Proud Boys in MAGA hats at a neo-Confederate rally in 2019 / credit: Anthony Crider/Flickr
Editor’s Note: This opinion was published as “Left-Right White Solidarity?” in Common Dreams in 2014, shortly after the U.S.-backed neo-Nazi coup in Ukraine, in response to solidarity emerging between left-wing and right-wing people of European descent in the United States and in Europe. However, this does not refer to the “horseshoe theory,” a concept that suggests the left and the right have much in common and pose a threat to a so-called “center.” The horseshoe theory leaves out the colonial question: What happens to people who have been colonized by Europeans in the United States and around the world? And what impact does white supremacy have not just on those who have been colonized, but on people of European descent? This version has been edited with the author’s permission.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” -George Santayana
Some years ago, Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri suggested that while not always visible in the social practices of everyday European life, the racist foundation for European fascism was still present, safely confined to a space in the European psyche, but always ready to explode in what he called a “racist delirium.”
Today, white workers and the middle classes in Europe and in the United States, traumatized by the new realities imposed on them by the decline of the Western imperialist project and the turn to neoliberalism, are increasingly embracing a retrograde form of white supremacist politics.
This dangerous political phenomenon is developing in countries throughout the European Union and in the United States. Just recently, the National Front, a racist, authoritarian party that labored on the fringes of French politics for years, has emerged as one of the dominant forces. The Tea Party in the United States, Golden Dawn in Greece, the People’s Party in Spain, the Partij Voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands—in these and other countries, a transatlantic, radical racist movement is emerging and gaining respectability.
The hard turn to the right is not a surprise for those of us who have a clear-eyed view of Euro-American history and politics. In all of the 20th century fascist movements in Europe, two elements combined to express the fascist project: 1) The rise of far-right parties and movements as the political expression of an alliance of authoritarian, pro-capitalist class forces bankrolled by sections of the capitalist class and constructed in the midst of capitalist crisis; and 2) racism grounded in white supremacist ideology.
The neo-fascism that is now emerging within the context of the current capitalist crisis on both sides of the Atlantic has similar characteristics to the movements of the 1930s, but with one distinguishing feature. The targets for racist scapegoating are different. The targets today are immigrants: Arab, Muslim and African in Europe; and Latinos as well as the never-ending target of poor and working-class African Americans in the United States.
What makes the rise of the racist radical right even more dangerous today is that it is taking place in a political environment in which traditional anti-racist oppositional forces have not recognized the danger of this phenomenon or—for strategic reasons—have decided to downplay the issue. That strategy has been tragically played out in the “immigrant rights” movement in the United States.
The brutal repression and dehumanization witnessed across Europe in the 1930s has not found generalized expression in the United States and Europe, at least not yet. Nevertheless, large sectors of the U.S. and European left appear to be unable to recognize that the U.S./NATO/EU axis that is committed to maintaining the hegemony of Western capital is resulting in dangerous collaborations with rightist forces both inside and outside of governments.
The manufactured crisis with Russia over the issue of Ukraine is a case in point. The incredible recklessness and outrageous opportunism of the U.S./NATO/EU axis in destabilizing Ukraine—knowing that the driving forces on the ground were racist, neo-Nazi elements from the Right Sector and the Svoboda party—demonstrated once again the lengths this axis is prepare to go to achieve its geo-strategic objective of full-spectrum economic and political global domination.
Yet, strangely, not only did many radicals in the United States and Europe not see the potential threat this situation represented—they seemed unable to penetrate the simplistic cold-war propaganda that suddenly re-emerged to frame events in Ukraine.
Instead of being concerned that—as a direct consequence of U.S. actions—a government came to power in Europe that, for the first time since the 1930s, included ultra-nationalist, racist neo-Nazis in key positions, the left along with the general population allowed the corporate media and U.S. propagandists to turn the narrative away from U.S./EU destabilization of Ukraine to Putin’s supposed expansionist aspirations.
The ease in which the corporate media was able to flip that script and make Putin the new face of evil has been truly astonishing. And the fact that that narrative was embraced by most liberals and large sectors of the white left in the United States only affirmed that—having abandoned class analysis and anti-imperialism, and never really having understood the insidious nature of white supremacist ideology—the U.S. left has no theoretical framework for apprehending the complexities of the current period.
The inability to extricate itself from the influences of white supremacist ideology has to be considered one explanation for the strange positions taken by large sectors of the white liberal/left over the last few years. How else can one explain the bizarre incorporation of the discourse of “humanitarian intervention” and the obscenely obvious racism of the “responsibility to protect”?
Could it be that many white radicals have fallen prey to the subtle and not-so-subtle racial appeal to a form of cross-class white solidarity in defense of “Western values,” civilization and the prerogative to determine who has the right to national sovereignty, all of which are at the base of the rationalization of the “responsibility to protect” asserted by the white West?
The apparent incapacity of white leftists to penetrate and understand the cultural and ideological impact of white supremacy and its powerful effect on their own consciousness has weakened and deformed left analysis of U.S. and European foreign policy initiatives. It has also resulted in the U.S. and European left taking political positions that either objectively championed U.S./NATO imperialist aggression or provided tacit support for that aggression though silence.
As a consequence of the abandonment of anti-imperialism and an active class-racial collaboration with the Western bourgeoisie, an almost insurmountable chasm has been created separating the Western left from its counterparts in much of the global South.
Instead of more resolute anti-imperialist solidarity, broad elements of the white left in the United States and Europe have consistently aligned themselves with the policies of the U.S/NATO/EU axis that supports right-wing forces from Ukraine to Venezuela.
Exaggeration, racial paranoia, and an overly simplistic and divisive—even “racist”—assessment of the liberal/left will be the charge. We accept those charges. We accept them because we know they will come. For those of us living outside the walls of privilege who must nevertheless accept the realities of the colonialist/imperialist-created global South, we don’t have the luxury of comforting illusions. Our lived experiences negate the false history of Europe’s benevolent civilization. We see developing in Europe and in the United States the very real possibility of a left-right racial convergence fueled by crisis, leftist ideological confusion and what appears to be a mutual commitment to maintaining the global structures of white supremacy.
Understanding the violent history of the Western project and the pathological nature of white supremacy, we are forced to see with crystal clarity that within the context of the volatile economic and social conditions in Europe, giving legitimacy to neo-fascist forces like the ones in Ukraine might just be the fuel needed to ignite that racist, fascist delirium Berneri referred to.
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president of the United States on the Green Party ticket. Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and was awarded the U.S. Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.
U.S. and Russian Officials Meet in Geneva to Discuss Ukraine
The Ukraine crisis began in Washington, not in Moscow. The Obama/Biden regime change plot against an elected Ukrainian president reverberates to this day. International law must be followed if a dangerous situation is to be averted.
This statement was originally published in Black Alliance for Peace .
January 12, 2022, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) concludes that the full responsibility for the dangerous crisis unfolding in Ukraine has its genesis in the illegal policies of the U.S./EU/NATO “Axis of Domination” beginning in 2014. As the corporate press presents a one-sided presentation of event in Ukraine as part of a massive propaganda effort to mobilize public opinion to support the reckless positions of the Biden administration, BAP believes that the public must be presented with a counternarrative of the chronology of events in Ukraine. BAP National Organizer; Ajamu Baraka summarizes some of those events:
“During the latter part of 2013 until February 2014, the Obama/Biden administration gave material support and encouragement to anti-democratic right-wing elements in Ukraine to execute “regime change” against the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych. This plunged Ukraine into crisis because substantial sectors of Ukrainian society did not support the coup, especially sections of predominantly Russian speaking Ukrainian citizens in the Eastern portions of the nation. Those Ukrainian citizens rejected the legitimacy of the coup government and began to voice support for independence from the neo-Nazi government that took power. And what was the response from the illegal coup regime? It attacked their citizens in the East. In other words, they attacked their own citizens – a crime that the Obama administration pretended was the excuse for U.S. subversion in Syria. “
The conflict that ensued as a result of the invasion of Eastern Ukraine by the Ukrainian government with the full support of right-wing paramilitary forces like the neo-Nazi Azon battalions, did not succeed in forcing the republics that subsequently referred to themselves as the Donbas Peoples’ Republic to submit to the coup government. An agreement between Donbas and the coup government was arrived at that became known as the Minsk II agreement. Terms of the agreement included a commitment to a ceasefire along with relative autonomy for Donbas. The agreement avoided all-out war and provided some degree of “stability” until the Biden administration came back to power.
Back in power, Biden and the democrats who have now become the party of war, begin to encourage Ukraine authorities to ignore Minsk and to forcefully take back control of Donbas. Even more dangerously, the U.S. and some European powers began to indicate that Ukraine might be invited to become a member of NATO. That could allow NATO with its nuclear weapons to be positioned right on the borders of Russia and with its nuclear arsenal.
BAP regards NATO as an illegitimate offensive force in the service of Western imperialism. Therefore, we call on all social forces committed to peace to join us in demanding that NATO be dismantled. In the meantime, and specifically on Ukraine, BAP is calling on the international Anti-war movement to demand that the U.S. and NATO deescalate the situation. Concretely this means demanding that:
The undermining of international law by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination committed to maintaining Western imperialist hegemony by operating outside the framework of international law, is now seen by much of the non-European world as the primary threat to international peace, security, and human rights.
BAP shares that assessment and pledges to continue to oppose U.S. policies, understanding that today as it was more than fifty years ago when Dr. King first uttered these words – “the U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president of the United States on the Green Party ticket. Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and was awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council.
Azov Battalion in Kyiv Photo: Sopa Images / SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty
“…it is imperative that everyone, in particular Black and working-class people, understand that not having an awareness of the interconnections of the “grind” (the struggle to survive in the U.S.) and U.S. white supremacist, imperialist policies, and not being prepared to commit to altering those power relations, ensures that the conditions will persist that translates into suffering and even death for the colonized, the working classes, the oppressed, and all of global humanity”
The worldview of liberals usually ends at the borders of the U.S. settler-state until they are mobilized by the oligarchy to provide ideological cover for the latest imperialist intrigue. This is as true for the liberal Black “misleadership” class as it is for Euro-American liberals.
But U.S.-centrism and class collaboration are not just maladies of the liberal class. Self-identified radicals or leftists from all backgrounds also suffer from this affliction, resulting in a very thin social base for anti-imperialism in the U.S., and even throughout Western Europe.
So, Ukraine, Russia, and NATO feel like a world away and in no way relevant to the everyday grind that the millions of working people are forced to engage in as part of this vicious, backward social, economic system called capitalism. However, because of the startling incompetency of the Biden Administration, the strong possibility of a misstep in Ukraine could very well lead to a nuclear confrontation with Russia — making the situation in Ukraine as significant as life itself for all of us.
What is in play?
The pro-state, pro-imperialist propaganda operations that masquerade as a press involved in journalism never brings any international issue to the attention of the U.S. public unless it is to mobilize the public to support the policies and interests of the capitalist elites. Over the last few weeks, the propagandists have been busy inundating the public with stories of Russia aggression in Ukraine.
Why?
Because even though it has only been a few months since the U.S. had to retreat from Afghanistan, the public is once again being mobilized to support the mad policies of the U.S. in Ukraine; policies that appear to be purposely attempting to evoke some kind of military response from the Russia Federation, which the U.S. has explicitly stated it would respond to.
The U.S. Peace Council’s statement on Ukraine Reveals why Ukraine is important.
The statement first provides important historical context in order to counter the narrative being pushed by the corporate press and their liberal and radical collaborators:
“For weeks, the U.S. corporate media have been shrill in declaring that Russia, having positioned tens of thousands of Russian troops on the border, may be about to invade Ukraine. U.S. State Department spokesmen have been threatening Russia with punishing economic sanctions if there were an invasion. Daily, if not hourly, TV viewers are shown satellite images supposedly showing Russian troop concentrations on the Ukraine border, accompanied by unflattering photos of a scowling Vladimir Putin, depicted as the evil source of the new U.S.-Russia tensions.”
And how did this situation emerge in Ukraine?
The corporate press usually leaves out vital information, like the U.S.-supported coup against the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych in 2014 (one of a number of coups that the Obama/Biden administration pulled off during its eight years in office).
As a result of the coup, many people in that country, but particularly in the more Russia speaking parts of Eastern Ukraine that had overwhelmingly supported Yanukovych, rejected the new coup government as illegitimate. In response, the coup government, which had significant numbers the extreme right- neo-Nazis in the government and in the security forces, attacked the peoples in the East. In other words, the government attacked its own people — a charge that the Obama administration had levelled at Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to delegitimize his government just a couple of years earlier.
As a result of the military assault by the new government, two regions in the East, Donetsk and Luhansk, broke away from Ukraine and declared themselves independent. The intensification of the ensuing war led to an agreement referred to as the Minsk II Accords in early 2015. This agreement was negotiated and agreed to by France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council, including the United States.
“The Accords provided for demilitarization of eastern Ukraine, restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty over the eastern regions, and full autonomy for the Donbas region. Despite occasional lip service, they have been largely ignored by the U.S. and NATO.”
The US Peace Council (USPC) statement also points out that Victoria Nuland, one of the architects of the Obama/Biden coup in 2014, testified before Congress on the billions of dollars the U.S. pumped into Ukraine to provoke the coup and then prop-up the coup government.
Back in power, the Democrats apparently have decided to take up where they left off in Ukraine. They consciously encouraged Ukraine’s government to ignore the Minsk agreement and to take back the Donbas region in the East by force and provided them with the military means to do so.
The geostrategic objective of expanding NATO right up to Russia’s doorstep is taking precedence over any considerations of what more war might mean for the peoples of Ukraine. But unlike U.S. imperial actions in largely defenseless global South nations, the Russian leadership countered that any war and the expansion of NATO would constitute an existential threat that they would be forced to respond to decisively.
“The incorporation of Ukraine into NATO would move NATO weapons and troops even closer to the heartland of Russia. This is to say nothing of the fact that, within living memory, the Russian people suffered invasion from the West. In 1941-45 Hitler's armies, 4 million strong, devastated the country in a genocidal war that took some 27 million lives.”
In his year-end press conference on December 23rd, Mr. Putin stressed that “Further movement of NATO eastward is unacceptable. They are on the threshold of our house. Is it an excessive demand — no more attack weapons systems near our home? Is there something unusual about this?” One need not be an unqualified admirer of the politics of Vladimir Putin to acknowledge that the Russian leader has legitimate security concerns.
What must be done according to the USPC:
The U.S. Peace Movement Must Act Before it is Too Late
To counter those permanent powerful forces will take counterpressure. The U.S. peace movement should reject demonization of Russian leaders. We must act urgently to push for immediate de-escalation of this NATO-created dangerous crisis. We must vehemently demand that:
● The Minsk II agreement serves as a framework for a non-violent, diplomatic solution to the crisis that also fully involves the United Nations Security Council.
● The U.S. and its allies cease unnecessary provocations including increased arms sales to Ukraine and suggested NATO membership.
● Potential threats to international peace be taken up by the United Nations and subjected to the provisions of the UN Charter and other elements of international law instead of arbitrary and illegal actions by any state or regional formation.”
The U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination has been a continuous threat to global peace and security. However, with the precipitous decline in their global prestige if not actual power, because they still possess enormous economic and military power, the inability of the white supremacist colonialist mind to come to terms with the new realities of the present world makes the decision makers in the U.S. and Europe an existential threat to all of humanity.
The military pivot to China, criminal sanctions against over thirty nations, wars, subversion, torture, the commodification of disease, the blatant disregard for life represented by the CDC’s decisions to force workers back on job even if they are sick, mass incarceration, militarized police, over eight hundred military bases around the world — all testify to why radical change in the U.S. and the dismantling of the U.S. empire is a global imperative.
It is also why it is imperative that everyone, in particular Black and working-class people, understand that not having an awareness of the interconnections of the “grind” (the struggle to survive in the U.S.) and U.S. white supremacist, imperialist policies, and not being prepared to commit to altering those power relations, ensures that the conditions will persist that translates into suffering and even death for the colonized, the working classes, the oppressed, and all of global humanity.
The right to peace is fundamentally intertwined with the right to life, and both rights are “People(s)-centered human rights.” However, these fundamental rights will never be realized as long as we allow the capitalist criminals currently in control of the U.S. state and system to operate with impunity. The task is clear.
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president of the United States on the Green Party ticket. Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and was awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council.
Azov Battalion in Kyiv Photo: Sopa Images / SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty
“…it is imperative that everyone, in particular Black and working-class people, understand that not having an awareness of the interconnections of the “grind” (the struggle to survive in the U.S.) and U.S. white supremacist, imperialist policies, and not being prepared to commit to altering those power relations, ensures that the conditions will persist that translates into suffering and even death for the colonized, the working classes, the oppressed, and all of global humanity”
The worldview of liberals usually ends at the borders of the U.S. settler-state until they are mobilized by the oligarchy to provide ideological cover for the latest imperialist intrigue. This is as true for the liberal Black “misleadership” class as it is for Euro-American liberals.
But U.S.-centrism and class collaboration are not just maladies of the liberal class. Self-identified radicals or leftists from all backgrounds also suffer from this affliction, resulting in a very thin social base for anti-imperialism in the U.S., and even throughout Western Europe.
So, Ukraine, Russia, and NATO feel like a world away and in no way relevant to the everyday grind that the millions of working people are forced to engage in as part of this vicious, backward social, economic system called capitalism. However, because of the startling incompetency of the Biden Administration, the strong possibility of a misstep in Ukraine could very well lead to a nuclear confrontation with Russia — making the situation in Ukraine as significant as life itself for all of us.
What is in play?
The pro-state, pro-imperialist propaganda operations that masquerade as a press involved in journalism never brings any international issue to the attention of the U.S. public unless it is to mobilize the public to support the policies and interests of the capitalist elites. Over the last few weeks, the propagandists have been busy inundating the public with stories of Russia aggression in Ukraine.
Why?
Because even though it has only been a few months since the U.S. had to retreat from Afghanistan, the public is once again being mobilized to support the mad policies of the U.S. in Ukraine; policies that appear to be purposely attempting to evoke some kind of military response from the Russia Federation, which the U.S. has explicitly stated it would respond to.
The statement first provides important historical context in order to counter the narrative being pushed by the corporate press and their liberal and radical collaborators:
“For weeks, the U.S. corporate media have been shrill in declaring that Russia, having positioned tens of thousands of Russian troops on the border, may be about to invade Ukraine. U.S. State Department spokesmen have been threatening Russia with punishing economic sanctions if there were an invasion. Daily, if not hourly, TV viewers are shown satellite images supposedly showing Russian troop concentrations on the Ukraine border, accompanied by unflattering photos of a scowling Vladimir Putin, depicted as the evil source of the new U.S.-Russia tensions.”
And how did this situation emerge in Ukraine?
The corporate press usually leaves out vital information, like the U.S.-supported coup against the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych in 2014 (one of a number of coups that the Obama/Biden administration pulled off during its eight years in office).
As a result of the coup, many people in that country, but particularly in the more Russia speaking parts of Eastern Ukraine that had overwhelmingly supported Yanukovych, rejected the new coup government as illegitimate. In response, the coup government, which had significant numbers the extreme right- neo-Nazis in the government and in the security forces, attacked the peoples in the East. In other words, the government attacked its own people — a charge that the Obama administration had levelled at Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to delegitimize his government just a couple of years earlier.
As a result of the military assault by the new government, two regions in the East, Donetsk and Luhansk, broke away from Ukraine and declared themselves independent. The intensification of the ensuing war led to an agreement referred to as the Minsk II Accords in early 2015. This agreement was negotiated and agreed to by France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council, including the United States.
“The Accords provided for demilitarization of eastern Ukraine, restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty over the eastern regions, and full autonomy for the Donbas region. Despite occasional lip service, they have been largely ignored by the U.S. and NATO.”
The US Peace Council (USPC) statement also points out that Victoria Nuland, one of the architects of the Obama/Biden coup in 2014, testified before Congress on the billions of dollars the U.S. pumped into Ukraine to provoke the coup and then prop-up the coup government.
Back in power, the Democrats apparently have decided to take up where they left off in Ukraine. They consciously encouraged Ukraine’s government to ignore the Minsk agreement and to take back the Donbas region in the East by force and provided them with the military means to do so.
The geostrategic objective of expanding NATO right up to Russia’s doorstep is taking precedence over any considerations of what more war might mean for the peoples of Ukraine. But unlike U.S. imperial actions in largely defenseless global South nations, the Russian leadership countered that any war and the expansion of NATO would constitute an existential threat that they would be forced to respond to decisively.
“The incorporation of Ukraine into NATO would move NATO weapons and troops even closer to the heartland of Russia. This is to say nothing of the fact that, within living memory, the Russian people suffered invasion from the West. In 1941-45 Hitler's armies, 4 million strong, devastated the country in a genocidal war that took some 27 million lives.”
In his year-end press conference on December 23rd, Mr. Putin stressed that “Further movement of NATO eastward is unacceptable. They are on the threshold of our house. Is it an excessive demand — no more attack weapons systems near our home? Is there something unusual about this?” One need not be an unqualified admirer of the politics of Vladimir Putin to acknowledge that the Russian leader has legitimate security concerns.
What must be done according to the USPC:
The U.S. Peace Movement Must Act Before it is Too Late
To counter those permanent powerful forces will take counterpressure. The U.S. peace movement should reject demonization of Russian leaders. We must act urgently to push for immediate de-escalation of this NATO-created dangerous crisis. We must vehemently demand that:
● The Minsk II agreement serves as a framework for a non-violent, diplomatic solution to the crisis that also fully involves the United Nations Security Council.
● The U.S. and its allies cease unnecessary provocations including increased arms sales to Ukraine and suggested NATO membership.
● Potential threats to international peace be taken up by the United Nations and subjected to the provisions of the UN Charter and other elements of international law instead of arbitrary and illegal actions by any state or regional formation.”
The U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination has been a continuous threat to global peace and security. However, with the precipitous decline in their global prestige if not actual power, because they still possess enormous economic and military power, the inability of the white supremacist colonialist mind to come to terms with the new realities of the present world makes the decision makers in the U.S. and Europe an existential threat to all of humanity.
The military pivot to China, criminal sanctions against over thirty nations, wars, subversion, torture, the commodification of disease, the blatant disregard for life represented by the CDC’s decisions to force workers back on job even if they are sick, mass incarceration, militarized police, over eight hundred military bases around the world — all testify to why radical change in the U.S. and the dismantling of the U.S. empire is a global imperative.
It is also why it is imperative that everyone, in particular Black and working-class people, understand that not having an awareness of the interconnections of the “grind” (the struggle to survive in the U.S.) and U.S. white supremacist, imperialist policies, and not being prepared to commit to altering those power relations, ensures that the conditions will persist that translates into suffering and even death for the colonized, the working classes, the oppressed, and all of global humanity.
The right to peace is fundamentally intertwined with the right to life, and both rights are “People(s)-centered human rights.” However, these fundamental rights will never be realized as long as we allow the capitalist criminals currently in control of the U.S. state and system to operate with impunity. The task is clear.
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president of the United States on the Green Party ticket. Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and was awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council.
he West’s fiction of “human rights” has been weaponized by neoliberals to rationalize naked imperialist interventions. But if human rights are to have any relevance for the oppressed, they must be “de-colonized” and given meaning by the oppressed themselves: a People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR).
"Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions." ~Frantz Fanon
International Human Rights Day is December 10. On that day in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was promulgated as the first in a series of covenants, treaties, and legal interpretations that would make up the post-war human rights framework.
However, the history of struggle that produced the UDHR, beginning with the 1945 convention in San Francisco that created the United Nations, is one that can only be characterized as contentious. It is not possible to cover all of that history here. However, it is important that the historiography of Black activism that saw Black activists as central players in UN processes and debates between 1945 and 1951 is well known . Suffice to say that the contentious ideological character around the concept of human rights is still being played out today.
The understanding of what constituted human rights mirrored the post-war ideological polarization that started to reemerge between the Soviet Union and the U.S. and its allies. Human rights , according to the U.S. and Western European powers, were civil and political with economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR) — like the right to healthcare, housing, food, education, leisure, and the practice of one’s language and culture — being merely aspirational. Consequently, the breakdown between the two approaches was between the West and civil and political rights grounded in the individual, and the East that championed collective ESCR’s.
Operating from the narrow perspective that marginalizes ESCR’s, but champions political rights, U.S. president Joe Biden is exploiting human rights day to advance the obscene notion that the U.S. and by extension the colonial states of Western Europe are somehow the defenders of “human rights.”
The idea that Western colonial/capitalist states were defenders of human rights struck many in the colonized South as either delusional or an affirmation that in the eyes of the West they were not human. For the colonized and racialized who were burned alive, tortured, and murdered by these champions of human rights, it was understood that whatever human rights were supposed to be they did not include the racialized and colonized peoples of the world.
Yet, the fiction that Western societies were committed to human rights persisted in the colonial metropoles. Today however, after the forty-year onslaught of the neoliberal counterrevolution that begin in the global South in 1973 before moving on to Northern economies, the brutal contradictions of capitalist accumulation meant that the capitalist bribe offered to workers in the North during the post-war years until the 1970s, was withdrawn.
The global economic crisis of neoliberal capitalism exacerbated by the covid pandemic exposed the ethical, moral, and political contradictions of the liberal human rights framework. The massive economic displacements with hunger, unemployment and unnecessary deaths that occurred among the population the United States, with a disproportionate rate of sickness and hospitalization among non-white workers and the poor in the U.S., was never condemned as violations of human rights.
Why?
Even though the liberal human rights framework gives a begrudging acknowledgement to ESCRs in its founding documents, in practice liberal capitalist states have been uneven in providing ESCR protections. The U.S., however, has been the most successful in separating the idea of fundamental ESCRs - like the right to health, food, housing, education, a means to subsist at an acceptable level of material culture, leisure, and real, life-long social security - from democratic discourse on what constitutes the responsibility of the state and the interests and rights the state should uphold in order to be considered legitimate.
Therefore, similar to Obama’s assertion that a war is only a war when U.S. military personnel die, U.S. policymakers, the press and consequently, the public do not apply a human rights lens to state and private capitalist policies. In other words, human rights violations did not occur with covid because it was determined that whatever occurred in the U.S. they would not be defined as human rights violations.
This categorical conversion and alternation of reality is precisely how the U.S. can continue to assert that it is a champion of human rights, and get away with it, at least for the U.S. public.
But the dangerous contradictions of liberal human rights do not stop at the level of domestic policies.
Operating from the ideological position that human rights are only civil and political such as the right to vote, speech, assembly, etc., and the false premise that human rights are natural, objective and politically neutral, the liberal framework was able to be further weaponized by neoliberals in the nineties as an ideological instrument that rationalized naked imperialist interventions.
Humanitarian interventionism (war) and the “responsibility to protect” became the contemporary expressions of the “white man’s burden” to save natives in the global South from their autocratic rulers. This insidious, white supremacist construction then metastasized from its liberal base into left circles and left discourses with the being left forces giving ideological cover for imperialist interventions and, consequently, making it very difficult to oppose attacks on non-European global South nations.
Liberal-left forces in the West did not recognize the white supremacist implications of aligning themselves with their bourgeoisie against nations in the Global South justified by the dubious position that white supremacist elites in the West were concerned about human rights and democracy in those nations.
It simply did not dawn on them that the “autocratic” rulers to be deposed were usually in nations that were attempting to resist complete domination by the U.S. and its European allies. From Cuba, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran to North Korea and Venezuela, subversion, direct military interventions, proxy wars, and sanctions were all deployed to “save” the people from their oppressive rulers. And it did not matter if tens of thousands died from the wars and sanctions that denied population medicines, the white West determined in their privilege and safe capitals thousands of miles away that these losses were acceptable collateral damage to preserve democracy and “human rights.”
The Imperative to Decolonize Human Rights
Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the
ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the
world for what it is, and move to transform it. ~Ella Baker
This cynical ideological manipulation of liberal human rights is the reason so many around the world turned away from using this framework. Yet, from W.E.B. Dubois and Claudia Jones through to Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and on to the Mississippi Workers Center for Human Rights of today, the radical Black movement still frames crucial elements of the struggles being waged by Africans within the vocabulary of human rights. Are Africans in the U.S. mistaken by using terms like human rights or are we operating from a different framework?
I have argued that from the moment that Black activists first articulated a position on human rights in 1945 that made the fundamental connection between the need to eradicate racial oppression and exploitation in the U.S. and European colonialism as a prerequisite for the realization of human rights, we were operating from a different framework: a framework I labeled as a “People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs) framework.
The assumption of the PCHRs frame is simple and clear. If human rights are to have any relevance for the oppressed, they must be “de-colonized” and given meaning by the oppressed themselves.
And what are People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR)?
They are “those non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment to universal human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define and secure for themselves through social struggle.”
This definition is a description of a process and an ethical framework as opposed to a pre-figured list of items defined as representing human rights. This is one of the key differences between the liberal framework and PCHRs. The PCHR approach asserts that human rights must be created from the bottom-up.
The PCHR framework rejects the idea that human rights only emanate from legalistic texts negotiated by states, as important as some of the principles represented in some of the texts. PCHRs are a creation of struggle and emerge from the people in formation. Unlike the liberal frame that elevates mystical notions of natural law (which is really bourgeois law) as the foundation of abstract rights, the “people” in formation create the ethical foundation and are the source of PCHRs.
The process is open-ended. It is informed by the needs and aspirations of the oppressed and serves as both a counternarrative to the ideological and cultural hegemony of capital and a guide to action. It is based on the assumption that a set of “human rights” can only emerge as part of a de-colonial liberatory process.
The people-centered framework proceeds from the assumption that the genesis of the assaults on human dignity that are at the core of human rights violations is located in the ongoing structural relationships of colonial/capitalist oppression. Therefore, the PCHR framework does not pretend to be non-political. It is a political project in the service of Africans and the colonized working classes, peasants and socially oppressed. It names the enemies of freedom: the Western white supremacist, colonial/capitalist patriarchy.
So, we are not confused by or distracted by the clownish antics of Joe Biden with his democracy summit or surprised that the flaccid reforms of the “Build Back Better “legislation were whittled down and then emptied of content. The bourgeoisie is clear and quite serious about the class war that they are waging.
That is why we must be clearer and more determined. Our lives and the planet depend on whether or not we are able to defeat the Pan European white supremacist colonial/capitalist patriarchy that would rather destroy the world than surrender power.
Defeat, therefore, is not an option.
The realization of authentic freedom and human dignity can only come about with this victory. With PCHRs, we have an ideological weapon. A weapon that envisions, centers, and legitimizes the understanding that it is only through social revolution that human rights can be realized.
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president of the United States on the Green Party ticket. Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and was awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.
The Delusional Commitment to the Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” is leading the U.S. and the World to Disaster
U.S. actions around the world seem mysterious unless the commitment to white supremacist notions of domination is clearly understood.
The 21st Century was supposed to be the century of continued and unchallenged global dominance by the U.S., at least that was the plan advanced by the right-wing political hacks at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Their optimism was understandable. With the dismantling of the Soviet Union, it was reasonable that the petit-bourgeois intellectual servants of capital would see no rival or check on U.S. power. According to liberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama , with the dismantling of the Soviet state and system, the historic struggle to establish the hegemony of classical liberalism and capitalism as the inevitable outcome of the “Western” driven project known as modernity had come to an end.
For both classical liberals like Fukuyama and neoconservatives who would rise to power during the George W. Bush administration, it was asserted that the societies of the U.S. and Western Europe should be viewed as representative of the apex of collective human development that all should aspire to because history and objective rationalism had determined it so, and - “there is no alternative.”
But human societies, even when they are claimed to be guided by objective scientific laws, have never emerged as a tabula rasa. What develops at any point in history is the outcome of the social and economic contradictions of the previous era with many of those unresolved contradictions still present in the new one.
The permanent unipolar dominance of the U.S. and the end of history that was decreed in the nineties proved to be as much of an ideological fiction as the thousand-year rule of Hitler’s Third Reich. And like Hitler, with whom the managers of the U.S. empire share a common philosophical commitment to white supremacy along with the recognition that global hegemony required a colonial empire, U.S. policymakers also made fatal strategic blunders once they found themselves with unchallenged global power.
Why?
The delusional quality of consciousness and a worldview infused with white supremacist ideology makes it exceedingly difficult if not impossible for individuals infected with this mental affliction to cognitively grasp the world as it really exists, let alone to understand the limitations of their power.
That is precisely why with the dawn of the 21st century the U.S. found itself embroiled in two simultaneous military conflicts that U.S. policymakers thought they could successfully conduct with a poverty conscripted army and a dubious rationale provided by the “War on Terror.”
However, instead of the global natives being in awe of U.S. power, by 2007 what Mao Zedong had proclaimed and the Vietnamese had confirmed and that was that the U.S. was a “paper-tiger.”
And with the defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, did U.S. policymakers draw any lesson from a military-first strategy that would compel a reassessment of that approach? Of course not.
In precipitous global decline and with an ongoing and deepening crisis of legitimacy domestically, the Obama administration launched and/or supported at least three wars, and the Trump administration continued many of those policies, including escalating tensions with both Russia and China.
The Biden administration embraced the anti-Chinese belligerence of the Trump administration and the Obama administrations’ military pivot to Asia. These policies epitomized the dangerously irrational and desperate belief that military bluster would pre-empt or reverse the fate that all empires face when their subjects are no longer afraid and the rulers have become soft, corrupt and are unable to even convince themselves that they are still fit to rule.
Yet, this is a cold-blooded criminal class that is ruthless and still dangerous. We must not forget this fact. The destruction of Libya, wars in Syria and Yemen, subversion in Ethiopia and Haiti, coups, illegal sanctions and the outrageous interventions into the internal affairs and electoral processes in Nicaragua and Venezuela are just some of the actions that bear out the destructive power of the U.S.
With its rulers’ consciousness and worldviews infused with the psychopathologies of white supremacist ideology, the drive to maintain global “Full Spectrum Dominance ,” a grotesque, bipartisan doctrine that commits the U.S. to aggressive counters to any real or imagine threats to its global or regional economic and political dominance, reflects more than just a strategy for continued bourgeois economic and political hegemony. It takes on an existential character because for the ruling class, “whiteness” and dominance are naturally interconnected and serve as the foundation of their identity. And it is why the rise of China is so incredibly disconcerting.
That is why like a crazed wounded animal, during the decline of the white West all of collective humanity is threatened by the devastating power of this narcissistic, colonial/capitalist minority of the global population that would rather destroy the world than to not be able to dominate it.
But then again, revolutionary forces, states, and projects are demonstrating that collective humanity is not ready to allow the greed, barbarity and selfishness of the Western capitalist ruling class to lead to the demise of life on the planet. There is growing opposition and that opposition is clear. In order for the world to live, the Pan European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy must die.
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president of the United States on the Green Party ticket. Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and was awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.
For all the policy failures of COP26 it may actually be an inflection point in history -- a point where social and political conditions force a transformation of consciousness and politics that can usher in epochal change.
COP 26 reaffirmed what has been obvious from the beginning: the Northern colonial and capitalist states most responsible for creating the climate crisis are unwilling to place people before profits in order to address the planet’s looming ecological collapse and humanitarian catastrophe.
We need justice. But that word -- Justice! -- despite all of the philosophical pontificating from John Locke to John Rawls, is a concept incompatible with the rapacious civilizational logic of a colonial/capitalist system based on self-interest, greed, and social Darwinism. Yet, without a firm commitment to the institutionalization of a just world order in which the gifts of mother-earth are equally shared along with respect for the earth and its natural order, the evidence is now irrefutable - human society will not survive.
The elementary logic of this observation suggests the necessity for a radical divergence from production processes, consumption patterns, destructive relationships to the natural world and degrading social relationships, is denied by powerful Northern capitalist countries.
What does this mean? It means that the appeals to reforms, finance and rationality coming out of the COP process are not enough to overcome the entrenched short-term interests of the international capitalist plutocrats.
It means recognizing that the fight for climate and environmental justice is in fact a revolutionary project, requiring mass-global resistance and the expropriation of economic and political power of finance and corporate capital. Without this recognition, the COP process will continue to be nothing more than a public relations stunt geared to convincing the public that green capitalism and saving the planet are compatible.
In his piece that appears in this special edition, Anthony Rogers-Wright points out that “the cataclysms of the interlinked crises of COVID and climate change were elucidated this past year in ways that cannot be repudiated.” That is true. But there were other connections that were made that are transforming the consciousness of peoples in the global South and the nationally oppressed and workers within the core capitalist nations that were exposed during the COVID crisis. The most immediate connection being that the lives of ordinary people mean nothing to the lords of capital.
At the height of the COVID outbreak nations in the global South experienced the consequence of disrupted global production and supply chains in ways even more severe than the economic disruptions that caused so much suffering among workers and the poor in the Northern nations.
With massive unemployment and stretched state budgets trying to provide minimum economic support to their populations and healthcare systems ravaged by structural adjustment policies imposed on them by the colonial powers, nations in the global South attempting to survive-- but without the ability of the US to print money that is accepted as a global currency --asked the Northern nations to suspend, just postpone, not forgive their overwhelming debt payments during the covid crisis. They were rebuffed.
COVID revealed the hidden reality of the dictatorship of capital and the fact that no lives matter to capitalists beyond their ability to provide labor or buy capitalist products. Those revelations explain why the comforting rhetoric of liberal reformism that mollified some activists involved in the COP process in the past is no longer working.
COP26 might be a turning point. One of those inflection points in history where conditions force a transformation of consciousness and thus a new politics that can usher in epochal change.
In Glasgow, the people saw how the colonial gangsters lobbied to weaken proposals to phase out subsidies for coal, oil, and gas. The people understood clearly what was really being said and what kinds of interest were really important when the powerful tried to explain why the target of a measly 100 billion a year to assist the nations who were not even responsible for the climate crisis was not realized. Especially when the people were aware that these same G20 nations who could not meet their obligations had subsidized fossil fuel industries to the tune of 3 trillion dollars just since 2015.
Radicalization occurs when all of the liberal options are proven to be untenable and unsupportable by objective reality. A political crisis for the continued rule of capital is being produced by the imposition of debt, the subversion of democratic projects, the militarism and wars, the environmental destruction, and the exploitation of resources and labor by capitalist nations.
It is this realization that is reflected in new forms of resistance and a steeled opposition, especially among the young, from indigenous, nationally oppressed, and racialized colonized peoples that are inoculated against the liberal obscurantism that has dominated so many of these global gatherings and resulted in so many being funneled into liberal reformism.
Imperialism, in the historic form of the Pan-European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy is the enemy. This is a revelation and a position that the internationalist African revolutionary movement recognized some time ago. It is an affirmation of the correctness of that position that so many, while not yet using those terms, have, nevertheless, come to understand that unless we disarm the colonial/capitalist West, we are all doomed.
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the steering committee of the Black is Back Coalition. He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He was awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shim award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.
Why do Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela pose such an existential threat to the U.S.? The promise of socialism and their resistance to US class warfare.
One of the extreme ironies of the latest attack by the settler-colonial regime of the United States against the national democratic project of Nicaragua is that in Nicaragua, the second poorest nation in the Americas, universal healthcare and education are guaranteed to the population as a human right, while in the U.S. those kinds of basic human rights are distant dreams.
The day after the so-called progressive block of legislators in the U.S. House of Representatives surrendered to President Joe Biden and the right-wing corporate wing of the party on the Build Back Better legislation that offered some minor and temporary relief for workers and the poor, many of those same “progressives” voted for the RENACER Act . The RENACER Act is a vicious piece of legislation meant to undermine the ability of the Nicaragua government to protect the human rights of its people and to punish the people for having the temerity to support their government and their anti-colonial project.
Why do Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela pose such an existential threat to the U.S.? Why are they able to unite all the wings of the democrat party and the republican party against them? It boils down to two factors. First, the power of their example in attempting to build independent, self-determining projects that center the material needs and interests of the people over those of capital. Second, the class warfare politics of the U.S. state.
The reassertion of the racist Monroe Doctrine by the former US National Security Advisor John Bolton was not repudiated by the Biden administration because it is also the guiding framework for its policies. The reference to the Monroe Doctrine was nothing more than connecting that doctrine to its contemporary policy expression reflected in the doctrine of “Full Spectrum ” dominance that has been bipartisan U.S. foreign policy for twenty years. The thrust of this policy is that any nation that attempts to defy the U.S. and build an independent project that threatens U.S. hegemony in any region of the world will be destroyed.
The fact that Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela are not only attempting to build independent projects but build socialism makes their example even more of a threat.
But there is also a domestic ideological component to this as well. The very existence of these nations at this historical moment, a moment characterized by the deepening and irreversible contradictions and current crisis of the capitalist order poses a potentially serious ideological threat. If these relatively poor nations can build public housing and eliminate homelessness, offer free education and universal healthcare, guarantee that no one will be allowed to go hungry, can build democratic structures with the protected right of popular participation, the question as to why these kinds of human rights are unrealizable for the people of the U.S. is a destabilizing one that must be avoided at all costs.
For the U.S. it has never been about human rights but hegemony
Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela are attempting to build a socialism that is committed to a framework of social justice that we refer to as People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs). PCHRs are informed by the theoretical social practice of the African American radical human rights tradition and have emerged as the flip side of the same coin from People(s)-centered development. Unlike the liberal, individualist, state-centric and legalistic conception of human rights, PCHRs are defined as:
“Those non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment to universal human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define and secure for themselves through social struggle.”
This approach to human rights views human rights as an arena of struggle that when grounded and informed by the needs and aspirations of the oppressed, becomes part of a unified comprehensive strategy for de-colonization and radical social change.
U.S. President Joe Biden declared that Nicaragua president Daniel Ortega was “no different from the Somoza family that Ortega and the Sandinistas fought four decades ago.” He went on to say that “the United States, in close coordination with other members of the international community, will use all diplomatic and economic tools at our disposal to support the people of Nicaragua and hold accountable the Ortega-Murillo government and those that facilitate its abuses.”
Biden forgot to mention that the U.S. placed Somoza in power and supported him until he was overthrown by the Sandinistas in 1979.
The idea that the U.S. is concerned about democracy or human rights anywhere in the world is an insult to all thinking persons. I will not list once again the litany of crimes that support that assertion except for two. The Biden administration and their ideological lackeys in the media and even among some elements of what is referred to as a left question the 65 percent turn-out for the elections in Nicaragua. But when it was objectively verified that less than one quarter of the voting population turned out for the phony election of the Clinton imposed president of Haiti Martel Martelly, or equally phony election of Jovenel Moise with less than twenty-percent turnout, where were the questions from the New York Times, Washington Post and all the other propaganda outlets posing as news operations?
What was Joe Biden’s position in the administration when his boss President Obama gave the greenlight to overthrow the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras? Did he oppose it?
Criminality is a core characteristic of all settler-colonial states because they are born out of systematic, terroristic, and genocidal violence against indigenous populations, and even more so when, as in the case of the U.S. they become global empires. Democracy and human rights are no more than ideological props to obscure the real interests and intentions of the rulers and to build domestic support for whatever criminal activity the state has embarked on.
Subversion in Haiti, sanctions and attacks on Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela and the ongoing wars launched from the over 800 U.S. military bases world-wide continues and will continue as long as the U.S. public is confused, disorganized, and diverted from understanding that the interests of the capitalist oligarchy are not their interests.
Slowly that shift in consciousness is happening in the U.S. The economic crisis of the last year and half, coming on the heels of the devastating crisis of 2008-9, has created a legitimation crisis and a new understanding of the real interests of the rulers that will not be reversed. The precarity of workers and the poor are forcing them to eliminate any and all illusions about their government and the economic system.
Debate around the Build Back Better legislation and the elimination of provisions that could have had a material impact on the lives of workers, in particular women of color workers, exposed the legislation as a cynical public relations stunt.
Compared to the attempts by states attempting to move toward socialism, the provisions in the bill even before it was stripped of most of its progressive provisions, still did not offer a real minimum floor for the protection of the fundamental human rights to social security, the right to an adequate income, housing, education, the right to participate in governance with the right to vote as a minimum, and healthcare, to name a few of the rights denied the population in the U.S., and even more so for its racialized and colonized captives.
That is why the idea of socialism and the possibility of an alternative to the barbarity of capitalism has been attacked. The U.S. intends to turn Nicaragua into Haiti, Cuba into Honduras, and Venezuela, which is key for liberation movements in the region, into Libya - the U.S. and European latte-left is helping.
But as brother Netfa Freeman stated, Black anti-colonial revolutionaries will stand with Nicaragua and all the struggling peoples of the planet against the number one threat to international peace and human rights – the United States of America. In that position, there is no compromise and no retreat!
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the steering committee of the Black is Back Coalition. He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He was awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shim award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.