17 November 2015

White Refugees and White Settlement: Strategies for Success


I'm clear that the Syrian refugee crisis we are talking about
, like the other refugee crises we aren't talking about, is purely man-made.
There are man-made refugee crises in Africa, where Western and Chinese capital seek to exploit resources and get the peoples of that land driven off the lands of their ancestors.

Why aren't these peoples being welcomed into Europe? Why isn't German chancellor Angela Merkel speaking on the behalf of Africa?


In the case of Syria, a rapidly escalating bombing campaign by the United States, then Russia, and now escalated by France, are driving the Syrian population from their homes. (Interestingly, coalitions are discussed, NATO considered, but once again the United Nations is sidelined for obvious reasons that the bombing is a war crime)

Africans in the North American diaspora would be justified to be wary of this influx of Syrians into the US, not on religious hysterical grounds or concerns about "terrorism." For good or bad, Islam is as known in the African diaspora as Christianity: unlike Europe, African piety for monotheism or traditional pantheism doesn't extend to Crusades and holocausts. And as far as terrorism, Africans in the diaspora are more likely to be terrorized by domestic white police officers than ISIL. The national police state is our terror.

Our wariness comes from a cursory look at immigration policy in the United States, a white-settler nation-state that basically ceased the acceptance of masses Africans with the end of the slave trade in the mid-1800's until the late 1960's.

Before the Civil War, and especially after, the United States, like much of Latin America and the Caribbean, opened its arms solely to European immigration, some of which, like the Irish, were virtually refugees given the British government's pogrom against them. The goal was to whiten the population.

These newer waves of white immigrants served their purpose. They were always placed quickly in positions above the First Nation and African populations, who arguably have been here for many more generations.

The post-US Civil War white immigrant learned very quickly where their place was in a white settlement. They learned quickly what the white man's Negro fantasy meant and to keep clear of that side of town ... unless you were trying to exploit them with a liquor store or a nail salon.

With few, notable exceptions, these white immigrants did not stand in solidarity with the conditions of First Nations and Africans. They aspired to be Kennedys, Carnegies, Rockefellers.

In the early 1960's, then-US attorney general Robert Kennedy had the audacity to tell writers James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry that he could foresee a Negro US president in fifty years.

Baldwin left this meeting incredulous that a white man who's family had just arrived on these stolen lands, been permitted to exploit the wealth of it, could lecture people who had been here since the early 1600's.

But this is always the pattern. The African and First Nation are kept on the bottom, while the newcomers afforded an opportunity to flourish on our backs.

The Statue of Liberty was never meant for Africans.

Our white friends and their right-wing brothers like to fall back on some version of a narrative that speaks to the newcomer's work ethic. They never realize it but this is as offensive as what Kennedy said. White people rarely speak to basics like how I as an African am perceived applying for a job I never get, let alone a business loan I never qualify for.

They won't talk about the structural racism that lifts some boats and sinks others.

I don't expect anything different with the Syrian refugee. I would not put it passed the racist institutions of this nation that they would welcome these non-African immigrants, whom by the way the US Census Bureau designates as "white" for the same reasons they did for the hundred years after the US Civil War. To keep, goes the motto, the Negro in his place.

This is why I have been clear from the start. End the causes of the refugee crises in all the global South. End the wars. The bombings. The drone-assassinations. The occupations and puppet generals-turned-presidents.That will address the refugee problem.

The United States as a white-settler nation-state with white-settler institutions is a tougher conundrum that history shows requires a more rigorous, militant response.

14 November 2015

Innocent Victims


The first telegrams of condolence for the victims and the wounded in Paris should come from the French government itself, not ISIS. France is one of the biggest arms dealers to the roguest elements in Western Asia and Africa. In fact, as Ghana's first president Kwame Nkrumah illustrates, this market in death is not only to keep pro-Western, anti-labor generals in power, or, to arm "rebels" who will depose pro-nationalist, anti-Western regimes, but it literally is also the main fund for the post-war European welfare state. Nkrumah writes that while the European left had been staunchly anti-imperialist before the end of WWII, they traded that position for the founding of the welfare state.

After WWII, the European Left abandoned its anti-imperialism for generous economic supports at home. These social programs were founded on the backs of neocolonial policies.

I might argue that just as France has some of the most generous social benefits, this is inextricably connected to its promiscuous market in weapons to the global South.

Just so, to the extent we are supposed to think of these victims in France as "innocent" we can only do so in as much as they do not participate in the trade. If I sell a loaded gun to a madman, and he shoots me, am I innocent? If my family are arms dealers and we sell a group of madmen guns, and they slaughter my whole family, are we innocent?

It's a provocative question, but one that must be asked if we are serious about locating the causes of "terrorism".

The question of innocence got Prof Ward Churchill hounded out and fired from his Univ of Colorado tenured post. After 9/11, Churchill, whose subject is mostly and richly First Nations struggles and the crimes committed against them, characterized the workers in the Towers as "Eichmanns." For those who don't recognize that name, Adolf Eichmann was a German Nazi bureaucrat in charge of administering the gas chambers. Put on trial at Nuremberg, his defense was "I was just following orders."

We have mostly forgotten that the court ruled that this is not a defense, and indicted him and executed him.

Pulling the former empires and their continued imperial thirsts out of the former colonies is a tall order to those who want their gas cheap, wardrobes affordable and filling every drawer, and all the creature comforts we are used to in the West. Our lifestyles are addictions that indict masses of Black and Brown peoples to a purgatory of dictatorships, torture chambers, sweat shops, and disappearances.

Are we innocent? No. Whether we confront the fact or not, just as those post-WWII European anti-imperialists turncoated their common cause with the workers in the colonies, so have we.

We have in the US built up a different kind of welfare state than Europe's, but it is just as vile at its foundations. We have sold our African brothers and sisters down the river to Hell. We have looked away while our government greenlighted Latin American generals to round up labor activists and drop their living bodies from helicopters into the ocean.

The telegrams of condolence should come first from our own governments, whom we need to send to Nuremberg for trial and execution.