal crossed the alps. It all has gotten deeper since you've succumbed to the white claws of death in that hospital in Maryland. The rich neighborhood and the slums today are mostly populated by the same faces, the same race of men and women. When I was in Nairobi last year, it reminded me so much of your analysis on the divided, schizophrenic colonial society.

In more ways than one it’s as if your take was about the neocolonial state in those illuminating first chapters of The Wretched of the Earth. The naked violence of it and the wanton disregard for human life makes you a prophet in this secular tradition of progressive politics we share. But more searing and penetrating of your analysis was the scholar and intellectual who comes home from the west. They’re here after all this time, still concerned about particulars and false western moralisms. They do all kinds of gymnastics with the minds of the masses to divert them from the struggle for land, bread, and water.

They are being found out, though. Young and old progressive Africans have started studying and propagating your works and see their (colonized intellectuals') likeness once again. The objective conditions are also giving rise to a newer, more badass context that defies the pull and gravity of bourgeois intellection grown from those barren western soils. These new rebels, ghetto-grown intellectuals, unknown revolutionaries, are at once denouncing these puppets and concretely building again the old-but-known mass organizational model that led to our liberation in times gone by from the clutches of classic colonialism.

Your name, though, continues to raise colonial anxiety. It continues to sound like metal dropping on the silence and soothing sounds of the corporate world. From Palestine to Panama, it continues to liberate, to agitate, even, as it brings home sanity to a lost generation. Your righteous ghost keeps coming back to haunt the Towers of Babel. Even after all this time! It reminds one of the old saying that wickedness tarries but a little while, but the works of the righteous lives on forevermore. Your lives and afterlives have clearly shown the truth and precision of that good old saying. Year after year, you resurface in the most unlikeliest of places, but unbeknownst to bourgeois historians, so long as oppression exists and there is a demand for the objective material conditions to change, you, the philosopher of the colossal mass, will show face, heart, and mind, and guide the movement even from the grave.

But there is trouble now. Your name and your work continues to be appropriated by academe. You’ve become a career for the well-to-do, the ones who erase. They have complicated your legacy. The colonized intellectual you so much detest has come to become the so-called guardian of your name. I hope you come into the whirlwind and destroy that myth. I hope you come into the thunder, into the tsunami, into the catalytic force of nature. But in the end, I guess that’s our battle to fight. To honor your name by bringing it home to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth.

There is so much to enrich this letter with, but so little time and space. But we who inherited the disinherited, we who took the pledge to raise a billion-strong army, we who know liberation and freedom is a birthright, we who want to end the compartmentalization of the world — the Manichaeism of the land — we are here, in our many forms, subjectively and objectively honoring the call to “...shake off the great mantle of night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light. The new day which is dawning must find us determined, enlightened and resolute. We must abandon our dreams and say farewell to our old beliefs and former friendships. Let us not lose time in useless laments or sickening mimicry.”