Group items tagged

Melinda Janki

In your important intervention you speak of increasing authoritarianism as a current condition. Should we not be as concerned about newly empowered transnational corporations, debt-driving inter-governmental organizations and hollowed-out states?

Is there a recorded inflation rate for gold currency in the interior?  How is gold exchange value determined.

How might we revisit Fonlon's instruction and the focus on Aristotle, Plato and other imperial, or imperialized, philosophers?

recalling the danger of firing squads that have been frequently used against political opponents (note to reader: remember the end of the Grenadian Revolution in 1983).

The fundamentals of our differences come down to, how does one understand the question of the internationalism of the oppressed? In order to answer this, there are two basic principles we start with: (1)a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, and (2)the law and nature of contradictions. We will attempt to apply both in our reply.

During this period, the so-called Cold War, where the USSR, China and several other countries were frequently identified with the cause of socialism and where, in many cases, workers and oppressed classes had succeeded in overthrowing formal capitalism and foreign domination, much of the Left fell into the fateful habit of deciding upon what stand to take on international matters not based on a substantive analysis but based largely on which countries fell on which sides of particular issues.

Baraka is absolutely correct in emphasizing that there is a long and ignominious history of social chauvinism by much of the organized Left in the global North, to which I would add a history of social chauvinism by numerous otherwise progressive movements—beyond the Left—in the global North. The infection of imperial consciousness became clear even in the international Communist movement by the 1930s when many revolutionaries in the global South felt betrayed by the approach of communist parties in the global North (and by the USSR) when too many of those latter parties abandoned the struggle against colonialism in the name of building anti-fascist fronts against the Germans, Italians and, later, the Japanese. This sense of betrayal led to splits in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America and, in some cases, the creation of new revolutionary formations (with often complicated politics).

The elimination of the Soviet bloc and the victory of neoliberal hegemony created challenges for countries in the global South which were following what the late Egyptian Marxist theorist Samir Amin would call “national populist projects.” By “national populist projects” Amin was referencing those regimes that had emerged out of anti-imperialist struggles but were not committed—in any serious/consistent way—to a socialist path, sometimes asserting themselves as non-aligned between the two superpowers, e.g., Egypt under Nasser. Many such regimes were able to survive through playing one superpower off again another, though this did not always succeed.

the national populist projects which were already in crisis due to internal contradictions—including class struggle, women’s movements, ethnic contradictions, democratic governance challenges—fractured.

With the collapse of the second superpower and the rise of neoliberal globalization,  the national populist projects which were already in crisis due to internal contradictions—including class struggle, women’s movements, ethnic contradictions, democratic governance challenges—fractured

The legitimacy crisis was not simply a public relations challenge. Struggle was breaking out within these states against the regimes. Sometimes led by forces to the left of the regime; other times by forces to the right of the regime (and sometimes both), these struggles were asserting that the regimes were abandoning their base; abandoning the people. One example of the ramifications of the legitimacy crisis unfolded in what came to be known as the Arab democratic uprisings or the “Arab Spring.” These insurrections, all beginning peacefully, were a challenge not only to pro-Western regimes, e.g., Egypt, but also to regimes that had emerged from the national populist projects, e.g., Syria.

Silence. There is no reply other than to challenge the authenticity of those of us on the Left who argue for an anti-imperialist AND anti-dictatorial politics of emancipation.

The question of solidarity of the globally oppressed must begin with a focus on the oppressed themselves. Baraka focuses on the struggle between governments. I start from a different standpoint: the question of the people. It is flowing from the question of the people that one can situate the larger context. In looking at Syria, for instance, what were the nature of the demands of the mass movement? Why was it that the response of the Assad regime was bloody repression? What does that response represent?

This is highlighted because many in the US Left have abandoned the demands for any action by the USA government on the basis that there is nothing that the USA government can or should do (or worse, that we, on the Left, should demand nothing of the USA government other than to cease and desist). The irony here is that during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the US Left was actively in favor of the USA, Britain and France providing direct, military assistance to the Spanish government against the fascists. It is important to remember that even with the danger of fascism, a threat to humankind, the demand for US assistance to the Spanish government came while the USA was still perpetrating crimes against the people of Latin America. A demand for a change in USA policy vis a vis Spain was not inconsistent with opposing the USA role in Latin America.

The main divide among anti-imperialists during the Cold War was rather caused by the attitude towards the USSR, which Communist Parties and their close allies regarded as the “fatherland of socialism”; they determined much of their own political positions by aligning with Moscow and the “socialist camp”—an attitude that was described as “campism.” This was facilitated by Moscow’s support for most struggles against Western imperialism in its global rivalry with Washington. As for Moscow’s intervention against workers’ and peoples’ revolts in its own European sphere of domination, the campists stood with the Kremlin, denigrating these revolts under the pretext that they were fomented by Washington.Those who believed that the defense of democratic rights is the paramount principle of the left supported the struggles against Western imperialism as well as popular revolts in Soviet-dominated countries against local dictatorial rule and Moscow’s hegemony. A third category was formed by the Maoists, who, starting from the 1960s, labeled the USSR “social-fascist,” describing it as worse than US imperialism and going so far to side with Washington in some instances, such as Beijing’s stance in Southern Africa.

Benghazi’s population implored the world for protection, while emphasizing that they wanted no foreign boots on the ground. The League of Arab States supported this request. Accordingly, the UNSC adopted a resolution authorizing “the imposition of a NFZ” over Libya as well as “all necessary measures…to protect civilians…while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” Neither Moscow nor Beijing vetoed this resolution: Both abstained, unwilling to assume the responsibility for a massacre foretold.

As the Western left has become more aligned with their imperialist bourgeoisie in the destabilization of the Global South, the radical Black tradition provides a clear approach to “turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism."

The contradictory nature of that relationship has sharpened as a result of the current crisis of global capitalism and the U.S. led Western imperialist project fueled by two interconnected elements: the devastating social-economic conditions that workers and the laboring classes now face as result of monopoly capital’s neoliberal turn over the last forty years in both the imperialist center and global South; and the intensifying challenge to neoliberalism from states and social movements in the global South, with the corresponding response from U.S. and European capital that has ranged from economic sanctions meant to punish whole populations to direct and indirect political subversion and military interventions, all illegal and morally indefensible.

While U.S. and Western innocence was always a component of the propaganda to justify colonialist aggression, the ideas of humanitarian intervention and its corollary, the responsibility to protect, emerged in the 1990s as one of the most innovative ideological weapons ever produced since the end of the second imperialist war in 1945.

Of course, as I have said on many occasions, the reality is much more complex, with neoliberalism actually representing a more dangerous threat to colonized and working-class peoples in the U.S. and globally. This is because within the context of the U.S., Democrats have been successful in perpetuating the myth that they represent “progressivism.” This perception usually leads to substantial demobilization and actual liberal – left alignment with neoliberalism objectively when Democrats occupy the Executive Branch.

Restoring the historic alliance between the U.S. and Europe was announced by Biden as a major objective of his administration. His “America is Back” slogan was supposed to signify that the U.S. was ready to reassume its leadership of the Western alliance. Biden proudly identified himself as an “Atlanticist,” and indeed a number of the members of his foreign policy team were plunked from the “Atlantic Council.” Similar to the Council on foreign Affairs (CFA), the Atlantic Council is a neoliberal think tank that is funded by a cross-section of the ruling class but significantly by neoliberals associated with the democrat party.

The Atlantic Council was a severe critic of the Trump administration, not because of any concerns about its “racism” but because the Council opposed Trump’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy and his dangerous ideas like pulling out of NATO, a desire to draw down U.S. troops and his insufficient hostility to Russia. Plus, the Council and the neoliberal ruling class never forgave Trump for his scuttling of the Trans-Pacific Partnership because it pulled the rug out from under the Trans-Atlantic Investment Partnership that was supposed to be the next agreement after TPP and would have solidified the hegemony of U.S. capital in Europe for next few decades.Biden and the Council believed that unity among the G-7 nations during the current global capitalist crisis was imperative. Consequently, Biden’s aggressive stance toward Russia, Venezuela, blind support for Israel and general hostility toward the progressive governments in Latin America signaled that belligerent U.S. policy would continue, but with an Obama-like smile.What has been response from the U.S. and Western left to Bourgeois Destabilization in Global South? Bolivian President, Evo Morales, faced a right-wing coup and instead of unrestrained mobilization the left engaged in a debate about the Bolivian process. In Europe, the liberal-left parliamentarians in the European Union awarded their Sakharav human rights prize to the Venezuelan right-wing opposition, an opposition known for burning alive dark-skinned Venezuelans assumed to be “Chavistas.” Bernie Sanders declares Hugo Chavez a “dead communist dictator” and most respectable liberal-left elements in the U.S. would not get caught dead at a pro-Venezuela demo as long as the new “authoritarian dictator,” Nicholas Maduro, is in power. Gaddafi deserved to die, Assad is a bloodthirsty tyrant, China is capitalist, and a human rights violator, and Haiti is a S…hole country that does not merit much thought or energy, let alone mobilization for.

The anti-anti-imperialism of a Eurocentric armchair commentator like Gilbert Achcar neatly captures the inanity of this approach, dressed-up as nuanced and sophisticated analysis. Grounded in Western chauvinism and completely suspended from the contradictory structures and class forces in the specific, concrete realities of this historical moment, it condemns the left projects that don’t correspond to the imagery of Western leftists who see revolutionary change as some pristine project. These leftists do not seem to notice or don’t care that they are usually on the same side of an international issue as the international bourgeoisie.

To counter the collaborationism and opportunism of the U.S. and Western left, Black revolutionaries must re-center the anti-colonial struggle that addresses the dialectics of the national and class issues produced by the colonial/capitalist system. This re-centering of anti-colonial struggle is not new. It has been the broad theoretical framework for African/Black radical tradition for decades — from Black socialists in Harlem like Hubert Harrison and the African Blood Brotherhood in the teens and the 1920’s to the revolutionary Pan African tradition. It was also reflected in the articulations of Lenin on the “National Question” and the assemblies of colonial peoples leading to the 1928 declaration on the right to self-determination on the part of colonized peoples and the declaration that Africans in the U.S. constituted an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination.The radical Black tradition provides an invaluable approach for how a left should address its bourgeoisie.  We say that concretely it means that authentic Western leftists must join us to “turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism.” Specifically for African revolutionaries in the U.S. we must build bottom-up organic black unity and an anti-colonial, pro-socialist movement anchored in the Black working class that must assert leadership of this movement and to the broader radical movement in the U.S.Biden and the neoliberal, neo-fascists are committed to countering the movements for national liberation and socialism by any means, including destroying the planet to maintain European imperialist power.The Western social-imperialist left that is still addicted to its material privileges and illusions of being a part of something called the “West” has a choice that it must make: either you abandon privilege and whiteness and join as class combatants against your bourgeoisie, or you will be considered part of the enemy.

we had not one conversation about how we economists induce harm and what ethical obligations follow from that fact.

That is, one cannot do any positive work with the concept, such as determining whether harm has occurred or measuring its extent, without the careful moral reasoning that defining harm requires.

The radical revolution of values that King hoped would transform the country was repackaged by the early 1970s into an individualist, pro-capitalist, debt-constructed consumer diversion.

the West has demonstrated that it will use all of its military means to maintain its hegemony. Yet, to realize that shift, the “people” are going to have to “see” through the ideological mystifications that still values Eurocentric assumptions as representing settled, objective realities on issues like democracy, freedom, human rights, economic development and cultural integrity in order to confront the new coalitions of privilege.  Dr. King and the black anti-racist, anti-colonialist movements for social justice brought clarity to these moral issues by its example of movement building that sparked struggles for social justice in every sector of U.S. society. That is why sidelining black radical organizations and the black social justice movement has been one of the most effective consequences of the Obama phenomenon.

Today the necessity to stand with the oppressed and oppose war and violence of all kinds has never been more urgent. But that stand cannot be just as individuals. Individual commitment is important, but what Dr. King’s life reaffirmed was the power of movement — of organized and determined people moving in a common direction. That is why the government so desperately attempts to disconnect Dr. King from the people and the movement that produced him and to silence any opposition to its colonialist violence. The example of movement building and struggle is an example that has to be brutally suppressed, as witnessed by how the Obama Administration moved on the Occupy Wallstreet Movement once it became clear that they could not co-opt and control it.

The first is that the metric of revolutionary success lies solely in the formal arena of institutional politics and the development of democratic mechanisms within it. The second is that Tahrir, along with the ludicrously titled “Facebook youth” who populated the square in January and February last year, is the only alternative space in which pressure on the formal arena is thrashed out.

And it’s that energy, that those who benefit from the status quo, from western governments to multinational corporations, really fear. Little wonder that there has been a rush by the world’s most powerful entities – from Hilary Clinton and David Cameron to Morgan Chase and General Electric – to simultaneously venerate Tahrir (as long as the demands voiced within it don’t overstep the mark), echo the generals’ calls for “stability” (shutting down broader discourses of dissent in the process) and form links with the largely neoliberal Muslim Brotherhood (whose policies, despite anguished op-eds in Washington think-tank journals, pose little threat to American interests, and indeed offer up many opportunities).

What they’re less keen to acknowledge – because it carries the revolution out of its sheltered borders – are the other trenches that are increasingly being etched at the margins of Egyptian society, dividing those who have reaped pharaonic-esque riches as a result of 20-odd years of “structural adjustment” from those left behind in zones of neoliberal exclusion.

Forget Shafiq’s advertising hoardings – the revolution is everywhere and it is potent.

As the sociologist Asef Bayat has argued, actions that appear to be individualistic strategies for survival and not explicitly political attempts to bring down elites can, in the right circumstances, become unstoppable and interlinked channels of mass rejection, a struggle for real agency in an era of globalised corporate cosmopolitanism that strives to deny it to so many.

This autonomous organising was truly Frantz Fanon’s work in practice. Abahlali has always been and still is a shackdwellers’ organisation, run not by privileged activists or academics but by shackdwellers themselves. But the continued repression of the movement has taken a toll on its members.

Renewed threats against Abahlali leadership put its president, S’bu Zikode, and general secretary, Bandile Mdlalose, back in safe houses and members began focusing on ANC repression, rather than the state, as the primary driver of this violence. Over the course of the past year, a shift seems to have taken place in the rank and file of the movement in KwaZulu-Natal. Their original critique of the state has shifted to an overarching and focused critique of the ANC.

I say opportunistically because that is what it truly is. In Cape Town, the DA plays the same role as the ANC in oppressing social movements and poor communities. The party pioneered the use of the Anti-Land Invasion Unit and is very happy to shoot protesting shackdwellers and build massive transit camps when it suits them.

There is nothing about DA policy that is progressive economically or supportive of the rights and needs of shackdwellers. However, the DA leadership in KZN did listen to one Abahlali demand (which the ANC failed to do): talk to us, not about us

I was shocked and horrified to hear of AbM-KZN’s decision to vote as a bloc for the DA. (Note: Abahlali baseMjondolo in the Western Cape has not endorsed the DA despite media reports to the contrary). I believe that this is a hugely mistaken move for the most important post-1994 social movement – both from an acknowledgement that the DA is a right-wing, white supremacist political party, and also from an understanding that electoral politics undermines, destroys, and co-opts rather than helps social movements. Despite my love for Abahlali, it is very difficult for me to continue to support an organisation that votes for the DA – a party founded on white supremacy.

Some leftists have cried foul, claiming that the process could not possibly have been democratic or that white supporters of the movement, such as myself, were involved in manipulating Abahlali to support the DA. To other leftists, the fact that AbM went through a rigorously democratic process and yet ended up voting for their oppressor, proves once and for all that shackdwellers cannot be trusted with a vanguardist political project.

If we are to talk about Abahlali baseMjondolo’s core focus around land and housing, it would also be important to note that not only are there many more shacks per capita in Cape Town than in eThekwini, but Cape Town remains by far the most segregated city in the country.

Most of the people attacking the movement have never lived a day of their life in a shack settlement – yet their self-righteousness is palpable. They’ve refused to comprehend the way repression makes backing the DA seem like a very practical decision – one not about principles or the extent of AbM’s radicalism, but about tactically defending one’s own life. Under constant threat of death, what would you do? Do any of us really understand how much pain they have endured?

The second resemblance between Soweto and Tahrir Square was on the question of unity.

Tahrir Square innovated a new politics. It shed the language of religion in politics, but it did so without embracing a militant secularism that would totally outlaw religion in the public sphere. It thus called for a broader tolerance of cultural identities in the public sphere, one that would include both secular and religious tendencies.

Dubbed by mainstream media the Arab Spring (though it started in December), the wave of protests started in Tunisia spread like wildfire through Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and on to Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia (briefly, or so it seems) Syria and Libya. The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings and the ousting of their dictators have given a distinctive flavour of exhilaration and hope to the latest World Social Forum held in Dakar from 6 to 11 February.

Thirty-four civil society and movements activists from 13 countries and three continents joined the conveners of the African Social Forum. We were hosted by the Union Générale de Travailleurs de Tunisie (UGTT), the largest Tunisian trade union, whose role was instrumental in the success of the Tunisian intifada. What follows are some reflections inspired by my participation in the solidarity caravan.

The demonstration that passed in front of the National Theatre paraded in front of us and continued towards the Kasbah where it settled into what became the Kasbah 3 sit-in. It followed the successful Kasbah 1 and 2 that called for the change of the interim governments that followed president Ben Ali’s departure still tainted by members of the previous regime. As I write critical reflections are being developed of the disappointing outcome of Kasbah 3 which demanded the exclusion of the current Interior Minister from the provisional government.

Those receding images of the demonstration, commented by the Tunisian friend with us on the bus, told an important story, despite differences, challenges and the titanic tasks demanding fulfilment, the utmost joy felt by all in Tunisia is that talking politics is indeed fine, that expressing one’s ideas, negotiating them, discussing them, and demonstrating for them is not repressed any more.

The humiliated dignity of a vegetable seller whose livelihood was destroyed by abusive public officials, was every youth’s and then every Tunisian’s humiliated dignity. His pain was everyone’s pain and the irresistible empathy that his tragic protest generated produced the final outburst which escalated and could not be stopped. The repeated violation of the youth’s sense of autonomy, self-respect and integrity sparked the revolution. When such horizons of personal representations are denied and when lying to oneself about the real conditions of one’s existence becomes impossible the trauma is such that even dying is acceptable and burning oneself up a viable protest.

We also discussed the role of media and technology in supporting activists. Facebook was in everyone’s mouth, Al Jazeera’s journalists were praised for their courage and dedication (though, some told us, ‘in the long run we can’t forget they are islamists’). But while nobody denied the supportive role of new social media, the general understanding was that though they helped they were certainly not the determining factors pace the international media (perhaps too eager to stress how western technology democratizes the world). Activists in Sidi Bouzid told us something else. They explained to us their sophisticated street strategy. They used cellphones to create zones of pressure and release in lightening-fast succession to disorient the police who ended up running around the town like headless chicken. It was the knowledge of the town down to its tiniest alleyways that won the control of the city, no Facebook or other social media could have been fast enough, they stress, or provided the strength and the courage necessary.

A key challenge encountered by many in representing the Tunisian revolution (and more broadly the unrest sweeping through the whole region) has been constituted by banal stereotyping and versions of negative and positive Orientalism. The awed surprise that welcomed the events of Tunisia, and soon after Egypt and the others, was constructed on the widespread misconception about the inability of the people of the MENA region to affect real change and be agent of their own emancipation from oppressive rule. Such misrepresentation is based on limited knowledge and preconceptions, political propaganda, Orientalism and outright racism.

Freedom from the dictator, from oppressive and exploitative political and economic systems, from ideological hegemonies, from shrewd political manipulations, from the embodiment of class, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality. There are other ways in which their demands are framed, other discourses, other semantic horizons in which their aspirations are articulated. There is one for each interlocutor and context (as it is the case in complex revolutionary networks of ideas, actors and values).

Some suggested that the youth in Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid are less politically wise than the youth in Tunis. Some suggested that decades of marginalisation from the rest of the country and economic and political privileges in the capital have generated profound social and human imbalances. One consequence of these imbalances, it is alleged by some of our Tunisian interlocutors, is that the youth in the most deprived areas are easier to manipulate and subject to launch themselves in unrealistic and unsophisticated political actions, like the hunger strike demanding immediate jobs to all unemployed the chances of success of which are nil beyond the actual will of local and national authorities. Others observed that the revolution has to avoid reproducing among allies the marginalisation and the elitism of wider society in order to avoid creating an unbridgeable gap between activists on the basis of alleged political and cultural sophistication defined in exclusive terms.

While the youth in Kasserine stressed repeatedly they did not want to be implicated in political battles played on their behalf by people who they did not trust, in Tunis a member of the student union said instead that they were struggling to ignite a ‘deep social transition’ aimed at ushering ‘a world devoid of capitalism and classism’. He added ‘we revolted against an economic pattern because we want Tunisia for all Tunisians’.

A member of the student union in Tunis regarding practices of change commented that as union ‘we distinguish political work from union work.’ Further, he said ‘We want to have a political party for the working class’, it would be one of the 51 registered political parties in Tunisia.

The role of women in developing, articulating and practising methodologies of change has been greatly influential in the revolution. An activist in Tunis expressed in the following way her take on change and practices of transformation ‘we are for the internationalisation of the revolutions to fight against savage capitalism’.

According to some activists, the international agents and institutions of capitalism and imperialism are trying to destroy the Tunisian revolution and set back the advances it has inspired in Tunisia and in the whole MENA region.

There are also internal challenges to the revolutionary movement. There exist tensions between those who want to go back to normality and those who want to fight for a full victory of the revolution and the achievement of a larger set of victories. Their opponents suggest instead that the time has come to revert to representative politics through free and fair elections and the work of the constituent assembly.

This question raises issues of global solidarity, development and political models and sets the ground for the cooperation between activists from the four corners of the planet. The joint Secretary General of the UGTT, told us in Tunis about the vision and values of the UGTT: ‘UGTT’s cultural tradition is European and socialist which we influence with new blood.’ He further said that to achieve the international goals of Tunisian workers it is important to establish stronger ties with the international union movement and with unions in South America, South Africa and elsewhere in the global South.

Messy as such trial and error is, complex as the shifting allegiances and alliances, chaotic as the multiplication of strategies, ideologies, ideas, visions, desires, aspirations, this is what democracy looks like and this process promises the most inspiring outcomes.

At the same time younger activists than the seasoned unionists and human rights activists are developing visions of better futures and are learning politics the hard way after decades of silencing, terror, repression, fear and hopelessness. They submit their demands to mistrusted government institutions, they understand their failure in generating economic development and political accountability, they scale up, down, sideways their demands and their strategies, they win and lose and they go back to the drawing board.

While listening to the praises many articulate of Bourguiba’s policies on education, one had the impression that Tunisian learning achievements are now entering a new phase outside of the classrooms of indoctrination and pedantic learning of useless ‘knowledge’, as doubtlessly illustrated by the high unemployment rate of graduates, and into the streets of relations and struggles, negotiations, differences, mediations. Knowledge, politics, culture, religion, dignity and aspirations, eventually met in the streets, emancipated by schools like jail, freed of the hopelessness of trust in something that is handed by a gracious government and empowered by success and failure, by action and thought, by deliberation and struggle, by trial and error by knowledge as it is, messy, dirty and bloody at times, rather than the sanitized and delusional knowledge imparted by any (more or less) tyrannical regime.

While heartfelt feelings about the issues addressed are here out of the question, the knowledge of the conflicts at stake might be both limited and oversimplified in symbolic codes that are not more than projections of the foreign observer which are then reproduced in a solipsistic space that while pretending dialogue, indeed reproduces a monologue of images that are selected on the basis of specific interests and emotional sensibilities fully rooted in the eyes of the beholder.

Of course, this might well be one further projection in which the assumption is the imbalance of power between ‘us’ and ‘them’ which I think, though, is illustrated if by nothing else by the fact that after the encounters ‘they’ went back to their lives of unemployed or bereaved family members and friends and ‘we’ moved on to our plush hotel and to our drinks by the poolside.

Participating in a solidarity tour to Tunisia, Amanda Sebestyen finds a country of dedicated organisers, heights of suffering and generosity, and a dangerous neglect of the deprived heartlands where the uprising was born.

Our solidarity tour – organised for the World Social Forum and hosted by the Tunisian League of Human Rights and the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) – arrived in Tunisia midway between Stephen Twigg and Angelina Jolie. The MP was travelling (tourist class, I was pleased to note) with a delegation from the Westminster Foundation for Democracy; the actor, with her entourage, went to the refugee camps on the Libyan border, of which the Tunisian people are immensely – and so justly – proud.

When refugees from Libya arrived in the south of Tunisia there was such an immense burst of solidarity that there are still shortages of medicines and staple foods because people bought them to send south when they heard the refugees needed them. Each refugee that arrived – and there were 140,000 in the first week – was greeted by local people with a bottle of water, some bread and some coffee , giving them dignity. The International Red Cross said they had never seen anything like it.'

In return, when Tunisians travel to Europe (not fleeing their revolution but taking up one of its new freedoms, escaping the draconian restrictions imposed by Ben Ali and Ghaddafi in return for bribes from Fortress Europe), the response of the EU is to threaten repatriation.

A new Tunisian Party of Labour aims to build democracy without falling into neoliberalism or religious bigotry.

On the second night, young people initiated rolling protests though the different parts of town. A new tactic was to use mobile phones to call on their friends to make a distraction, and draw police away when they got too heavy in any one place. On the third day the governor fled. For 13 days the uprising was in Sidi Bou Zid alone, then it spread through the region via our union branches: Bouzeyen, Regueb, Jilma; and then over to the town of Kasserine.'

'I don't actually agree that the Internet was the heart of the revolution. The heart of the revolution was the willpower of all the Tunisian people, not just the young.'

Someone looking like an El Greco painting, tall and thin with huge eyes, makes his way with grace on crutches to the stage. His leg has been lost... Why are British soldiers being given the best prosthetics and medical help, when these nonviolent heroes – of a democracy we all claim to support – are being left to cope on their own?

Importantly, 80 per cent of development funds for this year are now to be allocated to the long-forgotten interior regions. Unfortunately at Kasserine the ministers stayed for only three hours, spending part of their time with officials from the former regime.

policemen have virtually disappeared since local people stopped paying bribes. Yet I walked around many times at night and the town was utterly safe; a taxi driver explained how everyone looks out for everyone else. People are more philosophical here. 'The new policemen we can trust are still in the barracks being trained, and it takes time to track down the bad old ones and put them in prison.'

'In the course of this revolution I've discovered my country. I've travelled from the mountains to the desert, I've seen parts of my own home town Tunis which I never knew existed... We're discovering our culture; we're discovering the picturesque beaches and extraordinary landscapes which were reserved either for tourists or for "a certain person"....'

Sovereignty is the relation of the state to other states, to external powers, whereas self‐determination is an internal relation of the state to the people. In a democratic context, self‐determination should be seen as the prerequisite to sovereignty.

The result of the referendum could not have been in doubt. It would have been clear to anyone with a historical understanding of the issues involved, and of the experience of the process leading to Eritrean independence, that the referendum would lead to an overwhelming popular vote for an independent state in the South. Why then did the power in the North agree to a referendum? My answer is: the agreement to hold a referendum deferred a head-on confrontation with US power.

It brought to an end a thousand-year history of Christian states in the North. Sinnar demolished Christian states in the North and inaugurated the political history of Islam in Sudan. Given the conventional understanding that equates Islam with the North and Christianity with the South, I would like us to remember that political power in the North, in Nubia and Beja, was Christian – and that the royal family of the first Muslim state in Sudan came from the South, not the North. In contrast, Islam came to the North in the form of refugees and merchants, not royals or soldiers.

The migrations that we know of better were forced migrations, slavery. The South plundered for slaves from the 17th century onwards with the formation of the Sultanate of the Funj along the Nile and the Sultanate of Darfur in the west. But the slave trade became intense only in the late 18th century when the Caribbean plantation economy was transplanted to Indian Ocean islands.

Nonetheless, most of those enslaved in the South stayed in Darfur and Sinnar as slave‐soldiers. Most of those in Darfur became Fur. Most of those in Sinnar became Arab. They were culturally assimilated – mostly by consent, but the kind of consent that is manufactured through relations of force. For a parallel, think of how African slaves in North America became English‐speaking Westerners – thereby taking on the cultural identity of their masters.

The point of this historical survey of relations between North and South is to underline one single fact: this is not a one‐dimensional history of Northern oppression of the South. True, Northern domination is the main story, especially after independence. But there was a subsidiary story: the story of joint North–South struggle against that domination.

The SPLA was a movement with a strong leader – the weaker the organisation, the more difference does the death of one individual make. The history of liberation movements in this region testifies to this fact. It should also remind us that it has not been unusual for strong leaders to be eliminated towards the close of an armed struggle. Remember ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) and the killing of Tongogara on the eve of victory; the ANC (African National Congress) and the assassination of Chris Hani also on the eve of victory; and the SPLA and the death of Garang soon after return to Khartoum.

The CPA was built on the lessons of 1972. The key lesson was that power‐sharing had been too narrow. As a result, the CPA called for a broader sharing, ranging from political power to wealth to arms. Still, it remained sharing of power, power‐sharing, between elites, between two ruling groups, the NCP (National Congress Party) and the SPLA. It left out the opposition in both the North and the South. It was power‐sharing without democratisation!

All these cases have one thing in common. All have reformed the central state by introducing elections and a multi‐party system. But elections seem to lead to violence rather than stability. Why? For a clue, I suggest we look at another similarity between these cases of internal violence. None have managed to reform the local state – the local authority – the district authority that the British used to call the native authority.

Colonialism transformed tribe from a cultural identity to an administrative identity that claimed to be based on descent, not just culture. It became a blood identity. Tribe became a sub‐set of race

In sum then, there are two major sources of political violence after independence. Possible violence between North and South has three likely sources: border populations, IDPs and peasants and pastoralists with shared livelihoods.

While many have criticized this earlier discourse as Orientalist and lacking in analytical rigour, its seamless replacement dubbed as the ‘Arab Awakening’, is being constructed on the very same bases of representation.

In the case of Egypt, the recent uprising is constructed as a youth-led, non-violent revolution in which social media (especially Facebook and Twitter) are champions. The underlying message here is that these ‘middle-class’ and educated youth (read: modern) are not ‘terrorists’ - they hold the same values as ‘us’ (the democratic West) and, finally, use the same tools (Facebook and Twitter) that ‘we’ invented and use in our daily-lives. They are just like ‘us’ and hence they deserve celebration. These constructions are clear from a quick look at CNN, Time, Vanity Fair and others and their representations of the so-called leaders or icons of this revolution.

According to the BBC, Dr Gene Sharp - the author of the ‘Non-Violent Revolution Rulebook’ is ‘the man now credited with the strategy behind the toppling of the Egyptian government’ through activists ‘trained in Sharp’s work’. This same profile of young people similarly monopolised television talk shows in Egypt. And while many of these individuals did take part in the uprising - in different capacities - their status as icons of the ‘revolution’ in which the majority of those who participated were of the subaltern classes is both disturbing and telling. This majority have never heard of Sharp or Freedom House, never studied at the American University in Cairo and never worked for Google. More profoundly, they are antagonistic about ‘Western’ influence and presence in Egypt. Thus the class composition of dissent has been cloaked by a new imaginary homogenous construct called ‘youth’.

There is no doubt that the anti-regime demonstrations were non-violent, compared to the state-security use of ammunition. However, by 28 January all National Democratic Party headquarters and most police stations were set on fire. This was a clear reaction to the state’s systematic violence against subaltern classes, those who bore the brunt of the regime’s daily torture and humiliation precisely because of their position within the neo-liberal class matrix in Egypt.

Even Côte d'Ivoire was at one point was rightly dubbed 'the forgotten war'. It did not fit the media template of a sexy, tech-savvy, populist revolution, as that which had been constructed of Egypt. Instead Côte d'Ivoire had the uncomfortable but familiar look and feel of a Rwanda genocide-lite. It was a messy, bloody struggle for power between rebel and patriot factions in a country most educated people outside of Africa would struggle to find on a map.

On 20 February, in an industrial town called Koudougo, bigger than Sidi Bouzid, a student named Justin Zongo was taken into police custody after an alleged dispute with a female classmate. A few days later, Zongo was pronounced dead and according to official police reports, the cause of death was meningitis. His family and friends rejected this and claimed Zongo's death was due to police brutality.

So far none of Compaoré's pleas to restore order have worked and the mutiny's snowball effect continues to grow. There are reports that, despite the soldiers' lawlessness in some cities, the youths and some traders have united with revolting army officers.

True to dictator form, Compaoré, like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, has blamed foreign conspiratorial forces for the unrest and he has gotten rid of everyone else, except the problem, himself and his corrupt system.

All of the protests, from Cape to Cairo, with their own distinct set of local conditions, are linked to food security, economic instability and political dispossession – be it by ballot or dictatorship. There is a widespread feeling of continental discontent, but international and national pundits are so busy putting out possible fires of revolt in 'sub-Saharan Africa' with their analyses that the Burkina uprising has gone by largely unnoticed, and yet in two months mutineering soldiers and youth have stirred up serious trouble for the Compaoré regime – and possibly regionally too.

In different ways, masses of people are mounting serious challenges to totalitarian hegemonies and the iniquity of global capital that may lead to a new political dispensation, in successful revolutions, and at the very least for all countries, uprisings, including unsuccessful ones, reshape the role of the citizen in a political landscape as an empowered figure.

Some would be inclined to argue that Burkina Faso has been forgotten because the international media is biased towards representation of Africa south of the Sahara, and the ignoring or misrepresentation of the Rwanda genocide is the most cited example. But perhaps it is more complex than a simple Africa south of the Sahara bias; it's a bias against or in favour of certain African countries that has been constructed through namely, a country's geo-political and economic importance to the West and also through a history of colonial relations in which reader and viewer familiarity and association with former colonies is generated.

For example, because of its relation to America and France, the attempted return of a former leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, exiled in South Africa, to return to the Caribbean island of Haiti was more widely covered than the same attempt, a month before by another former leader, Marc Ravalomanana, exiled in South Africa to return to the tropical island of Madagascar, off the south-eastern coast of Africa.

Similar to Swaziland, the slightest hint of a fallout between the opposition and Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party in Zimbabwe is guaranteed widespread coverage and analysis, whereas the political musical chairs currently being played in Burkina by Compaoré in order to quell mutiny is of little interest to many major international media organisations, including South Africa.

In the face of such fierce competition, taking a few moments in between protest broadcasts to ask the world to remember the 5.4 million (and rising) Congolese dead since 1998 or to take a serious look at Compaoré's megalomanic scheming in Burkina Faso wouldn't be a suicidal gamble with the ratings. Events in Africa and the Middle East shouldn't be placed in competition with each other; what's happening in Nigeria, Syria or Libya can share the spotlight with many other untold or under-reported stories. It’s a question of willingness to pluralise news stories and cover unfamiliar terrain.

perhaps there is also a competition for dominance in coverage of the big revolution stories to present a more racy, more in-depth and more radical story than other media competitors.

But in addition to that dream is a more crucial demand that can be sooner met, namely that existing international media genuinely commit itself to new ways of telling everyone's stories, all the time, rather than competing to duplicate or better the popular stories.

President Isayas Afwerki remains firmly entrenched in the seat of power, claiming with alacrity to have foretold the groundswell overtaking his Arab neighbors while banning television coverage of the demonstrations and reorganising the military to pre-empt a possible coup.

Eritrea spends a whopping 20 per cent of its national budget maintaining a military comprised of forced conscripts whose virtually unpaid labour is reinvested in further militarisation of the society and economy. The Constitution has been on ice since 1997, the promise of multi-party elections remains unfulfilled and even North Korea boasts greater freedom of the press. Civil society institutions and competing political parties exist only in exile.

But human experience is what anthropologists are always after - how to put life and breath and flesh onto the cold bones of statistics; how to illustrate the concrete meanings of political violence and migration policies and practices as people live them. Among such human experiences are those of nineteen members of the elite Air Force of Eritrea who fled to Sudan a couple of years ago, risking the ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy of the Eritrean government - as hundreds of others do every month - seeking to cross the nearest international border.

Should the UNHCR take the situation seriously and realise these men need protection - an unlikely showing of concern for individuals by a bureaucracy whose esteemed reputation is outshined only by its impersonality, impenetrability, and unaccountability - they may be taken to a refugee camp, where they will still be subject to many of the same pressures, only in more concentrated form. This is glossed as ‘protection’, even a ‘solution’, though it is hardly that.

In detention, they discover legal-dilemma redux: many of the same problems that stalled the refugee process in Sudan follow them to the United States. They are possibly terrorists, or implicated in persecution and human rights abuses; they are cowardly deserters of a sovereign state's military; and of course, they are always criminals for having the audacity to migrate illegally.

It is not enough to simply address the human rights violations that lead people to become refugees at the source, crucial as that may be. All along the way, refugees face multiple and nested issues that are sometimes endemic and even actively produced or aggravated by the very systems designed to protect them.

Although Carrilles was an anti-communist zealot, it was his training by the CIA and CIA finances that made him a lethal force.

The strength of the recruitment of Osama bin Laden was that, unlike Posada, Osama provided some of his own money and helped raise millions from other wealthy anti-communist Arabs. Osama bin Laden then recruited hundreds of thousands for his jihad. Today, many countries in Africa are suffering the repercussions of this alliance between the CIA and Osama bin Laden

Students in Africa who do not know the history of United States terrorism will need to study the country’s intricate plot to assassinate presidents and freedom fighters at home and abroad, in addition to understanding the relationship of some US law enforcement agencies to international terrorism.

People that really care about Africa must question the credibility of AFRICOM against the background of the US tradition of training terrorists to fight for American interests while labelling freedom fighters as terrorists.

Scholars and activists who write on low intensity wars have been highlighting the ways in which the government of the United States was the principal supporter of terrorism.

The US Africa Command created a disinformation platform, Operation Objective Voice, to confuse Africans. One of the requirements of psychological warfare and information warfare is for some truth to serve as the basis of the information that is being peddled.

the criminal actions associated with killing 73 Caribbean youths are compounded by the economic terrorism unleashed by the US banking system and the forces that spread the doctrine of neo-liberal capitalism. Billions of dollars are scooped up from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America by the US financial oligarchy and these are the forces that benefit from all forms of terror.

With Manuel as trade minister from 1994-96, liberalisation demolished the clothing, textile, footwear, appliance, electronics and other vulnerable manufacturing sectors, as he drove tariffs below what even the World Trade Organisation demanded.

At that stage, with the world economy teetering, The Economist magazine named South Africa the most risky of the 17 main emerging markets, and the SA government released data conceding that the country was much more economically divided than in 1994, overtaking Brazil as the world’s most unequal major country.

Ironically, said Manuel in his miserly 2004 budget speech, ‘The privilege we have in a democratic South Africa is that the poor are unbelievably tolerant.’ In 2008, when an opposition politician begged that food vouchers be made available, Manuel replied that there was no way to ensure ‘vouchers will be distributed and used for food only, and not to buy alcohol or other things.’

Manuel’s leadership of the Green Climate Fund adds a new quantum of global-scale risk. His long history of collaboration with Washington-London raises prospects for ‘default’ by the industrialised North on payment of climate debt to the impoverished South.

 Some fake photos of the recent protests in Venezuela were recently circulated and students’ movements and allied groups across the world were quick to react viscerally (and authentically, in that sense) in expressing solidarity with the right wing protestors there…even though the pictures weren’t real and the ideology behind each movement isn’t exactly compatible. Still, this sounds good on the surface, we can all support each other’s rights to protest without ulterior motives of political affiliation.

The ugly back story to the student protests in Venezuela is highlighted by a host of Wikileaks cables that reveal a staggering amount of U.S. involvement in training the opposition leader, infiltrating the student movement, and even overtly funneling U.S. taxpayer dollars into bringing down the anti-imperialist Venezuelan government.

Venezuela has long been a ground zero for the anti-imperialist struggle, but this may be changing. It may have in fact already changed. Imperialist forces have launched an almost unprecedented smear campaign on the collective geo-political movement of the global south. And by tentative accounts, it looks like they are winning.

However, during the oil price slump of 2008, Chávez drew criticism at home for not concentrating on internal Venezuelan affairs rather than drawing the wrath of imperialist states during long international speeches. He heeded this warning and cut back on international engagements and visits. However, maintained an important role in Latin American relations. His leadership of a significant power in the region created a domino effect and enabled the surfacing and victory of progressive parties from Ecuador to Argentina ending the decades of isolation of Cuba.

Yet the key to the importance of President Chávez’s re-election for Africa lies strangely beyond Venezuela’s foreign policy and more so at the epicentre of its national struggle.

The election in Venezuela stood in stark contrast to the campaigning in the U.S. The ideological differences between incumbent President Chávez and the opposition candidate Radonski is far from a nuance and instead represents clear ideological paths, values, interests, alliances and priorities.

Yet Chávez progressive discourse presents an alternative to both. Rabidly anti-imperialist but equally anti-conservative, Chávez offers, particularly to the peoples’ movements of Africa, a discourse that resounds on the streets of Guinea, the farms of Madagascar and the squares of Egypt.

Chávez has been reluctant to criticise Global South leaders for any of their failings in leadership, understandably seeking allies amongst the few willing to openly oppose or resist the multiple layers of northern imperialism. However, with another six years to deepen the progressive agenda of not only Latin America and the Caribbean, but potentially the world, it will be critical that President Chávez and his administration consider supporting deepened solidarity between the peoples’ movements of Africa and the Americas to break the bipolarity of an increasingly belligerent world.

This is where I found myself differing most with Jones’ supporters: never before in history have world elites been so tempted to address global-scale crises, but – thanks to the adverse power balance represented by neoliberal ideology in the 1990s, neoconservatism in the early 2000s and some fusion of the two since Obama came to power – never before have they acted so incoherently.

Van der Pijl’s exceptionally rich study of Bilderberg and subsequent US-European geopolitical maneuvres, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (which thankfully Verso Press is about to reissue), provides the theoretical underpinning that I feel Jones’ passionately conspiratorialist followers desperately need, if they ever aim to properly judge the world’s complex combinations of structure and agency.

ut religion, Freemasonry, Rotary, Jews, etc., can be subsumed into the social category of ‘intellectuals’, whose function, on an international scale, is that of mediating the extremes, of ‘socializing’ the technical discoveries which provide the impetus for all activities of leadership, of devising compromises between, and ways out of, extreme solutions.”

But they were nervous, too, of a coming political storm, remarked van der Pijl. Representing both BP and Goldman Sachs in 2007, Peter Sutherland (former WTO director) “was quoted as saying that it had been a mistake to have referenda on the EU constitution. ‘You knew there was a rise in nationalism; you should have let your parliaments ratify the treaty, and it should be done with.’ Kissinger said words to the same effect concerning unification of the Americas, stressing the need to mobilise the enlightened media behind its propagation.”

So there is no doubt that world banker domination – which should have been reduced by the 2008-09 financial melt – will continue. Only the occasional sovereign default – Argentina (2002), Ecuador (2008), Iceland (2008) and maybe Southern Europe this year – or imposition of exchange controls (as rediscovered by Malaysia in 1998 or Venezuela in 2003) reduces the banksters’ grip.

The strongest political effort by these libertarian anti-Bilderberg protesters is to attempt the election of Texan member of Congress, Ron Paul, as president, and with 20 percent popularity, he remains Mitt Romney’s only irritant within the Republican Party as the November showdown with Obama now looms.

Radicals can mitigate destructive trends and hasten constructive ones, but that's the extent of the systemic ‘agency’ they can exhibit. Accordingly, they can have a lucid and correct interpretation of their activism only by understanding the historical context of their society, and the significance of its dominant tendencies.

We are in the early stages of the very protracted collapse of corporate capitalism and the nation-state system itself. We know that ‘climate change’ is going to constitute a global cataclysm; we know that, under the impact of neoliberal policies, the world's social fabric is being torn apart; and even the business press recognizes that economic trends of underconsumption and overproduction portend catastrophe.

Amidst the horrific tragedies, one may take comfort in the knowledge that at least it is not permanent. In fact, myopic anti-social politics is undermining the ruling class and its economy, by destroying the conditions for its long-term survival. It may destroy most life on earth in the process, or it may not; but the Left should recognize, in any case, that the coming crises in every country of the world will not mean the extinguishing of hope.

One government stands ready and anxious to mediate an elite solution to the Zimbabwe crisis, if one can be found: South Africa. The same government has positioned itself as the main third world arbiter of globalization, in arenas such as trade, finance, aid, sustainable development, racism, non-aligned politics, and many others.

In 1976, Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith was summoned to meet South African premier John Vorster and U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger in Pretoria. In an uncomfortable encounter, Smith was told that his dream of delaying black majority rule in Zimbabwe for “a thousand years” was over. Accommodation with the liberation movements would be necessary, both for the sake of the West’s legitimacy in the struggle against the Soviet Union and simply because Smith’s position—defending legalized racial domination by a quarter of a million white settlers over more than six million indigenous black people, of whom fifty thousand were in the process of taking up arms, at a time of unprecedented economic crisis—was untenable. Smith resisted the inevitable with a mix of ineffectual concessions and heightened repression, but the power that South Africa held over imports and exports was decisive. Simultaneously, guerrilla war intensified and Smith could no longer count on Pretoria’s military backing. Three years after the ultimatum from Vorster and Kissinger, Smith and his conservative black allies were forced to the Lancaster House negotiating table in London, where Zimbabwe was born. Thanks to what Smith termed “the great betrayal” by South Africa and Britain, Zanu and its allies laid down their arms and swept the first democratic election in February 1980. A quarter of a century after that fateful meeting in Pretoria, an analogous moment reappeared in the relations between Zimbabwe and South Africa. In Zimbabwe, thirteen million black Zimbabweans suffer under the rule of an undemocratic, exploitative elite and of a repressive state machinery serving the class interests of a few tens of thousands of well-connected bureaucrats, military, and paramilitary leaders. And this is in the context of unprecedented economic crisis. In South Africa, meanwhile, it is not difficult to posit a similar trajectory of material decline, ruling-party political illegitimacy, and ascendant opposition, as the rand crashed by more than 50 percent over a two-year period and trade union critiques of neoliberal policies harden.

Mugabe’s “huge social spending spree” was, in reality, a brief two-year period of rising education and health expenditures, followed by systematic cutbacks and deprivation under IMF and World Bank guidance. The needs of trade unionists were as little respected as were those of any other sector of society.

To misread Zimbabwe’s situation so blatantly and self-servingly was not new in Pretoria. As another example that gets to the heart of the exhausted nationalist contradiction, consider the case of former ANC Land Minister Derek Hanekom, who also used Zimbabwe as a whipping boy beginning in 1997. At that stage, land hunger was causing organic land invasions (not war-veteran induced) and farmworker strikes in several areas of rural Zimbabwe. In November, of that year, Mugabe announced that the Land Designation Act would finally be implemented. For South Africa, the specter of large-scale land reform in Zimbabwe would have been terrible for investor confidence at a time when Mbeki’s own Washington-centric structural adjustment program—the misnamed Growth, Employment, and Redistribution strategy—was already failing noticeably.

around February 2000, two options emerged: hunker down and mindlessly defend the Zanu government against its critics; or move into a “constructive engagement” mode that might serve as the basis for an “honest broker” role on some future deal-making occasion. A third option—active support Zimbabwe’s social-justice movements, so as to ensure Mugabe authorized genuinely free and fair elections—presumably did not warrant attention; no doubt for fear that the last bullet would inspire South African trade unionists to do the same, and in the near future.

Vorster, Kissinger, and ultimately the British managers of Zimbabwe’s transition together hoped for a typical neocolonial solution, in which property rights would be the foundation of a new constitution, willing-seller/willing-buyer land policy would allow rural social relations to be undisturbed, and nationalization of productive economic activity would be kept to a minimum. A black government would, moreover, have greater capacity to quell labor unrest, strikes, and other challenges to law and order.

The romance of Southern African liberation struggles made it logical for radical activists across the world to intensify pressure first for the liberation of the Portuguese colonies Angola and Mozambique (1975), then the former British colony Zimbabwe (1980), then Namibia (1990), and finally South Africa (1994). That kind of solidarity was colony specific. Something more universal has subsequently emerged: North-South unity of progressive activists fighting a common scourge, international neoliberalism. What is most needed, in this new context, is a set of processes that help identify and implement popular solidarity.

At the fore of those who would repel both the kleptocratic elite and the generalized economic crisis associated with globalization are progressive civil society groups.

what lessons does this confusing period in Zimbabwe’s post-independence experience provide to other third world progressive social forces? The appropriate normative formula is not the dismissal of strengthened state sovereignty as a short–medium term objective. Instead, aligned simultaneously with international popular struggle against Washington and transnational corporate headquarters, the goal must be the rekindling of nation state sovereignty, but under fundamentally different assumptions about power relations and development objectives than during the nationalist epoch. Such power relations can probably only be changed sufficiently if the masses of oppressed people contest those comprador forces who run virtually all their nation states. To do so will require the articulation of a multifaceted post-nationalist political program, grounded in post-neoliberal economic formulations.

Three people recounted how a Pacific Rim official boasted that cyanide was so safe that the official was willing to drink a glass of a favorite local beverage laced with the chemical. The official, we were told, backed down when community members insisted on authentication of the cyanide. “The company thought we’re just ignorant farmers with big hats who don’t know what we’re doing,” Miguel said. “But they’re the ones who are lying.”

Along one wall is the Salvadoran version of the US Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in this case etched with the names of about 30,000 of the roughly 75,000 killed in the civil war. Thousands of them, including the dozens killed in the Lempa River massacre of 1981, were victims of massacres perpetrated by the US-backed—often US-trained—government forces and the death squads associated with them.

Anti-mining sentiment was already so strong in 2009 that both the reigning ARENA president and the successful FMLN candidate, Mauricio Funes, came out against mining during the campaign.

We pushed further, trying to understand how a technical analysis could decide a matter with such high stakes. On the one hand, we posed to Duarte, gold’s price has skyrocketed from less than $300 an ounce a decade ago to more than $1,500 an ounce today, increasing the temptation in a nation of deep poverty to consider mining. We quoted former Salvadoran finance minister and Pacific Rim economic adviser Manuel Hinds, who said, “Renouncing gold mining would be unjustifiable and globally unprecedented.” On the other hand, we quoted the head of the human rights group and Roundtable member FESPAD, Maria Silvia Guillen: “El Salvador is a small beach with a big river that runs through it. If the river dies, the entire country dies.”

While he hoped this process would produce a consensus, Duarte admitted it was more likely the government and the firm would have to lay out “the interests of the majority,” after which the two ministries would then make their policy recommendation.

Oscar Luna, a former law professor and fierce defender of human rights—for which he too has received death threats. We asked Luna if he agreed with allegations that the killings in Cabañas were “assassinations organized and protected by economic and social powers.” Luna replied with his own phrasing: “There is still a climate of impunity in this country that we are trying to end.” He is pressing El Salvador’s attorney general to conduct investigations into the “intellectual” authors of the killings.

Our interactions in Cabañas and San Salvador left us appreciative of the new democratic space that strong citizen movements and a progressive presidential victory have opened up, yet aware of the fragility and complexities that abound. The government faces an epic decision about mining, amid deep divisions and with institutions of democracy that are still quite young. As Vidalina reminded us when we parted, the “complications” are even greater than what we found in Cabañas or in San Salvador, because even if the ban’s proponents eventually win, “these decisions could still get trumped in Washington.”

The brief methodically lays out how Canada-headquartered Pacific Rim first incorporated in the Cayman Islands to escape taxes, then brazenly lobbied Salvadoran officials to shape policies to benefit the firm, and only after that failed, in 2007 reincorporated one of its subsidiaries in the United States to use CAFTA to sue El Salvador.

Dozens of human rights, environmental and fair-trade groups across North America, from U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities and the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador (CISPES) to Oxfam, Public Citizen, Mining Watch and the Institute for Policy Studies, are pressuring Pacific Rim to withdraw the case.

The contagious spirit of the mass protests that have been rocking Brazil over the past year has also found fertile soil in the favelas, where the death of every young person murdered by police is another rallying cry for popular resistance. As the current wave of anti-World Cup protests shows, the genie is out of the bottle — and it will take a lot more than violent evictions and police repression to silence the awakened and indignant multitude.

enforcing and supporting state oppression and building ties with civil society organizations.

In this sense, we must not cast aside these protests and uprisings as being instigated by the West, but rather that they emerged organically, and the West is subsequently attempting to co-opt and control the emerging movements.

A July 2009 diplomatic cable from America’s Embassy in Tunisia reported that, “many Tunisians are frustrated by the lack of political freedom and angered by First Family corruption, high unemployment and regional inequities. Extremism poses a continuing threat,” and that, “the risks to the regime’s long-term stability are increasing.”[2]

Significantly, the trade union movement had a large mobilizing role in the protests, with a lawyers union being particularly active during the initial protests.[4]

Social media and the Internet did play a large part in mobilizing people within Tunisia for the uprising, but it was ultimately the result of direct protests and action which led to the resignation of Ben Ali. Thus, referring to Tunisia as a “Twitter Revolution” is disingenuous.

[Editors Note: The US based foundation Freedom House was involved in promoting and training some Middle East North Africa Facebook and Twitter bloggers (See also Freedom House), M. C.].

We must also keep in mind that social media has not only become an important source of mobilization of activism and information at the grassroots level, but it has also become an effective means for governments and various power structures to seek to manipulate the flow of information.

This was evident in the 2009 protests in Iran, where social media became an important avenue through which the Western nations were able to advance their strategy of supporting the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ in destabilizing the Iranian government.

The strategically disabling condition of middle-class people is the belief that they are in it by themselves, subject not only to individual isolation but also to the failure to look around for allies.

Now we understand why college faculty members are so often passive when student movements emerge on campus and why public school unions often fail to make common cause with parents and other unions.

The cultural attributes that go with being working class can also hurt strategy. A Canadian example is a militant union that for decades has extended its resources and energy to assist anti-poverty groups, aborigines and many other causes that are marginalized in that country. Recently that union was thrown on the defensive and forced into a strike. Remarkably, the union failed to create a movement by gathering around itself the forces that it has helped.

A vital theme of owning-class culture is the “big picture.” The right wing easily puts us on the defensive because they know what they want. The counter-offensive that gives parents, school unions and others their only chance awaits the creation of vision. It’s vision that inspires people to go to the level of sacrifice that is necessary to win.

It is both ironic and sad that while mediocre analysts, to say the least of their understanding of the changing Middle East, make frequent appearances in two-minute on-air interviews in newsrooms, the voices of other academics and experts with serious research backgrounds and true expertise of the region remain largely unheard.  Serious analysts are not in demand, not only because they have long overcome this Orientalist paradigm in analyzing the politics of change in the Middle East, but also because they don’t have the talent of crafting those superficial, short, studio-made answers to questions of news anchors.   

The United States, Britain and many other counterparts have heavily invested in the empowerment of a tamed Islamist rule—spearheaded, of course, by the Muslim Brotherhood—to take over the Middle East from post-colonial populist regimes living long past their expiry dates. American and British ambassadors to the region have been carefully weaving this vision and reporting back home that this is simply the best formula for the protection of their interests in the region. That such a formula would lend itself to the protraction of another cycle of vicious human rights abuses and continued economic injustices is, naturally, of little concern to them.

The Prime Minister’s older brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, while he was PM himself, attempted to bring in a modern capitalist system to this submissive and deeply scared nation. And not only that: he housed the poor, introduced an excellent free universal medical care system (much more advanced than anything ever proposed in the United States), free and very advanced primary and secondary education, and other concepts deemed dangerous to the world order, and to the local feudal elites, as well as the army. Thai elites, whose love of being obeyed more than wealth, admired and feared, reacted almost immediately. The PM was exiled, barred from returning home to his country, and smeared.

‘Protestors’ blocked several central arteries of Bangkok, declaring that “Thailand is not ready for democracy”, and that “if elections should determine the country’s future, pro-Shinawatra forces would keep winning”. That, of course, would be unacceptable to the elites and to many Western countries that have, for decades, benefited from the Thai feudal system.

Those elected democratically, those progressive in their core, these governments all over the world have been under severe attacks by some armed thugs, bandits, and anti-social elements, even by outright terrorists.

Hatay was overran by Saudi and Qatari jihadi cadres, pampered by the US, EU and Turkish logistics, support, weaponry and cash. The terror these people have been spreading in this historically peaceful, multi-cultural and tolerant part of the world, could hardly be described in words.

the local elites, right now in January 2014, are doing whatever they can, to prevent the re election of Ms Dilma Roussef… You are an experienced Latin America´s observer, you know very well…

I witnessed President Morsi of Egypt (I was critical of his rule at first, as I was critical of the government of Mr. Shinawatra, before real horror swept both Egypt and Thailand), being overthrown by the military, which, while in its zealous over-drive, managed in the process to murder several thousands of mainly poor Egyptian people.

The logic and tactics in Egypt were predictable: although still capitalist and to a certain extent submissive to IMF and the West, President Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood, were a bit too unenthusiastic about collaborating with the West. They never really said ‘no’, but that had not appeared to be enough for the Euro-North American regime, which, these days, demands total, unconditional obedience as well as the kissing of hands and other bodily parts.

All this is nothing new, of course. But in the past, things were done a little bit more covertly. These days it is all out in the open. Maybe it is done on purpose, so nobody will dare to rebel, or even to dream. And so, the revolution in Egypt has been derailed, destroyed, and cruelly choked to death. There is really nothing left of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, just a clear warning: “never try again, or else”.

Now in Egypt, Mubarak’s clique is rapidly coming back to power. He was a well-trusted ‘devil’, and the West quickly realized that to let him fall would be a serious strategic blunder; and so it was decided to bring him back; either personally, or at least his legacy, at the coast of thousands of (insignificant) Egyptian lives, and against the will of almost the entire nation.

Ukraine is not a fresh victim of destabilization tactics of the European Union, which is so sickly greedy that it appears it, cannot contain itself anymore. It salivates, intensively, imagining the huge natural resources that Ukraine possesses. It is shaking with desire dreaming of a cheap and highly educated labor force.

Of course the EU cannot do in Ukraine, what it freely does in many places like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It cannot just come and pay some proxy countries, as it pays Rwanda and Uganda (that are already responsible for the loss of over ten million Congolese lives in less than 2 decades), to plunder Ukraine and kill almost all those people that are resisting.

More than a month ago, a bizarre deal was proposed, where European companies would be allowed to enter and clean Ukraine of its natural resources, but the people of Ukraine would not be allowed to even come and work in the EU. The government, logically and sensibly, rejected the deal. And then, suddenly, Thai-style or Egyptian-style thugs appeared all over the streets of Kiev, armed with sticks and even weapons, and went onto trashing the capital and demanding the democratically elected government to resign.

In Africa, just to mention a few cases, tiny Seychelles, a country with the highest HDI (Human Development Index by UNDP) has for years been bombarded with criticism and destabilization attempts.

“We are trying to be inclusive, democratic and fair”, the Eritrean Director of Education recently told me, in Kenya. “But the more we do, the more we care about our people, the more infuriated Western countries appear to be.”

Bolivians almost lost their ‘white’ and-right wing province of Santa Cruz, as the US supported, many say financed the ‘independence movement’ there, obviously punishing the extremely popular government of Evo Morales for being so socialist, so indigenous and so beloved. Brazil, in one great show of solidarity and internationalism, threatened to invade and rescue its neighbor, by preserving its integrity. Therefore, only the weight of this peaceful and highly respectable giant saved Bolivia from certain destruction. But now even Brazil is under attack of the ‘manufacturers of opposition’!

What the West is now doing to the world; igniting conflicts, supporting banditry and terror, sacrificing millions of people for its own commercial interests, is nothing new under the sun.