Category: politics

Nick Estes: The United States has a long history of sacrificing or killing off groups of people—through war or disease or both—in the name of its self-proclaimed destiny. This belief in the country’s violent superiority was already evident among the early Puritans, who attributed the mass die-off of Indigenous peoples to divine intervention. “God hath so pursued them” John Winthrop, the Puritan leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote of the Indigenous to the King of England in 1634.

[…] To blind themselves to the destruction they wrought, colonizers wove cultural fictions about the “vastness” of a continent devoid of human civilization—terra nullius—and thus open for white European settlement. (This was an early ideological ancestor of the Zionist phrase, “a land without a people for a people without a land,” that has come to justify the expulsion and colonization of Palestinians.) General Henry Knox, the revolutionary war hero and the United States’ first secretary of war, was less confused about how the land was emptied. He recalled “the utter extirpation of all the Indians in the most populous parts of the Union” by measures “more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru.” No small feat.

The imperial project wasn’t confined to what became the continental United States. It soon turned outward, as the settler state exported the horrors it had committed against the Indigenous to the rest of the planet. Most historians have failed to draw what are obvious connections between heightened rates of infection and conditions of war, invasion, and colonialism. We need only look at the cholera outbreak in Yemen to see the relationship of disease to U.S. foreign policy. No one is disputing the fact that the infection of millions and the deaths of thousands there at the hands of this preventable disease are the result of a U.S.-backed, Saudi-led war, which has destroyed Yemen’s health care infrastructure. It shouldn’t surprise us to learn that one in four surgical amputations conducted at Red Cross centers in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen are the result of diabetes. These three countries have been the staging ground for U.S.-backed military interventions and invasions that have disrupted critical food and medical supply chains.

Economic sanctions, frequently hailed by politicians of all stripes as a “humane” alternative to war, are simply war by another means. U.S. sanctions currently hit hard in thirty-nine countries—one-third of humanity—causing currency inflation and devaluation and upsetting the distribution of medicine, food, power, water treatment, and other human needs. A 2019 report by the Center for Economic and Policy Studies found that U.S. sanctions on Venezuela accounted for an estimated forty thousand deaths and a loss of $6 billion in oil revenue between 2017 and 2018. As Iran began to experience increased rates of coronavirus infection, the country faced medical supply shortages because of sanctions. While countries like China and Cuba, themselves both sanctioned by the United States, provided international aid to other countries suffering from the pandemic, Trump actively prevented other countries from adequately responding to the crisis.

Indigenous scholars have long contested the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis. Today, it is clear that the disease thesis simply doesn’t hold up. More here.

this is a historic discussion. using the lens of black internationalism, it ties black liberation in america (in the belly of the imperial beast) to south asian struggles led by the dalit community in india and the sheedis (african diaspora) in pakistan. what a beautiful vision of solidarity across geographies, languages, and histories. black internationalism is what i find most exciting in black liberation movements because it illuminates the necessity to see the big picture – how wars abroad, for example, are directly connected to police violence, how inequities amongst nations are reflected in racial and economic hierarchies here in the US, etc.

it’s a longish video, in three different languages, with two interpreters, but it’s one of the most hopeful things i’ve seen in a while. and may i say, how much i love dr west. his generosity, how he gives access to his time and energy, to his person, whenever he can support oppressed people anywhere in the world, is immensely moving. he doesn’t just talk solidarity, he does it.

i hope that my south asian community will watch and reflect on the anti-blackness and casteism that’s so embedded in our language and society. i also hope that my american friends will watch and learn about movements, on the other side of the planet, fighting the same fight for rights and dignity. it might unsettle some of the notions americans have about india and pakistan.

thank u Equality Labs.

Repost from @culturestrike:

We’re joining the call to support our Native American communities & demand complete divestment from using depictions of indigenous people as mascots.

Culture, identity, and existence are not costumes. Native communities have been calling for this change for decades and it’s about time that the world finally listened! @r_dsk_ns & the @nfl do not get a pass in this battle for equality and justice.

#TheTimeIsNow #ChangeTheName

Tanzeela Qambrani is the first Afro-Pakistani woman politician in Pakistan. She belongs to the Sheedi community (the African Diaspora in Pakistan) and is going to become a member of the Sindh Assembly this Friday.

love this interview so much because it validates my own thoughts about not using the same blueprint/MO/logic that we’ve taught by neoliberal, carceral, colonial, capitalist systems in order to fight those same systems.

Cornel West: In the end, if you really want Black people to be free, and I do, Black people will never be free under a system of predatory capitalism. We will never be free under a system with imperial tentacles, [we] will never be free with Pentagon elite running amok with militaristic policies and killing people in Latin America and in the Caribbean, and so forth.

So it is not a luxury which is theoretical or academic, to say ‘Oh, we don’t have time for interconnectivity and interdependency, [and] we’ve got to deal with this particular issue’. That particular issue is always already connected. More here.

The same regime that grounded its legitimacy on rescuing Egypt’s secular identity from Islamist fanatics, the same regime that professes itself as Europe’s inevitable bulwark against floods of refugees and Islamist terror, has terrorized and persecuted Queers and trans people on a regular basis to purport moral rectitude. Yes, patriarchy is also secular.

[…] Queer fear is sometimes contagious and relentless. It can be temporarily soothed, it can be made dormant; the physical conditions that allow it to unfold can be abolished or suspended, but it continues to nag you in distant places. It continues to live under your skin. You smell it in the cold air of your exile, it lies on the surface of the things and bodies you touch. It can pop up in the corners of a city, when you suddenly realise that it will remain alien, no matter how often you walked the streets and cherished the company of its people. It inhabits our contemplations on longings and loss, it manifests itself in the sheer absence of home, the same home that we – oddly enough – escape out of fear. More here.