While Western commentators - and revealingly some of our friends on the far left - will predictably mock the Institute of International Studies (IIS) recent report, "White Paper on Human Rights Violations in the U.S. in 2017," the report should be taken seriously and prompt some deeper questions.
It's not only because the US is once again being scrutinized for its human-rights abuses that will cause cognitive dissonance in a chattering class of that can only see the United States as a city on a hill, lit with a halo, but this white paper will be dismissed because this IIS is not in Washington DC or London but in Pyongyang, North Korea [DPRK].
It should be amazing at this late and dire hour that the Democratic Party, for all its failings and broken promises and neglect, can still do no wrong, and be advocated as any kind of ally for working and poor people, while the DPRK, which has not done a single slight to the Black community, should remain an object of ridicule.
But it's not really amazing given that Washington, London, and Paris are still considered global leaders of democracy and civilization.
MANUFACTURING THE DPRK NARRATIVE
The DPRK narrative has been effectively hijacked by the US State Department and, reflexively, much of US journalism. This dominant narrative of the West has been so effective that no one seems to notice how unbalanced it is.
Even the most mundane issues among the Washington consensus will pretend to be shown with two sides, usually a Republican who seems to favor a hard capitalism opposing a Democrat favoring a soft capitalism.
But with the DPRK, I challenge you to find even the alternative media daring to present a rhetorical counter narrative but rather US State Department jargon picked up by reporters and commentators.
Instead of any semblance of other narratives, the DPRK is synonymous with human rights abuses, run by a family of madmen, and, lately, intent on nuclear destruction of the world. Et cetera.
We should have asked ourselves a long time ago why the DPRK, which has never dropped a nuclear weapon on a country, invaded, or overturned a foreign government, never assassinated a foreign head of state, neither created a doctrine of preemptive strike nor meddled in anyone's elections should deserve the tarnishing it has gotten, while the United States, UK, France, and Belgium have volumes of such history attached to it and whose white papers are received earnestly.
Nevertheless, if anyone has the moral authority to address the human rights abuses of the United States, on behalf of its victims, the DPRK ranks on that list because of the insurgent history of North Korea and its Workers Party in the global South - the former colonial world.
When we pull ourselves away from the inside the beltway, Washington consensus narrowed narrative of much of US journalism and academia, the DPRK emerges as one of those countries who stood on the right side of anti-colonial liberation while our supposed victors - the US, NATO, and Western Europe - stood firmly on the wrong side.
While the rhetorical and material supports from the former USSR are hard to rival, African liberation movements had junior partners to assist them as well. The late Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress, and South African Communist Party praised Libya under Col. Muammar Qaddafi for its assistance in fighting the US/UK-backed apartheid regime. The GDR [East Germany] is included in this number of friends.
THE RECORD VS THE RHETORIC
The DPRK, beginning with its first leader, Kim Il-sung, who was also a member and freedom fighter with Mao in the Communist Party of China, have been allies with African anti-colonial resistance movements since the 1960's.
The DPRK and its Workers Party of Korea lent aid and support to such far-left movements as ZANLA in Zimbabwe, SWAPO in Namibia, FRELIMO in Mozambique, ANC in South Africa, and the MPLA in Angola. And just as the former Soviet Union had done, and Cuba continues to do, the DPRK exhibited true internationalism by training many Africans in Pyongyang in technical and specialized fields.
Recall that during these same anti-colonial struggles, the Western countries trained mercenaries and built bombs - like the bombs the US and UK dropped to excess all over a rebellious North Korea during the Korean War. In fact, the US/UK alliance dropped so many bombs, they ran out of targets and bombed rubble.
EXCERPTS FROM THE WHITE PAPER
The white paper is replete with indicting, elementary data about the "world's moral leader," that richest country on the planet:
" ... in the US, a self-styled 'model country of democracy,' all national organs are staffed with those representing the interests of monopoly capitalists, and the working masses are thoroughly excluded from politics" the report notes, holding a special light to the current administration.
"In the US, between January and September 2017, the cases of searching and confiscation against journalists account for 12 and the same goes for 11 cases of violation against them. Moreover, 19 persons in the domestic press circles and 4 foreign journalists were arrested or detained and suffered fascist outrageousness," the IIS report reveals.
The infamous Klan march in Charlottesville was also noted in the IIS white paper:
"Hundreds of gangsters including the notorious Ku Klux Klan members and neo-fascists openly staged a demonstration in advocacy of White supremacy, and drove a truck over the protestors, killing and wounding 20 of them.
"What was more surprising is that at a press conference Trump, who has a title of president, denounced the protestors as 'peculiar Left' and backed the advocates of White supremacy by saying that 'both sides are to blame'."
The US has its fill of elected officials, local, state, and national, wringing their hands over the dire crisis of homelessness, and among the loudest are Democratic strongholds, like San Francisco and the blue state of Hawaii. And yet nothing in the last generation seems to get accomplished to even stop the rising numbers themselves, let alone fix the problem altogether. This hypocrisy does not escape the DPRK think-tank:
"House prices across the country skyrocket every year, showing a rise of 7% in one year until November over the corresponding period of the previous year. This resulted in the rapid increase in number of the homeless wanderers.
" … According to what the US administration made public, in 2017 the homeless numbered 554,000, about 10% increase as compared to that two years ago, and the poor families, living in rented rooms devoid of elementary facilities for living, numbered approximately 8,300,000."
These are indictments of the most obvious nature that should be the daily report of our own Western media, and yet mysteriously we are distracted with nonsense about Oprah's speech at the Grammy Awards, how empowering it supposedly was, and whether she will run for president, among other minutiae.
We look for allies and discourse under the biggest rocks and delude ourselves that the underlying slime is on the side of the radical, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-misogynist, anti-queerphoic Left.
STATES ARE VIOLENT INSTITUTIONS
You don't have to be a DPRK flag waver to recognize its contributions and appreciate its stature to speak about these issues. It has earned the right to do so. These revelations, after all, do not come with threats to sanction or impose blockades on the United States.
Recall Noam Chomsky's reply about the United States, and any state: "you can never be proud of it. States are violent institutions."
The continuing problem with the West is its blatant hypocrisy to hold others to an exacting, high standard, while it gives itself a pass. African leaders have noticed this of late with the use of the International Criminal Court to favor indictments of global South leaders while overlooking the perpetrators of Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, and torture sites, not to forget the occupation of Palestine, the northern part of Ireland by the UK, and the subversion of Catalonia's sovereignty and the imposition of an outdated monarchy on the Spanish state.
It would be a different matter if the critics took Chomsky's somewhat anarchist line and applied it to all states, not just those of the former colonies.
This hypocrisy so infects the Left one must look elsewhere from political ideology as the cause. This is not merely a function of the Republicans or neoconservatives but also parts of the so-called "progressive" wings. Is it racial? Is this hypocrisy a function of white power/white rule and extensions of the hundreds of years of white colonialism?
RENAISSANCE FOR WORKERS
Radical solidarity across races and ethnicities is critical, but does it have limitations so long as its implicated in white rule? The answer must be yes.
There is a beautiful statue in Senegal called the African Renaissance. It was built by the DPRK to commemorate the continent's many liberation struggles and North Korean's involvement in them. Like the Statue of Liberty in the US, Motherland Calls in Volgograd [formerly Stalingrad], African Renaissance must be made an historical reference point for everyone fighting on the right side of history against those on the wrong side who continue to distract our best, militant efforts for worker empowerment, worker democracy, and socialism.
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