Remembering the Original Black Panther Party

By Aneesh Gogineni

In 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, two students attending Merritt Community College in Oakland, founded what would be one of the most infamous organizations in US history, The Black Panthers. In fact, the FBI director at the time, J. Edgar Hoover regarded the Black Panthers’ breakfast program, not their guns, as the greatest threat to the nation’s internal security. Separating themselves from other black liberation groups at the time, the BPP was fighting the underlying evil that shapes and supplies racism — classism.

The Black Panthers were a Marxist group based on the ideology of revolutionary intercommunalism, a theory formed by Huey Newton that recharacterized imperialism and its relation to black subjugation. The theory rejected Western and neoliberal systemic issues in favor of Leninist style resistance to the neoliberal world order through means of a vanguard party to achieve socialist dictatorship of the proletariat. The Black Panthers were one of the largest domestic left-wing groups in the US that revolted against police brutality, systemic racism, racial capitalism, and worldwide imperialist efforts by the US empire. Running on what they called the Ten-Point Program, they believed in Black freedom and liberation at the same time as the abolition of capitalist systems of oppression and exploitation. At the height of the BPP, there were 68 chapters within the US from Chicago to Oakland to Louisiana. The BPP extended farther than just the United States as it had connections with similar organizations in Algeria, India, South Vietnam, and many other countries. Comprised of predominantly young, black members, very prominent activists were originally BPP members. Fred Hampton, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur are a few of the activists that were either a part of the BPP or influenced heavily by its core beliefs.

The Black Panthers engaged in various modes of Black resistance. This included violent and peaceful means of resistance. Some of the violent methods included community protection and surveillance in which many Black Panthers armed themselves and patrolled black communities to prevent police brutality and anti-black crime. This resulted in lots of violence between the group and the cops as the cops were very brutal towards black people within black communities. On the other end of the stick, the party also engaged in peaceful, radical action. Some of this action included educating children with non-whitewashed history rather than public school learning. They also created community food programs that had free breakfast for children in school. In fact, this program founded by the BPP is what has led to free lunch and breakfast in nationwide public schools. Through these violent and peaceful programs, they were able to establish a radical commune predicated on fulfilling material needs for everyone in the community rather than profiting off of exploitation of workers and POC within the community.

As the Black Panthers became more prominent around the world, they ascended the FBI’s list of threats to the nation’s internal security. In 1956, COINTELPRO was an FBI operation founded to disrupt the activity of socialist entities such as the Communist Party of the USA or the Socialist Workers Party. As the Black Panther Party gained power, COINTELPRO placed them at the top of the list and sent agents to begin infiltration. In December 1969, the FBI shot and killed multiple leaders around the US. They staged police raids in neighborhoods in order to assassinate leaders. This resulted in the deaths of multiple black panthers including young leader Fred Hampton. However, the Black Panthers were able to remain intact throughout the 70’s and 80’s and continue to spread radical ideas. The demise of the Black Panthers can be attributed to dissolution of leadership as leaders either moved away from the party or were killed. In 1989, Huey Newton was killed and the party came to an official end.

The Black Panthers had a very large domestic and international reach. Multiple chapters throughout the nation replicated the communist praxis of the BPP with pioneers like Fred Hampton leading it in different areas. However, the reach of it extended farther than the US borders into the international spector. By establishing ties with other black liberation movements around the world, they were able to spread revolutionary intercommunalism and influence other areas of the world. An example of how strong their influence was can be seen in the Dalit Panther Party. In India, there is a hierarchal caste system based on what family one is born into. The Dalits were the lower caste that were constantly dehumanized, killed, subjugated and legally oppressed. Thus, the Dalit Panther Party was formed as a method of resistance and rejecting the caste system. Mentioned in the BPP magazines, the Dalit Panthers were a wonderful example of the original party’s reach.

Similarly, in Dallas, the group known as Guerilla Mainframe participates in community aid programs as a method of resistance. They also engage in militant protests to police brutality within their community, which is very reminiscent of the Black Panthers. The legacy of the BPP has been carried on around the world with the Yellow Panthers in Vietnam, the Vanguard Party of the Bahamas, and many more groups that studied and copied the Black Panthers’ model of organizing resistance. Thus, we should remember The Black Panther Party not as a terrorist group but rather as an inspirational Party that was key in the fight for black liberation and abolition of class. Thus, in the name of the Black Panthers and the millions of other deaths resulting from capitalism, we must endorse alternative methods of communing.

Sources

https://viewpointmag.com/2018/06/11/intercommunalism-the-late-theorizations-of-huey-p-newton-chief-theoretician-of-the-black-panther-party/

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Black-Panther-Party/Legacy

Decolonizing the American Mind: A Review of Matt Sedillo's "Mowing Leaves of Grass"

By Jon Jeter

Had Amiri Baraka been born 50 years later to a Chicano family in Southern California rather than a black family in Newark, he would’ve been Matt Sedillo. 

Present in the work of both poets –the late icon and the relative ingenue respectively –is the rhythmic mixture, una mezcla, of the street, and minds sharpened, like swords, by struggle, and self-enlightenment.

This is not to suggest that Sedillo’s poetry is all fire and brimstone. Like Baraka before him, Sedillo infuses his poetry with a certain knowing, or playfulness, befitting an outsider who is in on the joke, and has seen through the illogic of a handful of Europeans “discovering” 90 million indigenous people. The white settler’s arrogance produces both amusement and blinding, righteous, anger. 

And so it is that Sedillo’s second book of poetry, Mowing Leaves of Grass, reads like a criminal indictment handed up by, well, a poet. In the book’s first poem, entitled Pilgrim, he writes:

See, I come from struggle

And if my story offends you

That is only ‘cause you made the mistake of seeking your

reflection

In my self-portrai

In one of the book’s shorter poems, Pedagogy of the Oppressor, it is made abundantly clear that Sedillo’s poetry is, at its core, an attempt to decolonize the American mind:

And when they read  

They read in conquest 

And when they thought 

They thought of process 

And when they wrote  

Again and again  

It was the word progress 

And when they spoke  

A festival of bayonets 

Impaled the audience  

Line the children  

It’s getting late November  

Teach them Pilgrim  

Teach them Indian  

Speak of gratitude  

Speak of friendship 

Of all the usual suspects perp-walked by Mowing Leaves of Grass, however, the kingpin is Walt Whitman, whose storied 1855 book of poems, Leaves of Grass, is the inspiration of Sedillo’s book title. Widely regarded by ivory-towered elites as the greatest book of poetry in the history of the Republic –or the genre’s Huck Finn – Leaves of Grass is considered a siren song, calling for a young and yearning nation of castoffs and cut-ups to unite in the democratic experiment that is America. 

Sedillo, however, makes no claim to the mantle of poet-laureate but rather dissident laureate, and he finds Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, like the nation itself,  wanting, and in need of a reappraisal. Why, he seems to ask in Mowing Leaves of Grass, is Whitman so fawned over and feted when he fails to account for the suffering, the despair, or the rivers of blood spilled by Native Americans, and blacks, in the making of the nation?

In his poem titled “Oh Say,” Sedillo remixes stanzas from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,  lyrics to the anthems Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful, and the dirge popularized by Billie Holliday, Strange Fruit.

So we were bound 

To keep singing 

Oh captain 

My captain 

Drunk on blood anthems Blind patriots 

Raised flags 

And fallen veterans 

The myths 

The hymns 

The bitterness 

Of fairy tales 

Best woven into song 

From the dawn’s 

Early light 

To twilight’s last gleaming From Plymouth Rock 

To Dred Scott 

From smallpox 

To church bomb 

From black bodies 

Swinging in the summer breeze To the endless blood 

Of countless wounded knees Old glory 

We are born 

Witness 

To the sins of your soil 

Oh pioneer

I’ve never heard Sedillo recite his poetry live but I am told by those who have that he is electric, inhabiting the words, owning the room,  spitting fire and truth much as Baraka did in his day, but to a rapid-fire, staccato, hip-hop beat rather than Baraka’s jazzy cadence. The writer Greg Palast calls him the best political poet in America, and while I’m not in any position to agree or disagree, I can say that his poems leave me feeling ennobled, and less alone in the world.

Sedillo’s voice is defiant, irreverent, even wrathful, but his metier is championing the cause of the unwashed, and the unloved, be they Chicanos, African Americans, Indonesian sweatshop workers, or Palestinians. And the irony is that what shines through in Mowing the Leaves, more than anything is not of a poet seething at the injustice of it all, but besotted with the people. From his poem, Once:

I have this dream

Every so often

Of people

Beyond borders and prisons

Gathered in the distance

Telling tales of a time

When women feared the evening

When communities were punished by color

And grown men hunted children

Hardly able to believe

People once lived this way

Jon Jeter is a former Washington Post correspondent and the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama’s Postracial America.

Questioning Violence in the Wake of the Right-Wing Mob Attack in Washington, D.C.

By James Dugan

“The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as a means to attain liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions about violence. . . . [V]iolence in any society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It is neither right nor is it wrong. It is just simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.”

–Kwame Ture, 1969.

We won’t soon forget January 6, 2021—the day in which the nationalistic, xenophobic, and vitriol spewing conspiracy theorist, President Donald Trump, incited a violent far-right mob to descend upon and occupy the U.S. Capitol. The riot, all but ushered in by Capitol Police, resulted in 5 deaths, the evacuation of lawmakers, and the disruption of what is typically a ceremonial session to certify the Presidential election results. Elected officials quickly took to Twitter to denounce the siege and criticize violence from both sides of the political spectrum. Senator Ted Cruz tweeted, “The Constitution protects peaceful protest, but violence—from Left or Right— is ALWAYS wrong.” Presiding over the resumption of the Joint Session of the Congress, Vice President Mike Pence echoed the sentiments of many Twitter handles, stating, “To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, You did not win. Violence never wins. Freedom wins.” In short, condemnations of violence carried the day. Yet, as we continue to unravel and examine these extraordinary events, we might detour to ask why politicians were so quick to equate and denounce violence from both sides when the violence on January 6th came from only one: the extreme end of the far-right.

As a jumping off point, we might first question the assertion that violence is “ALWAYS wrong” by asking whether it has ever been true in our country. In what way is the claim that “violence never wins” accurate? Does not the State, from the Pentagon to the local police precinct engage in violence to enforce policy every single day? Is our country’s origin not rooted in and upheld by violence? These questions in mind, an initial attempt at interpreting the real meaning of the unified denouncement of violence by elected officials on January 6th might read, “Violence on both sides is wrong because violence has been monopolized by the State. Violence is only right when the State engages in it.”

While this definition is certainly more instructive, two lines of questioning should be raised before we accept its legitimacy. First, at what point in this country’s history has violence from the left and violence from the right ever been treated equally by the State? Isn’t our history littered with examples of white vigilante violence that the State either openly allied itself with or swept under the rug? From the civilian militias that assisted the State in quelling slave revolts in the 1800s, to the campaigns of terrorism deployed by the KKK throughout the 20th Century, to the police departments that align themselves with white supremacist organizations at protests today (E.g., Kenosha, Wisconsin), violence coming from the far-right has not only evaded punishment, it has been effectively endorsed by the State.

The second line of questioning that should be pursued relates to the position of the State itself. When the State is engaging in violence, is it doing so as some neutral enforcer of justice? Upon the political spectrum, does the State sit objectively in the middle between right and left? To answer this, we might first say that the function of the State is to maintain the structural integrity and stability of Society. At first blush, that sounds neutral enough. But, if our society is inherently unequal—if it is steeped in racial and economic inequality—if it is built upon a foundation of colonization, slavery, and imperialism—is the State which upholds it truly an unbiased authority? Or does it sit far to the right of the political spectrum as an entity that maintains systems of oppression on behalf of those who benefit from economic exploitation and white supremacy? Asked in simpler terms, if the status quo is unequal, and the State exists to maintain the status quo, to which side of the political spectrum does the State’s existence benefit? Understood in these terms, the State exists not as an impartial mediator between left and right, but—as put by Lenin—the “creation of ‘order’, which legalizes and perpetuates [] oppression.” The State thereby exists to deprive “the oppressed classes of definite means and methods of struggle to overthrow the oppressors.” As such, the position of the State is indistinguishable from the position of those who seek to maintain this country’s unequal conditions—i.e., the conservative right.

Why is the State willing to denounce violence from “both sides” if the State effectively exists to serve the right? Well, it should first be noted that this hasn’t always been the case. At times when the State has been unable to quell liberation struggles and social justice movements on its own, it has called upon reactionary civilians to assist in “maintaining order.” By way of example, we can point to the militias that assisted the U.S. Army in protecting settlers as they invaded unceded indigenous land and the militias that assisted the State in massacring coal miners who went on strike to improve working and living conditions. We can point as well to the Fugitive Slave Act—whereby civilians were required to enforce and return fugitive slaves on behalf of the State and wealthy plantation owners. That the street-level fascists—who, as an aside, were so anti-mask that they chose not to wear them while committing crimes in one of the most heavily surveilled buildings in the world—will certainly be made examples of and serve prison time for their federal offenses doesn’t change this reality. It is merely an example of what Benjamin L. McKean calls the “dance between the far right and the electoral right.” As stated in his recent take on the events for Jacobin Magazine, “Right-wing political parties can deplore right-wing street violence while using the disorder caused by reactionary mobs as another occasion for extending power.”

That aside, the State is comfortable in denouncing violence from “both sides” because, when push comes to shove, the State will act on its own behalf to violently suppress any movement that threatens the established order.  In an era in which the Defense budget is to the tune of $740 billion and nearly every local police department is militarized to the point of mimicking a Regiment in the U.S. Marine Corps, the State doesn’t need far-right extremists because the State has the ability to use violence whenever necessary. By monopolizing the use of violence, the State masquerades as a neutral body that proffers to only use force when absolutely justified. But, in practice, the left is typically the only side in which the use of force is ever necessary. The State need not use violence against the far-right because they exist on each other’s behalf—i.e., they are on the same team. The far-right doesn’t threaten the current order, which as we established above, is one of domination and inequality. Thus, in effect, we have finally reached an understanding of what the trope in question actually translates to: “Violence from the left—i.e., violence from the side of the oppressed—is always wrong.” This is the language that has been and will continue to be weaponized against pro-justice movements that yearn for a less oppressive existence. We should be unsurprised when the aforementioned tweets from January 6th resurface in the future to justify the brutal repression of efforts from the left to change the racist and exploitative status quo.

So, let’s return once more to the premise that violence is “ALWAYS wrong.” How can this be true? We have shown that the State has engaged in violence for centuries. We have also shown that the right has done the same without reprimand. Finally, we have established that the current order of our society is one of inherent inequality; an immoral condition of antagonism between—as Malcolm X once put—“those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation.” At this juncture, Paulo Freire’s words are instructive: “With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence?”

What do we do with the apparent paradox that Freire raises? Perhaps it is the initiation of violence, rather than violence itself, which is always wrong. Is violence always wrong, or is violence only wrong when it is used to oppress and exploit; to subjugate and tyrannize? Maybe the more important conclusion to reach here is that self-defense, whether violent or not, is not wrong. Malcolm X had one of the most percipient understandings of the nuances between violence and self-defense. To quote his words once more, “I don’t believe in violence—that’s why I want to stop it. And you can’t stop it with love. So, we only mean vigorous action in self-defense and that vigorous action we feel we’re justified in initiating by any means necessary.”

Alternatively, the paradox could be resolved even if we come to agree with establishment politicians and reactionary conservatives in saying that violence is always wrong. Taking Freire’s words as true, this is merely an admission that the current conditions in this country—the current relationship of oppression—is violent and wrong. If such is true, then perhaps we narrow the definition of “violence” so that it doesn’t include self-defense. Nonetheless, whether only the initiation of violence is wrong, or whether violence is inherently wrong but is defined in such a way as to exclude acts of self-defense, the result is the same: the oppressed are justified in striving for freedom by any means necessary.

With this analysis in mind, we can test the veracity of the Mike Pence/Ted Cruz assertion by raising a few historical questions:

Was Toussaint Louverture wrong to lead the Haitian revolution?

Was Nat Turner wrong to initiate the Southampton insurrection?

Was John Brown wrong to raid Harpers Ferry?

As we ruminate on these final inquiries, we might keep the wisdom of Assata Shakur and Kwame Ture in mind. The former informed us, “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” The latter concisely stated, “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” 

Militant Anti-Imperialism and Liberal Anti-Imperialism: A Demarcation

By Will Griffin

The term “anti-imperialist” gets thrown around so much today that the very definition of it is muddled up. Does opposing the wars abroad make you anti-imperialist? What about the wars here at home? Are there different kinds of anti-imperialists? Can we oppose military/political interventions while supporting economic interventions? How would they be different and how can we draw lines of demarcation between these differences?

First, let’s make clear what demarcation means. J. Moufawad-Paul describes drawing clear and decisive lines of demarcation as a militant philosophical approach to distinguish between competing interpretations within “the zones of praxis through which it cuts (Demarcation and Demystification, 2019).” In a nutshell, to be as precise as possible in our understanding of our own praxis and theory, it behooves of us to draw clear and distinct lines of differences between particular strategies and interpretations. 

In the book, Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy (2020), Devin Zane Shaw draws a clear line of demarcation of militant antifascism and liberal antifascism. This book provided a clear framework for me to apply the same to the anti-imperialist movement. 

The term “militant” is another word which has been thrown around a lot. Today, it often gets associated with some kind of unnecessary violence, an incorrect usage of the term due to liberal propaganda. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. practiced militant nonviolence. We can confidently say that a militant is someone who is willing to face antagonistic contradictions head on. Whether a militant uses the tactic of nonviolence or armed struggle to face an antagonistic enemy is not the question as both are militant. A labor strike can be militant. A sit-down protest can be militant. Anything can be militant as long as they are willing to face their oppressors. 

In order to understand anti-imperialism more clearly, we must demarcate a split within anti-imperialism itself. The two main trends within any anti-imperialist movement are militant anti-imperialism and liberal anti-imperialism. Both types of anti-imperialisms stand against imperialism, undoubtedly. Yes, I believe liberal anti-imperialists genuinely want to end imperialism; it is just their framework of understanding imperialism is incorrect and therefore their strategy to end imperialism is most certainly wonky. This wonky framework and strategy used by the liberal anti-imperialist could potentially lead down the road of capitulation to the imperialists, which is one reason we need to draw a distinct line of demarcation between liberal and militant anti-imperialism. Wherever liberal anti-imperialists fail, militant anti-imperialists can pick up the ball and continue pushing forward. 

Liberal anti-imperialism tends to funnel resistance back towards the institutions which are practicing imperialism, mainly the capitalist State. Essentially, they believe this State is neutral and can be won over to an anti-imperialist line. For those of us familiar with Marxist history, especially V.I. Lenin’s work in State and Revolution, understand the capitalism-imperialist state can never be won over as it is ultimately tied by a thousand threads to the capitalists and imperialists. So, liberal anti-imperialists are essentially begging a body of parasites to stop being parasitic. This is akin to requesting a human to stop drinking water or for the Earth to stop revolving around the Sun. 

The liberal anti-imperialists tend to denounce nearly all militant forms of resistance to imperialism, such as People's Wars in the Global South, when black and brown people destroy property or march with weapons or anything that they construe as "too far" or "too militant.". In the end, liberal anti-imperialists adhere to a faith in the institutions of government. Much of their faith relies on voting imperialism out of existence. The typical pattern for them is to not only denounce imperialism, but also stigmatize the militant anti-imperialists. How can one say no to the oppressor but also say no to the oppressed? Anyone who opposes liberal ways must be opposed against themselves; this is the liberal mentality.

A fundamental and detrimental mistake made by liberal anti-imperialist is taking the tactic of nonviolence and upholding it as a principle. This is the reason why liberals sit on the sideline as people are murdered in the street and bombed by drones from the sky. Kwame Ture taught us a valuable lesson in a speech where he said, 

“We must not confuse tactics with principles. This is an error that Dr. MLK made, and it also helps to confound the error. Dr. King took nonviolence, which is a tactic, and made it a principle. Being an honest man he came to compound his error because being an honest man he couldn’t compromise this principle, so he was forced to say ‘at all times, under all conditions, we must use nonviolence’. Malcolm X was correct. Malcolm said ‘nonviolence can only be a principle in a nonviolent world’, as MLK’s death came to prove.” (Kwame Ture speech at Florida International University, 1992)

Militant anti-imperialism uses direct action and does not rely on the capitalist State for any kind of policy change. We support movements who practice revolutionary militancy. We understand the necessity of fighting back physically in order to defend oneself from the horrors of imperialism. Militant anti-imperialists tend to realize that imperialism cannot be voted out of existence, it must be stepped on, forced out and overthrown. Militant anti-imperialists place their faith in the people, not the imperialist state; a huge fundamental difference from liberal anti-imperialists. 

The purpose of demarcation here is to force open the terrain of a radical, even revolutionary, militant left that goes beyond a parliamentary struggle. Also in doing so, we can mark the terrain for effective movement building. Despite having some gains in exposing the brutality of imperialism, liberal anti-imperialism will ultimately fail. When it does fail, a militant anti-imperialist movement will offer a new option for people to compete against this failure. 

We should not transform this non-antagonistic relationship between militant anti-imperialist and liberal anti-imperialists into an antagonistic contradiction. Many of the liberal anti-imperialists can, and should, be won over. We must oppose dogmatically applying this demarcation but hold true to it. Liberal anti-imperialists, at least some of them, can be shown the failures of their framework and strategy eventually winning them over to supporting militant anti-imperialist struggles. After all, were any of us born a militant anti-imperialist? No, we had to work our way up to this level of consciousness. 

I want to stress the importance in one of the differences in these trends. Liberal anti-imperialists deny the existence of militant struggles against imperialism, here and abroad. This fundamental outlook leads to the whitewashing of history and current movements around the world. It explains the limitations and failures of the mainstream “anti-imperialist” movement. They disconnect from the militant struggles and, therefore, are demarcating themselves from actual and effective anti-imperialist movements. In my experience, it’s often the pacifists who are the first to censure, and even condemn, movements which choose to pick up the gun, burn a facility down or even dress up in military fatigues. This is intrinsically tied to the idea of holding nonviolence as a principle. 

Is it really anti-imperialist? Anti-imperialism is just as much about opposing the Coca-Cola factory in Iraq as it is in opposing the bombs being dropped. Economic intervention is just as important as a military/political intervention. Imperialism is primarily an economic system, where the more powerful nations exploit, or super-exploit, the less powerful nations. Often, it is about stealing resources but also other reasons like geopolitics. Nonetheless, imperialism maintains an unequal economic, cultural and territorial relationships between nations and capitalist enterprises, often in the form of empire, based on domination and subordination. 

In our universities, the bourgeois academics develop the ideology for the imperialists. One method involves disassociating politics from economics. To understand more precisely and in a more holistic manner of our world, we require the more accurate term, political economy. Politics and economics are intrinsically tied to each other. The military intervention invades in order to protect the economic system of exploitation and super-exploitation. In our era, the Global North exploits the Global South for its resources and to play on the grand chessboard of hegemony. This is only made possible with a powerful capitalist state. 

Liberal anti-imperialists lack a clear idea of imperialism by limiting it to military/political interventions only, leaving out the possibility of economic interventions. When transnational corporations intervene in a poor and oppressed nation in order to plunder its resources, is this not a form of imperialism? The military/political intervention is dependent upon the economic intervention. In fact, the State intervenes in order to protect the economic interests of the ruthless and exploitative corporations. This fractured framework of the liberal anti-imperialists weakened their resolve in opposing imperialism. The clarity around the nature of imperialism can only strengthen the anti-imperialist movement. Drawing this line can help to offer clarity on where each one of us may stand. It helps us to develop a more effective strategy in order to defeat imperialism. Militant anti-imperialists hold true to the power of the people, to combat imperialism in an assertive yet principled manner, and to overcome the weaknesses in our strategies and tactics. 

Will Griffin is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who is now an anti-imperialist and a content creator at The Peace Report, a militant anti-imperialist media collective. 

Blows Against the Empire—2020 In Memoriam

By Steve Lalla

To say that 2020 has been memorable would be an understatement, but experience teaches us that our memories of the pandemic may well be struck from the record.

“The 1918 influenza epidemic is one of history’s great conundrums, obliterated from the consciousness of historians,” wrote Gina Kolata, and COVID-19 may yet meet the same fate.[1] Kolata recalls that not only was the Spanish flu omitted from basic history in her elementary and high school, but was also ignored in microbiology and virology courses in college, even though it killed more people than the first world war.

From the onset of the pandemic it was clear that it would accelerate the crumble of the u.s empire. Many had commented on the fragility of neoliberalism in the face of public health crises, and it was pretty obvious from the start that the imperialist system would prove incapable of handling COVID-19 in a reasonable manner.

While the u.s and its capitalist vassals fell prey to COVID-19, blaming it on China or insisting that “one day, like a miracle, it will disappear,” the pandemic overshadowed imperialist defeats in the Middle East and Latin America, and masked some of the scariest climate catastrophes in recorded history.

A chronology of 2020’s most salient dates:

January 5: Iraq’s parliament voted to expel all u.s troops from the country. Deputy commander of the Popular Mobilization Units of Iraq, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, was assassinated in a January 3 drone strike—in addition to Iran’s General Soleimani—the last straw for Iraq politicians’ toleration of any u.s troops on their soil. About 5,000 u.s troops remain in the country. The ruling was the final blow to Bush Jr.’s lie that the Iraq War would “bring freedom” to Iraqis, who instead revile the u.s for killing a million of their brothers and sisters, destroying their economy and infrastructure, and bombing their most precious ancient sites.

January 6: Millions filled the streets of Tehran, Iran, following the drone killing of Major General Qasem Soleimani. Widely publicized footage of astounding mourning processions contradicted u.s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s hollow boasts: “We have every expectation that people not only in Iraq, but in Iran, will view the American action last night as giving them freedom, freedom to have the opportunity for success and prosperity for their nations. While the political leadership may not want that, the people in these nations will demand it.” Coupled with the late-2019 u.s retreat in Syria, it became clear that the empire was losing their war against the Shia Crescent.

January-February: Early in the new year raging forest fires in Australia grabbed world attention. Fires incinerated over 45 million acres and caused almost 500 deaths, either directly or as a result of smoke inhalation. Ecologists estimated that over one billion mammals, birds and reptiles were killed, including about eight thousand koalas. Climate change and destruction of the environment, spurred by decades of conspicuous consumption and a dependence on fossil fuels, are the results of an anarchic capitalist economic system that profits from waste and obsolescence. The u.s produces over 30 percent of the planet’s waste but holds about 4 percent of world population, a profligate lifestyle they imagine can be exported globally.   

March 10: China announces victory in the struggle against the COVID-19 virus. To date, they’ve reported one death and a handful of cases since mid-April. Following strong measures to combat the pandemic including mandatory lockdowns and mask use, antibacterial dousing of public spaces, contact tracing, and regulating travel, China emerged as the global leader in pandemic defense. As a result China represents the one significant national economy that didn’t slump in 2020 and the world’s “only major growth engine,” according to Bloomberg. They dealt an additional blow to imperialism by sending doctors and equipment to the rescue of NATO countries, notably Italy, France, and Spain, or to stalwart u.s allies such as Brazil, Indonesia or the Philippines, in addition to helping numerous resistance nations including Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, and African nations such as Algeria, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, or Zimbabwe.

April 6: Prominent right-wing political figures and news sources shared the story that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had died of COVID-19. In reality Nicaragua had recorded only one death. Camera-shy Ortega made a rare televised speech on April 15th denouncing the u.s empire for spending trillions of dollars on bombs and war but refusing to provide basic free health care for their people. By December, the u.s death rate for COVID-19 was 40 times that of Nicaragua. 

April 20: A blitz of news regarding the death of Kim Jong-un filled all mainstream media. With the pandemic claiming lives around the world this story became huge. Unsurprisingly the lie originated with media funded by the u.s regime-change operation National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

May 3: Venezuelan fishermen foiled the Operation Gideon armed invasion led by former green berets employed by private security company Silvercorp. In March trump placed a $15 million bounty on Maduro, with predictable results. Following the arrest and confession of Silvercorp founder Jordan Goudreau, we learned that u.s officials and their Venezuelan puppets juan guaidó and leopoldo lópez planned and funded the attack. Goudreau even presented documents to prove it. Eight mercenaries were killed, seventeen were captured. The photo of prostrate commandos in front of the Casa of Socialist Fishermen was cited as one of the year’s best.

May 24: Anti-imperialist nations, locked out of world markets by u.s sanctions, were starting to team up. On this day Iranian oil tankers, escorted by boats, helicopters and planes of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) of Venezuela, broke the blockade and landed in El Palito.

May 25: The public lynching of George Floyd horrified the world. In the middle of the street, in broad daylight, while being filmed, a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes, until Floyd breathed no more. One of over 1,000 murders by u.s police in 2020, Floyd’s killing sparked massive spontaneous protests across the u.s in every city and town. Widespread arson and looting occurred and an army of live streamers shared daily demos, speeches, and police brutality, for those at home. The protests raged for months and had many peaks. The empire deployed the National Guard, military helicopters, and by July were using unidentified troops in black vans to kidnap protesters. At least 14,000 civilians were arrested, and 19 killed, in the protests.

May 28: Protestors torched the Minneapolis’ 3rd Precinct police headquarters, where George Floyd’s killer worked. Police forces had fled the building. The incendiary images provided some of the year’s most widely shared and beloved photographs.

May 31: u.s president trump was taken to a fortified bunker as thousands of protestors besieged the White House and threatened his life. Eventually the empire’s security forces established a perimeter around the president’s residence, with multiple layers of fencing, and fought a pitched battle with bottle-throwing protestors for weeks on end.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/03/trump-bunker-george-floyd-protests

June 3: Cristobal makes landfall in Louisiana, the first of a record-breaking five named storms to hit the state in 2020. Lake Charles, a city that held almost 80,000 people, immortalized in The Band’s “Up On Cripple Creek,” will never recover. Over 45,000 homes were damaged, insured losses topped $10 billion, and thousands of residents are still displaced.

June 20: After tweeting that “almost one million people requested tickets for the Saturday night rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!" trump spoke to only 6,000 supporters and over 13,000 empty seats. He was trolled by K-Pop fans and teens on Tik Tok who had bought up all the tickets and created fake hype around the event. Photos of a dejected trump leaving the rally were wildly popular.

August 19: Out-of-control California wildfires began to gain international media attention. By this day over 350 fires were already burning. The state went on to record over nine thousand fires, burning about 4 percent of the state’s land, by far the worst wildfire season in California’s history. The smoke from the fires, which are still burning, will create a miniature nuclear winter, contributing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the cars, cities and industries in the u.s during an entire year, and release energy equivalent to “hundreds of hydrogen bombs.”

October 6: Enormous protests erupted across Indonesia in the wake of the government’s passing of an Omnibus Law that undermines workers’ rights and the environment. The law was enacted November 3; protests are ongoing and have resulted in the arrest of at least six thousand civilians including 18 journalists.

October 13: In recognition of their success in maintaining the “highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights,” both Cuba and China were elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

October 18: Luis Arce, candidate of the Movement for Socialism (MAS), swept into power by trouncing Carlos Mesa in Bolivia’s presidential election, gaining 55 percent of the vote to Mesa’s 28 percent. The results put the lie to claims by u.s-backed Organization of American States (OAS) that the 2019 elections, in which Evo Morales was elected to a new term, were fraudulent. Arce’s election vindicated those who had argued for a year that Morales was deposed in an illegitimate, u.s-sponsored coup. Coup dictator jeanine añez and her coterie of imperialist supporters were panned worldwide. añez was captured trying to flee the country while other offending politicians, such as Minister of the Interior arturo murillo, and Minister of Defense fernando lopez, escaped.

October 25: In response to gigantic demonstrations that began in October, 2019 and still haven’t let up, Chile held a Constitutional Referendum. The main objectives of the ongoing protest movement are the removal of president piñera and of the pinochet Constitution that made Chile “ground zero” for the failed neoliberal experiment. To date over 2,500 Chileans have been injured, almost three thousand arrested, and 29 killed in the protests. In the October 25 referendum 80 percent voted for a new constitution, and chose to have it drafted by a Constituent Assembly elected by the people.

November 3: trump’s loss in the u.s presidential elections wasn’t really a defeat for imperialism because biden’s regime will prove to be just as bad, or worse,  for targets of the empire.

Nevertheless, it felt like a victory for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because trump embodied outright neo-fascism and was supported by the most reactionary, racist yankees. Secondly, because, following his electoral defeat, trump and his entourage resorted to every possible ruse that CIA regime-change operations have employed in other countries for decades: crying fraud, attacking voting centers, and denouncing imaginary communists. “trump did more for the liberation of humanity from Western imperialism, because of his crudeness, than any other u.s leader in history,” commented political analyst Laith Marouf. “The latest example was him calling the u.s elections a fraud. With that he made it impossible to undermine the elections in Venezuela.”

November 11: Evo Morales returned to Bolivia exactly one year to the day after his ouster. His return was celebrated by multitudes, and hailed as a “world historic event.” Morales assumed his place as head of MAS and as an eminent spokesperson against imperialism.

November 23: While u.s reported their largest increase in poverty since they began tracking data, China announced that they had lifted all counties out of poverty, and eradicated extreme poverty across the Republic. Since 1978 China has lifted over 850 million out of poverty, according to the World Bank.

November 25: Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla revealed links between members of the San Isidro movement and the u.s embassy in Havana. The failed San Isidro campaign revolved around Cuban rapper Denis Solis, detained in Havana for failing to respect COVID-19 regulations and assaulting a police officer. A small group went on a highly publicized "hunger strike" demanding his release and claiming that Cuba was repressing dissent. Meanwhile Cuba's government and investigative journalists revealed the ties, including funding and numerous meetings, between San Isidro group members, Miami-based right-wing agitators and u.s politicians in Cuba. The rapper in question, Denis Solis, didn't help his case by yelling "trump 2020!" at Cuban police officers in a video he filmed and shared himself a few days after trump had lost the election.

November 26: Over 250 million took to the streets in India, reported as the “biggest organized strike in human history,” protesting new laws that will attack farm workers and subject the nation to inequitable neoliberal doctrines. Huge masses of demonstrators marched on Delhi from neighboring states. They met barricades, roadblocks, armed security forces, teargas and all manner of obstructions, but dismantled everything and reached their target. "They are trying to give away agriculture to capitalists, just like they sold so many of our important public sector companies across India," said a spokesperson. "Through this relentless privatization they want to further exploit farmers and workers."

December 6: Venezuela’s Parliamentary Election resulted in a landslide victory for Maduro’s Chavista party PSUV/GPP, breaking a deadlock in Parliament that had lasted for five years, and ushering in a new era in Venezuelan politics that will last until the end of Maduro’s term in 2024—barring a military invasion, assassination or successful coup by imperialist powers.

The upcoming year certainly holds more of the same in store for us: embarrassments for imperialism, hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID-19 deaths, and a doubling-down on capitalism’s claims that it provides the only way forward, evidenced by the hubris of promotional efforts for The Great Reset.

Notes

[1] Kolata, Gina. Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999

Corporate Dictatorship, Mass Incarceration, and Imperialism: The Nature of the American State

© Susan Walsh/AP Photo

By Yanis Iqbal

Republished from Dissident Voice.

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is  already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

-George Jackson

USA’s President-elect Joe Biden’s cabinet picks have already deflated the hopes of lesser-evilists. Filled with deep-dyed neoliberals and unswerving imperialists, Biden’s cabinet will try its hardest to competently revive the murderous American empire. Externally, it would mean the professional management of an imperialist, interventionist and hyper-militarized foreign policy in the name of “humanitarianism”. Internally, it would signify the discursive re-packaging and ideological invisibilization of an interminable domestic war against Black communities. Whereas Donald Trump politically publicized this war as part of his white chauvinist campaign, the Democrats will cleverly cloak it in the hollow language of national unity and multiculturalism.

When confronted by the reality of Democrats openly defying some leftists’ expectation that they will be minimally better than Trump, we need to re-think our political categories and mode of conceptualization. One major concept in need of rectification is “fascism”. Through its repeated use by corporate democrats to create the Trumpist bogeyman, the word has totally lost any analytical value within the US political discourse. In opposition to the ruling elite’s propagandistic obscuration of fascism, we need to theorize it from a Marxist perspective which allows us to use it for revolutionary, tactical purposes. 

In his book Blood in my eye, the Black Panther party leader George Jackson wrote:

“One has to understand that the fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has programmed into its very nature a massive, complex and automatic defense mechanism for all our old methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of people. The essence of the U.S.A. totalitarian socio-political capitalism is, concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. Then the debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle.”

From the above quotation, we can understand the structural nature of fascism in America. Instead of being confined to a right-wing faction of the political elites, fascism represents a superstructural tendency of capitalism, which helps the bourgeoisie to overcome the resistance of various social forces. Democrats and Republicans utilize these fascist tendencies in varying degrees to perpetuate the unending brutality inflicted on revolutionary forces through methods such as mass warehousing, repression and racist policing.

While Democrats and Republicans are firmly situated within a fascist framework, they are not wholly identical. While the former utilizes fascist tactics in an unobtrusive manner, the latter amplifies and foregrounds it as a central strategy. If the Democrats reproduce a dual system of political subjects - one group with “rights” and another consigned to zones of non-being - Republicans politically intensify it. Under Republicans, marginalization of those traditionally ghettoized by the former nominally “liberal” state is noticeably extended, giving a “visible” and “spectacular” character to the silent, structural violence of Democrats’ governmental apparatus.

As Gabriel Rockhill has written:

“While it is certainly true, from a tactical organizing perspective, that dealing with the histrionics of the good cop [Democrats] is usually far preferable to the barefaced barbarism of the bad cop [Republicans], it is strategically of the upmost importance to identify them for what they are: partners in capitalist crime.”

Thus, it is not the case that Democrats signify a radical break from the fascism of Republicans. Rather, both are concrete embodiments of a single phenomenon: fascism.

Whereas, the liberalism of the Democrats bases its administrative operations on an officially unannounced state of emergency (fascism) for dissident forces, the authoritarianism of the Republicans merely does the task of proclaiming aloud that state of emergency. Trump, for example, did nothing more than the aggressive declaration of a preexisting fascist formation through the creation of alliances with different social sectors - neo-confederates, declassed lumpenproletariat, socio-economically destabilized petty bourgeois and a historically privileged segment of white proletariat facing the specter of downward mobility.

Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, writes,

“the corporate Democrats…are the most dangerous because so few people conceive of them as fascists, despite their abject subservience to corporate dictatorship, the carceral state, and endless warfare.”

With the election of Biden, the “inconspicuous” fascism of Democrats has re-gained power, promising to return America back to its “natural” conditions of dehumanization: low-intensity, oligarchy-controlled democracy for whites; guns, prisons, murder and war for blacks. In a situation like this, it is of utmost importance that we comprehend the true nature of fascism in America.

Tragedy and Resistance: A Brief History of the United States

By Scott Remer

I’ve been thinking a lot the last few months about the concept of tragedy: what it obscures, and what it reveals. The United States and the world have been suffering the natural disaster of Covid-19, but the US is also suffering from the effects of unnatural tragedies, the inevitable results of lethal, racist mechanisms which were designed at the outset of the American experiment.

Three episodes in American history are particularly pertinent for understanding the new movement emerging in the streets and fighting for the freedom of people of color: slavery, the attempted Reconstruction of the rebellious South, including the original Populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Since, as William Faulkner once put it, the past isn’t ever dead—it isn’t even past—these chapters of American history deserve another look to see what we can learn about these tempestuous times and what lies ahead.

Origins

The United States was founded on stolen soil, watered with the blood of indigenous people, cultivated with the blood of slaves who were brutally uprooted from their African homelands. Their labors, without remuneration or recognition, literally built the United States. Numerous rapacious Wall Street banks—financial institutions which exist to this day—owned slaves or invested in Southern plantations. Centuries of pain and suffering connect present and past in a chain of exploitation. The work and degradation of people of color were and continue to be the engine that generates wealth in the richest, most powerful country in human history.

Slavery was a barbaric, totalitarian system. Families were ripped apart without an afterthought. Slaveowners brutally repressed the slaves’ African culture. Slaveowners abused slaves without shame or legal repercussions. Slaves couldn’t receive an education or even the most fundamental human rights. Of course, contrary to popular textbooks that distort the historical record and submerge the history of resistance, the slaves weren’t merely victims resigned to their unenviable fate. Resistance against the dictatorship of the slaveowners could always be found: according to some research, over 250 rebellions with more than ten participants took place during the era of slavery, including Nat Turner’s famed rebellion. Despite these valiant efforts, slavery was deeply rooted and persisted for over three centuries from its beginnings in the 16th century until the emancipation of the last slaves on June 19, 1865, nowadays commemorated as Juneteenth.

It’s worth emphasizing the bare facts—it’s easy to avoid confronting the full horror of American history by hiding behind the 150+ years that separate us from slavery. Millions and millions of people were born, lived, and died under a regime that was a hell on earth. This system lasted for longer than the time that distances 2020 from the end of slavery in 1865. The evil that this system fed, created, and unleashed changed America’s character irrevocably. Its consequences ramified and multiplied over time. They corrupt the present and threaten our future. Despite all this, many white people still don’t have courage to face the facts. To understand why, we have to delve into how exactly the Civil War concluded.

The Failed Reconstruction of the South

After four long years of internecine bloodshed, on April 9, 1865, the Civil War ended. Over 1.75 million people had died. Large parts of the South, in particular the farms of Georgia, had been devastated. The main cities of the South were destroyed, reduced to ashes. It was an opportune moment for a complete transformation, one which would have realized the unfulfilled dream of freedom for all, especially in a South that was basically feudal.

At the outset, it looked like the Radical Republicans, encouraged by the Union’s victory, would be willing to do everything necessary to impose a revolution on a defeated yet resistant South. The Radical Republicans wanted to bring the full emancipation of former slaves to completion: they wanted people of color to be able to obtain all their civil rights, including the vote, and they were ready to exterminate Confederate racism and chauvinism as soon as possible. They believed in complete equality between the races.

To achieve this program, the Radical Republicans advocated the empowerment of a comparatively weak, underdeveloped federal government. This position was the perfect antithesis of the Confederate philosophy of “states’ rights.” The Republicans created the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide benefits to emancipated people and help them navigate the new world of the labor market now that slavery had been abolished. Some white allies moved to the South to teach and train freed people of color. Congressional Republicans drafted a civil rights law and expected a simple process of approval.

Unfortunately, things wouldn’t prove quite so easy. Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, was highly conservative. He opposed land redistribution to people of color and vetoed the initial, moderate civil rights law, saying that he sympathized with African-Americans but couldn’t accept the expansion of federal power that would be necessary to implement the law. He claimed it was unconstitutional. In the South, an enormous wave of resistance arose—the KKK tried to use a campaign of terrorism and violence to maintain the antebellum racial order, and many people of color perished at the hands of unrepetant white supremacists.

In the end, the Republicans forced the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment had an enormous, tragic gap—it says “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States”—which nows serves as a legal justification for the system of slavery that exists in prisons and jails. Today, many prisoners are forced to work for less than a dollar per hour. The Republicans also impeached President Johnson. After Johnson’s impeachment, they passed the Acts of Reconstruction, placing the South under military control. 20,000 soldiers were dispatched to the South. The military governors protected the rights of recently freed people—they helped freedpeople exercise their rights by registering Black voters and supervising elections to prevent disenfranchisement. The soldiers also paralyzed the KKK: the military governments prosecuted KKK leaders and frustrated their plots to defend white supremacy. Liberal political coalitions formed in the South, based on the support of the occupying forces, the influx of Northerners who supported racial equality, and the new political role that Black people were playing. Meanwhile, President Grant, a Republican, worked to expand the federal government’s powers to ensure Southern compliance with the law. For a moment, it seemed that this method of securing racial justice might just work.

Sadly, this glimmer of hope didn’t last. With the passage of time, political will in the North diminished; keeping the South under control through military occupation no longer seemed as appealing to many Northern whites. Resistance to Reconstruction wasn’t only a question of Southern opposition: it also stemmed from deep-rooted Northern racism. In the presidential election of 1876, the precarious political coalitions that had kept Reconstruction intact collapsed. The election was very close, and nobody knew who’d truly prevailed. The Democratic Party exploited the opportunity this electoral chaos presented: it agreed to give the presidency to the Republican Party in exchange for the end of Reconstruction and the withdrawal of all federal soldiers from the South.

After federal forces withdrew, Southern whites seized control of state and local governments. In one notable instance in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, they staged a coup. Then, exploiting Northern exhaustion and fading interest, they passed discriminatory laws to deprive people of color of their rights. Although Black people enjoyed their legitimate rights for a brief period during Reconstruction, the exercise of those rights was dependent on active protection from the federal government, which had an expiration date. During that short-lived period, people of color were unfortunately unable to take control of the land, tools, and money that they needed to start new lives with true freedom. Because Black people lacked capital and economic power, during the era following Reconstruction, white plantation owners reinstituted a system very similar to slavery. The sharecropping system rivaled slavery in its brutality, and it enjoyed complete legality.

The Original Populist Movement

A new grassroots movement—the Farmers’ Alliance—sprouted up on the Great Plains after the failure of Reconstruction. It represented a revolt against unfettered capitalism and an attempt to rescue American democracy. The farmers suffered from the depredations of the great corporations of the East. They craved an end to monopoly power and Wall Street oligarchy. They developed a clear program with well-defined demands, all based on a major expansion of the regulatory powers of the federal government: land reform, progressive taxation, the nationalization of the banking sector, the nationalization of railways and telecommunications, the establishment of postal banks, and recognition of workers’ right to unionize. To achieve these goals, the Alliance organized demonstrations with bands and parades.

The Alliance’s efforts met with a certain measure of success: at the beginning of 1884, its members numbered 10,000; by 1890, their ranks had blossomed to over a million. The movement began in the Great Plains, but to create a durable coalition in the US, a social movement needs a nationally distributed base of support. Then as now, the American working class and lower classes were multiracial and lived in different parts of the country. To expand their reach, the Alliance had to overcome deep-rooted interethnic and interracial divisions in the South and in the cities of the North. This proved to be particularly problematic, just as difficult as combating corporations’ fierce resistance and smashing corporate control over the political process once and for all.

Take Tom Watson, a leader of the Populist movement in his home state of Georgia, as an example. At first, he ardently defended the civil rights of people of color: he advocated for equality at the ballot box and roundly denounced lynching. But after some electoral defeats in 1896 and a mysterious psychological alteration, Watson reversed course. Around 1900, he began to attack people of color with racist vitriol. Watson’s abrupt shift symbolized the Populists’ predicament. Confronted with irredentist, revanchist politics and a campaign of terror by racist paramilitary groups, the Populist movement hesitated—and that was the definitive end to Reconstruction and the promise of social democracy in the United States at the end of the 19th century.

The 1960s and a Frustrated Mass Movement

Fast forward six decades. The segregation regime in the South had endured, codified in state laws and daily practices. Unionization campaigns in the South in the 1940s and 1950s, including the CIO’s Operation Dixie, had failed, unable to surmount ingrained racism. But finally a well-coordinated movement, with capable leaders; a ready, determined rank and file; and decades of preparation, was on the march.

At first, the civil rights movement encountered resistance in the field of public opinion. In May 1961, 57% of people believed that demonstrations in the South (sit-ins, Freedom Buses, etc.) would harm the cause of desegregation. Even as late as May 1964, after many protests, 74% of people believed that mass demonstrations by people of color would damage racial equality. Only in the end of the 1960s, after five years of marches, and with the specter of violence hanging in the air, did public opinion finally change: in May of 1969, 63% of people believed that nonviolent protests could achieve racial equality.

How this change of heart occurred—and how the civil rights movement evolved during the 1960s—is instructive. Initially, and with good reason, reflecting the most pressing problems, it focused principally on liberal, formal equality: the right to desegregated public facilities, the right to vote without reprisals, the right to attend integrated schools, the right to be protected from labor discrimnation. Public demonstrations unquestionably succeeded, creating the push necessary for the federal government to act: LBJ didn’t have any other option but to take decisive legislative action to make racial equality more than empty words.

But Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders of the movement, including the queer democratic socialist Bayard Rustin, recognized that civil rights don’t count for much without complementary economic and social rights. King asked, referring to the sit-ins, “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?” In the years before his assassination, King began to pay attention to the need for sweeping structural changes to the economy. He was assassinated in the midst of a visit to Memphis to support a sanitary workers’ strike.

King was organizing a Poor People’s March in 1968 to win universal economic and human rights. King and other leaders of the movement wanted to unify poor whites, Native Americans, Chicanos, Black people, and other marginalized groups into a powerful coalition capable of transforming the United States into a humane nation, with democratic socialism for all and militarism and imperialism for none. The Black Panthers and other radical Black Power organizations emphasized separatist elements of Black empowerment in some cases, but they always underlined the importance of socialism and anti-imperialism in winning genuine liberty. Radical groups like the Black Panthers also operated social programs in their own communities, offering a grassroots model for social change.

Sadly, the spate of assassinations in the middle and late 1960s of leaders on the Left like MLK, RFK, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton, coupled with the bloody war in Vietnam, conspired to deflate the movement. Although the Poor People’s March still took place, it didn’t receive the attention it deserved, and the dreams of a more just country and world bled nearly to death, victims of the Cold War and violent reaction spearheaded by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the Republican Party. Instead of resisting this regression, the Democratic Party establishment united with the Republicans during the 1980s and 1990s to pass laws which spawned a grotesque system of mass incarceration and out-of-control policing, hiding behind anti-crime slogans. Meanwhile, the history of imperialism and interventionism that has destroyed the lives of people of color worldwide continued to unfold.

The Present

What lessons do these episodes of American history suggest for us today?

Firstly, the fight for the right to vote—and for the civic equality that it represents—has always been central in the struggle for racial justice: from the beginning, during Reconstruction, the Populist movement, and the civil rights movement. A common thread that connects American history is the elite attempt to limit the electorate—only by doing so can elites maintain their fidelity to the idea of formal democracy. The moment the electorate turns into a threat against racist and capitalist power, elites have always been willing to jettison their ostensible love for democracy, even going so far as to use terrorist violence to repress people of color.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, Reconstruction never attempted to correct economic injustice and the racial power imbalance. Former slaves were converted—against their will—into workers ready to enter the new labor market that the capitalists had instituted in the “reconstructed” South. Ex-slaves won neither reparations nor control over capital and the economic conditions that structured their lives. Congress didn’t pass land reform. The Thirteenth Amendment didn’t even abolish slavery completely. Reconstruction’s failure to change material conditions in the South and elsewhere was its weakest point. One might even say that the Civil War never truly concluded: we never successfully quashed the Confederacy’s racism and feudalism.

Defeated outright on the battlefield, the Confederacy switched tactics, transferring its hatred and opposition towards American state-building and national consolidation to new vessels: reactionary Republicans and Dixiecrats, paramilitary campaigns of racial terrorism, and white supremacist groups like the KKK. The battle between federal power and “states’ rights” has always had racial implications. “States’ rights” acts as a mask, a euphemistic facade, to preserve white supremacy. Where exactly the conflict between the federal government and local legislatures stands is a good indicator of the status of civil rights nationwide at any given moment in American history, with the shameful history of HUD redlining and the Trump administration’s Department of Justice serving as prominent exceptions to this tendency.

The sad collapse of the Populist movement shows us how racism has functioned as a weapon against grassroots movements. Racial tensions are a major obstacle that discourage unity among oppressed groups, even though marginalized groups share many of the same interests. As the author Isabel Wilkerson suggests in an extraordinary article (and in her new book), we should regard the United States’ racial system as a caste system akin to the one in India.

The civil rights movement’s experience shows us that protests can get results. On their own, they can change public opinion—certainly not overnight, but gradually. More importantly, they can force legislative changes. Those changes tend to persuade people more effectively and efficiently than almost anything else. The civil rights movement’s ultimate collapse in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a question of bad luck: the assassinations of MLK, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, and Fred Hampton effectively arrested the momentum of the movement’s radical and mainstream wings alike, as did the disaster in Vietnam.

The history of the civil rights and Populist movements also underscores the connection between the struggle for racial equality and the struggle for democratic socialism: a dialectical relationship exists between particular demands and universal demands. For tactical and moral reasons, in a country with a multicultural, multiracial working class, one must construct a coalition that unifies different groups to have the possibility of overthrowing a potent, united corporate elite.

An internationalist analysis is essential: the role that the US has played on the international stage is inseparable from our domestic situation. In other words, America’s racism against its own citizens and its racism against people of color in countries around the world are inextricably linked. Exactly for that reason, before he died, King began to fiercely critique the war in Vietnam, denouncing militarism, materialism, and imperialism as deadly triplets linked with racism, and warning that the United States was risking “spiritual death.” The inevitable consequence of a system that devalues the lives of a large part of its own people is that its disdain for humanity will infect every cell of the body politic, internally and externally.

We’ve seen this truth manifest disturbingly in Portland and other parts of the US, where federal troops have sought to repress protests using violent, illegal tactics. To safeguard white supremacy, Trump and his flunkies have seemed willing to impose all-out authoritarianism on American soil, a marked difference from the history of American imperialism, which ordinarily preserves some degree of separation between conditions in the imperial metropole and conditions in the periphery. If we cross that Rubicon, it won’t be a coincidence that the lurch into outright authoritarianism will have a great deal to do with racism. Nor was it a coincidence that federal troops used the arms and authority that the War on Terrorism, a war which has been a catastrophe for people of color in the global South, has given them.

But there are also some promising signs. The protests we’ve been witnessing have lasted a considerable amount of time, and a broad coalition appears to be forming to support the protesters. Although the vast majority of the protesters’ policy agenda hasn’t been realized yet, popular awareness of the urgent need for racial justice has risen rapidly. The deplorable economic situation in which we find ourselves also offers us an opportunity to mobilize the people to fight for economic justice. Also promising is the energy we felt on the streets this summer. Although it’s tempting to surrender in the face of all the formidable obstacles we face, the protesters appear committed, come what may.

American history is tragic. This chapter isn’t an exception: the extrajudicial execution of George Floyd by the police was particularly horrific. Even so, Floyd’s murder was yet another in an appallingly long list of similar murders. The implication of the term “tragedy” is that we can neither avoid nor change our fate. Fortunately, the protesters have demonstrated, in spite of everything, that they still believe our destiny can be changed.

Disturbing The Peace: UN Peacekeepers and Sexual Abuse (Part 2: Unabated Horrors)

By Devon Bowers

Author’s Note: This article and series focuses on sexual abuse and assault, with some graphic descriptions of such acts. Reader discretion is advised.

Nearing the end of the 20th century, there was an increase in United Nations peacekeeping missions around the world. While there were positive efforts to maintain and/or create peaceful environments where non-violent solutions could be pursued in war-torn nations, there was also a dark underbelly to these operations. Most prominently that peacekeepers would regularly abuse primarily women and girls, many of them having already fallen victim to government and rebel forces, they were to be victimized yet again but by the very people who should have provided security and stability.

Still worse, the United Nations itself would engage in cover ups of the abuse, hanging victims out to dry and suffer in silence. With the turn of the century, one would hope that there would new efforts would be put forth and sought after to hold abusers accountable, yet the horrors would continue unabated.

Ethiopia and Eritrea

In 1998, violence broke out between the neighboring African nations of Ethiopia and Eritrea regarding a border dispute, with the Organization of African Unity mediating a sort of peace between them, yet clashes occurred again in May 2000, ending with the OAU working out a cessation of hostilities and the UN sending in a peacekeeping mission to monitor the ceasefire and the border dispute in July 2000.[1]

The very next year it was reported that a former member of the Italian contingency had been involved in abuse, specifically the Italian military justice system was investigating them “for allegedly having sex with underage girls while serving in the Mission area.”[2] That same year, three Danish soldiers were sent home and charged with having sex with a thirteen year old Eritrean girl. This, coupled with the Italian story, enraged the local populace, with “diaspora Eritreans [accusing] UNMEE of trying to destroy their country by ‘bringing their sick nature with them.’”[3]

Though there were few reported incidents of abuse throughout the entire mission, it reveals that the cancer that is sexual abuse was still strong in peacekeeping operations.

Liberia

In September 2003, then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan requested that a peacekeeping force be deployed to Liberia to support the transitional government in their attempt to establish order and legitimacy, primarily stemming from the second Liberian civil war, with forces being deployed that month.[4]

The chief of the UN mission, Jacques Paul Klein, a French UN diplomat, emphasized that the zero-tolerance rule for sexual misconduct would be enforced and that anyone caught having sex with minors would be summarily repatriated.[5] Despite these reassurances and even the enforcement of a midnight curfew, abuse still occurred.

An internal UN letter from 2004, written by a UN Children’s Fund representative to the mission’s second-highest ranking official, stated that “girls as young as 12 years of age are engaged in prostitution, forced into sex acts and sometimes photographed by UN peacekeepers in exchange for $10 or food or other commodities,”[6] noted the failure to address several misconduct reports, and that the U.N. Deputy Secretary General, Louise Frechette, was pressuring leadership to crack down on sexual abuse.[7]

This information of the abuse of young girls was made all the worse when the UK branch of the children-oriented humanitarian organization Save The Children published a 2005 report which found that “girls as young as eight were selling sex for items such as food, beer, clothing, perfume or mobile phones [while others] were reported as having sex with adults in return for good school grades, video screenings or rides in cars”[8] and those bribing and raping these girls were primarily UN peacekeepers and agency staff. There was a stark hypocrisy as these same individuals would promote anti-sexual exploitation and abuse narratives, but would partake in that very exploitation on their off hours.

The girls would actively sell themselves to peacekeepers and aid workers as a way to make money, but there was still risk. Beyond getting sexually transmitted infections, if a girl were to become pregnant, they would quickly be disowned and blamed for their situation, despite her parents enjoying the extra funds that were being produced.[9]

The situation was extremely predatory, with “children [being] viewed as potential sexual conquests.” One example is Oretha, 15, and her 16 year old sister Sarah, who “go to the town's [Foya’s] main highway and beg from foreign aid workers in NGO-branded 4x4s who give them the equivalent of 40 pence [$0.54 USD] in exchange for sex.” If the highways were bare, “they go to the base where the UN peacekeepers are stationed and ask for food, but they say the peacekeepers, too, expect sex in return.”[10] The allegations of purchasing sex came up again in 2015 when a report from the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services noted that peacekeepers in Liberia were purchasing sex by offering money, jewelry, and cell phones, among a variety of items used to bribe and lure victims.[11] This effectively created a free-for-all of sorts where peacekeepers can abuse women and girls, with little to no concern in being held responsible for their actions.

While testimonies and reports are useful in examining the level of abuse that occurs, statistics help to create an even fuller picture, however even if one looks at the numbers, it is impossible to get an encompassing analysis.

The Numbers Game

In March 2007, the UN reported some positive changes regarding sexual abuse allegations, namely that the number of assaults in Liberia decreased from 45 to 30, with programs such as “a compulsory induction course for all military and civilian staff members to raise awareness about the effects and consequences of sexual exploitation and abuse”[12] and training local NGOs to spread the message about the UN’s program on preventing such abuse being credited for the decline. However, we have to question the numbers as there are serious problems with how they are calculated. There are two main problems: 1) the sole reliance of reporting of cases as a way of gathering data and the larger issues that stem from that and 2) the actual statistical data being so muddled that it is, at the very least, extremely difficult to get any hard numbers on the matter.

Though the UN touts its zero-tolerance policy, it is extremely important to note that the entire policy depends on people reporting abuse. While there may be actions that are an attempt to mitigate the chances of sexual abuse happening, overall, the ability of the UN to enforce its zero-tolerance policy is extremely difficult[13], as can be seen in the form of patrols. Patrols looking to curb and enforce sexual abuse laws still have difficulties as

situations that may be seen as suspicious with regards to SEA [sexual exploitation and abuse] often end up going unreported and unpunished or, if reported, garnering only a minor punishment. A typical example – and one we witnessed personally – is when a mission staffer is caught with a local person in the car. Because the couple (in this case a male UN employee and female local, in a UN vehicle parked by the side of the road at ten o’clock on a Friday night) was not caught en flagrante and neither admitted any wrongdoing (indeed, the woman slipped out of the car and quickly vanished), the end result was that the employee would only be reported as having an unauthorized personnel in his vehicle. [14]

Rather than deal similar problems through the proper channels, it was dealt with internally, generally resulting only in a peacekeeper losing their driver’s license. Not only does this deprive the victims of justice, but it also helps to skew reported numbers of sexual abuse, making the problem seem less prevalent than it actually is. Just as bad, however, is that even if there are reports from third parties, it’s almost impossible to substantiate the accusations due to the lack of physical evidence or eyewitnesses. Many times, when a victim comes forward, it devolves into a ‘he said, she said’ situation, again making enforcement near impossible.

A secondary problem with relying on reporting as the primary means of enforcing sexual abuse rules is that it assumes that sending up such incidents is a unit priority, that “reporting cases of SEA will trump other priorities – such as loyalty to colleagues or a desire not to get involved in someone else’s private life.”[15] To those ends, it has been found that many peacekeepers have an idea of what is and isn’t ‘legitimate’ sexual abuse and will act on those ideas when deciding whether or not to report.

The situation was looked at in-depth in 2013 when an independent report was conducted which evaluated the sexual abuse prevention efforts in UN missions in Haiti, Liberia, the Congo, and South Sudan, respectively. The team of was composed of General Paban J. Thapa, a retired Force Commander of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan, Dr. Thelma Awori, a retired Assistant Secretary General of UNDP Africa, and Dr. Catherine Lutz, a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

It was brought to light that there were a number of bureaucratic issues that resulted in a decrease in reports being sent up, such as:

 1) That there were multiple routes for reporting which created problems when attempting to track cases.

2) The lack of information sharing between the Office of Internal Oversight Services, the Conduct and Discipline team, and the military/police.

3) The military police weren’t out in the field, which denied “the Force Commander information about conduct and discipline that could be used to enforce the SEA policy and regulations.”[16]

4) There were poor investigation methods, which creates problems when trying to prosecute a case due to lack of evidence or evidence not meeting a high standard.

5) There was generally “a culture of enforcement avoidance, with managers feeling powerless to enforce anti-SEA rules, a culture of silence around reporting and discussing cases, and a culture of extreme caution with respect to the rights of the accused, and little accorded to the rights of the victim.”[17]

All of the problems reinforce one another, resulting in the victims being thrown away and ignored, while priority is given to abusers whose protection is multi-layered.

The conspiracy of silence even extended to victims, as many peacekeepers would simply pay them off and go about their way while the peacekeepers who would stand up for the protections and rights of victims would be stigmatized by their peers.[18]

Academic Kate Grady conducted a study on UN abuse statistics, which found in part that “the manner in which this data has been collated, presented and explained raises a number of questions as to the reliability of these statistics.”[19] For example, in 2004, statistics were provided on ‘cases,’ however the term itself was never defined and in subsequent UN reports, there was the use of phrases such as ‘allegations’ and ‘cases,’ which still lacked any definition.[20]

In 2007, a sliver of insight was provided regarding these terms, with a footnote explaining that “it should be noted that these numbers do not reflect the number of alleged perpetrators nor victims, as multiple allegations could correspond to one alleged perpetrator” and “conversely, a single allegation may be made in respect of more than one individual.” However, in later years, “the reports explain that ‘each allegation may involve more than one possible victim,’ but do not say whether any allegations cover more than one perpetrator.”[21] The lack of definitive definitions and explanations as to the details of each case or allegation and if they involve one peacekeeper and one victim or multiple peacekeepers with a single or multiple victims results in not only a dearth of understanding regarding sexual abuse, but also an inability to get a full view of the amount of abuse that is occurring.

The situation seems to be that the UN isn’t even attempting to measure the amount of abuse, but is rather “measuring the number of communications it receives about incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse.” Yet that leads to a different problem altogether, as it could mean that the measuring methods of these communications could result in having “incidents involving multiple victims or multiple perpetrators are masked since they are treated as only one allegation.”[22] This situation is made all the worse as the UN doesn’t say if it is able to account for cases that have been doubly reported and adjust accordingly.

On some level, there was an attempt to remedy this as UN Secretary General, António Guterres, stated that he would seek support in establishing a centralized repository of cases, which would be under the Special Coordinator on Improving the United Nations Response to Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, with the goals of “[accelerating] the provision of appropriate aid to victims, [helping] to regularize the initiation of appropriate administrative and criminal investigations, and [providing] system-wide empirical data for more in-depth analysis of events to aid in understanding patterns of misconduct, in order to devise more effective preventive measures.”[23] However, the overall bureaucratic and linguistic problems still majorly contribute to the underreporting of abuse cases.

Burundi

In 2004, UN peacekeepers were sent to Burundi to aid in a national reconciliation attempt to end the civil war between Hutus and Tutsis.[24]

From the outset, the UN was adamant about preventing sexual abuse, with head of the mission and Canadian diplomat, Carolyn McAskie stating in an interview that the UN was enacting plans to curb the chances of abuse happening, such as having certain areas of a town be considered off limits and the threat of dismissal being used for troops who attempt to solicit prostitutes.[25]

This was followed up by discussions with battalion commanders on the issue and creating some level of accountability by having commanders face increased scrutiny as greater training and accountability was implemented. There was also a policy change which required that members report abuse, even if it was only suspect.[26]

Unfortunately, abuse still took place, with two peacekeepers being found guilty of having sex with prostitutes, one of whom was a minor.[27] Thankfully, that was the only reported case and the UN departed in 2007.

Ivory Coast

UN peacekeepers deployed to the Ivory Coast in 2004 to aid in ending the nation’s civil war and guiding it to have free and fair presidential elections.[28]

In 2007, the UN began to investigate serious accusations of abuse involving Moroccan soldiers having sex with “a large number of underage girls,”[29] which resulted in an entire battalion being confined to their barracks.

More information on the amount of abuse that was going on was brought to light via Save The Children with their 2008 report entitled No One To Turn To: The Under-reporting of Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Aid Workers and Peacekeepers.

Based on field work done in Southern Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire and Haiti, it was found that “children as young as six [were] trading sex with aid workers and peacekeepers in exchange for food, money, soap and, in a very few cases, luxury items such as mobile phones.”[30] There was even testimony from Ivory Coast children who discussed what went on in their respective towns. One boy stated that the peacekeepers “[asked] them for various types of favors,” while others went into more detail:

Sometimes they ask us to find them girls. They especially ask us for girls of our age. Often it will be between eight and ten men who will share two or three girls. When I suggest an older girl, they say that they want a young girl, the same age as us.

[…]

For us, we said to ourselves that even if it is bad, we are gaining something from it too. So we continue because we then get the benefits, such as money, new t-shirts, souvenirs, watches and tennis shoes. They also used their mobile phones to film the girls.[31]

The utter lack of morality in these peacekeepers is truly revealed here in that they are literally using children as middle men in order to abuse and denigrate other children, going about and bribing people who are in desperate need of bare necessities and preying upon them. The worst aspect is that local authorities weren’t able to unable to prosecute the perpetrators, in spite of knowing their identities, due to insufficient evidence and lack of cooperation.[32]

The use of bribing underage girls for sex was further confirmed in 2011 when a U.S. Embassy cable was released by Wikileaks. The cable focused on peacekeepers from Benin that were in the town of Toulepleu, where it was found that “parents were encouraging their daughters to sleep with the peacekeepers so they would provide for them.”[33] This only reveals the extent to which the abuse had been normalized, to the point that parents would encourage their children to sleep with UN troops. A total of 16 Beninese peacekeepers were subsequently barred.[34]

Still, some were never punished, such as in 2008, when it was reported that that ten UN peacekeepers gang-raped a 13 year old girl, with her saying that they grabbed her, threw her on the ground, and raped her. ‘Elizabeth’ stated “I was terrified. Then they just left me there bleeding.”[35] Yet no action was taken against the soldiers and worse, it was found that aid workers had been sexually abusing children, both boys and girls. There was also the case of fourteen Moroccan soldiers, where information “including DNA evidence showing that some had fathered children” [36] was considered inconclusive and so the Moroccan government dropped all charges against the soldiers.

The mission came to a close in 2017.

Haiti

During February 2004, among the US-motivated and deeply controversial[37] departure of Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the UN moved in to clamp down on the fighting that sparked up in multiple cities around the country.[38]

At the start of the operation, it seemed that the zero-tolerance policy was taken seriously, with one high level military commander saying that he was “very concerned about sexual exploitation” with a senior police official adding that its wrongness “[needed] be drummed into people. It has to be reinforced all the time.”[39] Despite these strong assertions of zero tolerance, many Haitians were not convinced that the UN took the issue seriously.

In February 2005, two UN soldiers were suspended after having sex with a prostitute[40], however, this was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the interactions between prostitutes and UN forces. The humanitarian organization Refugees International issued a report where it was stated that “prostitutes haunt the streets every evening and hang out in many of the bars frequented by UN staff,”[41] with one Haitian man saying that such establishments actively fed into the increase in prostitution and that the police were even involved.

Bolstering the argument that the UN presence aided in the proliferation of prostitution, a Haitian women’s group stated: “We’ve seen an increase in prostitution since MINUSTAH came. In 1994, we had a lot of problems with the Multinational Forces. The [peacekeepers] bring their bad habits with them to Haiti, but they do not bring change.”[42]

Interestingly enough, the ‘zero contact’ policy that was enacted in Haiti led to “increased complaints of sexual harassment by UN female personnel, both local and international,”[43] which when added onto the reluctance of victims to come forward, created a de facto wall of silence which restricted the UN’s ability to investigate allegations and get a full understanding of the problem.

The peacekeepers often contributed to larger, ongoing problems in Haiti. Violence, both physical and sexual, already came from criminals and the Haitian National Police. So the UN peacekeepers, primarily the ones from Brazil and Jordan[44], simply added on yet another layer of destruction, pain, and misery for a populace that was already bearing massive political and economic burden. This was made all the worse when those peacekeepers were the ones who would supposedly bring protection and stability but delivered the opposite.

In late 2006, the BBC revealed the amount of sexual abuse that was ongoing in Haiti, with one 11 year old girl reporting sexual abuse by peacekeepers. Another 14 year old girl described her personal horror of having been abducted and raped inside a UN naval base two years prior, where “despite detailed medical and circumstantial evidence, the allegation was dismissed by the UN for lack of evidence”[45] and the attacker was repatriated to their nation of origin.

There were peacekeepers who would regularly take advantage of the cash-strapped and desperate population for their own depraved ends, with one incident occurring of a “14-year-old girl who told of the peacekeeper who offered her jelly, sweets and a few dollars for sex with her and her friend - a child of just 11 years.”[46] BBC reporter Mike Williams told of one especially horrific story.

Sarah (not her real name) is a fragile looking girl of 16. She says that two years ago, she was raped by a Brazilian soldier serving with the UN mission there.

She stared at the ground while we talked and, almost in a whisper, she explained what happened: "He held me down by the arms and held both my wrists, twisting them back and we struggled together. And then he raped me."

Her mother cried while she recalled that day: "When I found her I didn't recognize my own child," she says. "She had the face of a dead person - I started to cry out, she couldn't tell me what had happened."[47]

Once again, there was insufficient evidence to find the perpetrator guilty of any crimes. This was a regular occurrence unfortunately.

In some cases, there would be problems due to relatives, such as with ‘Natasha,’ who was raped by a Sri Lankan peacekeeper in 2004, but whose mother forbade her from making a complaint for two years due to the stigma attached to rape.[48] Such actions only helped to muddy the waters with regards to testimony and evidence, effectively aiding the offending party in avoiding justice. Though one of the UN’s biggest miscarriages of justice would happen in 2011.

In September 2011, a video began circulating on the internet which showed a Haitian man being sexually assaulted by a group of Uruguayan peacekeepers. Eventually it was found that the assault had occurred in July, but the video, which showed four UN troops attacking Johnny Jean, only surfaced in the following months.

Two young Haitian men had come across the video while looking at a peacekeeper’s cell phone when they were exchanging music and one of the men recognized Jean and transferred the video to his own personal device, turning the video over to a local journalist soon after. The two men later met with a UN official who immediately denied any allegations, but was then shown the video.[49]

A preliminary investigation done by the UN “found that the men did not sexually abuse the Haitian teen but that they committed misconduct by allowing a civilian into their barrack and could face severe penalties,”[50] however, this is in direct conflict with information provided by medical professionals which proved that Jean “had sustained injuries consistent with having been sexually assaulted,”[51] as well as the video itself being sexual in nature. It should be emphasized, though, that there was evidence of sexual assault not just in the immediate aftermath, but could still be found five weeks after the incident.[52] From the beginning of the situation, not only do we see the immediate denial by UN officials, but then further rejection of something that is crystal clear.

Eventually, the accused soldiers were freed due to the case having stalled,[53] the details of which are rather intriguing. Jean was scheduled to testify against his attackers, with a UN spokesperson stating that the soldiers would be free until Jean could be located to provide his testimony, however he had to actually be in Uruguay to testify. [54] Actions such as these simply reinforce an observation made by the US Institute of Peace, which noted that there was a need to create effective programs to assist victims, especially when they themselves nor the UN were unable to hold abusers accountable. [55]

Another travesty of justice would take place in 2012 when Pakistani peacekeepers were accused of sexually assaulting a 14 year old boy. UN spokesperson Martin Nesirky stated that Pakistani authorities had said that the guilty individuals would be punished, “including through dishonorable discharge from service with loss of benefits and imprisonment, the latter sentence to be served immediately on return to Pakistan.”[56] Unfortunately, the punishment was laughable, as the perpetrators only served a single year in prison.[57] Even worse, was how the UN dealt with it. They agreed to have the soldiers tried in a closed trial at a Pakistani military court and took at face value assurances that there would be financial compensation for the victims. Unsurprisingly, no compensation occurred, the troops were essentially given a slap on the wrist, and Pakistani soldiers still continued going over to Haiti, unabated.

UN Assistant Secretary for Field Support, Anthony Banbury, gave some major insight when he spoke to the New York Times about the case: “People can always say punishment was too light or whatever, but the system worked as it should.”[58] (emphasis added) In doing so, he reveals that the manner in which the system works is that the UN plays dumb and pretends that national militaries will try their soldiers fairly, while making no effort to hold them accountable, and willingly leaves victims out to dry.

Similarly to Liberia and the Ivory Coast, peacekeepers in Haiti were found to have transactional sex with women in exchange for basic needs like cash, food, medication, and more. The UN’s Office of Internal Oversight stated in the aforementioned draft report that there was “significant underreporting” of abuse and noted further problems, most prominently how “a third of alleged sexual abuse involves people younger than 18, [assistance] to victims is ‘severely deficient,”[59] and that investigations regularly took over a year to complete.

The year 2015 actually saw an increase in sexual abuse cases, with a total of 99 compared to 80 in 2014.[60] A UN report stated that the Secretary General would work within his authority to ensure that abusers would be held responsible “through disciplinary actions or criminal accountability measures when so warranted” and that the Secretary General “was determined to take measures to prevent misconduct.”[61] To those ends, a number of new initiatives were to be launched, including a mandatory e-learning program on sexual abuse, asking that troop contributing nations’ pre-deployment training be up to UN standards, and the development of a complaint reception mechanism to encourage people to come forward.[62]

In the following years, there was also a change to policy as António Guterres, a Portuguese politician and diplomat, took over from Ban Ki-Moon in 2017. The new Secretary General wanted all personnel to have written statements saying that they understood and would abide by the UN’s policy against sexual exploitation and abuse.[63]

New ideas were being put into place, senior leaders were to issue management letters to “their governing bodies certifying that all allegations have been reported and appropriate action is taken on them,” screening mechanisms would work to ensure that abusers weren’t able to leave one element of the UN only to be hired in another, and anyone involved in field activities would “be required to carry the ‘no excuses’ pocket card that restates our rules and spell out how to report allegations,”[64] among other reforms.

On the topic of aiding victims, little was done. The UN Field Support Chief, Atul Khare, an Indian diplomat, spoke of the creation of a trust fund to get victims the psychological, medical, and legal help they needed, though he did note “It would be funded voluntarily, but also from the salaries withheld from those who face significant allegations which have been substantiated.”[65] This simply hearkens back to the problem that victims are not prioritized in the process of seeking justice. Unfortunately, these changes would not be enough to prevent some of the most egregious abuse that was to occur during the mission.

In 2007, it was uncovered that over 100 Sri Lankan peacekeepers were alleged to have engaged in sexual abuse and were sent packing. More specifically they were accused of transactional sex, with UN spokeswoman Michele Montas adding that “there is the question of some underage girls.”[66] More horrors were to come though, as these allegations didn’t stop other Sri Lankans from coming over to aid in operations. The Associated Press broke the story in 2017, in which they found a child sex ring was ongoing, where young girls were regularly abused.

The Sri Lankan peacekeepers wanted sex from girls and boys as young as 12. “I did not even have breasts,” said a girl, known as V01 — Victim No. 1. She told U.N. investigators that over the next three years, from ages 12 to 15, she had sex with nearly 50 peacekeepers, including a “Commandant” who gave her 75 cents.[67]

It was found that between 2004 and 2007, 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers, at minimum, exploited nine children. Not a single person was imprisoned.

Interestingly enough, the UN data, which draws information focused on sexual abuse over a 12 year period, was found to be incomplete, varying in the amount of details especially for cases before 2010, and that “hundreds of cases were closed with little or no explanation.”[68] (emphasis added) While the soldiers involved in the sex ring were sent home, they were” still in the Sri Lankan military as of [2016]”[69] and the UN still took soldiers from Sri Lanka and sent them to Haiti in spite of the child sex ring.

A Sri Lankan general, Major General Jagath Dias, was sent in 2013 to investigate the matter, though he may not have been the best person for the job due to the fact that he was most likely a war criminal, who stood “accused of attacking civilians and bombing a church, a hospital and other humanitarian outposts in 2009, during the fierce last months of Sri Lanka’s civil war.”[70] The AP found that “Sri Lanka has never prosecuted a single soldier for sexual assault or sexual misconduct while serving in a peacekeeping mission abroad.” (emphasis added) Undeterred by the accusations against the general and the lack of discipline in the Sri Lankan army, the U.N. still accepted Dias as the investigator and said they were “working with the Sri Lankan government on enhanced screening for prospective peacekeepers,”[71] such as providing a backlog for all soldiers they send over so they could be screened by the UN.

While the mission ended in 2017[72], there were still lingering effects, especially for the children who had been fathered by peacekeepers. Haitians created new terms to describe them, “bébés casques bleus (blue helmet babies) or ‘les enfants abandonnés par la MINUSTAH’ (the children who are abandoned by the MINUSTAH),”[73] something that denotes how they were ‘othered’ in a way and a group distinct from average Haitians.

The peacekeepers created major rifts in Haiti, as they would make lavish promises to girls, “they would say that they are going to pay for their school, allow them to go to the university”[74] but nothing would materialize.

These false promises would lead to frustration later on for women who wound up birthing these peacekeeper’s children, where the mother would be the sole provider. Many of these girls were under the age of 18 at the time of their relationships with UN troops and when they had children with them, which caused a rift in not only their familial relations, as was expounded upon by one woman:

Now, the child is 4 years old and I haven’t ever received support from an NGO, from the Brazilians, from the Haitian state. It’s only me that’s giving to the child to eat because I can’t pay for school for the child… When I was with the Brazilian, I was 14 years old. I went to school at a Christian school. When I became pregnant, my father kicked me out of the house. And now I do work for someone who gives me 25 gourdes [about $0.35 USD] so that me and my child can eat.[75]

While the soldiers left, the scars of abuse echoed and lingered, casting a dark, haunting shadow over the island nation.

Sudan

In 2005, following the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which formally ended Sudan’s 21 year civil war, the UN dispatched soldiers in order to aid in its implementation, demine areas, and help repatriate refugees.[76]

Within two years, the UN was already sending soldiers back home. January 2007 saw four Bangladeshi soldiers being sent home for alleged sexual abuse.[77] That same month, it was reported that “peacekeeping and civilian staff based in Juba are accused of picking up young children and forcing them to have sex,”[78] with peacekeepers raping and abusing children as young as 12, with it having begun in 2005 and indications emerging within months of international troops initially arriving. Due to the economic disparities, some people who were abused want to continue the situation in order to have at least some money, such as was with one 14 year old boy by the name of Jonas who told of his own abuse.

"A man in a white car drove past and asked me if I wanted to get into the car with him. I saw that the car was a UN car because it was white with the black letters on it. The man had a badge on his clothes. When he stopped the car, we got out, he put a blindfold on me and started to abuse me. It was painful and went on for a long time. When it was over we went back to the place we had been, and he pushed me out of the car and left."

Jonas now returns to the same place regularly in the hope of being picked up and paid something for his services. "I know it is a terrible thing to do but I see the UN cars around late at night by the drinking places and I sit there in the hope of being picked up. If I get 1000 SD ($3) a day then that is a good day."[79]

Not much abuse was reported, but the fact that something like this was going on for two years coupled with there being known cases of under-reporting, only shows that abuse was occurring, but not reported on in the media. The very fact that victims would continue their own abuse to have money highlights the desperation and depravity of the situation.

While the UN Sudan mission ended in 2011, when South Sudan became its own nation[80], forces remained in Darfur until 2020.[81] Still, another mission was set up immediately in the new nation of South Sudan. The UN still has ongoing missions and in those can be seen an echo of cold and uncaring environment for victims that has been perpetuated for three decades.

Notes

[1] United Nations Peacekeeping, Ethiopia and Eritrea - UNMEE – Background, https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/past/unmee/background.html

[2] United Nations, UN Mission in Ethiopia, Eritrea to probe misconduct charges against former peacekeeper, https://news.un.org/en/story/2001/08/11652-un-mission-ethiopia-eritrea-probe-misconduct-charges-against-former-peacekeeper (August 27, 2001)

[3] Elise Fredrikke Barth, Karen Hostens, Louise Olsson, Inger Skjelsbæk, Gender Aspects of Conflict Interventions: Intended and Unintended Consequences, Peace Research Institute Oslo Center on Gender, Peace, and Security, https://gps.prio.org/utility/DownloadFile.ashx?id=1133&type=publicationfile, pg 13

[4] The New Humanitarian, Annan asks for 15,000 UN peacekeepers for Liberia, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/report/46188/liberia-annan-asks-15000-un-peacekeepers-liberia (September 16, 2003)

[5] Relief Web, Sexual exploitation in Liberia: Are the conditions ripe for another scandal? https://reliefweb.int/report/liberia/sexual-exploitation-liberia-are-conditions-ripe-another-scandal (April 20, 2004)

[6] The New Humanitarian, UNMIL investigating alleged sexual misconduct by peacekeepers in four incidents, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2005/05/03/unmil-investigating-alleged-sexual-misconduct-peacekeepers-four-incidents (May 3, 2005)

[7] Colum Lynch, “U.N. Faces More Accusations of Sexual Misconduct,” Washington Post, March 13, 2005 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30286-2005Mar12.html)

[8] David Fickling, “Aid staff abusing Liberian children, charity says,” The Guardian, May 8, 2006 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/may/08/westafrica.davidfickling)

[9] Ibid

[10] Jenny Kleeman, “Liberia’s childhood horror,” The Guardian, October 16, 2009 (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/oct/16/liberia-rape)

[11] James Butty, “UN Peacekeepers in Liberia Accused of Buying Sex,” Voice of America News, June 12, 2015 (https://www.voanews.com/africa/un-peacekeepers-liberia-accused-buying-sex)

[12] UN News, UN in Liberia report shows decline in sex abuse allegations; envoy says some progress, https://news.un.org/en/story/2007/03/211582-un-liberia-report-shows-decline-sex-abuse-allegations-envoy-says-some-progress (March 9, 2007)

[13] Kathleen M. Jennings, Protecting Whom? Approaches to Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in UN Peacekeeping Operations, Fafo Research Foundation, http://lastradainternational.org/lsidocs/fafo_approaches_abuse_0309.pdf (2008), pg 25

[14] Ibid, pg 26

[15] Ibid, pg 28

[16] Thelma Awori, Catherine Lutz, Paban J. Thapa, Final Report: Expert Mission to Evaluate Risks to SEA Prevention Efforts  in MINUSTAH, UNMIL, MONUSCO, and UNMISS, https://web.archive.org/web/20150709034934/http://www.aidsfreeworld.org/Newsroom/Press-Releases/2015/~/media/Files/Peacekeeping/2013%20Expert%20Team%20Report%20FINAL.pdf (November 3, 2013), pg 3

[17] Ibid

[18] Ibid, pg 7

[19] Kate Grady, “Sex, Statistics, Peacekeepers and Power: UN Data on Sexual Exploitation and Abuse and the Quest for Legal Reform,” Modern Law Review 79:6 (November 2016), pg 936

[20] Ibid

[21] Ibid, pg 937

[22] Ibid

[23] United Nations, General Assembly, Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and abuse: a new approach, A/71/818, February 28, 2017 (https://peacekeeping.un.org/sites/default/files/sg_report_a_71_818_special_measures_for_protection_from_sexual_exploitation_and_abuse.pdf), pg 11

[24] UN Peacekeeping, The United Nations in Burundi: Peacekeeping Mission Completes its Mandate, https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/past/onub/photos.pdf (December 31, 2006)

[25] Relief Web, IRIN interview with Carolyn McAskie, head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Burundi, https://reliefweb.int/report/burundi/irin-interview-carolyn-mcaskie-head-un-peacekeeping-mission-burundi (November 5, 2004)

[26] Global Policy Forum, UN Reforms Aim to End Sexual Abuse by Peacekeepers, https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/199/40951.html (May 25, 2005)

[27] BBC, UN sex abuse sackings in Burundi, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4697465.stm (July 19, 2005)

[28] Joe Bavier, "U.N. closes Ivory Coast mission, security remains fragile," Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ivorycoast-un-peacekeepers-idUSKBN19L1VK (June 30, 2017)

[29] Claudia Parson, “Moroccan UN troops accused of abuse in Ivory Coast,” Reuters, July 20, 2007 (https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=https://jp.reuters.com/article/idUSN20327686&prev=search&pto=aue)

[30] Corinna Csáky, Save The Children UK, No One To Turn To: The Under-reporting of Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Aid Workers and Peacekeepers, https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/content/dam/global/reports/education-and-child-protection/no-one-to-turn-to.pdf (March 2008), pg 5

[31] Ibid, pg 6

[32] Ibid, pg 16

[33] Daily Mail, UN peacekeepers 'traded food for sex with underage girls' in west Africa, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2032951/WikiLeaks-releases-U-S-diplomatic-cable-exposing-scandal-U-N-peacekeepers-traded-sex-food-underage-girls.html (September 2, 2011)

[34] Defence Web, United Nations bars 16 peacekeepers from Benin following Ivory Coast sex abuse claims, https://www.defenceweb.co.za/joint/diplomacy-a-peace/united-nations-bars-16-peacekeepers-from-benin-following-ivory-coast-sex-abuse-claims/ (September 6, 2011)

[35] BBC, Peacekeepers 'abusing children,’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7420798.stm (May 27, 2008)

[36] Carla Ferstman, Criminalizing Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Peacekeepers, United States Institute of Peace, https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/SR335-Criminalizing%20Sexual%20Exploitation%20and%20Abuse%20by%20Peacekeepers.pdf (2013), pg 4

[37] Scott Cooper, Annals of American Imperialism: The 1991 Coup in Haiti, Left Voice, https://www.leftvoice.org/annals-of-american-imperialism-the-1991-coup-in-haiti (September 29, 2020)

See also: Ansel Herz, Kim Ives, “WikiLeaks Haiti: The Aristide Files,” The Nation, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wikileaks-haiti-aristide-files/ (August 5, 2011)

[38] UN Peacekeeping, MINUSTAH Fact Sheet, https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/minustah

[39] Relief Web, Haiti: Sexual exploitation by peacekeepers likely to be a problem, https://reliefweb.int/report/haiti/haiti-sexual-exploitation-peacekeepers-likely-be-problem (May 7, 2005)

[40] Haiti Democracy Project, U.N. Soldiers Suspended in Prostitution Incident, https://haitipolicy.org/2005/02/u-n-soldiers-suspended-in-prostitution-incident (February 24, 2005)

[41] Sarah Martin, Must Boys Be Boys? Ending Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in U.N. Peacekeeping, Refugees International, https://web.archive.org/web/20051023224811/http://www.refugeesinternational.org/files/6976_file_FINAL_MustBoys.pdf (October 2005), pg 5

[42] Ibid, pg 6

[43] Ibid, pg 7

[44] Royce A. Hutson, Athena R. Kolbe, “Human rights abuse and other criminal violations in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: a random survey of households,” The Lancet 368:9538 (2006), pg 872

[45] BBC, UN troops face child abuse claims, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6195830.stm (November 30, 2006)

[46] BBC News, Fears Over Haiti Child ‘Abuse,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6159923.stm (November 30, 2006)

[47] Ibid

[48] Reed Lindsay, “U.N. effort dogged by sex claims / Peacekeepers based in Haiti the latest accused of abuse,” SF Gate, https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/U-N-effort-dogged-by-sex-claims-Peacekeepers-2481908.php (December 22, 2006)

[49] Democracy Now, Video of U.N. Peacekeepers’ Sexual Assault of Haitian Prompts Calls to Focus on Post-Quake Rebuilding, https://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/6/video_of_un_peacekeepers_sexual_assault (September 6, 2011)

[50] Trenton Daniel, Raul O. Garces, “Haiti: Boy Who Claims Sexual Assault By Uruguay Peacekeepers Supported By Demonstrators,” Huffington Post, September 6, 2011 (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/haiti-sexual-assault-un-peacekeepers_n_950159)

[51] Ansel Hertz, Matthew Mosk, Rym Momtaz, “U.N. Peacekeepers Accused of Sexually Assaulting Haitian Teen,” ABC News, September 2, 2011 (https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/peacekeepers-accused-sexually-assaulting-haitian-teen/story?id=14437122)

[52] Huffington Post, September 6, 2011

[53] Ansel Herz, Matthew Mosk, Brian Ross, “Haiti Outrage: UN Soldiers from Sex Assault Video Freed,” ABC News, January 6, 2012 (https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/soldiers-held-sex-assault-freed/story?id=15306826)

[54] Maha Hilal, Fawwaz Mustafa, Michelle Seyler, Zoe Walden, Tipping The Scales: Is The United Nations Justice System Promoting Accountability in the Peacekeeping Missions or Undermining It? Government Accountability Project, https://web.archive.org/web/20140418010726/https://whistleblower.org/sites/default/files/FinalTippingTheScales.pdf (September 2012)

[55] Ibid

[56] UN News, Haiti: Three UN peacekeepers repatriated for sexual abuse, https://news.un.org/en/story/2012/03/406312-haiti-three-un-peacekeepers-repatriated-sexual-abuse (March 13, 2012)

[57] Amnesty International, Convictions Against UN Peacekeepers in Haiti Do Not Serve Justice, https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2012/03/convictions-against-un-peacekeepers-haiti-do-not-serve-justice/ (March 15, 2012)

[58] Jake Johnston, UN Points to MINUSTAH as “Model of Accountability” for Sexual Abuse Cases, Center For Economic and Policy Research, https://cepr.net/un-points-to-minustah-as-model-of-accountability-for-sexual-abuse-cases/ (May 27, 2015)

[59] Justin Moyer, “Report: U.N. peacekeepers in Haiti had ‘transactional sex’ with hundreds of poor women,” Washington Post, June 11, 2015 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/11/report-u-n-peacekeepers-in-haiti-had-transactional-sex-with-hundreds-of-poor-women/)

[60] United Nations, General Assembly, Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse, A/70/729, February 26, 2016 (https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/a_70_729.pdf), pg 2

[61] Ibid, pg 7

[62] Ibid, pgs 15-16

[63] Somini Sengupta, “U.N. Plans Reforms to Stamp Out Sexual Abuse by Peacekeepers,” New York Times, March 8, 2017 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/world/americas/united-nations-antonio-guterres-peackeepers.html)

[64] UN Permanent Missions, SG launches new strategy to fight Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, https://www.un.int/news/sg-launches-new-strategy-fight-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse (March 9, 2017)

[65] UN News, ‘We must not allow protectors to become predators’ – UN field support chief, https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/03/523592-we-must-not-allow-protectors-become-predators-un-field-support-chief (March 4, 2016)

[66] Reuters, Peacekeepers Accused of Abuse in Haiti, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-un-abuse-srilanka/peacekeepers-accused-of-abuse-in-haiti-idUKN0259118620071102 (November 2, 2007)

[67] Paisley Dodds, “UN child sex ring left victims but no arrests,” Associated Press, April 12, 2017 (https://apnews.com/article/e6ebc331460345c5abd4f57d77f535c1)

[68] Ibid

[69] Ibid

[70] Katy Daigle, Paisley Dodds, “UN Peacekeepers: How a Haiti child sex ring was whitewashed,” Associated Press, May 26, 2017 (https://apnews.com/article/96f9ff66b7b34d9f971edf0e92e2082c)

[71] Ibid

[72] Somini Sengupta, “U.N. Votes Unanimously to End Peacekeeping Mission in Haiti,” New York Times, April 13, 2017 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/world/americas/un-peacekeeping-haiti-cholera.html)

[73] Susan Bartels, Sabine Lee, “They Put a Few Coins in Your Hand to Drop a Baby in You: A Study of Peacekeeper-fathered Children in Haiti,” International Peacekeeping 27:2 (December 2019), pg 182

[74] Ibid, pg 190

[75] Ibid, pg 192

[76] United Nations, Security Council, Security Council Establishes UN Mission in Sudan for Initial Period of Six Months Unanimously Adopting Resolution 1590, SC/8343, March 24, 2005 (https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/sc8343.doc.htm)

[77] ReliefWeb, Sudan: Four peacekeepers accused of sex abuse already repatriated - UN mission in Sudan, https://reliefweb.int/report/sudan/sudan-four-peacekeepers-accused-sex-abuse-already-repatriated-un-mission-sudan (January 4, 2007)

[78] Kate Holt, Sarah Hughes, “UN staff accused of raping children in Sudan,” The Telegraph, January 4, 2007 (https://web.archive.org/web/20080608090750/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1538476/UN-staff-accused-of-raping-children-in-Sudan.html)

[79] Ibid

[80] UN Peacekeeping, UNMIS: United Nations Mission in Sudan, https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/past/unmis/

[81] Michelle Nichols, “U.N., African Union peacekeeping mission in Sudan's Darfur to end Dec. 31,” Reuters, December 23, 2020 (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/un-african-union-peacekeeping-mission-in-sudans-darfur-to-end-dec-31/ar-BB1caayO)

A Brutal History: Slave Patrols and Building a Racist System with Political Power

By Kaity Baril

In the US, the modern context of ruthless policing or oppressive social control originated as far back as the 1790s. The Charleston City Watch and Guard controlled the movement of the slave population at the time. The Guard was armed with swords and pistols, and it imposed a nine o’clock curfew for Black residents of the city. White slave owners wanted to prevent uprisings and revolts. Patrols closely monitored those in captivity, especially when they were working outside of the sight or the control of the enslaver. 

The creation of the first publicly funded police force, in Boston, was in the 1830s. By the 1890s, every major city in the United States had a police presence, born from racist, slave patrols in the era of slavery and relied on through  Black Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. 

Now, rather than upholding slavery, cops enforce laws and policies similarly meant to control the lives and movement of Black people. The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period of enormous social turmoil that raised the possibility of revolution. All fundamental institutions of society—the government, the “free” market, the military and war, the police, the nuclear family, white supremacy and others—were challenged. The elite, white, ruling class responded to these direct challenges to their power with Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Crime,” followed by Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” which were jumping off points for subsequent administrations to maintain their preferred social order. The “War on Drugs,” renewed with vigor by Ronald Reagan, still rages, and the U.S. has had the highest incarceration rate in the world since at least 2010. The increase of law enforcement in schools creates a “school to prison pipeline,” in which out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests are increasingly used to deal with student misbehavior, especially for minor incidents, and huge numbers of children and youth are pushed out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Not surprisingly, children of color (as well as children with disabilities and children from other vulnerable populations) are disproportionately targeted with these punitive measures.

During the 1980s, the ideology of “zero tolerance” school discipline originates from the “get tough on drugs and crime” policies of that era. This was also the dawn of mandatory minimum sentencing laws — fixed sentences for individuals convicted of a drug crime, with no judicial leniency allowed.  More than 1.6 million people are arrested, prosecuted, incarcerated, placed under criminal justice supervision, and/or deported each year on a drug law violation. “Three-strikes” laws, now in place in 28 states after first appearing in 1994, require anyone previously convicted of two or more violent crimes or serious felonies to receive a life sentence upon a third felony conviction,, regardless of the circumstances or, as in California, sometimes even the severity of the offense (e.g. felony petty theft).  

The Clinton Administration’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was the largest crime bill in the history of the country. It provided 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons, and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs.

The “War on Terror,” following the September 11, 2001 attacks, was a catalyst for the use of military grade weapons on protestors, most conspicuously in Ferguson in 2014, following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown. So began the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Cops are Tools of Class Oppression and Mass Incarceration

For decades, starting in 1966, school districts across the country employed the “Officer Friendly” program that brought cops into local Elementary classrooms. Their goal was to indoctrinate children with the belief that the police are an indispensable part of society, who not only uphold the law but protect them. Perhaps this is because the police were established to protect the interests of the wealthy. Racial violence has always been a part of the mission to protect private, crooked institutions.

The institutions that the State has endowed with the most direct power over people’s lives, and a disproportionate share of tax dollars, are the police, prisons, courts, and the military. These enact forms of legalized punishment and repression under the guise of neutrality by being “bound to laws.” In reality, the laws primarily serve one class: the wealthy. Cops are the primary line of defense for a small fraction of the U.S. population – a handful of private corporate owners. A clear example of this is the role police played in the housing crisis. 

The number of empty, unsellable homes far exceeds the number of homeless. Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S. If policing served the people, cops would have arrested the bankers and the white collar criminals who made enormous profits by manipulating the housing market, even after their schemes created a massive global recession in 2008, and a spike in homelessness. Cops would be helping to seize homes to end, not create, homelessness. Yet evictions continue on a daily basis.

Who does policing target? Police are typically deployed to criminalize poverty, concentrating their efforts on criminalizing those with dark skin, forcing millions of people – primarily people of color, people with mental illness, and those in poverty – into the prison system, depriving them of voting and employment rights, and thereby preserving privileged access to housing, jobs, land, credit, and education for whites. Police are used to break strikes and assault picket lines, where workers are struggling for basic human rights and better conditions. Protests and uprisings during the Black Lives Matter movement have resulted in the use of military crowd control techniques. The political aim of the police is seemingly to silence the demonstrators and curtail their constitutional right to free speech and freedom of assembly, especially Black, Brown, Indigenous folks, and communities of color.

The Violent Military Industrial Complex Leaks into the U.S. Police State

The Military Industrial Complex is directly connected to policing and the Prison Industrial Complex in this country. American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war, with almost no public discussion or oversight. The U.S. already acts as the police force of the world, enforcing authority through drone wars, proxy battles, and meddling. Black liberation is a global struggle, and there is a link between racial oppression internationally and domestically. A militarized police is only equipped to escalate situations.

Throughout US history, the police (including federal policing agencies like the FBI) have attacked and undermined social justice organizations and efforts, at home and abroad, through various forms of surveillance, infiltration, sabotage, and assassination. The political function of the police destroys any form of revolution, so it’s no surprise that in the 10 years of anti-establishment social unrest between 1965 and 1975, the number of police officers grew by roughly 40 percent nationally. In 1974, $15 billion was spent on criminal justice, 57 percent going directly to police expenditures4. With this increase of spending, the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO “neutralized” political dissidents and threats, like the Black Panther Party, through subterfuge and extreme violence. In league with local police units, the FBI declared war on radicals and groups from nationally oppressed communities. Then, the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams were first formed in Los Angeles in 1968. Fifty years later, the US still holds these political prisoners captive, like Mumia Abu-Jamal. The Free Them All Campaign continues to advocate for their release, even as the police continue to use these tactics against protestors today

Using federal funds, state and local law enforcement agencies have amassed military arsenals to wage the failed “War on Drugs,” disproportionately in communities of color. Aggressive enforcement of this mandate from decades ago has lost its public mandate, as 67 percent of Americans think the government should focus more on treatment than on policing and prosecuting drug users. Aggressive drug arrests and prosecution has impacted millions of lives , disproportionately in communities of color, though drug use rates are quite similar across race and class. Law enforcement agencies’ routine use of heavily armed SWAT teams to search people’s homes for drugs is the same hyper-aggressive form of domestic policing that killed Breonna Taylor.  

The militarization of American policing is evident in police officer training, which encourages them to adopt a “warrior” mentality and view the people they are supposed to serve as enemies. It’s also evident in the equipment they use, such as battering rams, flashbang grenades, and APCs. The 1033 Program transferred surplus military equipment to civilian police departments. Only 45 days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Congress effortlessly passed the Patriot Act , which George W. Bush signed less than a month after the United States invaded Afghanistan, as part of the “War on Terror”. It broadly expanded law enforcement powers to search, surveil, investigate and indefinitely detain people. Among its effects, the Patriot Act has been used to expand the racist war on drugs. 

Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002 to coordinate government intelligence gathering in order to improve counterterrorism efforts,  has set up centers with the FBI and local police that have been used to spy on protest movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter. More than 7,000 people were arrested during the Occupy movement over the course of just a few months. These arrests, alongside incidents of police brutality, were intended to stamp out a movement that took aim at the face of class oppression from the rich, elite of Wall Street.

Since May 2020, the uprising spurred by the police lynching of George Floyd, has intensified the militarized mobilization of law enforcement. The police forces are equipped in full riot gear and use weapons designed for war. Black and Brown activists in the United States, especially during the Ferguson protests, have described domestic police departments as “occupying forces,” much like those in Afghanistan or Yemen or Palestine. In fact, allowing Israeli forces and U.S. participants to learn from each others’ violent practices and tactics results in the violation of the human rights of Black and Palestinian people, but there are efforts to end this through a campaign called, “End the Deadly Exchange.” Our police, at the behest of local government, wield not only military arms, but what they’ve learned from the military’s formal joint training, tactics (both street combat and psychological operations), and other means of  suppression. At least 200 cities in the U.S. had imposed curfews by early June, while more than 31 states and Washington, D.C. activated over 75,000 National Guard personnel, arresting over 10,000 people. Yet widespread police brutality and the mobilization of military law enforcement tactics, like kidnapping protestors, have only furthered massive civil unrest. 

The Case for Revolutionary Optimism: A Path towards Abolition

So, how do we fight an institution doing what it has been designed to do, one that’s protected by government leaders and employment contracts, and is therefore incapable of reform?  The problems of punitive, racist policing are cultural — ingrained in our society — and cannot be solved by merely identifying a couple murderers or “bad apples,” if you will. 

Given how corrosive policing has historically been and continues to be, it shouldn’t be surprising that with alternatives, our society could flourish without cops. Policing could, and should, be defunded and abolished.

A society that prioritizes human needs ahead of profit means communities that have sufficient housing, food, health care workers, prisoner re-entry services, and community practices that hold all of its members accountable for any harm and enact restorative justice. Mutual aid, rather than one-time giving events, would allow us to share our skills collectively and all contribute. 

It may seem implausible or unreachable. It requires divesting from police, prisons, and the military, and instead, investing in communities of color and supporting the public policies that encourage, not inhibit, family-sustaining wages, job development, education, and the equitable distribution of resources. We cannot accept corporate, private interests to define our way of living. The ruling, capitalist class is in power, controls our government policies, and we must not capitulate to the world they want us to live in. It is one with an illegal slave system that is the Prison Industrial Complex. A society with an abolitionist as a focus will not be built on the violence of a capitalist state designed to defend property and capital, but one in which the people are empowered to provide for each other. 

We must build class unity and solidarity through organizing within our communities to protect one another. There are few tools within the system to fight the State’s abuse politically and legally, but we can ask for the immediate release of inmates in this country’s tortuous prison system; the end of three strikes and overly harsh sentencing guidelines; changing the 13th Amendment to eliminate the clauses that allow for slavery and “involuntary servitude” for people who are convicted; the end of qualified immunity for officers; the repeal of federal programs that send military equipment to local police; the end of “Broken Windows” policing tactics, including stop-and-frisk and other police harassment tactics; the prohibition of no-knock entry; and laws that make it harder for the police to obstruct free speech activity. 

While these are only reforms, we can also strengthen community accountability models that critique punitive systems that maintain repressive, colonial ideology.  Together, we can connect movements, groups, and individuals to transgress the boundaries of institutions. These alternatives must include continuing critiques to improve social conditions, as well as provide accessible, sustainable levels of resources that are consistent with anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism principles. This is how we can transform and empower communities towards justice and abolition.

"Forcible Hindrances": On the Structural Violence of Capitalism and How People Respond To It

By Yanis Iqbal

In his 1845 book “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, Friedrich Engels wrote:

“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessities of life, places them in conditions in which they cannot live,—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.”

Engel’s abovementioned remarks remain as pertinent today as they were when he wrote them. The Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report 2020 (PSPR2020) estimates that Covid-19 will likely push between 88 and 115 million people into extreme poverty i.e. those living under $1.90 a day. It is important to remember that the International Poverty Line (IPL) of $1.90 a day is ridiculously low — in 2011 in the US, $1.90 would have just been sufficient to buy a cup of coffee. Therefore, the magnitude of the process of existential erosion unleashed by the pandemic is likely greater than those being predicted by various financial institutions. The impoverishment of the majority is not solely due to the negative effects of the pandemic. It is closely linked to the brutal logic of neoliberalism capitalism which has instituted austerity-ravaged health infrastructures, precarized the everyday lives of workers through “flexible” jobs and detached itself from productive economic sectors through frenzied financialization. While innumerable people get mired in the vortex of poverty and endless suffering, billionaires are amassing unprecedented amounts of wealth, creating lagoons of affluence and privilege surrounded by oceans of mass misery.

What is happening today because of the fusion of epidemiological and economic crises is merely a stark manifestation of the endless murders being committed by capitalism for hundreds of years. Through accelerated capital accumulation and expanded exploitation, capitalism has cold-bloodedly reduced the state of existence to a process of rotting whose final destination is a harrowing death. This “structural violence” of capitalism is not an inadvertent byproduct of a perfectly functioning economic regime; it is an inseparable internal mechanism with the help of which capital satisfies its insatiable reproductive needs. Under neoliberalism, capital’s economic exigencies have displayed themselves in ever more acute forms like permanent unemployment, job insecurity, cuts in public spending and dispossession as a socially ravaged system desperately attempts to stave off economic crises. 

When confronted by the massive structural violence of capitalism, the subalterns inevitably search for alternative ways of living which would shield them from the ruination wreaked by the existing system. This conscious experience of the objective oppressiveness of capitalism leads to social conflicts between classes generated by antagonistic relations of production. These instances of class struggle act as subjective interventions in the structural conflict between forces and relations of production. As the forces of production develop, the relations of production, which once had facilitated their expansion, slowly began to impede further development. Through the direct action of subaltern subjects, the contradiction between the centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor is finally solved, leading to a revolution.

Understanding Bourgeois Democracy

While a revolution need not necessarily be violent, historical circumstances under capitalism have operated in such a way as to render violence the only viable method to overthrow the ruling class. Even after the establishment of parliamentary institutions and a “democratic” state, revolutionary violence has continued to act as a last resort for those who are the victims of globalization and necropolitical neoliberalism. In an 1878 article written by Karl Marx on the Anti-Socialist Law in Germany, we can find rough explanations regarding the conflictual presence of revolutionary violence and bourgeois democracy:

“An historical development can remain “peaceful” only so long as no forcible hindrances are placed in its path by those holding power in society at the time…the peaceful movement could become a "violent" one on encountering the resistance of those interested in the old state of affairs…In fact the government tries to crush by force development which is inimical to it although legally invulnerable.”

The “forcible hindrances” are constituted by the state under capitalism. The capitalist state is not an autonomous entity working outside the logic of accumulation; it a highly complex terrain of class struggle embodying the conflict between accumulation and legitimacy. On the one hand, the political power of state is incapable of independently organizing production — property is private and the productive sectors of the economy are in the hands of private companies to whose activities the state has to continually react. In so far as the state is unable to construct a self-supporting productive base and depends on revenues from surplus extraction, its capacities are indirectly determined through private productivity and profitability. This means that politicians and officials have to strengthen capital accumulation to be able to exist within the state. On the other hand, the ruling dispensation brought to power through electoral means has to maintain hegemony within the citizenry if it does not want a crisis of legitimacy to destabilize its tenure.

The conflict between accumulation and legitimacy is maintained and balanced by using coercive power against those political forces which raise issues that cannot be structurally accommodated within the limits of capitalistic democracy that only allows for insufficient and gradual changes. When the subalterns become cognizant of this structural limitation of bourgeois democracy, they are compelled to utilize revolutionary violence to regain agency and put forth their demands in a visible way.

In the current conjuncture, the internal disjunctions of bourgeois democracy are increasingly coming under stress under as the subalterns articulate new demands which are opposed to the murderous mechanisms of capitalism. In the US, for example, the George Floyd uprising — one of the largest movement in US history — highlighted the racist veins of capitalism and explicitly foregrounded the structural violence of capitalism. Since the American rebellion expressed demands which transcended the delimited area of bourgeois democracy, it was met with heavy state repression. Apart from the US, sustained protests have also occurred in Colombia where the concentrated anger of the subalterns against neoliberalism coalesced around the issue of police brutality — identified as one of the constitutive components of a wider picture of injustice. Like the Black rebellion in America, the Colombian protests, too, were violently subdued through the sheer use of force.

Revolutionary Violence: The Ethical Dimension

As class struggle continues to intensify across the world, a theory of revolutionary violence which is able to build the foundations of politico-ethical hegemony for the Left will likely form. If a coherent theory of revolutionary violence is formed, leftist forces worldwide will get access to a tool which is capable of breaking the cycle of parliamentary violence and consolidating a new constellation of social forces. The application of revolutionary violence against class enemies has always acted as an addendum to politics and has historically been invariably interwoven with and subordinated to careful efforts aimed at forming ideological bases of counter-hegemony within the womb of capitalist society.

In the last instance, revolutionary ideology acts as the primary factor behind the overthrow of capitalism. To use the words of Fidel Castro,

“Just ideas have greater power than all the reactionary forces put together… ideas are and always will be the most important weapon of all…There is no weapon more powerful than a profound conviction and clear idea of what must be done. It is with these kinds of weapons, which do not require enormous sums of money, but only the capacity to create and transmit just ideas and values, that our people will be increasingly armed. The world will be conquered by ideas, not by force”.

While giving a speech to the Hanover Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1899, Rosa Luxemburg had remarked that the proponents of revolution “are the last to take up violent means, the last to wish a brutal, violent revolution on ourselves…such matters do not depend on us, they depend on our opponents”. Violence, therefore, has been a tactical necessity forced upon the proletariat by counter-revolutionary offensives throughout modern history. And while violence has certainly been one functional aspect of revolution, it is also a mode of struggle having ethical ramifications i.e. it is itself constitutive of the new humans that emerge from the revolutionary process. In so far that revolutionary violence has an ethical dimension, a moral framework has often been provided for its exercise. The basic structure of this moral framework can be outlined through two points.

Firstly, revolutionary violence has been performed strictly in keeping with the moral goal of destroying capitalism and correspondingly cleansing the world of structural violence and gratuitous deaths. This means that violence itself is ethically molded by the goal of revolution and is exercised to prevent further violence. In the concluding sentences of his essay “Tactics and Ethics”, Georg Lukacs had expressed this point eloquently: “only he who acknowledges unflinchingly and without any reservations that murder is under no circumstances to be sanctioned can commit the murderous deed that is truly - and tragically - moral.” From this statement, it is quite clear that revolutionary violence can be carried out only when individuals realize that the brutalization and degradation of human life under capitalism has to end. When revolutionary violence is conceived as such, it becomes an endeavor to replace moral narcissism —preservation of the purity of one’s soul at the expense of humanity as a whole — with a collectivist struggle for the destruction of a social order which constantly violates the right to life of an individual.

Secondly, since revolutionary violence has been guided and regulated by the moral ideals of socialism, it also has an internal code of ethics which balances the ends (socialism) with the means (violence). The unification of means and ends has been necessary in so far that revolutionary violence has a direct bearing on the subjectivities of the individuals produced through class struggle. Furthermore, if violence is not mediated by ethical codes consonant with the goals of socialism, the process of struggle is emptied of its political meaning and deforms the goal itself. As Herbert Marcuse has said:

“No matter how rationally one may justify revolutionary means in terms of the demonstrable chance of obtaining freedom and happiness for future generations, and thereby justify violating existing rights and liberties and life itself, there are forms of violence and suppression which no revolutionary situation can justify because they negate the very end for which the revolution is a means. Such are arbitrary violence, cruelty, and indiscriminate terror.”

In order to understand the historical, ethical edifice of revolutionary violence, we need to differentiate between specific types of destruction. In Albert Camus’ play “The Just Assassins”, a leading character, Dora, asserts: “even in destruction there is a right way and a wrong way – and there are limits”. The right way is constituted by prefigurative methods of violence which act as embryonic expressions of the future. Through these prefigurative practices, a politico-ethical fabric of hegemony is woven which allows the subalterns to struggle in the present and at the same time experience the socialist future. Slavoj Zizek accurately outlines the contours of such a prefigurative struggle:

“Revolution is experienced not as a hardship over which the future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow – in it, we are already free even as we fight for freedom; we are already happy even as we fight for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is…its own ontological proof, an immediate index of its own truth.”

According to Norman Geras, ethical practices within the field of revolutionary violence comprise primarily of (1) the distinction between direct agents of class oppression and everybody else and (2) a notion of minimum force: “one's weapons must be capable of stopping enemy combatants, which in the given circumstances involves killing them; but they should not, beyond this, seek gratuitously to accentuate suffering.” Camilo Guevara — Che Guevara’s son — reiterates similar points and writes that “revolutionaries, even if they are being massacred sadistically, should invoke the use of force only when absolutely necessary, and even then, should never accompany it with cruelty. This idea is directly proportional to the condition of being a revolutionary”. When these kinds of ethical arrangements are integrated into revolutionary violence, a form of class struggle is produced which contributes towards the development of a subjectively enriching process of socialist humanization.

With the exacerbation of material conditions and rising subaltern resistance, the legitimacy of bourgeois democracy is constantly coming under threat. This tense period of disequilibrium is similar to past times, when revolution through the politically circumscribed use of violence has been one among the many tactics of revolution. The rationale behind the tactical use of violence was explained by Marx as thus: “the governments are opposed to us: we must answer them with all the means that are at our disposal…We must declare to the governments: we will proceed against you peaceably where it is possible and by force of arms when it may be necessary.” While revolutionary violence is underway in many parts of the world, it has not typically made its way into the imperial core. However, as capitalism’s contradictions come to a head, we are seeing more and more people flooding the streets, even within the US. Though revolutionary violence has historically functioned as a tactic, it also has moral aspects which need to be ethically structured to construct socialist hegemony among the subaltern classes. In the contemporary period, if it is to come about organically in response to capitalism’s structural violence, it can be visceral in nature (and thus misplaced at times) or ethically-informed, and thus utilized as a part of a broader organized movement to replace capitalism with socialism.