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.