Nobody has a bad word to say about the French Resistance in the Second World War, right?  Who would criticise a group confronting fascism, right?

Yet this month the UK group Palestine Action has been proscribed as a “terrorist” organisation by their government for their non-violent direct action against UK-based industries supplying technology to fuel Israel’s destruction of the Palestinian people.

Are they terrorists or the very best of us in the West?

• READ MORE: Palestine Action: What has the group done, as it faces a ban?
• Other Israel’s Gaza genocide reports

Stéphane Hessel, a leading member of the French Resistance, survived time in Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald. After the war he was one of the co-authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), a pillar of international law to this day.

The Declaration affirms the inherent dignity and equal rights of all humans. In later years Hessel (d. 2013), who was Jewish, saw the treatment of the Palestinians as an affront to this and repeatedly called Israel out for crimes against humanity.

Hessel argued people needed to be outraged just as he and his fellow fighters had been during the war.

In 2010, he said: “Today, my strongest feeling of indignation is over Palestine, both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The starting point of my outrage was the appeal launched by courageous Israelis to the Diaspora: you, our older siblings, come and see where our leaders are taking this country and how they are forgetting the fundamental human values of Judaism.”

In his book Indignez-vous (Time for Outrage!) he called for a “peaceful insurrection” and pointed to some of the non-violent forms of protests Palestinians had used over the years.

“The Israeli authorities have described these marches as ‘nonviolent terrorism’. Not bad . . .  One would have to be Israeli to describe nonviolence as terrorism.”

How wrong Stéphane Hessel was on this point. The British Parliament has just proscribed Palestine Action as “terrorists” despite them having never attacked anyone, never used weapons, but only undertaken destruction of property linked to the arms industry.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The marvellous irony in this is that much of the budget increases have been prompted by Trump’s perceived unreliability and capriciousness when it comes to European affairs. Would he, for instance, treat obligations of collective defence outlined in Article 5 of the organisation’s governing treaty with utmost seriousness? Since Washington cannot be relied upon to hold the fort against the satanic savages from the East, various European countries have been encouraging a spike in defence spending to fight the sprites and hobgoblins troubling their consciences at night.

The European Union, for instance, has put in place initiatives that will make getting more weaponry and investing in the military industrial complex easier than ever, raising the threshold of defence expenditure across all member countries to 3.5% of GDP by the end of the decade. And then there is the Ukraine conflict, a war Brussels cannot bear to see end on terms that might be remotely favourable to Russia.

The promised pecuniary spray made at the NATO summit was seen by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte as utterly natural if not eminently sensible. Not much else was. It was Rutte who remarked with infantile fawning that “Sometimes Daddy has to use tough language” when it came to sorting out the murderous bickering between Israel and Iran. Daddy Trump approved. “He likes me, I think he likes me,” the US president crowed with glowing satisfaction.

Rutte’s behaviour has been viewed with suspicion, as well it should. Under his direction, NATO headquarters have made a point of diminishing any focus on climate change and its Women, Peace, and Security agenda. He has failed to make much of Trump’s mania for the annexation of Greenland, or the President’s gladiatorial abuse of certain leaders when visiting the White House – Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa come to mind. “He is not paid to implement MAGA policy,” grumbled a European NATO diplomat to Euroactive.

In his doorstep statement of June 25, Rutte made his wish known that the NATO collective possess both the money and capabilities to cope, not just with Russia “but also the massive build-up of military in China, and the fact that North Korea, China and Iran, are supporting the war effort in Ukraine”. Lashings of butter were also added to the Trump ego when responding to questions. “Would you really think that the seven or eight countries not at 2% [of GDP expenditure on defence] at the beginning of this year would have reached the 2% if Trump would not have been elected President of the United States?” It was only appropriate, given the contributions of the US (“over 50% of the total NATO economy”), that things had to change for the Europeans and Canadians.

The centrepiece of the Hague Summit Declaration is a promise that 5% of member countries’ gross GDP will go to “core defence requirements as well as defence and security-related spending by 2035 to ensure our individual and collective obligations”. Traditional bogeyman Russia is the predictable antagonist, posing a “long-term threat […] to Euro-Atlantic security”, but so was “the persistent threat of terrorism”. The target is optimistic, given NATO’s own recent estimates that nine members spend less than the current target of 2% of GDP.

What is misleading in the declaration is the accounting process: the 3.5% of annual GDP that will be spent “on the agreed definition of NATO defence expenditure by 2035 to resource core defence requirements, and to meet NATO Capability Targets” is one component. The other 1.5%, a figure based on a creative management of accounts, is intended to “protect our critical infrastructure, defend our networks, ensure our civil preparedness and resilience, unleash innovation, and strengthen our defence industrial base.”

Another misleading element in the declaration is the claimed unanimity of member states. The Baltic countries and Poland are forever engaged in increasing their defence budgets in anticipation of a Russian attack, but the same cannot be said of other countries less disposed to the issue. Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico, for instance, declared on the eve of the summit that his country had “better things to spend money on”. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has also called the 5% target “incompatible with our world view”, preferring to focus on a policy of prudent procurement.

Rutte seemed to revel in his role as wallah and jesting sycophant, making sure Trump was not only placated but massaged into a state of satisfaction. It was a sight all the stranger for the fact that Trump’s view of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is a warm one. Unfortunately for the secretary general, his role will be forever etched in the context of European history as an aspiring warmonger, one valued at 5% of the GDP of any of the NATO member states. Hardly a flattering epitaph.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark believes the Cook Islands, a realm of New Zealand, caused a crisis for itself by not consulting Wellington before signing a deal with China.

The New Zealand government has paused more than $18 million in development assistance to the Cook Islands after the latter failed to provide satisfactory answers to Aotearoa’s questions about its partnership agreement with Beijing.

The Cook Islands is in free association with New Zealand and governs its own affairs. But New Zealand provides assistance with foreign affairs (upon request), disaster relief, and defence.

• READ MORE: Mark Brown: Cook Islands ‘not consulted’ on NZ-China agreements
• Other Cook Islands crisis reports

The 2001 Joint Centenary Declaration signed between the two nations requires them to consult each other on defence and security, which Foreign Minister Winston Peters said had not been honoured.

Peters and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown both have a difference of opinion on the level of consultation required between the two nations on such matters.

“There is no way that the 2001 declaration envisaged that Cook Islands would enter into a strategic partnership with a great power behind New Zealand’s back,” Clark told RNZ Pacific on Thursday.

Clark was a signatory of the 2001 agreement with the Cook Islands as New Zealand prime minister at the time.

“It is the Cook Islands government’s actions which have created this crisis,” she said.

Urgent need for dialogue
“The urgent need now is for face-to-face dialogue at a high level to mend the NZ-CI relationship.”

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has downplayed the pause in funding to the Cook Islands during his second day of his trip to China.

Brown told Parliament on Thursday (Wednesday, Cook Islands time) that his government knew the funding cut was coming.

He also suggested a double standard, pointing out that New Zealand had also entered deals with China that the Cook Islands was not “privy to or being consulted on”.

A Pacific law expert says that, while New Zealand has every right to withhold its aid to the Cook Islands, the way it is going about it will not endear it to Pacific nations.

Auckland University of Technology senior law lecturer and a former Pacific Islands Forum advisor Sione Tekiteki told RNZ Pacific that for Aotearoa to keep highlighting that it is “a Pacific country and yet posture like the United States gives mixed messages”.

“Obviously, Pacific nations in true Pacific fashion will not say much, but they are indeed thinking it,” Tekiteki said.

Misunderstanding of agreement
Since day dot there has been a misunderstanding on what the 2001 agreement legally required New Zealand and Cook Islands to consult on, and the word consultation has become somewhat of a sticking point.

The latest statement from the Cook Islands government confirms it is still a discrepancy both sides want to hash out.

“There has been a breakdown and difference in the interpretation of the consultation requirements committed to by the two governments in the 2001 Joint Centenary Declaration,” the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Immigration (MFAI) said.

“An issue that the Cook Islands is determined to address as a matter of urgency”.

Tekiteki said that, unlike a treaty, the 2001 declaration was not “legally binding” per se but serves more to express the intentions, principles and commitments of the parties to work together in “recognition of the close traditional, cultural and social ties that have existed between the two countries for many hundreds of years”.

He said the declaration made it explicitly clear that Cook Islands had full conduct of its foreign affairs, capacity to enter treaties and international agreements in its own right and full competence of its defence and security.

However, he added that there was a commitment of the parties to “consult regularly”.

This, for Clark, the New Zealand leader who signed the all-important agreement more than two decades ago, is where Brown misstepped.

Clark previously labelled the Cook Islands-China deal “clandestine” which has “damaged” its relationship with New Zealand.

RNZ Pacific contacted the Cook Islands Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment but was advised by the MFAI secretary that they are not currently accommodating interviews.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

What is unfolding right now in California—with hundreds of Marines deployed domestically; thousands of National Guard troops federalized; and military weapons, tactics and equipment on full display—is intended to intimidate, distract and discourage us from pulling back the curtain on the reality of the self-serving corruption, grift, graft, overreach and abuse that have become synonymous with his Administration.

Don’t be distracted. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be sidelined by the spectacle of a police state.

This is yet another manufactured crisis fomented by the Deep State.

When Trump issues a call to “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” explaining to reporters that he wants to have them “everywhere,” we should all be alarmed.

This is martial law without a formal declaration of war.

This heavy-handed, chest-thumping, politicized, militarized response to what is clearly a matter for local government is yet another example of Trump’s disregard for the Constitution and the limits of his power.

Political protests are protected by the First Amendment until they cross the line from non-violent to violent. Even when protests turn violent, constitutional protocols remain in place to safeguard communities: law and order must flow through local and state chains of command, not from federal muscle.

By breaking that chain of command, Trump is breaking the Constitution.

Deploying the military to deal with domestic matters that can—and should—be handled by civilian police, despite the objections of local and state leaders, crosses the line into authoritarianism.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

In the span of a single week, the Trump administration is providing the clearest glimpse yet of its unapologetic, uncompromising, corrupt allegiance to the authoritarian Deep State.

These two events—the federalization of the National Guard deployed to California in response to protests and the president’s lavish, taxpayer-funded military parade in the nation’s capital—bookend the administration’s unmistakable message: dissent will be crushed, and power will be performed.

Trump governs by force (military deployment), fear (ICE raids, militarized policing), and spectacle (the parade).

This is the spectacle of a police state. One side of the coin is militarized suppression. The other is theatrical dominance. Together, they constitute the language of force and authoritarian control.

Yet this is more than political theater; it is a constitutional crisis in motion.

As we have warned before, this tactic is a familiar one.

In times of political unrest, authoritarian regimes often invoke national emergencies as a pretext to impose military solutions. The result? The Constitution is suspended, civilian control is overrun, and the machinery of the state turns against its own people.

This is precisely what the Founders feared when they warned against standing armies on American soil: that one day, the military might be used not to defend the people, but to control them.

It is a textbook play from the authoritarian handbook, deployed with increasing frequency under Trump. The optics are meant to intimidate, broadcast control, and discourage resistance before it even begins.

Thus, deploying the National Guard in this manner is not just a political maneuver—it is a strategic act of fear-based governance designed to instill terror, particularly among vulnerable communities, and ensure compliance.

America is being transformed into a battlefield before our eyes.

Militarized police. Riot squads. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Stun grenades. Crowd control and intimidation tactics.

This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.

This is the language of force.

This transformation is not accidental—it’s strategic. The government now sees the public not as constituents to be served but as potential combatants to be surveilled, managed, and subdued. In this new paradigm, dissent is treated as insurrection, and constitutional rights are treated as threats to national security.

What we are witnessing today is also part of a broader setup: an excuse to use civil unrest as a pretext for militarized overreach.

We saw signs of this strategy in Charlottesville, Virginia, where police failed to de-escalate and at times exacerbated tensions during protests that should have remained peaceful. The resulting chaos gave authorities cover to crack down—not to protect the public, but to reframe protest as provocation and dissent as disorder.

Then and now, the objective wasn’t to preserve peace and protect the public. It was to delegitimize dissent and cast protest as provocation.

It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the Deep State. The government wants a reason to crack down, lock down, and bring in its biggest guns.

This is how it begins.

Trump’s use of the military against civilians violates the spirit—if not the letter—of the Posse Comitatus Act, which is meant to bar federal military involvement in domestic affairs. It also raises severe constitutional questions about the infringement of First Amendment rights to protest and Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure.

Modern tools of repression compound the threat. AI-driven surveillance, predictive policing software, biometric databases, and fusion centers have made mass control seamless and silent. The state doesn’t just respond to dissent anymore; it predicts and preempts it.

While boots are on the ground in California, preparations are underway for a military spectacle in Washington, D.C.

At first glance, a military procession might seem like a patriotic display. But in this context, it is not a celebration of service; it is a declaration of supremacy. It is not about honoring troops; it is about reminding the populace who holds the power and who wields the guns.

This is how authoritarian regimes govern—through spectacle.

By sandwiching a military crackdown between a domestic troop deployment and a showy parade, Trump is sending a unified message: This is about raw, unchecked, theatrical power. And whether we, the people, will accept a government that rules not by consent, but by coercion.

The Constitution was not written to accommodate authoritarian pageantry. It was written to restrain it. It was never meant to sanctify conquest as a form of governance.

We are at a crossroads.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Strip away that consent, and all that remains is conquest through force, spectacle, and fear.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we allow the language of fear, the spectacle of dominance, and the machinery of militarized governance to become normalized, then we are no longer citizens of a republic—we are subjects of a police state.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on June 8, 2025. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

U.S. President Donald Trump deployed 2,000 National Guard members in response to protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Los Angeles over the weekend, as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth threatened to call in the marines.

The protests kicked off on Friday in opposition to ICE raids of retail establishments around Los Angeles. During Friday’s protests David Huerta, president of SEIU California and SEIU-United Service Workers West, was injured and then arrested while observing a raid. His arrest sparked further protests, which carried over into Saturday in response to apparent ICE activity in the nearby city of Paramount.

“The Trump administration’s baseless deployment of the National Guard is plainly retaliation against California, a stronghold for immigrant communities, and is akin to a declaration of war on all Californians,” Victor Leung, chief legal and advocacy officer at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Foundation of Southern California, said in a statement.

“They yell ‘invasion’ at the border—but this is the real one: Trump is seizing control of California’s National Guard and forcing 2,000 troops into our streets.”

Saturday’s most dramatic protest occurred outside a Home Depot in Paramount following rumors of an ICE raid there. However, Paramount Mayor Peggy Lemons told the Los Angeles Times that the ICE agents may instead have been staging at a nearby Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office. There were also rumors of an ICE raid on a meatpacking plant that never occurred.

“We don’t know what was happening, or what their target was. To think that there would be no heightening of fear and no consequences from the community doesn’t sound like good preparation to me,” Lemons said. “Above all, there is no communication and things are done on a whim. And that creates chaos and fear.”

According to the LA Times, the Home Depot protests began peacefully until officers lobbed flash-bang grenades and pepper balls at the crowd, after which some individuals responded by throwing rocks and other objects at the ICE cars, and one person drove their vehicle toward the ICE agents.

“Many of the protesters did not appear to engage in these tactics,” the LA Times reported.

In another incident, Lindsay Toczylowski, the chief executive of Immigrant Defenders Law Center, wrote on social media that ICE agents threw a tear-gas canister at two of the center’s female attorneys after they asked the agents if they could see a warrant and observe their activities.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California said that over a dozen people were arrested on Saturday for interfering with the work of immigration agents.

The first member of the Trump administration to mention sending in the National Guard was White House border czar Tom Homan, who told Fox News, “We’re gonna bring National Guard in tonight and we’re gonna continue doing our job. This is about enforcing the law.”

Trump then signed a memo Saturday night calling members of the California National Guard into federal service to protect ICE and other government officials.

“To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States,” the memo reads in part.

“The only threat to safety today is the masked goon squads that the administration has deployed to terrorize the communities of Los Angeles County.”

Instead of using the Insurrection Act, as some had speculated he might, Trump federalized the guard members under the president’s Title 10 authority, which allows the president to place the National Guard under federal control given certain conditions, but does not allow those troops to carry out domestic law enforcement activities, which invoking the Insurrection Act would enable.

“On its face, then, the memorandum federalizes 2,000 California National Guard troops for the sole purpose of protecting the relevant DHS personnel against attacks,” Georgetown University Law Center professor Steve Vladeck explained in a blog post Saturday. “That’s a significant (and, in my view, unnecessary) escalation of events in a context in which no local or state authorities have requested such federal assistance. But by itself, this is not the mass deployment of troops into U.S. cities that had been rumored for some time.”

Indeed, several state leaders spoke out against the deployment.

“The federal government is moving to take over the California National Guard and deploy 2,000 soldiers,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on social media Saturday. “That move is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions. LA authorities are able to access law enforcement assistance at a moment’s notice. We are in close coordination with the city and county, and there is currently no unmet need.”

“The Guard has been admirably serving LA throughout recovery,” he continued, referring to the devastating wildfires that swept the city early this year. “This is the wrong mission and will erode public trust.”

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) posted on social media that he “couldn’t agree more.”

“Using the National Guard this way is a completely inappropriate and misguided mission,” Padilla said. “The Trump administration is just sowing more chaos and division in our communities.”

Rep. Norma Torres (D-Calif.) added, “They yell ‘invasion’ at the border—but this is the real one: Trump is seizing control of California’s National Guard and forcing 2,000 troops into our streets.”

While the National Guard’s mission is currently limited, Vladeck argued that there were three reasons to be “deeply concerned” about the development. First, troops could still respond to real or perceived threats with violence, escalating the situation; second, escalation may be the desired outcome from the Trump administration, and used as a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act after all; and third, this could depress the morale of both National Guard members and the civilians they engage with while degrading the relationships between federal, local, and state authorities.

“There is something deeply pernicious about invoking any of these authorities except in circumstances in which their necessity is a matter of consensus beyond the president’s political supporters,” Vladeck wrote. “The law may well allow President Trump to do what he did Saturday night. But just because something is legal does not mean that it is wise—for the present or future of our Republic.”

Leung of the ACLU criticized both the ICE raids and the decision to deploy the Guard.

“Workers in our garment districts or day laborers seeking work outside of Home Depot do not undermine public safety,” Leung said. “They are our fathers and mothers and neighbors going about their day and making ends meet. Rather, the only threat to safety today is the masked goon squads that the administration has deployed to terrorize the communities of Los Angeles County.”

He continued: “There is no rational reason to deploy the National Guard on Angelenos, who are rightfully outraged by the federal government’s attack on our communities and justly exercising their First Amendment right to protest the violent separation of our families. We intend to file suit and hold this administration accountable and to protect our communities from further attacks.”

National political leaders also spoke out Sunday morning.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote on social media that it was “important to remember that Trump isn’t trying to heal or keep the peace. He is looking to inflame and divide. His movement doesn’t believe in democracy or protest—and if they get a chance to end the rule of law they will take it. None of this is on the level.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) posted that the entire incident was “Trump’s authoritarianism in real time.”

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth threatened further escalation Saturday night when he tweeted that “if violence continues, active duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized—they are on high alert.”

Newsom responded: “The Secretary of Defense is now threatening to deploy active-duty Marines on American soil against its own citizens. This is deranged behavior.”

“This is an abuse of power and what dictators do. It’s unnecessary and not needed.”

Hegseth then doubled down on the threat Sunday morning, replying on social media that it was “deranged” to allow “your city to burn and law enforcement to be attacked.”

“The National Guard, and Marines if need be, stand with ICE,” he posted.

Journalist Ryan Grim noted that it was an “ominous development” for the secretary of defense to be commenting on immigration policy or local law enforcement at all.

Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.) said of Trump and Hegseth’s escalations: “This is an abuse of power and what dictators do. It’s unnecessary and not needed.”

Writing on his Truth Social platform early Sunday, Trump praised the National Guard for their work in Los Angeles. Yet local and state leaders pointed out that the Guard had not yet arrived in the city by the time the post was made.

As of Sunday morning, the National Guard had arrived in downtown Los Angeles and Paramount, ABC 7 reported.

In the midst of the uproar over Trump’s actions, labor groups continued to decry the ICE raids and call for the release of Huerta.

National Nurses United wrote on Friday: “With these raids, the government is sowing intense fear for personal safety among our immigrant and migrant community. Nurses and other union workers oppose this, and are standing up in solidarity with fellow immigrant workers. We refuse to be silent, and people like David Huerta are bravely putting their own bodies on the line to bear witness to what ICE is doing. It’s appalling that ICE injured and detained him while he was exercising his First Amendment rights. We demand his immediate release.”

AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond said in a statement Saturday:

The nearly 15 million working people of the AFL-CIO and our affiliated unions demand the immediate release of California Federation of Labor Unions Vice President and SEIU California and SEIU-USWW President David Huerta. As the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda has unnecessarily targeted our hard-working immigrant brothers and sisters, David was exercising his constitutional rights and conducting legal observation of ICE activity in his community. He was doing what he has always done, and what we do in unions: putting solidarity into practice and defending our fellow workers. In response, ICE agents violently arrested him, physically injuring David in the process, and are continuing to detain him—a violation of David’s civil liberties and the freedoms this country holds dear. The labor movement stands with David, and we will continue to demand justice for our union brother until he is released.

The unrest in Los Angeles may continue as Barragán told CNN on Sunday she had been informed that ICE would be present in LA for a month. She argued that the National Guard deployment would only inflame the conflict.

“We haven’t asked for the help. We don’t need the help. This is [President Trump] escalating it, causing tensions to rise. It’s only going to make things worse in a situation where people are already angry over immigration enforcement.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Olivia Rosane.

Seven European nations have called on Israel to “immediately reverse” its military operations against Gaza and lift the food and water blockade on the besieged enclave.

They have also called on all parties to immediately engage with “renewed urgency and good faith” for a ceasefire and release of all hostages.

The seven countries are Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, Slovenia, and Spain.

• READ MORE: ‘Cracks are opening up’ in Western complicity over Gaza genocide, says Minto
• Why the wall of silence on the Gaza genocide is finally starting to crack
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

They declared that they would be silent in the face of the man-made humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza that has so far killed more than 50,000 men, women and children.

Israeli forces continue bombarding Gaza yesterday, killing at least 125 Palestinians, including 36 in the so-called “safe zone” of al-Mawasi.

The intensified Israeli attacks have rendered all the public hospitals in northern Gaza out of service, said the Health Ministry.

The joint statement
The joint statement signed by the leaders of all seven countries said:

“We will not be silent in front of the man-made humanitarian catastrophe that is taking place before our eyes in Gaza. More than 50.000 men, women, and children have lost their lives. Many more could starve to death in the coming days and weeks unless immediate action is taken.

“We call upon the government of Israel to immediately reverse its current policy, refrain from further military operations and fully lift the blockade, ensuring safe, rapid and unimpeded humanitarian aid to be distributed throughout the Gaza strip by international humanitarian actors and according to humanitarian principles. United Nations and humanitarian organisations, including UNRWA, must be supported and granted safe and unimpeded access.

“We call upon all parties to immediately engage with renewed urgency and good faith in negotiations on a ceasefire and the release of all hostages, and acknowledge the important role played by the United States, Egypt and Qatar in this regard.

“This is the basis upon which we can build a sustainable, just and comprehensive peace, based on the implementation of the two-State solution. We will continue to support the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, and work in the framework of the United Nations and with other actors, like the Arab League and Arab and Islamic States, to move forward to achieve a peaceful and sustainable solution. Only peace can bring security for Palestinians, Israelis and the region, and only respect for international law can secure lasting peace.

“We also condemn the further escalation in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, with increased settler violence, the expansion of illegal settlements and intensified Israel military operations. Forced displacement or the expulsion of the Palestinian people, by any means, is unacceptable and would constitute a breach of international law. We reject any such plans or attempts at demographic change.

“We must assume the responsibility to stop this devastation.”

The letter was signed by Kristrún Frostadóttir, Prime Minister of Iceland; Micheál Martin, Taoiseach of Ireland; Luc Frieden, Prime Minister of Luxembourg; Robert Abela, Prime Minister of Malta; Jonas Gahr Støre, Prime Minister of Norway; Robert Golob, Prime Minister of Slovenia; and Pedro Sánchez, President of Spain.

Gaza proves global system ‘incapable of solving issues’
Meanwhile, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, says the crisis in Gaza has once again demonstrated that “the pillars of the international system are incapable of resolving such issues”, reports Al Jazeera.

It also showed “that the fate of the [Middle East] region cannot and should not remain at the mercy of extra-regional powers”, he said during a speech at the Tehran Dialogue Forum.

“What is currently presented by these powers as the ‘regional reality’ is, in fact, a reflection of deeply constructed narratives and interpretations, shaped solely based on their own interests,” Iran’s top diplomat said.

He said these narratives must be redefined and corrected from within the region itself.

“West Asia is in dire need of a fundamental reassessment of how it views itself,” Araghchi said.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A group of New Zealand academics at Otago University have drawn up a “Declaration on Palestine” against genocide, apartheid and scholasticide of Palestinians by Israel that has illegally occupied their indigenous lands for more than seven decades.

The document, which had already drawn more than 300 signatures from staff, students and alumni by the weekend, will be formally adopted at a congress of the Otago Staff for Justice in Palestine (OSJP) group on Thursday.

“At a time when our universities, our public institutions and our political leaders are silent in the face of the daily horrors we are shown from illegally-occupied Palestine, this declaration is an act of solidarity with our Palestinian whānau,” declared Professor Richard Jackson from Te Ao O Rongomaraeroa — The National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies.

• READ MORE: How Israel’s war on Gaza is destroying Palestinian education
• Gaza: An expression of conscience
• Other Gaza scholasticide reports

“It expresses the brutal truth of what is currently taking place in Palestine, as well as our commitment to international law and human rights, and our social responsibilities as academics.

“We hope the declaration will be an inspiration to others and a call to action at a moment when the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is accelerating at an alarming rate.”

Scholars and students at the university had expressed concern that they did not want to be teaching or learning about the Palestinian genocide in future courses on the history of the Palestinian people, Professor Jackson said.

Nor did they want to feel ashamed when they were asked what they did while the genocide was taking place.

‘Collective moral courage’
“Signing up to the declaration represents an act of individual and collective moral courage, and a public commitment to working to end the genocide.”

In an interview with the Otago Daily Times published at the weekend, Professor Jackson said boycotting academic ties with Israel was among the measures included in a declaration.

The declaration commits its signatories to an academic boycott as part of the wider Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanction (BDS) campaign “until such time as Palestinians enjoy freedom from genocide, apartheid and scholasticide”, they had national self-determination and full and complete enjoyment of human rights, as codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The declaration says that given the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled there is a “plausible” case that Israel has been committing genocide, and that all states that are signatory to the Genocide Convention must take all necessary measures to prevent acts of genocide, the signatories commit themselves to an academic boycott.

BDS is a campaign, begun in 2005, to promote economic, social and cultural boycotts of the Israeli government, Israeli companies and companies that support Israel, in an effort to end the occupation of Palestinian territories and win equal rights for Palestinian citizens within Israel.

It draws inspiration from South African anti-apartheid campaigns and the United States civil rights movement.

The full text of the declaration:

The Otago Declaration on the Situation in Palestine

We, the staff, students and graduates, being members of the University of Otago, make the following declaration.

We fully and completely recognise that:
– The Palestinian people have a right under international law to national self-determination;
– The Palestinians have the right to security and the full enjoyment of all human and social rights as laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;

And furthermore that:
– Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian nation, according to experts, official bodies, international lawyers and human rights organisations;
– Israel operates a system of apartheid in the territories it controls, and denies the full expression and enjoyment of human rights to Palestinians, according to international courts, human rights organisations, legal and academic experts;
– Israel is committing scholasticide, thereby denying Palestinians their right to education;

We recognise that:
– Given the International Court of Justice has ruled that there is a plausible case that Israel has been committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, that all states that are signatory to the Genocide Convention, which includes Aotearoa New Zealand, have a responsibility to take all necessary measures to prevent acts of genocide;

We also acknowledge that as members of a public institution with educational responsibilities:
– We hold a legal and ethical responsibility to act as critic and conscience of society, both individually as members of the University and collectively as a social institution;
– We have a responsibility to follow international law and norms and to act in an ethical manner in our personal and professional endeavours;
– We hold an ethical responsibility to act in solidarity with oppressed and disadvantaged people, including those who struggle against settler colonial regimes or discriminatory apartheid systems and the harmful long-term effects of colonisation;
– We owe a responsibility to fellow educators who are victimised by apartheid and scholasticide;

Therefore, we, the under-signed, do solemnly commit ourselves to:
– Uphold the practices, standards and ethics of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign in terms of investment and procurement as called for by Palestinian civil society and international legal bodies; until such time as Palestinians enjoy freedom from genocide, apartheid and scholasticide, national self-determination and full and complete enjoyment of human rights, as codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
– Adopt as part of the BDS campaign an Academic Boycott, as called for by Palestinian civil society and international legal bodies; until such time as Palestinians enjoy freedom from genocide, apartheid and scholasticide, national self-determination and full and complete enjoyment of human rights, as codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• The Otago Declaration congress meeting will be held on Thursday, May 15, 2025, at 12 noon at the Museum Lawn, Dunedin.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“Apparently the guy that did Trump’s tariff calculations put together this ratepayer-funded coal bailout plan, because it’s just as stupid. Trump’s fraudulent January 20 energy emergency declaration unsurprisingly is heavy on useless rhetoric and devoid of any facts.

“Reviving or extending coal to power data centers would force working families to subsidize polluting coal on behalf of Big Tech billionaires and despoil our nation’s public lands. States planning to move to cleaner, cheaper energy sources could be forced to keep old coal plants up and running for years, forcing nearby residents to breathe dirty air and harming the climate. Trump’s expected use of the threat of power demand growth from AI data centers to ramp up domestic coal mining and consumption is unjustifiable, as Public Citizen recently pointed out to Congress. Trump and his team of incompetents continue to demonstrate their lack of understanding of how energy markets work. Public Citizen is more than happy to meet with Administration officials and walk them through why forcing American families to pay for uneconomic coal power plants is dull-witted and will result in a massive ratepayer-funded subsidy for Big Tech billionaires.

“The future of steel in the United States is utilizing green hydrogen and renewable energy to revolutionize production. Doubling down on dirty coal to make steel sets our economy back decades, and allows the rest of the world to make steel cheaper and greener. Competing to make steel means investing in the technologies that will power steel production in the future, not doubling down on the production from the past.

“The Big Tech firms that are driving energy demand at data centers with their new AI technologies—but which have long claimed to be concerned about the climate crisis—should renounce this Trump diktat immediately.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The Pacific’s peak diplomatic bodies have signalled they are ready to engage with Papua New Guinea’s Autonomous Government of Bougainville as mediation begins on the delayed ratification of its successful 2019 independence referendum.

PNG and Bougainville’s leaders met in the capital Port Moresby this week with a moderator to start negotiations on the implementation of the UN-supervised Bougainville Peace Agreement and referendum.

Ahead of the talks, ABG’s President Ishmael Toroama moved to sideline a key sticking point over PNG parliamentary ratification of the vote, with the announcement last week that Bougainville would unilaterally declare independence on September 1, 2027.

• READ MORE: PNG and Bougainville to hold more talks on independence issue
• Other Bougainville reports

The region’s two leading intergovernmental organisations — Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) and Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) — have traditionally deferred to member state PNG on discussion of Bougainville independence as an internal matter.

But as a declaration of nationhood becomes increasingly likely and near, there has been a subtle shift.

“It’s their [PNG’s] prerogative but if this matter were raised formally, even by Bougainville themselves, we can start discussion on that,” PIF Secretary-General Baron Waqa told a press briefing at its headquarters in Fiji on Monday.

“Whatever happens, I think the issue would have to be decided by our leaders later this year,” he said of the annual PIF meeting to be held in Solomon Islands in September.

Marked peace deal
The last time the Pacific’s leaders included discussion of Bougainville in their official communique was in 2004 to mark the disarmament of the island under the peace deal.

Waqa said Bougainville had made no formal approach to PIF — a grouping of 18 Pacific states and territories — but it was closely monitoring developments on what could eventually lead to the creation of a new member state.

In 2024, Toroama told BenarNews he would be seeking observer status at the subregional MSG — grouping PNG, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia’s FLNKS — as Bougainville’s first diplomatic foray.

No application has been made yet but MSG acting Director-General Ilan Kiloe told BenarNews they were also keeping a close watch.

“Our rules and regulations require that we engage through PNG and we will take our cue from them,” Kiloe said, adding while the MSG respects the sovereignty of its members, “if requested, we will provide assistance” to Bougainville.

“The purpose and reason the MSG was established initially was to advance the collective interests of the Melanesian countries, in particular, to assist those yet to attain independence,” he said. “And to provide support towards their aim of becoming independent countries.”

The 2001 peace agreement ended more than a decade of bloody conflict  known as the Bougainville crisis, that resulted in the deaths of up to 15,000 people, and laid out a roadmap for disarmament and the referendum in 2019.

‘We need support’
Under the agreement, PNG retains responsibility for foreign affairs but allows for the ABG to engage externally for trade and with “regional organisations.”

“We need countries to support us, we need to talk to those countries [ahead of independence],” Toroama told BenarNews last September.

The referendum on independence was supported by 97.7 percent of Bougainvillians and the outcome was due to be ratified by PNG’s Parliament in 2020, but was deferred because of the covid-19 pandemic.

Discussions by the two parties since on whether a simple or two-thirds majority vote by parliamentarians was required has further delayed the process.

Toroama stood firm on the issue of ratification on the first day of discussions moderated by New Zealand’s Sir Jerry Mataparae, saying his people voted for independence and the talks were to define the “new relationship” between two independent states.

Last week, the 15 members of the Bougainville Leaders Independence Consultation Forum issued a statement declaring PNG had no authority to veto the referendum result and recommended September 1, 2027 as the declaration date.

“As far as I am concerned, the process of negotiating independence was concluded with the referendum,” Toroama said.

Implementation moderation
“My understanding is that this moderation is about reaching agreement on implementing the referendum result of independence.”

He told Marape “to take ownership and endorse independence in this 11th Parliament.”

PNG’s prime minister responded by praising the 25 years of peace “without a single bullet fired” but warned Bougainville was not ready for independence.

“Economic independence must precede political independence,” Marape said. “The long-term sustainability of Bougainville must be factored into these discussions.”

“About 95 percent of Bougainville’s budget is currently reliant on external support, including funding from the PNG government and international donors.”

Proposals to reopen Rio Tinto’s former Panguna gold and copper mine in Bougainville, that sparked its civil conflict, is a regular feature of debate about its economic future.

Marape also suggested people may be secretly harbouring weapons in breach of the peace agreement and called on the UN to clarify the outcome of the disarmament process it supervised.

“Headlines have come out that guns remain in Bougainville. United Nations, how come guns remain in Bougainville?” Marape asked on Monday.

“You need to tell me. This is something you know. I thought all guns were removed from Bougainville.”

PNG relies on aid
By comparison, PNG has heavily relied on foreign financial assistance since independence, currently receiving at about US$320 million (1.3 billion kina) a year in budgetary support from Australia, and suffers regular tribal violence and massacres involving firearms including assault rifles.

Bougainville Vice-President Patrick Nisira rejected Marape’s concerns about weapons, the Post-Courier newspaper reported.

“The usage of those guns, there is no evidence of that and if you look at the data on Bougainville where [there are] incidents of guns, it is actually very low,” he said.

Further talks are planned and are due to produce a report for the national Parliament by mid-2025, ahead of elections in Bougainville and PNG’s 50th anniversary celebrations in September.

Republished from BenarNews with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Papua New Guinea being declared a Christian nation may offer the impression that the country will improve, but it is only “an illusion”, according to a Catholic priest in the country.

Last week, the PNG Parliament amended the nation’s constitution, introducing a declaration in its preamble: “(We) acknowledge and declare God, the Father; Jesus Christ, the Son; and Holy Spirit, as our Creator and Sustainer of the entire universe and the source of our powers and authorities, delegated to the people and all persons within the geographical jurisdiction of Papua New Guinea.”

In addition, Christianity will now be reflected in the Fifth Goal of the Constitution, and the Bible will be recognised as a national symbol.

• READ MORE: Other PNG Christianity reports

Father Giorgio Licini of Caritas PNG said that the Catholic Church would have preferred no constitutional change.

“To create, nowadays, in the 21st century a Christian confessional state seems a little bit anachronistic,” Father Licini said.

He believes it is a “cosmetic” change that “will not have a real impact” on the lives of the people.

“PNG society will remain basically what it is,” he said.

An ‘illusion that things will improve’
“This manoeuvre may offer the impression or the illusion that things will improve for the country, that the way of behaving, the economic situation, the culture may become more solid. But that is an illusion.”

He said the preamble of the 1975 Constitution already acknowledged the Christian heritage.

Father Licini said secular cultures and values were scaring many in PNG, including the recognition and increasing acceptance of the rainbow community.

“They see themselves as next to Indonesia, which is Muslim, they see themselves next to Australia and New Zealand, which are increasingly secular countries, the Pacific heritage is fading, so the question is, who are we?” he said.

“It looks like a Christian heritage and tradition and values and the churches, they offer an opportunity to ground on them a cultural identity.”

Prime Minister James Marape, a vocal advocate for the amendment, is happy about the outcome.

He said it “reflects, in the highest form” the role Christian churches had played in the development of the country.

Not an operational law
RNZ Pacific’s PNG correspondent Scott Waide said that Marape had maintained it was not an operational law.

“It is something that is rather symbolic and something that will hopefully unite Papua New Guinea under a common goal of sorts. That’s been the narrative that’s come out from the Prime Minister’s Office,” Waide said.

He said the vast majority of people in the country had identified as Christian, but it was not written into the constitution.

Waide said the founding fathers were aware of the negative implications of declaring the nation a Christian state during the decolonisation period.

“I think in their wisdom they chose to very carefully state that Papua New Guineans are spiritual people but stopped short of actually declaring Papua New Guinea a Christian country.”

He said that, unlike Fiji, which has had a 200-year experience with different religions, the first mosque in PNG opened in the 1980s.

“It is not as diverse as you would see in other countries. Personally, I have seen instances of religious violence largely based on ignorance.

“Not because they are politically driven, but because people are not educated enough to understand the differences in religions and the need to coexist.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Pacific delegates have been left “shocked” by the omission of sexual and reproductive health rights from the key declaration of the 69th UN Commission on the Status of Women meeting in New York.

This year CSW69 will review and assess the implementation of the 1995 Beijing Declaration, the UN’s blueprint for gender equality and rights for women and girls.

The meeting’s political declaration adopted on Tuesday reaffirmed the UN member states’ commitment to the rights, equality and empowerment of all women and girls.

• READ MORE: Other women’s rights reports

It was the product of a month of closed-door negotiations during which a small number of countries, reportedly including the U.S. and Russia, were accused of diluting the declaration’s final text.

The Beijing Declaration three decades ago mentioned reproductive rights 50 times, unlike this year’s eight-page political declaration.

“It is shocking. Thirty years after Beijing, not one mention of sexual and reproductive health and rights,” Pacific delegate and women’s advocate Noelene Nabulivou from Fiji told BenarNews.

“The core of gender justice and human rights lies in the ability to make substantive decisions over one’s body, health and sexual decision making.

“We knew that in 1995, we know it now, we will not let anyone take SRHR away, we are not going back.”

Common sentiment
It is a common sentiment among the about 100 Pacific participants at the largest annual gathering on women’s rights that attracts thousands of delegates from around the world.

“This is a major omission, especially given the current conditions in several (Pacific) states and the wider pushback and regression on women’s human rights,” Fiji-based DIVA for Equality representative Viva Tatawaqa told BenarNews from New YorK.

Tatawaqa said that SRHR was included in the second version of the political declaration but was later removed due to “lack of consensus” and “trade-offs in language.”

“We will not let everyone ignore this omission, whatever reason was given for the trade-off,” she said.

The Pacific Community’s latest survey of SRHR in the region reported progress had been made but significant challenges remain.

It highlighted an urgent need to address extreme rates of gender-based violence, low contraceptive use (below 50% in the region), lack of confidentiality in health services and hyperendemic levels of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), which all fall under the SRHR banner.

Ten Pacific Island countries submitted detailed Beijing+30 National Reports to CSW69.

Anti-abortion alliance
Opposition to SRHR has come from 39 countries through their membership of the anti-abortion Geneva Consensus Declaration, an alliance founded in 2020. Their ranks include this year’s CSW69 chair Saudi Arabia, Russia, Hungary, Egypt, Kenya, Indonesia and the U.S. under both Trump administrations, along with predominantly African and Middle East countries.

“During negotiations, certain states including the USA and Argentina, attempted to challenge even the most basic and accepted terms around gender and gender equality,” Amnesty said in a statement after the declaration.

“The text comes amid mounting threats to sexual and reproductive rights, including increased efforts, led by conservative groups, to roll back on access to contraception, abortion, comprehensive sexuality education, and gender-affirming care across the world,” adding the termination of USAID had compounded the situation.

The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) confirmed in February that the US, the UN’s biggest donor, had cut US$377 million in funding for reproductive and sexual health programmes and warned of “devastating impacts.”

Since coming to office, President Donald Trump has also reinstated the Global Gag Rule, prohibiting foreign recipients of U.S. aid from providing or discussing abortions.

In his opening address to the CSW69, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres issued a dire warning on progress on gender equality across the world.

‘Poison of patriachy’
“The poison of patriarchy is back, and it is back with a vengeance, slamming the brakes on action, tearing up progress, and mutating into new and dangerous forms,” he said, without singling out any countries or individuals.

“The masters of misogyny are gaining strength,” Guterres said, denouncing the “bile” women faced online.

He warned at the current rate it would take 137 years to lift all women out of poverty, calling on all nations to commit to the “promise of Beijing”.

The CSW was established days after the inaugural UN meetings in 1946, with a focus on prioritising women’s political, economic and social rights.

CSW was instrumental in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and the Beijing Declaration.

One of the declaration’s stated goals is to “enhance women’s sexual and reproductive health and education”, the absence of which would have “a profound impact on women and men.”

The 1995 Beijing Platform for Action identified 12 key areas needing urgent attention — including poverty, education, health, violence — and laid out pathways to achieve change, while noting it would take substantial resources and financing.

This year’s political declaration came just days after International Women’s Day, when UN Pacific released a joint statement singled out rises in adolescent birth rates and child marriage, exacerbating challenges related to health, education, and long-term well-being of women in the region.

Gender-based violence
It also identified the region has among the highest levels of gender-based violence and lowest rates of women’s political representation in the world.

A comparison of CSW59 in 2015 and the CSW69 political declaration reveal that many of the same challenges, language, and concerns persist.

Guterres in his address offered “antidote is action” to address the immense gaps.

Pacific Women Mediators Network coordinator Sharon Bhagwan-Rolls told BenarNews much of that action in the Pacific had been led by women.

“The inclusion of climate justice and the women, peace, and security agenda in the Beijing+30 Action Plan is a reminder of the intersectional and intergenerational work that has continued,” she said.

“This work has been forged through women-led networks and coalitions like the Pacific Women Mediators Network and the Pacific Island Feminist Alliance for Climate Justice, which align with the Blue Pacific Strategy and the Revitalised Pacific Leaders Gender Equality Declaration.”

Republished from BenarNews with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

President Donald Trump delivered the longest presidential address to a joint session of Congress in modern history Tuesday night, laying out his vision for the next four years as he defended his many executive actions to dismantle large portions of the federal government. For an hour and 40 minutes, Trump repeatedly lied and exaggerated his accomplishments and his opponents’ failures, deploying racist and dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, LGBTQ people and his critics. Trump heaped praise on billionaire Elon Musk and his efforts to slash entire government agencies. The speech was “a declaration of war against the American people, including Trump voters, in favor of the super-rich and the giant corporations,” says Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Many of those notables that assembled in the city of Philadelphia in that historic year of 1787 were intent on framing a resilient centralized government that stood in accordance with Adam Smith’s essential maxims which affirmed that “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all;” contending that civil government, “grows up with the acquisition of valuable property.”^[3] Consequently, this analysis will challenge that long-held notion which has described early American thought and society as “egalitarian, free from [the] extreme want and wealth that characterized Europe.”^[4] In fact, as will be demonstrated throughout the work that follows, by an array of noted scholars and academics, this exploration will prove that property, class, and status played a significant, although perhaps not an exclusive, role in the development of that early colony and its nascent nation.

The intricacies of these contradictions will be examined in further detail throughout this study, arguing that, it is impossible to elude the fact that status, class, and race performed a major part in the views and doctrines woven within the principles and legal mechanisms formulated by those luminaries in that early republic. In fact, the following quote extracted from a letter written in 1786 by a French diplomat (positioned as the chargé d’affaires), in communiqué with his government, leading up to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, helps to delineate the top-down attitudes and devices engineered by the men historically known as the “Framers:”

Although there are no nobles in America, there is a class of men denominated “gentlemen.” … Almost all of them dread the efforts of the people to despoil them of their possessions, and, moreover, they are creditors, and therefore interested in strengthening the government and watching over the execution of the law…. The majority of them being merchants, it is for their interest to establish the credit of the United States in Europe on a solid foundation by the exact payment of debts, and to grant to Congress powers extensive enough to compel the people to contribute for this purpose.^[5]

As supported, evidenced, and argued by famed bottom-up historians like Michael Parenti, Charles A. Beard, Michael J. Klarman and others, the concepts of class and ownership and their European legacy greatly contributed to the initial composition of that early American dominion and its proprietorship stratum. In fact, as Professor Parenti demonstrates, “from colonial times onward, ‘men of influence’ received vast land grants from the [English] crown and presided over estates that bespoke an impressive munificence.” Parenti also reveals the stark differentials woven within the colonial class structure through exposing the fact that, “By 1700, three-fourths of the acreage in New York belonged to fewer than a dozen persons.” And, beyond that, “In the interior of Virginia, seven individuals owned 1.7 million acres,” exhibiting a structuralized formulation of wealth concentration from early on. In the run-up to the American Revolution, some twenty-seven years prior to the Continental Congress taking place in that celebrated year of 1787, Professor Parenti additionally notes that, “By 1760, [some] fewer than five hundred men in five colonial cities controlled most of the commerce, shipping, banking, mining, and manufacturing on the eastern seaboard.” Again, Parenti brings to the fore, a clear demarcation between the few and the many, property ownership and capital accumulation in that newly formed land of “equality,” which will be explored and surveyed in further detail within this work.^[6]

Chapter One of this dissertation will do a deep dive, in part, by focusing on documentary evidence penned by the “Framers” themselves. In addition to that, this work will seek to challenge existing historiographical debates, as noted, by displaying both the negative and positive legacy left by the men that articulated the U.S. Constitution in the city of Philadelphia in that momentous year of 1787. Furthermore, a major theoretical element of this retrospective will be working with, and challenging, the classifications and clashes within the so-called American ideals of Independence, Liberty, and Equality through studying an array of viewpoints from historical masterworks by Gordon S. Wood, Woody Holton, and others as mentioned below. Some of the topics brought forth within this research will include Chapter One, “An American Paradox: The Marriage of Liberty, Slavery and Freedom.” Chapter Two, “Cui Bono – Who Benefitted Most from the Categorical Constructs of Race and Class in Early America?” And, finally, in Chapter Three, this work will take a cogent look at “The Atomization of the Powerless and the Sins of Democracy,” historically from antiquity and beyond, by reflecting upon the judgments, attitudes and viewpoints, from a class perspective, of the privileged faction of men that forged that early nation’s crucial founding doctrines and documents. Again, these chapters above mentioned will take a thorough look at the varying constructs of race and class throughout the American experience from the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and early part of the Twentieth centuries, focusing on cui bono, that is, who benefitted most from those racialized constructs of division and how those benefits negatively affected those societies at large socially, politically, and culturally.

Specifically, the chapters summarized above will bring together the importance of understanding just how class, ownership, and status, per race, position, and wealth demarcated the early American experience within governmental and societal structures, rules, and regulations from 1787 forward – surveying the uniqueness of the U.S. Constitution (both pro and con) along with its Amendments (known as the Bill of Rights)  will help provide a nuanced understanding of both said document and the men that formulated it. Which later impacted social movements and social discord from abolitionism to civil rights. This study will deliver not just a structuralized economic and political viewpoint, but a humanistic perspective. Moreover, this research will incorporate historical and scientific classics by such noted scholars as Edmund S. Morgan, Edward E. Baptist, Barbara J. Fields; and Nancy Isenberg – just to name a few. The foundations of racial divisions mentioned above were clearly measured by 16th-century English theorist and statesman Francis Bacon when he penned, “The Idols of the Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men.”^[7] As determined, Bacon defined racism as an innate element of human nature. Hence, this study will challenge that hypothesis, in part, by arguing that divisions of race within the human condition are social constructs that ultimately benefit those that exercise those dictates.

1
The Paradox of Early American Freedom

What were the underlying moral and ideological contradictions woven within that newly birthed land of freedom’s class-stratified slave society?

We believe we understand what class is, that being, an economic social division shaped by affluence and privilege versus want and neglect. “The problem is that popular American history is most commonly told, [or] dramatized, without much reference to the existence of social classes.” The story, in the main, is taught and/or conveyed as a tale of American exceptionalism – as if the early American colonies, and their break with Great Britain, somehow miraculously transformed the constraints of class structuralism – resulting in a greater realization of “enriched possibility.” This conception of America was galvanized by the men that formulated its constitution in the city of Philadelphia in that momentous year of 1787 with great elegance – an image of how a modern nation “might prove itself revolutionary in terms of social mobility in a world traditionally dominated by monarchy and fixed aristocracy.” America’s most beloved myths are at once encouraging and devastating: “All men are created equal,”^[8] for example, which excluded Indigenous Peoples and African Americans, penned by renowned American statesman and philosopher Thomas Jefferson in his landmark Declaration of Independence written in 1776 – was effectively employed as a maxim to delineate, as historian Nancy Isenberg presents, “the promise of America’s open spaces and united people’s moral self-regard in distinguishing themselves from a host of hopeless societies abroad,” but the tale is much darker, more troublesome and abundantly more nuanced than that.^[9]

An elite colonial land-grabbing class, from early on, in that fledgling America, contrived its own attitudes and perspectives – those which served it best. After settlement, starting as early as the seventeenth century, colonial outposts exploited their unfree labor: European indentured servants, African slaves, Native Americans, and their offspring – describing such expendable classes as “human waste.”^[10] When it comes to an early settler-colonial mentality of not only conquest but profitability as an exemplar, “Coined land,” is the term that Benjamin Franklin (noted Eighteenth Century political philosopher, scientist, and diplomat) used to refer to, or celebrate, the intrinsic monetary value woven within the then brutal land acquisition and/or theft from the Indigenous Native American population at the time – appropriated land which was later “privatized and commodified” in the hands of venture capitalists, described as “European colonists.”^[11] These attitudes of hierarchy over “the people out of doors,” as those eminent luminaries that gathered in Philadelphia later referred to them were long held. A phrase, according to noted Professor of History Benjamin Irvin, that was largely defined to incorporate not only “the working poor” that clamored in the streets of Philadelphia during the Convention of 1787, but all peoples who were disenfranchised by that newly formed Continental Congress, “including women, Native Americans, African Americans, and the working poor.”^[12] In fact, as Isenberg demonstrates, notions of superiority from the upper crust of that early society toward, “The poor, [or waste people], did not disappear, [on the contrary], by the early eighteenth century they [the lower classes] were seen as a permanent breed.”^[13] That is, a taxonomical classification viewed through how one physically appeared, grounded in their class and conduct, came to the fore; and, this prejudicial manner of classifying and/or categorizing bottom-up human struggle or failure took hold in the United States for centuries to come – which will be further explored within subsequent chapters.

These unfavorable top-down class attitudes toward the poor or “waste people” emanated from what was known at the time as the mother country, that is, England itself – where as early as the 1500s and 1600s, America was not viewed as an “Eden of opportunity,” but rather a “giant rubbish heap,” that could be converted and cultivated into productive estates, on behalf of wealthy landowners through the unloading of England’s poor and destitute – who would be used to develop that far-off wasteland. Again, as Isenberg contends, “the idle poor [or] dregs of society, were to be sent thither simply to throw down manure and die in a vacuous muck.” That is, before it became celebrated as the fabled “City on a Hill,”^[14] auspiciously described by John Winthrop (English Puritan lawyer and then governor), in his well-known sermon of 1630, to what was then the early settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, “America was [seen] in the eyes of sixteenth-century adventurers [and English elites alike] as a foul, weedy wilderness – a ‘sink-hole’ [perfectly] suited to [work, profit and lord over] ‘ill-bred commoners,’”^[15] clearly defining top-down class distinctions from early on.

Returning to those eminent American men that later devised the doctrines and documents which conceived of a “new nation” built on individual liberty and freedom, under further examination, begs the question: “Freedom for whom and for what?” This study will delve deeper into who those men were and how their overall attitudes toward the general populous as far as class, education, rank, and proprietorship, eventually led to a decisive result known as the U.S. Constitution. To appreciate the U.S. political and economic structure, it is essential to understand its original formulation, starting with said constitution. Those dignitaries that gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were intent on framing a strong centralized government in adherence with (what they believed to be Scottish economist and theorist) Adam Smith’s fundamental dicta and/or revelations, which stated that government was “instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor” and “grows up with the acquisition of valuable property.”^[16] As Political Scientist and author, Robert Ovetz argues below, the mechanisms and/or devices designed and implemented within the U.S. Constitution were contrived from the outset to thwart any and all democratic control. Equally noted, the Framers’ brilliance was in formulating a virtually unalterable system which offered through clever slogans like “We the People” an assurance of participation within the constructs of a Republic, all the while permitting “a few to hand-pick some representatives,” whilst the majority thus surrendered “the power of self-governance.” The U.S., still to this day, lauds itself as a “Democracy,” yet, from the outset, as argued, that illustrious landmark charter mentioned was nefariously intended to “impede democratic control of government” all the while foiling “democratic control of the economy.”^[17]

Under careful observation, no section of the U.S. Constitution is more misconstrued and misinterpreted than its Preamble. Moreover, the term, “We the People,”  for example was, and still is to this day, deliberately employed as a rhetorical device in the form of a “philosophical aspiration,” separating it from the dry legalese that compose most of the rest of the charter. This, perhaps, is why the Preamble . has grasped the attention of the common everyday citizen. It embodies the hopes and values of ordinary people, cunningly expressing what they would ideally like the Constitution to achieve in practice – even though in truth it does something distinctively different. In fact, if we survey the meaning of the doctrines found within the Preamble, we find a set of material relations dating back to the 1700s which were brilliantly devised to deliberately constrain economic and political democracy:^[18]

Figure 1: The original handwritten Preamble to the U.S. Constitution on permanent display at the National Archives.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.^[19]

The “Blessings of Liberty” run amiss. Again, those “Framers,” or group of elite men that gathered in Philadelphia for that historic event in 1787 ideally utilized the inclusive language of “We the People,” .  while at the same time, implementing a complex structural formulation which would stave off the will of the common people at every turn. The fifty-five of the seventy-four delegates that showed up on the scene, were, in fact, a cohort indistinguishable from themselves as “wealthy white men” of whom only a small number were not rich (but nevertheless affluent). They viewed themselves as “the People,” who would not only be provided liberties under that newly devised constitution, but also offered themselves the power to control the authority within that newly formed centralized government.^[20]

Figure 2: The Framers working out the concept of “We the People” by Tom Meyer.

By bringing the term “insure domestic Tranquility” to the fore, an early American top-down class paradigm is made evident by those men of property historically known as the “Framers.” The U.S. Constitution was the result of the repercussions of the American Revolution and decades of class conflict from within. Cogent warnings provided by not only Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence,^[21] which cautioned against “convulsions within” and “exciting domestic insurrections amongst us,” but also forewarnings offered by the man considered “the father of that newly formed nation,” George Washington. In the following statements to the run-up of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, written in correspondence to his then erstwhile comrade-in-arms and chief of artillery, General Henry Knox, George Washington (supreme commander of the American revolutionary colonial forces and hero par excellence) projected clear class distinctions, fears and/or biases which lie at the heart of this study, “There are combustibles in every state, to which a spark might set fire.”^[22] Hence, as Professor of Law, Jennifer Nedelsky asserts, what General Washington believed was necessary was a statutory formulation of control, instituted and devised by the upper crust of society, in the shape of a constitution, “to contain the threat of the people rather than to embrace their participation and their competence,”^[23] or else, as stated in a second letter to Knox, the eminent General warned, “If government shrinks, or is unable to enforce its laws … anarchy & confusion must prevail – and every thing will be turned topsy turvey,”^[24] demonstrating an elite fear most pronounced.

Figure 3: George Washington (1732-1799), Supreme Commander of the American Revolution and First President of the United States.

A good exemplar of a “spark that set fire,” which struck fear in the hearts of that elite class of men assembled in Philadelphia, is famously known as Shays’ Rebellion (August 29, 1786 to February 1787), led by former American army officer and son of Irish Immigrants, Daniel Shays, which culminated in a bottom-up armed revolt that took place in Western Massachusetts and Worcester, in response to a debt crisis imposed upon, in large part, the common citizenry; and, in opposition to the state government’s increased efforts to collect taxes on both individuals and their trades – as a remediation for outstanding war debt. The rebellion was eventually put down by Colonial Army forces sent there by George Washington himself – staving off the voice of the people, in that newly formed land of liberty. What “Tranquility” actually meant, as established by the Framers, was a centralized government formulated within the constitution, with the ability to halt and/or suppress conflict or unrest that threatened “the established order and governance of the elite.”^[25] Shays’ Rebellion in combination with the possibility of slave uprisings and native resistance offered the justification for creating, and later expanding, a domestic military force as penned into the Charter by Gouverneur Morris (1752 – 1816), American political leader and contributor to the Preamble outlined above. Morris cleverly emphasized the necessity for a general fiscal “contribution to the common defense” on behalf of his class interests, warning of the possible dangers of both “internal insurrections and external invasions” as outlined in detail in Article I Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.^[26] In summary, by centralizing a military power within a national charter, “the elites got their own protection force against the possibility of the majority’s ‘popular despotism’” as described by Washington himself – thwarting any and all popular resistance to elite rule. In fact, by 1791, just four years after the Constitutional Congress met in the city of Philadelphia, that newly formed nation’s military force tripled its cost and increased its number of troops by fivefold.^[27]

In challenging that ideal of promoting “the general Welfare,” within a class paradigm, William Manning, (1747 – 1814) American Revolutionary soldier, farmer, and novelist, was one of the few voices at the Constitutional Convention that stood up and pushed back against the elite coup that was evidently taking place. After having fought in the Revolutionary War, as a common foot soldier, he began to believe that his military service and sacrifice carried little weight with the elites that surrounded him. He also delineated the fact that those measures which reflected Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and (the first President of the Continental Congress) John Jay’s views, and policies, created a poisonous atmosphere, ideology, and division between the “Few and the Many.” William Manning feared that by locking “the people out of doors,” out of government, the Founders were implementing measures such as Hamilton’s economic vision for that newly formed nation “at the expense of the common farmer and laborer.”^[28] When it came to Shays’ Rebellion, for example, his views were commensurate with those of the uprising, but not with their methods of armed resistance. Based on his staunch democratic values, he called upon the common man to forcefully use new organizational tactics by directly petitioning the government to redress grievances. Manning understood the economic divisions as implemented.^[29] In 1798, he authored his most celebrated work,  The Key of Liberty, in which he displayed what he believed to be the objectives of the “Few” – which were to “distress and force the Many” into being financially dependent on them, “generating a sustained cycle of dependence.” Manning argued that the only chance for the “Many” was to choose those leaders that would battle for those with lesser economic and political authority.^[30] What Manning understood so well was that those early colonial financial interests defined their own class “influence and benefits” as “the general Welfare” which was, in his view, in diametrical opposition to much of the population. 

Figure 5: Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), the First Secretary of the Treasury from 1789 to 1795 during George Washington’s presidency.

Alexander Hamilton’s celebrated financial plan alluded to above, put that early nation on a trajectory of economic growth, through a concentration of wealth in the form of property and holdings which would serve his class best, “…so capital [as] a resource remains untouched.”^[31] Hamilton delivered an innovative and audacious scheme in both his First and Second Reports on the Further Provision Necessary for Establishing Public Credit issued on 13 December 1790. Again, on behalf of his class interests, that newly devised federal government would purchase all state arrears at full cost – using its general tax base. Hamilton understood that such an act would considerably augment the legitimacy of that newly formed centralized government. To raise money to pay off its debts, the government would issue security bonds to rich landowners and wealthy stakeholders who could afford them, providing huge profits for those invested when the time arrived for that recently formed Federal government to pay off its debts.^[32] Charles Beard, Columbia University historian and author, in his famed book, An Economic Interpretation of The Constitution of The United States, succinctly outlines Hamilton’s class bias woven within his strategy per taxation, “[d]irect taxes may be laid, but resort to this form of taxation is rendered practically impossible, save on extraordinary occasions, by the provision that ‘they [taxes] must be apportioned according to population’ – so that numbers cannot transfer the burden to accumulated wealth”^[33] – revealing a significant economic top-down class preference and formulation of control from the outset. Beard summarizes as such, “The Constitution was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.”^[34] Given the United States’ long history of top-down class biases and bottom-up class struggle, to be further explored within this research, Beard provides a cogent groundwork.

Figure 6: James Madison (1751-1836), Father of the U.S. Constitution and Fourth President of the United States.

James Madison, elite intellectual and Statesman, was and is traditionally proclaimed as the “Father of the Constitution” for his crucial role in planning and fostering the Constitution of the United States and later its Bill of Rights. For many of the Framers, with Madison in the lead, the Articles of Confederation (previously formulated on November 15, 1777, and effectuated on March 1, 1781) were a nefarious compact among the 13 states of the United States, previously the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain, which operated as the nation’s first framework of government establishing each individual State as “Free and Independent” – eloquently encouraged and outlined in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.^[35] From a class vantage point, the phrase “establish Justice” as devised by Madison within the Preamble above, meant in an idealistic sense, that the government would apply the rule of law impartially and consistently to all, irrespective of one’s station in society. But, in fact, the expression, “establish Justice,” explicitly points to the Framers’ “intent to tip the balance of power back in favor of the elites.”^[36] Notably, by early 1783, in his famed “Notes on Debates in Congress Memo” dated January 28^th, 1783, some four years prior to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution on December 12^th, 1787, Madison had well-defined what “justice” had meant to him and his cohorts by asserting that, “the establishment of permanent & adequate funds [in the form of a general taxation] to operate … throughout the U. States is indispensably necessary for doing complete justice to the Creditors of the U.S., for restoring public credit, & for providing for the future exigencies of … war.”^[37] For Madison,  as argued by eminent Professor of History Woody Holton, “establishing Justice” envisioned doing what some of the States were reluctant and/or incapable of achieving – that being, the payment of debts for the elites by “safeguarding their property” whether it be slave, land, or financial.^[38]

How class and race maintained supremacy. In essence, the cleverly devised Three-fifths Compromise outlined in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, conceived by Madison, not only preserved, and reinforced the atrocity of slavery, but it also made stronger “the power of property” produced by the capitalization of all human labor. The minority checks embedded in the constitutional power of taxation ultimately prevented all types of what the Framers referred to as “leveling,” that being a fair and equal redistribution of wealth and resources amongst the general population.^[39] In doing so, the constitution serves in perpetuity to protect wealth from what the Framers feared most: “economic democracy.”^[40] Unambiguously, the Three-fifths clause established that three out of every five enslaved persons were counted, on behalf of their owners, when deciding a state’s total populace per representation and legislation. Hence, before the Civil War, the Three-fifths clause gave disproportionate weight to slave states, specifically slave ownership, in the House of Representatives.

A final element written within the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution worth further mention is the famed idiom “secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and Our Posterity,” a phrase that concisely encompasses the opinions of that band of elites, that amassed in Philadelphia, known as “the Framers” and their historical and material view of the possession of “Private Property” – greatly influenced and inspired by English Enlightenment philosopher and physician John Locke (1632-1704). Locke, in his famed The Two Treatises of Civil Government, argued that the law of nature obliged all human beings not to harm “the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another,” defined as “Natural Rights.”^[41] As a result, the Framers (most of whom were large landowners) were intent on designing a centralized government that would singularly protect and defend “private property.”  The U.S. Constitution fosters this by placing a collection of roadblocks and/or obstacles in the way of majority demands for “economic democracy”  – what, on numerous occasions, James Madison himself described as an oppression, enslavement and/or tyranny of the majority.^[42] In a land without Nobles, Madison declared that “the Senate ought to come from, and represent, the wealth of the nation.”^[43] With Madison’s compatriot John Dickinson of Delaware in full accord, proclaiming that the Senate should be comprised of those that are, “distinguished for their rank in life and their weight of property, and bearing as strong a likeness to the British House of Lords as possible.”^[44] Additionally, Pierce Butler, wealthy land-owning South Carolinian, stood in complete agreement confirming that the Senate was, “the aristocratic part of our government.”^[45] Those elite men, as members of that continental congress, largely on their own behalf, cleverly formulated “a plethora of opportunities to issue a minority veto of any changes by law, regulation, or court rulings,” that might menace their property ownership.^[46] In essence, that charter known as the U.S. Constitution was brilliantly constructed to ensure an elite control and privilege that would last for “Posterity” – forever unchanged and unchangeable.

There is a wealth of evidence, as demonstrated, that the U.S. Constitution was originally designed and implemented not to facilitate meaningful bottom-up systemic change, but to ultimately avert anything that does not serve the benefits of the propertied class. Let us keep in mind that meaningful change from below has always been hard-fought, but not impossible. It took roughly seventy-eight years from 1787; and, a Civil War which lasted from 1861 to 1865, culminating in the loss of nearly 620,000 lives to officially abolish slavery under Amendment XIII (ratified on December 6^th, 1865).^[47] Until then, human bondage was a long held and integral form of property ownership within the United States – to be further examined within this work. Reflecting succinctly on the underlying class interests during and prior to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, two indispensable statements, concerning “human nature,” from two essential minds, per class, which undergird the views here summarized, are as follows: Benjamin Franklin keenly observed that any assemblage of men, no matter how gifted, bring with them “all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interest and their selfish views.”^[48] Which stood ironically in accordance with Adam Smith’s, “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind,”^[49] which demonstrates Smith’s historical view per an innate class perspective of wealth concentration.

2
Cui Bono – Who Benefitted Most from the Categorical Constructs of Race and Class?

The year 1776 is a deceptive starting point when it comes to the ideologies of American freedom and liberty. Independence from Great Britain did not expunge the British class arrangement long embraced by colonial elites that undergirded a social system of division which promulgated “entrenched beliefs about poverty and the willful exploitation of human labor.” An unfavored view of African slaves and poor whites widely thought of as “waste and/or rubbish,” remained a long-held social construct which served American elites well into the modern era.^[50] From the outset, when it came to class dynamics, no one understood the manipulative power of faction and discord sown amongst the masses better than James Madison himself as boldly outlined in Federalist #10. The danger, Madison argued on behalf of his class interests, was not faction itself, but the escalation of “a majority faction” grounded in that “most common and durable source” of conflict: the “unequal distribution of property.”^[51] In that widely celebrated land of “democracy,” Madison revealed not only his class biases anathema to the concept, but his fear of the very idea: “When a majority is included in a faction,” it could use democracy, “to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest the public good and the rights of other citizens” – that is, the privileges of the propertied class.^[52] To his credit, from early on, James Madison laid out clear class distinctions, partialities, and fears woven within that newly formulated American social stratum – which are essential to this study. Within Federalist #10, Madison brilliantly devised a strategy of division which would protect elite interests by suppressing the economic menace of a majoritarian class faction through the encouragement of as many divisions within the populous as possible. Hence, as he outlined, the “greater variety of parties and interests [within class, race, gender, or religion] … make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have common motive.”^[53] Ironically, faction was problematic as stated, yet, at the same time, paradoxically, according to James Madison, more of it was the answer.

From the outset of the American experience, as outlined in his masterwork, American Slavery, American Freedom, Edmond S. Morgan, Yale Professor of History, makes evident the elite class interests and/or dynamics that fortified the use of clever rhetorical devices, such as “freedom and liberty” upon the general populous – all the while devilishly using the cruelty of slavery as a unifying force. During his visit to that early America, an astute English diplomat by the name of Sir Augustus John Foster, serving in Washington during Jefferson’s presidency (1801-1809), keenly observed, “[Elite] Virginians above all, seem committed to reducing all [white] men to an equal footing.” Foster observed, “owners of slaves, among themselves, are all for keeping down every kind of superiority”; and he recognized this pretension of equality used upon the masses as a powerful manipulative tactic. Virginians, he argued, “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves….”^[54] In that ruthless slave society, as Morgan reveals, “Slaves did not become leveling mobs, because their owners would see to it that they had no chance to. The apostrophes to equality were not addressed to them.”^[55] In clarification, he adds:

…because Virginia’s labor force was composed mainly of slaves, who had been isolated by race and removed from the political equation, the remaining free [white] laborers and tenant farmers were too few in number to constitute a serious threat to the superiority of the [elite white] men who assured them of their equality.^[56]

The ancient Roman concept of Divide and Conquer, which dates to Julius Caesar himself, was effectively implemented by Virginia’s elite propertied class through the skillful use of cooptation. Virginia’s yeoman class comprised of small land-owning farmers were made to believe that they shared “a common identity” with those “men of better sorts,” simply due to the fact that neither was a slave – hence, both were alike in not being slaves.^[57] Ironically, in the mindset of those early American elites that viewed themselves as the founders of a republic, largely inspired by Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the pushing off of monarchy, slavery occupied a critical, if not indeterminate position: it was thought of as a principal evil which free men sought to avoid for society in general through the usurpation of monarchies and the establishment of republics. But, at the same time, it was also viewed as the solution to one of society’s most pressing problems, “the problem of the poor.” Elite Virginians could move beyond English republicanism, “partly because they had solved the problem: they achieved a society in which most of the poor were enslaved.”^[58] In truth, contempt for the poor permeated the age. John Locke, English philosopher and physician (1632-1704), considered one of the most essential of Enlightenment thinkers, commonly read, discussed, and admired by early American elites, famously wrote a classic defense of the right of revolution in his Two Treatises of Civil Government published in 1689 – yet he did not extend that right to the poor. ^[59] In fact, in his proposals for workhouses and/or “working schools,” outlined in his Essay on the Poor Law, published in 1687, the children of the [English] poor would “learn labor,” and nothing but labor, from a very young age, stopping short of enslavement – though it would require a certain alteration of mind to recognize the distinction.^[60] That said, those astute men that assembled in the city of Philadelphia in 1787 took their inspiration from Locke very seriously.

Hamilton and Madison were in absolute accord with Locke’s views per property and ownership, that being, “Government has no other end but the preservation of property.”^[61] Consequently, the U.S. Constitution was designed to both govern the population through limiting its capacity to self-govern; and by protecting all forms of property ownership including the enslavement of human beings. Hence, as historian David Waldstreicher (expert in early American political and cultural history) presents, the Constitution was devised not only to safeguard slavery as a separate economic system, but as integral to the basic right of what he describes as the “power over other people and property (including people who were property).”^[62] As a result, the tensions and/or rivalries that resided in that newly formed nation, which would eventually lead to a bloody Civil War, were not over quantities of land possession between the North and the South, but more focused on how many slaves resided in each. To his credit, Madison presciently admitted as such:

[T]he States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size … but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These two causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the U. States. It did not lie between the large & small States: It lay between the Northern & Southern.^[63]

Slavery was considered insidious by some, and yet fundamental to those that profited from it, both North and South. In fact, John Rutledge, esteemed Governor of South Carolina during the Revolution; and delegate to the Constitutional Convention, spoke on behalf of the Southern planters’ class by supporting slavery, of which, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney also of South Carolina, stood in full agreement. Both men implored their fellow delegates to recognize their common interests in preserving slavery from which they “stood to profit,” not only from selling slave-produced goods, but from carrying the slaves on their ships^[64] – hence, they argued, stood a long-held alliance between Northern “personality” (that is, financial holdings) and “that particular form of property” (slavery) which dominated the South.^[65] Slaves were long held the most valuable asset in the country. By 1860, the total value of all the slaves in America was estimated at the equivalent of $4 billion, more than double the value of the South’s entire farmland valued at $1.92 billion, four times the total currency in circulation at $435.4 million, and twenty times the value of all the precious metals (gold and silver) then in circulation at $228.3 million.^[66] Thus, at the time and thereafter, North American slavery was not just a national or sectional asset, but a global one. As a result of the promise of monetary benefits and values produced by enslaved peoples, “the Framers,” in defense of their own interests, collectively devised a system of fail-safe mechanisms to protect their most cherished resource: human vassalage.^[67] Moreover, in addition to the Three-Fifths Clause described above, the Constitution contained several safeguards with a clear objective of maintaining the vile system as it was. The Foreign Slave Trade Clause as outlined in Article 1; Section 9 of that charter known as the U.S. Constitution stated that Congress could not prohibit the “importation of persons” prior to 1808 – which cleverly excluded the term “slave.”^[68] The intention of said clause, was not to stave off slavery, but was implemented to maintain, if not inflate, the monetary value of those persons already in captivity – when it came to their sale and transport to other slave states outside of Virginia. The Fugitive Slave Clause as written in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, was clearly devised to protect elite proprietorship over individuals forcefully ensconced in a system of chattel slavery:

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.^[69]

This Clause, not nullified until the Thirteenth Amendment’s abolition of slavery, considered it “a right” on the part of a slaveholder, to retrieve an enslaved individual who had fled to another state. Finally, as esteemed University of Chicago Professor, Paul Finkelman, contends, the ban on congressional export taxes adamantly argued for by those elite men that gather in Philadelphia, was, for the most part, a concession to southern planters whose slaves primarily produced agricultural goods for export.^[70] Clearly demonstrating and demarcating an upper-class bias based on ownership, race, and wealth from the outset.

How elite capture worked in early America – diversity was implemented and utilized as a ruling class ideology. Privileged landowners, specifically Virginians, being “men of letters,” as they would have thought of themselves, understood very well that all white men were not created equal, especially when it came to property and what they referred to as “virtue,” a much admired “elite attribute” which can be traced back to Aristotle himself, in his classic work, Nicomachean Ethics, who defined the only life worth living as “a life of leisure” – that is a life of study and freedom for the few which rested on the labor of slaves and proprietorship.^[71] As thus revealed, the material forces and benefits which dictated southern elites to see Negroes, mulattoes, and Indians as one, also “dictated that they see large and small planters as one.” Consequently, racism became an essential, if unacknowledged, ingredient woven within that “republican ideology” that enabled Virginians to not only design, but to “lead the nation,” for generations to come. An important question thus addressed: Was the ideological vision of “a nation of equals” flawed from the very beginning by the evident contempt, exhibited, toward both poor whites and enslaved blacks? And beyond that, to be further explored within the final chapter of this research project: Are there still elements of colonial Virginia, ideologically, ethnically, and socially, woven within America today? More than a century after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox (on April 9^th, 1865) – those questions per race and class still linger….^[72]

As Edward E. Baptist, Professor of History at Cornell University, makes clear in his epic work, The Half Has Never Been Told, Slavery and The Making of American Capitalism, attitudes toward race and race superiority in America long remained. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, America’s first generation of professional historians, he argues, “were justifying the exclusion of Jim Crow and disfranchisement” by telling a story about the nation’s past of slavery and civil war that seemed to confirm, for many white Americans, that “white supremacy was just and necessary.” In fact, Baptist proclaims that racism had not only become culturally accepted, but historically and socially grounded within a form of “race science” to be further explored in the final chapter of this study. He states that by the latter part of the nineteenth century, “for many white Americans, science had proven that people of African descent [if not the poor in general] were intellectually inferior and congenitally prone to criminality.” As a result, he argues, that that cohort of racist whites in [Jim Crow] America, “looked wistfully to [the] past when African Americans had been governed with whips and chains.” Confirming the fact that class, race, and racism have long been integral parts of America’s long and difficult history^.[73]

American capitalism, land, cotton, slaves, and profit: by the early nineteenth century, the U.S. Banking system was fundamental when it came to entrepreneurial revenue development in the form of land acquisition, cotton production, and slave labor. Bank lending became the key ingredient that propelled slave owners to greater heights of wealth accumulation, “Enslavers benefited from bank-induced stability and steady credit expansion.” The more slave purchases that U.S. Banks would finance, the more cotton enslavers could produce, “and cotton [at the time] was the world’s most widely traded product.” As mentioned, in this newly devised system of capital, lending, and borrowing, cotton was an essential resource in an unending global market. So, the more cotton slaves produced, the more cotton enslavers would sell, and thus the more profit they would make. In fact, “owning more slaves enabled planters to repay debts, take profits, and gain property that could be [used as] collateral for even more borrowing.”^[74] Early U.S. Capitalism not just undergirded, but bolstered and expanded the harsh and inhumane system of slavery as such, “Lending to the South’s cotton economy was an investment not just in the world’s most widely traded commodity, but also in a set of producers who had shown a consistent ability to increase their productivity and revenue.”^[75] Said differently, American slave owners, throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, had the “cash flow to pay back their debts.” And, the debts of slave owners were secure, given the fact that they had “a lot of valuable collateral.” In fact, as argued by a number of economic historians, enslavers, by mid-century had in their possession the largest pool of collateral in the United States at the time, 4 million slaves worth over $3 billion, as “the aggregate value of all slave property.”^[76] These values embedded themselves in a global system of investment through slave commodification which benefitted mostly the upper crust of society in both the U.S. and the U.K., “this meant that investors around the world would share in revenues made by ‘hands in the field.’” Even though at the time, and to its credit, “Britain was liberating the slaves of its empire,” British banks could still sell, to a wealthy investor, a completely commodified human being in the form of a slave – not as a specific individual, but as a holding or part of a collective investment venture “made from the income of thousands of slaves.”^[77]

Furthermore, as mentioned, the fact that popularly elected governments repeatedly sustained such bond schemes, on both sides of the Atlantic, was therefore not only insidious by its very nature, but at the same time remarkable. Popular abolitionist movements were springing up from one side to the other, and demanding abolition across the board. Beyond that, in the United States, there were many elements of class recognition in the form of an “intensely democratic frontier electorate” of both slaves and poor whites that saw banks as “machines designed to channel financial benefits and economic governing power to the unelected elite.”^[78] By mid-century, the rift and divisions between the North and the South became catastrophic in the form of a bloody Civil War. It took a poor boy from a dirt-floor cabin in Kentucky named Abraham Lincoln, who rose to the prominence of lawyer and statesman becoming the 16^th President of the United States, to write and implement the Emancipation Proclamation brought forth on January 1^st, 1863. As President, Abraham Lincoln issued that historic decree, which served not only as a direct challenge to “property ownership,” in the form of human bondage, but a direct assault on the lucrative southern slaveocracy as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared “that all persons held as slaves within the rebellious states are, and henceforward shall be free.”^[79] Although Lincoln’s, contribution has been much contested to this day, by historians both Black and white alike, the fact remains that, his efforts as already presented, were undoubtedly a more active and direct support for the freedom of African slaves than those of all the fifteen previous presidents before him combined – The Emancipation Proclamation would prove to be the most important executive order ever issued by an American president, offering the possibility of freedom to an enslaved people held in a giant dungeon that was the confederacy.^[80] Even though there are those historians that argue that the Proclamation was incomplete due to the fact that it “excluded the enslaved not only in Union-held territories such as western Virginia, but also southern Louisiana” where there were pro-Union factions that were trying not to be antagonistic toward local whites who were hell-bent on maintaining the status quo.^[81]

But facts speak for themselves, Abraham Lincoln had been working diligently to persuade the political class in the border states that were loyal to the Union to agree to a “gradual or compensated” emancipation plan – pushing back against the benefactors of the race and class divide. Even though some within the border states refused to give in and held out for permanent slavery, by April 1862, because of Lincoln’s tenacious efforts, Congress passed legislation “freeing – in return for payments to enslavers totaling $1 million – all 3,000 people enslaved in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware and Kentucky.” After the Union army’s victory at the battle of Antietam, Lincoln felt “he could move more decisively” against the institution of slavery and hence released that historic executive order which he had written months earlier as outlined above.^[82] Undoubtedly, again, the Emancipation Proclamation offered for the first time in American history the unquestioned possibility of freedom to a long-held and enslaved people that were seized in a giant open-air prison which was the American South. The Emancipation did unbar the door. Next, enslaved Africans, due to their own agency, forced it wide open.^[83]

As an exemplar of that heartfelt commitment, stood Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895), former slave in his home state of Maryland, who rose to become a historic social reformer, abolitionist, writer, orator, and statesman. Lincoln was the first U.S. President in a long line, to invite an eminent African American intellectual, such as, Frederick Douglass to the White House to discuss the wonton discrimination within the military ranks cast upon African American men. That well-known meeting between Lincoln and Douglass took place in August 1863, two years after the start of the war on April 12, 1861. Douglass tenaciously argued for the enlistment of Black soldiers in the Union Army based largely on his legendary speech delivered at the National Hall in Philadelphia (on July 6, 1863), a month prior, entitled “the Promotion of Colored Enlistments,” outlined in the well-known publication The Liberator, that same month. Where Douglass stated:

Let the black man get upon his person the brass letters US … a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.^[84]

Douglass presented the same argument to Lincoln, that “Black men in Blue” would not only swell the ranks of the Union Army but would elevate those former slaves to the status of free men of honor – shifting the course of American history.^[85] Lincoln took decisive action, per Douglass’ request, enlisting nearly 200,000 battle-ready African Americans, understanding that without those Black soldiers, there would be no Union. As a result, Douglass wholeheartedly endorsed the President for his coming reelection on November 8, 1864. “The enlistment of blacks into the Union Army was part of Lincoln’s evolving policy on slavery and race.”^[86] Ultimately, he paid the price. On April 14, 1865, the 16^th President of the United States was brutally slain by an assassin’s bullet for his valiant efforts against the racist slavocracy known as the Confederacy – Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865.^[87] The Civil War ultimately nullified the barbarity of slavery, which was later codified in the 13^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, true, yet prejudicial elements of both race and class remained a fixture in American society for decades to come….

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the coalescing or coming together from a class perspective of the lower ranks in the American South, later revealed itself in the formulation of the “Colored Farmers’ Alliance,” which stood as a direct threat to the established southern regime leading to a brutal and repressive racialized crackdown in the form of the Ku Klux Klan and the implementation of an oppressive social order known as Jim Crow – to be further explored within this study.

3
The Atomization of the Powerless
and the Sins of Democracy

Finally, as alluded to, the appellation and/or utilization of the term “race” was seldom employed by Europeans prior to the fifteen-hundreds. If the word was used at all, it was used to identify factions of people with a group connection or kinship. Over the proceeding centuries, the evolution of the term “race,” that came to comprise skin color, levels of intelligence and/or phenotypes, was in large part a European construct – which served to undergird a strategy of division amongst the masses that helped to maintain a stratified class structure with “elite white land-owning men” placed firmly at the top of the social-ladder in that newly birthed land of “freedom” called America.

As succinctly stated by David Roediger, esteemed Professor of American history at the University of Kansas, who has taught and written numerous books focused on race and class in the United States, “The world got along without race for the overwhelming majority of its history. The U.S. has never been without it.”^[88] Nothing could be further from the truth. As outlined in previous chapters, American society uniquely and legalistically formulated the notion of “race” early on to not only justify, but support its new economic system of capitalism, which rested in large part, if not exclusively, upon the exploitation of forced labor – that is, the brutal enslavement and demoralization of African peoples. To understand how the development of race and its bastardized twin “racism” were fundamentally and structurally bound to early American culture and society we must first survey the extant history of how the notions of race, ethnocentrism, white supremacy, and anti-blackness came to exist.

The ideas that undergirded the notions of “race, a class-stratified stratified slave society, as we recognize them today, were birthed and developed together within the earliest formation of the United States; and were intertwined and enmeshed in the phraseologies of “slave” and “white.” The terms “slave,” “white,” and “race” began to be utilized by elite Europeans in the sixteenth century and they imported these hypotheses of hierarchy with them to the colonized lands of North America. That said, originally, the terms did not hold the same weight they have today. However, due to the economic needs and development of that early American society, the terms mentioned would transform to encompass new racialized ideas and meanings which served the upper class best. The European Enlightenment, defined as, “an intellectual movement of the 17^th and 18^th centuries in which ideas concerning god, reason, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent in the West and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics,”^[89] would come to underpin and contribute to racialized perceptions which argued that, “white people were inherently smarter, more capable, and more human than nonwhite people – became accepted worldwide.” In fact, from an early American perspective, “This [mode] of categorization of people became the justification for European colonization and subsequent enslavement of people from Africa.”^[90] To be further surveyed.

As Paul Kivel, noted American author, social-justice educator and activist, brings to the fore, the terms “white” or “whiteness,” historically, from a British/Anglo-American perspective, served to underpin class distinctions and justify exploitation through human bondage by providing profit-accumulation to a distinct ownership class, “Whiteness is [historically] a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white.”^[91] Where and how did it begin? The conception of “whiteness”  did not exist until roughly 1613 or so, when Anglo-Saxon forces, later known as the English, first “encountered and contrasted themselves” with the Indigenous populations of the East Indies – through their cruel and rapacious colonial pursuits – later justifying, and bolstering, a collective cultural sense of racial superiority. Up and until that point, roughly the 1550s to the 1600s, within Anglo-Saxon society, “whiteness”  was used to set forth clear class signifiers.

In fact, the word “white”  was utilized exclusively to “describe elite English women,” because the whiteness of their skin indicated that they were individuals of “high social standing” who did not labor “out of doors.” That said, conversely, throughout that same period, the appellation of “white”  did not apply to elite English men, due to the stigmatizing notion that a man who would not leave his home to work was “unproductive, sick and/or lazy.” As the concept of who was white and who was not began to grow, “whiteness” gained in popularity within the Anglo-American sphere, for example, “the number of people that considered themselves white would grow” as a collective pushback against people of color due to immigration and eventual emancipation.^[92] These social constructs centered around race accomplished their nefarious goals – thus, unifying early colonists of European descent under the rubric of “white,” and hence, marginalizing, stigmatizing and dispossessing native populations – all the while permanently enslaving most African-descended people for generations. As acclaimed African American Professor, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY) contends concerning America’s base history, “Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it….”^[93] A revelatory statement by John Jay (1745-1829, the first Chief Justice of the United States and signer of the U.S. Constitution) helps make evident, from a class perspective, the entrenched values of those early American elites toward their newly proclaimed democracy, “The people who own the country ought to govern it!”^[94] The preceding two quotes help to summarize and clarify the top-down legal and societal mechanisms embedded within that early American social stratum which linger to this day.

The social status and hence the nomenclature of “slave” have been with mankind for millennia. Historically, a slave was one who was classified as quasi-sub-human, derived from a lower lineage; and forced to toil for the benefit of another of higher standing. We can find the phraseology of slave throughout the ancient world and within early writings from Egypt, the Hebrew Bible, Greece, and Rome, as well as later periods. In fact, Aristotle (384 to 322 BC, famed polymath, and philosopher) succinctly clarified, from his privileged vantage-point, the social standing and value of personages classified as slaves – which would endure for epochs to come. From the legendary logician’s point of view, a slave was defined as, “one who is a human being belonging by nature not to himself [or herself] but to another is by nature a slave.” Aristotle further described a slave as, “a human being belongs to another if, in spite of being human, he [or she] is a possession; and as a possession, is [simply a tool for labor] having a separate existence.”^[95] Clarifying the fact that in the known world prior to Columbus’ famed voyage, in the late 15^th century, opening the floodgates of European colonial theft, pillage, and domination, historical notions of Western hierarchy and supremacy were commonplace. As European Enlightenment ideals such as, “the natural rights of man,” aforementioned, became ubiquitous amongst early American colonial elites throughout the 18^th century, “equality” became the new modus operandi which galvanized whites over and above all others. Hence, by classifying human beings by “race,” a new method of hierarchy was established based on what many at the time considered “science” to be further explored. As the principles of the Enlightenment penetrated the colonies of North America forming the basis for their early “democracy,” those same values paradoxically undergirded the most vicious kind of subjugation – chattel slavery.^[96]

A significant codified shift took place in colonial America within one of its most prosperous slave domains known as Virginia. Under the tutelage and guidance of the then Governor Sir William Berkeley (1605-1677), wealthy planter and slave owner, the House of Burgesses (the first self-proclaimed “representative government” in that early British colony) included a coterie of councilors hand-chosen by the governor to enact a law of hereditary slavery – which would economically serve their elite planter class interests. The English common law, known as, Partus Sequitur Patrem, traditionally held that, “the offspring would follow the condition … of the father.”^[97] But after a historic legal challenge brought by Elizabeth Key, an enslaved, bi-racial woman who sued for her freedom and won, in 1656, on the basis that her father was white – elite white Virginians understood that a shift in the law was not only necessary, but essential, if they were to maintain and/or increase their wealth through human bondage in the form of “property ownership.” Consequently, the new 1662 law, Partus Sequitur Ventrem, diverged from English common law,  in that it proclaimed that the status of the mother, free or slave, determined the status of her offspring in perpetuity.^[98] Thus, African women were subjugated to the ranking of “breeders,” that would serve to produce more offspring categorized as slaves, whether bi-racial or not, and hence more profit for the ruling class. Enlightenment values ensconced in a rudimentary “race science,” by famed early Americans, would also help to solidify a systematized racialized hierarchy for decades to come.^[99]

Figure 7: Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Diplomat, Son of the Enlightenment, Planter, Lawyer, Philosopher, Primary Author of the Declaration of Independence and Third President of the United States.

Thomas Jefferson is famed to be one of the most quintessential characters in the formulation of America’s early Republic, along with James Madison and others, severing foreign rule and developing a new independent nation, substantiated on the Enlightenment principles of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,”^[100] based largely on John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which argued that true “freedom” is defined by one’s singular control over their holdings and/or estates, i.e., property.^[101] But the most basest question which still lingers, within America’s long and twisted historical tragedy of early conquest and domination, which must be probed, is, “freedom for whom and for what?” Jefferson, that complex and enigmatic son of Enlightenment thought, both in science and sociological principles, clearly demarcated and endorsed a racialized societal structure that undergirded a system of hierarchy in which white colonists and their European legacy were considered far superior to all others – simplified notions woven within an early race science which would endure through time and memorial. Throughout his lifetime, race was defined by phenotype (or the look of human beings), physical characteristics which “appended physical traits [or idiosyncrasies] defined as ‘slave-like’ [were attributed] to those enslaved.”^[102] As Karen and Barbara Fields, two noted African American scholars, point out, Jefferson became convinced that a forced separation of people delineated by skin color was the only solution; that “the very people white Americans had lived with for over 160 years as slaves would be, after emancipation, too different for white people to live with any longer.”^[103] In fact, he suggested that if slaves were to be freed they should be promptly deported, their lost labor to be best supplied “through the importation of white laborers.”^[104]

Jefferson unabashedly qualified his racialized views when writing, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”^[105] John Locke and Thomas Jefferson stood in agreement, philosophically, when it came to the superiority versus inferiority of selected “races,” underpinning a racialized stratification within early colonial thought that helped to culturalize a race-based hierarchy in that newly formed “land of freedom,” known as the United States. These arguments of hierarchy which spread throughout the European mindset within that early colonial era, aided and abetted, “the dispossession of Native Americans” and “the enslavements of Africans” during that golden era of revolution.^[106] In his historic manuscript known as, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson outlined in detail his Enlightenment-inspired racialized interpretations of European superiority, demarcating what he believed to be a “scientific view” of the varying gradations of human beings based on race:

Comparing them [both blacks and whites] by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior … and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. But never yet could I find that a black has uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait, of painting or sculpture.^[107]

Ironically, given the complexity of the man, in response to a critic who opposed his views as presented above, Jefferson confessed that even if blacks were inferior to whites, “it would not justify their enslavement.”^[108] Hence, to his credit, he admitted and/or recognized the strangeness and/or irony of his own position when it came to Enlightenment constructs of race and their structural consequences.^[109] Again, from early on, racialized notions of superiority versus inferiority served the American planter class best, by cleverly embedding perceptions of hierarchy or white preeminence, they were able to suppress that which they feared most – which was the unification or coming together of a mass of lower classes comprising both enslaved Africans and poor whites. The historic incident which, served as an exemplar, sending shockwaves through that propertied class of early colonial America was notably Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676.

Nathaniel Bacon (1647-1676) elite Virginian, born and educated in England, member of the governor’s Council and close friend of Sir William Berkeley then colonial Governor – led a bottom-up rebellion which sent tremors through the upper classes of that newly birthed slave society, known as, Virginia – still considered one of the most foundational events of early American history. The colonial elite were threatened on all sides, as made evident by Governor Berkeley’s revelation, “The Poore Endebted Discontented and Armed” would, he feared, use this opportunity to “plunder the Country” and seize the property of the elite planters.^[110] Bacon, “who was no leveler,” was cleverly able to formulate a coalition (or unification), on behalf of his class interests, which included poor white indentured servants, free and enslaved Africans, to push back against any and all encroachments by native inhabitants which included the Appomattox and Susquehannock indigenous tribes of the region, in order to cease their lands and enrich himself and his class even further, insisting that, “the country must defend itself ‘against all Indians in general for that they were all Enemies.’”^[111] Some one hundred years later, in his acclaimed paradox of liberty known as the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, obviously influenced by Bacon’s racialized frame of thought, referred to the indigenous Native American peoples as nothing more than, “merciless Indian savages.”^[112] Hence, the native populations of that early America were collectively used as “scapegoats,” to enlarge the land holdings and wealth of the propertied class. From early on, the United States’ nascent form of Capitalism became dependent upon exploitative low-cost labor, “especially that of those considered nonwhite,” but also that of “the poor in general, including women and children – black and white alike.”^[113] Ironically, by the 1850s, antislavery sentiment grew even more intense amongst the masses, largely spurred on by white Southerner’s aggressive attempts to maintain the societal structure as such through political dominance and the spread of that “peculiar institution,” known as slavery to newly pilfered lands.^[114] In turn, the very idea of the possibility of any and all “lower class unity,” or a coming together of poor white indentured servants and African slaves as a militant force rising up against an entrenched planter class, brought forth a racialized culturalization grounded upon racial difference, racial hierarchy, and racial enmity, “a pattern that those statesmen and politicians of a later age would have found [politically useful and] familiar.”^[115] In fact, right through to the end of the 19^th century, post-Civil War and Reconstruction era (1865-1877), any form of lower-class unity in America stood as a direct threat to the established order of things throughout the nation as a whole; and especially throughout the South – most notably in the form of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance and the South’s reactionary implementation of a brutal social-order of domination and control known as Jim Crow.

Figure 8: Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), American Lawyer, Statesman and Politician. Sixteenth President of the United States and Author of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although historically contentious, Abraham Lincoln’s primary goal within his Reconstruction scheme was to reunite a fractured nation after a bloody and costly Civil War. Through which, Lincoln’s objective was to reestablish the union and transfigure that implacable Southern society. His plan was also stridently committed to enforcing progressive legislation driven by the abolition of slavery. In fact, Lincoln directed Senator Edwin Morgan, chair of the National Union Executive Committee, to put in place a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. And Morgan did just that, in his famed speech before the National Convention on May 30, 1864, demanding the “utter and complete extirpation of slavery” via such an amendment.^[116] Beyond the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln was the first President in American history to call forth an amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing the long-held institution of chattel slavery. For the first time, President Lincoln demanded the eventual passage of the Thirteenth Amendment Section 1 (ratified on December 6, 1865), which mandated that, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”^[117] Defining it as “a fitting, and necessary conclusion” to the war effort that would make permanent the joining of the causes of “Liberty and Union.”^[118] Lincoln’s sweeping Reconstruction agenda  was a fight for freedom, requiring the South to adhere to a new constitution that would implicitly include black suffrage through the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment Section 1, ratified after his death on July 9, 1868, which for the first time in American history, declared:

All persons [meaning black and white alike] born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.^[119]

Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, saw his Reconstruction struggles above all as, “an adjunct of the war effort – a way of undermining the Confederacy, rallying southern white Unionists, and securing emancipation,”^[120] for which he paid the ultimate price. From early on, internecine rivalry, or infighting, within the Republican Party from those labeled as “the Radicals,” led to a push-back against certain elements of Lincoln’s strategy mentioned above – arguing that Reconstruction should be postponed until after the war, “as outlined in the Wade-Davis Bill of 1864, which clearly envisioned, as a requirement, that a majority of southern whites take an oath of loyalty,” to the United States; and that the federal government should by necessity, “attempt to ensure basic justice to emancipated slaves.” A point at which, “equality before the law,” not “black suffrage,” as Lincoln had suggested, was an essential factor for many of the Republicans in Congress at the time.^[121] As a result of Lincoln’s efforts in taking away the productive forces of labor within the South, and in turn, the diminishment of property, wealth, and political power of the elite southern planter class, a nefarious conspiracy to murder the President was hatched and executed by southern loyalist and assassin John Wilks Booth, on April 14, 1865, while the President sat accompanied by his wife, Mary, watching a play titled, Our American Cousin, at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. – oddly, the assassin was able to gain access to the theater, enter the Presidential Booth, and shoot and kill the President of the United States. Lincoln’s body was carried to the nearby Petersen House, where he passed away at 7:22 a.m., the following morning. At his bedside, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton famously remarked, “Now he belongs to the ages.”^[122] Reflecting upon not only the uniqueness of the man, but his tremendous contributions to those American ideals of “Liberty and Freedom.” Emphasizing the fact that the Emancipation of Africans from forced labor; and the abolishment of chattel slavery, through a stroke of his pen, uniquely placed Abraham Lincoln in the pantheon of historical renown.

That said, throughout the end of the 19^th Century, the road ahead per class relations for African Americans and poor whites alike, especially in the South, would be a hard and arduous one of top-down control and division. Reactionary as they were, as argued, Southern elites would forcefully implement doctrines of superiority, separation, and control that would crush and/or punish any form of lower-class unity which threatened their power and influence over the majority. This reaction would become most evident in the racialized militant form of the Ku Klux Klan; and later the structural control and dominance of an imposed social order known as Jim Crow, which would orchestrate the groundwork for a deepening racial divide.

The Colored Farmers’ Alliance, formulated in the 1870s, still stands as a historical model of class unity amongst the poor, both Black and white alike, which galvanized southern elites in a top-down belligerent class war to protect their interests. The Alliance was created, “when an agricultural depression hit the South around 1870 and poor farmers began to organize themselves into radical multiracial political groups”^[123] – which stood as a direct threat to upper-class Southern dominance and their wealth accumulation. Years earlier by 1865, that elite militancy revealed itself in the form of the Ku Klux Klan (a violent and racist, hate-filled supremacist terror organization) that, “extended into almost every southern state by 1870 and became a vehicle for white southern resistance to the Republican Party’s Reconstruction-era policies aimed at establishing political and economic equality for Black Americans.”^[124] Klan members devised a subversive crusade of coercion and brutal violence directed at Black and white Republican leadership. Even though the U.S. Congress had successfully pushed through regulations intended to mitigate Klan extremism, the KKK  viewed its main goal as the “reinstatement of white governance and supremacy throughout the Southlands in the 1870s and beyond,” made most evident through Democratic victories within state legislatures across the South.^[125] Jim Crow was the name given to a racialized social order or caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively, in the southern and border states between 1877 to the mid-1960s. “Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life.”^[126] Under the system of Jim Crow, African Americans were consigned to the rank of second-class citizens, as emphasized by African American Professor Emeritus, Adolph L. Reed Jr., “We were all unequal, but [when it came to race and class], some were more unequal than others.”^[127] Divisions amongst the lower classes, throughout the South, served as a powerful and effective hegemonic tool of supremacy. Hence, it was not long, thereafter, within that stratified class society, before that black-white alliance had ended – as Democrats slowly united in a series of successful white supremacy campaigns to banish the Fusionists and discontinue what most white southern racists denoted to as, “Negro rule.”^[128] Hence, as noted throughout this study, class, race, and racism have long been fundamental elements of control woven within this class-conscious slave culture, paradoxically, self-described, “birthplace of freedom.”

Conclusion

From the outset, as early as the Constitutional Convention of 1787, it has been inherently difficult to reconcile a faith in the U.S. Constitution as a “living, flexible and changeable,” document – with the fundamental unfeasibility of making systemwide class transformation in the United States of America. There is copious and convincing evidence that the U.S. Constitution was intended and/or mechanized, by design, to stifle and/or inhibit any “meaningful systemic change,” in order to counteract anything that does not assist the benefits of the moneyed elite. Brilliantly designed and implemented by those acclaimed early American “Framers,” such as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and others – the means and complex configurations woven within the U.S. Constitution were deliberately intended to be unchangeable when it came to any and all challenges from below. The Constitutional aphorism over “the rights of private property possession” and its accompanied protections for example – made possible by the “expropriation of Native Americans lands, slavery; and the exploitation of lower-class labor” as discussed – has served, from the very beginning of that early American experiment, as a primary preset to protect wealth.^[129] Political Science Professor Robert Ovetz argues, in fact, that the U.S. Constitution has never really lived up to its well-known first three words, of “We the People,”  insisting that that renowned Charter is, by its very nature and design, “self-breaching,” because “we the people have never directly given consent to be governed by it – nor do the laws put in place give [the people] the liberty to do so.”^[130] That said, given the complexity of mind of those men recognized as “the Framers,” and in their defense, they did interweave a certain language of liberty, in the form of protections, as exemplified in Amendment IX, which states, “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”^[131]

Amendment IX to the Constitution was authorized on December 15^th, 1791. And, it clearly proclaims that the text is not a wide-ranging list of every right of the citizen, but that the unnamed rights to come will be allowed protections under the law.^[132] The IX Amendment explicitly acknowledged that the people have a reserve of rights that go beyond the Constitution. Hence, the enumeration of specific rights “shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”^[133] As a counterweight to popular belief, American political scientist, author, and activist, Michael Parenti contends that, “those privileged delegates gave nothing to popular interests, rather – as with the Bill of Rights – they reluctantly made democratic concessions under the menacing threat of popular rebellion.”^[134] Race and class, in early America, not only substantiated that, “the wealthy are a better class of men,” as James Madison proclaimed during the Convention^[135] – but that wealth and privilege were correlated to intelligence and deserved protections. In fact, not dissimilar to present-day America, “According to the dogma [of that early elite colonial class] efforts to lessen inequality, through progressive taxation, or redistributive public spending, infringe the liberty of the rich,” meaning the rich deserve their benefits and reward as such. Consequently, intelligence determines merit, and merit apportions rewards are those early American values which permeate the culture to this day. The working class, both Black and white alike, “that have been consigned to the lower reaches of society were there,” as noted African American scholars Barbara and Karen Fields have demonstrated, “due to attributions of low intelligence” – demarcating clear class distinctions and divisions based on a model of superiority from early on which privileged an elite few.^[136] The seeds of race supremacy and the hypocrisy of liberty, throughout America’s long and difficult history, were planted by the Framers themselves, “most of whom accepted that human beings could be held as property and that Africans and Native Americans were inferior to Caucasians” in a multitude of ways^[137] – as demonstrated throughout this study.

Endnotes:

[1] James Madison, “Federalist Papers: Primary Documents in American History: Federalist No. 10,” research guide, accessed August 27, 2023, https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-1-10.

[2] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, Notes on the State of Virginia (Yale University Press, 2022).

[3] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: G. Routledge, 1893), 556–60.

[4] Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 8th ed (Boston: Thomson-Wadsworth, 2008), 40.

[5] Louis Otto quoted in Herbert Aptheker, Early Years of the Republic: From the End of the Revolution to the First Administration of Washington (1783-1793) (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 41.

[6] Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 40. Sourcing the works of Sidney H. Aronson, Status and Kinship in the Higher Civil Service: Standards of Selection in the Administrations of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1964); Daniel M. Friedenberg, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Land: The Plunder of Early America (Buffalo, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 1992).

[7] Francis Bacon, The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, with Prefaces and Notes by the Late Robert Leslie Ellis, Together with English Translations of the Principal Latin Pieces, ed. James Spedding, vol. 4 (London: Longman & co., 1861), 64.

^[8] “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” America’s Founding Documents, National Archives, accessed March 22, 2024, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.

^[9] Nancy G. Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 1.

^[10] Isenberg, 1.

^[11] David McNally, Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2020), 178.

[12] Benjamin Irvin, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–18.

[13] Isenberg, White Trash, 1.

[14] John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity, 1630,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd Series (Boston, 1838), 7:31-48, https://history.hanover.edu/texts/winthmod.html.

[15] Isenberg, White Trash, 3.

[16] Smith, Wealth of Nations, 556–60.

[17] Robert Ovetz, We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few (London: Pluto Press, 2022), 2–3.

[18] Ovetz, 41.

[19] “The Constitution of the United States,” National Archives, accessed September 3, 2023, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution.

[20] Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 40.

[21] “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.”

[22] “From George Washington to Henry Knox,” December 26, 1786, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-04-02-0409.

[23] Jennifer Nedelsky, Private Property, and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and Its Legacy, Paperback ed., (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 159.

[24] “From George Washington to Henry Knox,” February 3, 1787, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-05-02-0006.

[25] Gregory H Nobles, “Historians Extend the Reach of the American Revolution,” in Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding, ed. Alfred Fabian Young and Gregory H. Nobles (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 213.

[26] “The Constitution of the United States.”

[27] Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783-1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 80, 95, 120.

[28] William Manning, The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “a Laborer,” 1747-1814, ed. Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz, The John Harvard Library (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993), 113.

[29] Manning, 164–66.

[30] Manning, 162.

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^[62] David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 14.

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^[64] James Madison, “Madison Debates,” August 22, 1787, Yale Law School, The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_822.asp.

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^[66] Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2017), 65.

^[67] Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), 294.

^[68] “The Constitution of the United States.”

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^[71] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, 2009, https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html.

^[72] Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 386–87.

^[73] Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Paperback edition (New York: Basic Books, 2016), xviii–xix.

^[74] Baptist, 244–45.

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^[76] Steven Deyle, “The Domestic Slave Trade in America: The Lifeblood of the Southern Slave System,” in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, ed. Walter Johnson and Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 95.

^[77] Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 248.

^[78] Baptist, 248.

^[79] Abraham Lincoln, “The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863,” January 1, 1863, https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals_iv/sections/nonjavatext_emancipation.html.

^[80] James M. McPherson, “Who Freed the Slaves?,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 139, no. 1 (1995): 1–10.

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^[82] Baptist, 400.

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^[84] “SPEECH OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Delivered at a Mass Meeting Held at National Hall, Philadelphia, July 6, 1863, for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments,” Liberator (1831-1865), American Periodicals, 33, no. 30 (July 24, 1863): 118.

^[85] David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 409–10.

^[86] John T. Hubbell, “Abraham Lincoln and the Recruitment of Black Soldiers,” Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association 2, no. 1 (1980).

^[87] “Lincoln’s Death,” Ford’s Theatre, accessed July 16, 2024, https://fords.org/lincolns-assassination/lincolns-death/.

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^[89] Brian Duignan, “Enlightenment,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, July 29, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/event/Enlightenment-European-history.

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^[91] Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice (Gabriola Islands, BC: New Society Publ, 1996), 127.

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^[94] Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It, Vol Vintage Books, 1989, 15–16.

^[95] Aristotle, Politics, trans. Harris Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1944), 1.5 1254a13-18, https://catalog.perseus.org/catalog/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0086.tlg035.perseus-eng1.

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^[124] History.com Editors, “Ku Klux Klan: Origin, Members & Facts,” History, April 20, 2023, https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/ku-klux-klan.

^[125] History.com Editors.

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^[131] “The Constitution of the United States.”

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^[134] Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 50–51.

^[135] Madison, “Notes on Debates.”

^[136] Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 278.

^[137] Klarman, The Framers’ Coup, 2016, 630–31.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stephen Joseph Scott.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark maintains that Cook Islands, a realm of New Zealand, should have consulted Wellington before signing a “partnership” deal with China.

“[Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown] seems to have signed behind the backs of his own people as well as of New Zealand,” Clark told RNZ Pacific.

Brown said the deal with China complements, not replaces, the relationship with New Zealand.

• READ MORE: China deal ‘complements, not replaces’ NZ relationship, says Cook Islands PM
• Other China in Pacific reports
• The Joint Centenary Declaration of 2001

The contents of the deal have not yet been made public.

“The Cook Islands public need to see the agreement — does it open the way to Chinese entry to deep sea mining in pristine Cook Islands waters with huge potential for environmental damage?” Clark asked.

“Does it open the way to unsustainable borrowing? What are the governance safeguards? Why has the prime minister damaged the relationship with New Zealand by acting in this clandestine way?”

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Clark went into detail about the declaration she signed with Cook Islands Prime Minister Terepai Maoate in 2001.

“There is no doubt in my mind that under the terms of the Joint Centenary Declaration of 2001 that Cook Islands should have been upfront with New Zealand on the agreement it was considering signing with China,” Clark said.

“Cook Islands has opted in the past for a status which is not independent of New Zealand, as signified by its people carrying New Zealand passports. Cook Islands is free to change that status, but has not.”

Missing the mark
A Pacific law expert said there was a clear misunderstanding on what the 2001 agreement legally required New Zealand and Cook Islands to consult on.

Brown has argued that New Zealand does not need to be consulted with to the level they want, something Foreign Minister Winston Peters disagrees with.

AUT senior law lecturer and former Pacific Islands Forum policy advisor Sione Tekiteki told RNZ Pacific the word “consultation” had become somewhat of a sticking point:

“From a legal perspective, there’s an ambiguity of what the word consultation means. Does it mean you have to share the agreement before it’s signed, or does it mean that you broadly just consult with New Zealand regarding what are some of the things that, broadly speaking, are some of the things that are in the agreement?

“That’s one avenue where there’s a bit of misunderstanding and an interpretation issue that’s different between Cook Islands as well as New Zealand.”

Unlike a treaty, the 2001 declaration is not “legally binding” per se but serves more to express the intentions, principles and commitments of the parties to work together in “recognition of the close traditional, cultural and social ties that have existed between the two countries for many hundreds of years”, he added.

Tekiteki said that the declaration made it explicitly clear that Cook Islands had full conduct of its foreign affairs, capacity to enter treaties and international agreements in its own right and full competence of its defence and security.

There was, however, a commitment of the parties to “consult regularly”, he said.

For Clark, the one who signed the all-important agreement all those years ago, this is where Brown had misstepped.

Pacific nations played off against each other
Tekiteki said it was not just the Joint Centenary Declaration causing contention. The “China threat” narrative and the “intensifying geopolitics” playing out in the Pacific was another intergrated issue.

An analysis in mid-2024 found that there were more than 60 security, defence and policing agreements and initiatives with the 10 largest Pacific countries.

Australia was the dominant partner, followed by New Zealand, the US and China.

A host of other agreements and “big money” announcements have followed, including the regional Pacific Policing Initiative and Australia’s arrangements with Nauru and PNG.

“It would be advantageous if Pacific nations were able to engage on security related matters as a bloc rather than at the bilateral level,” Tekiteki said.

“Not only will this give them greater political agency and leverage, but it would allow them to better coordinate and integrate support as well as avoid duplications. Entering these arrangements at the bilateral level opens Pacific nations to being played off against each other.

“This is the most worrying aspect of what I am currently seeing.

“This matter has greater implications for Cook Islands and New Zealand diplomatic relations moving forward.”

Protecting Pacific sovereignty
The word sovereignty is thrown around a lot. In this instance Tekiteki does not think “there is any dispute that Cook Islands maintains sovereignty to enter international arrangements and to conduct its affairs as it determines”.

But he did point out the difference between “sovereignty — the rhetoric” that we hear all the time, and “real sovereignty”.

“For example, sovereignty is commonly used as a rebuttal to other countries to mind their own business and not to meddle in the affairs of another country.

“At the regional level is tied to the projection of collective Pacific agency, and the ‘Blue Pacific’ narrative.

“However, real sovereignty is more nuanced. In the context of New Zealand and Cook Islands, both countries retain their sovereignty, but they have both made commitments to “consult” and “cooperate”.

Now, they can always decide to break that, but that in itself would have implications on their respective sovereignty moving forward.

“In an era of intensifying geopolitics, militarisation, and power posturing — this becomes very concerning for vulnerable but large Ocean Pacific nations without the defence capabilities to protect their sovereignty.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol faces impeachment after opposition parties in the country’s National Assembly introduced a motion to force him from office for his shocking declaration of martial law. The conservative Yoon made his announcement in a televised briefing Tuesday evening, accusing the liberal opposition of undermining the state and possibly colluding with North Korea. Thousands of Koreans massed at the parliament to oppose the move as lawmakers rushed inside to vote unanimously to overturn Yoon’s declaration, which he rescinded just hours later. Yoon’s ouster is now all but certain, either through impeachment or his resignation, and he also faces possible treason charges.

“We would never imagine — some of us, the younger ones — that we would have martial law called during our lifetimes,” says organizer Dae-Han Song from Seoul. He describes how “a lot of ordinary people came out” to oppose the power grab.

We also speak with longtime peace activist Christine Ahn, recently banned from entering South Korea by Yoon’s government. She says the “living memory” of life under dictatorship, which lasted into the 1980s, clearly inspired many ordinary citizens to fight back. “They will not tolerate that,” says Ahn. “It’s an extraordinary example of what Americans must learn from South Korea.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Jeff Bezos has finally taken the halo off of his head. It should have never been there in the first place.

Ever since his $250 million purchase of the storied Washington Post in 2013, Bezos has been feted as a savior of the free press (e.g., Slate, 8/6/13; Business Insider, 5/15/16; AdWeek, 11/28/16; New York Times, 2/27/21; Guardian, 6/12/24). The endless fawning was always misplaced. And for me, having grown up watching my parents run the local newspaper, this praise was nauseating.

While Facebook and Google have rightly been called out for destroying the news business, Amazon has been given a comparative pass, even though it may be the worst offender.

Amazon may hoover up a smaller (but growing) portion of ad revenue than Google and Facebook. But its ruthless business practices have helped turn once vibrant Main Streets into ghost towns across the country. Thanks to Amazon, it’s not just ad dollars being lost, but the advertisers themselves—local bookstores, clothing stores, toy stores, etc. And those losses destabilize fragile local economies, and the newspapers that depend on them.

If current trends continue, by the end of the year the US will have lost one-third of its newspapers and nearly two-thirds of its journalism jobs in a span of just two decades, according to a 2023 report by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative. The number of lost reporting jobs, 43,000, is more than enough to fill DC’s baseball stadium.

‘A terrible mistake’

CJR (10/25/24): “Journalists at the Post, in both the news and opinion departments, were stunned” to learn that the paper would not be issuing a presidential endorsement.”

Fortunately, we won’t have to read this Bezos-saves-the-free press drivel any longer, which may be the only good thing to come out of his halo-off moment.

That moment came last Friday when the Post announced that it will no longer be endorsing for president, breaking with its decades-long precedent, and providing a shot in the arm to Trump’s candidacy. The Post’s move came a week after the LA Times, another billionaire-owned paper, did likewise (FAIR.org, 10/25/24).

In short order, Bezos’ top lieutenants at the Post dutifully fell on their swords, claiming it had been their decision. But simultaneously they (or others) leaked to the media that the decision was in fact Bezos’ alone, and they’d even argued against it (New York Times, 10/27/24). In fact, the Post editorial board had been working on its draft endorsement of Kamala Harris for weeks, and for the past week had been awaiting only the sign-off from the top that Bezos never gave (CJR, 10/25/24).

The gold star for trying-to-put-a-happy-face-on-this-hot-mess goes to Will Lewis, the Post CEO and publisher. Bezos tapped the Brit for the paper’s top job last year despite his shady right-wing past. In attempting to defend the indefensible, Lewis (Washington Post, 10/25/24) wrote, “we are returning to our roots.”

No one found this terribly convincing, not even Post columnists, 21 of whom signed onto a statement (10/25/24) calling the non-endorsement “a terrible mistake.” “Disappointing” is how the famed Post duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein put it. But maybe the harshest criticism came from former Post executive editor Marty Baron, who called it “cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty.”

The fallout from Bezos spiking the Harris endorsement has been swift. Since Friday, nearly a third of the Post’s 10-person editorial board has resigned in protest, two Post columnists have departed the paper entirely (with more resignations expected), and 250,000 readers—10% of the Post’s total—have canceled their subscriptions. “It’s a colossal number,” said another former Post executive editor, Marcus Brauchli.

Bezos’ blocking of the Harris endorsement came just 11 days before the election, and on the heels of the Post issuing endorsements for lower-level offices like Senate and House—a practice the Post will continue, even as it discontinues endorsing for president, the one office that can seriously threaten Amazon’s sprawling interests.

Hedging Bezos’ bets

Former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron (CNN, 10/27/24): “Trump rewards his friends and he punishes his perceived political enemies and I think there’s no other explanation for what’s happening right now.”

“This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump in the anticipation of his possible victory,” Post columnist and opinion editor Robert Kagan, who resigned in protest after 25 years at the paper, told CNN (10/27/24):

Trump has threatened to go after Bezos’ business. Bezos runs one of the largest companies in America. They have tremendously intricate relations with federal government. They depend on the federal government.

Recall that Trump as president routinely attacked Amazon and Bezos over the Post’s coverage of him. Trump even went so far as to upend a $10 billion cloud-computing deal between the Pentagon and Amazon Web Services. (Amazon then sued; the contract was ultimately divided among four companies, including Amazon.)

With Trump’s return to office looking as likely as not, Bezos has reason to hedge his bets. That’s especially true considering how dependent on federal largess Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, also is. It currently has a $3.4 billion contract with NASA, and is expected to compete for $5.6 billion in Pentagon contracts over the next five years. Surely this came up when Blue Origin’s CEO met with Trump only hours after the Post announced its non-endorsement (Guardian, 10/27/24). (Blue Origin’s chief competitor is SpaceX, headed by Trump superfan Elon Musk.)

‘Endorsements do nothing’

“Something we are doing is clearly not working,” writes Jeff Bezos (Washington Post, 10/28/24)—and he’s decided that “something” is endorsing presidential candidates.

With all hell breaking loose in the wake of his personal electioneering, Bezos—who can rarely be bothered to explain himself to the free press he supposedly cherishes—had to interrupt his European vacation to pen an op-ed for the Post (10/28/24).

Mustering all the humility you’d expect from the world’s third-richest man, Bezos began not with an apology but an attack—directed at, of all things, the media, including his own paper.

“In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom,” Bezos wrote at the top of his op-ed, headlined “The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media.”

The fact that Bezos’ last-minute nixing of the Harris endorsement will only worsen trust in the media went unstated, of course. Thin-skinned billionaires are better at pointing fingers.

Bezos’ op-ed continued:

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None.

And with that, Bezos absolved himself of any role in aiding Trump’s potential return to the Oval Office.

But in the eyes of Trump fundraiser Bill White, it sure looks like Bezos just put his thumb on the scale. “Bezos not endorsing Kamala Harris—I think that’s a $50 million endorsement for Trump,” White told the Post (10/28/24). “Not picking a horse is picking a horse.”

‘No quid pro quo’

Robert Kagan (Daily Beast, 10/26/24): “All Trump has to do is threaten the corporate chiefs who run these organizations with real financial loss, and they will bend the knee.”

The billionaire went on to assure readers that there was “no quid pro quo of any kind” regarding the meeting between the Blue Origin CEO and Trump that took place immediately following the non-endorsement.

Bezos may have penned this line in response to Kagan, the recently departed Post columnist who two days earlier told the Daily Beast (10/26/24) that a quid pro quo is exactly what went down:

Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people…. Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.

While Bezos’ non-endorsement may seem like a last-minute decision, it had “obviously been in the works for some time,” Kagan said, citing Lewis’ hiring as Post CEO and publisher back in January.

Lewis rose to prominence over a decade ago when he helped steer the British wing of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire to calmer waters, at a time when Murdoch’s tabloid News of the World was engulfed in a phone-hacking scandal. While Lewis’ actions during this time remain the subject of legal inquiries, Murdoch was quick to promote him, naming Lewis CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal in 2014.

When Bezos tapped Lewis to helm the Post earlier this year, he was aware of Lewis’ shady background (Washington Post, 6/28/24)—and may have even viewed it as a plus.

“[Lewis’] eager solicitude before power could well be why Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos tapped Lewis for the publisher’s job in the first place,” the Nation’s Chris Lehmann (6/21/24) wrote. “[Bezos] may well look at Murdoch’s sleazy antidemocratic empire and think, ‘I want one of those, too.’ If so, his eager quisling Will Lewis is already hitting all the right notes.”

For Kagan, Lewis’ hiring was an early signal of Bezos’ intention to take the Post in a different, right-wing direction. “All the facts” point to Bezos’s desire to remake the Post in the image of the Wall Street Journal, with an “anti-anti-Trump editorial slant,” Kagan told the Daily Beast (10/26/24).

Amazon’s antitrust antipathy

FTC chair Lina Khan (Wired, 9/26/23): “Amazon is now exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform.”

While media are focused on how Bezos bent the knee for Trump, something important has been left out of the story: namely, that it may be President Harris whom Bezos fears most.

A second Trump presidency may put Amazon’s (and Blue Origin’s) current government contracts in danger, but it’s Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, who poses a more serious long-term threat to Amazon, as she seeks to break apart dominant monopolies like the online retail giant, which she’s currently suing.

If Harris wins, there’s a possibility that Khan will stay put, enabling her to continue building on the Biden administration’s aggressive antitrust enforcement.

While the FTC’s case against Amazon hasn’t received much attention, it “marks the biggest legal test to date for Amazon’s 30-year-old e-commerce business,” according to the Post (10/1/24). Khan’s lawsuit—which is joined by 17 state attorneys general—alleges that the retailer is “punishing sellers who offer their goods elsewhere at lower prices,” according to Wired (9/26/23)—keeping prices artificially high not only at Amazon, but at thousands of other sites across the web.

In addition to antitrust enforcement, there’s another reason that Bezos (and his ilk) may prefer Trump. “Further compounding the incentive for some executives to stay out of the race is Democrats’ policy agenda,” the Post (10/28/24) reported. “Harris has backed a plan to raise taxes on many of the country’s highest earners.”

For Bezos’ part, he insists (10/28/24), “I do not and will not push my personal interest.” But now that the halo is off, it’s easier to see this is nonsense.

“With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former Blue Origin employee told the Post (10/30/24). “It’s business, period. That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Pete Tucker.

The Ocean Declaration that will be agreed upon at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) this week will be known as the Apia Ocean Declaration.

In an exclusive interview with the Samoa Observer, Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland said members were in a unique position to bring their voices together for the oceans, which have long been neglected.

“The Apia Ocean Declaration aims to address the rising threats to our ocean faces, especially from climate change and rising sea levels,” she said.

• READ MORE: Other CHOGM reports, October 21-26

Commonwealth pushes for ocean protection with historic Apia Ocean Declaration. Video: Samoa Observer

Scotland, reflecting on her tenure as Secretary-General, noted the privilege of serving the Commonwealth, a diverse family of 56 countries comprising 2.7 billion people.

“I am very much the child of the Commonwealth. With 60 percent of our population under 30 years, we must prioritise their future.”

Scotland reflected that upon assuming her role, she recognised immediately that addressing climate change would be a key priority for the Commonwealth.

“Why? Because we have 33 small states, 25 small island states and we were the ones who were really suffering this badly,” she said.

Pacific a ‘big blue ocean state’
“We also knew in 2016 that nobody was looking at the oceans. Now, the Pacific is a big blue ocean state.

“But it’s one of the most under-resourced elements that we have. And yet, look at what was happening. The hurricanes and the cyclones were getting bigger and bigger.

“Why? Because our ocean had absorbed so much of the heat, so much of the carbon, and now it was starting to become saturated. So before, our ocean acted as a coolant. The cyclone would come, the hurricane would come, they’d pass over our cool blue water, and the heat would be drawn out.”

The Apia Ocean Declaration emerged from a pressing need to protect the oceans, especially given the devastating impact of climate change on coastal and island nations.

“We realised that while many discussions were happening globally, the oceans were often overlooked,” Scotland remarked.

“In 2016, we recognised the necessity for collective action. Our oceans absorb much of the carbon and heat, leading to increasingly severe hurricanes and cyclones.”

Scotland has spearheaded initiatives that brought together oceanographers, climatologists, and various stakeholders.

Worked in silos ‘for too long’
“We worked in silos for too long. It was time to unite our efforts for the ocean’s health.

“That’s when we realised that nobody had their eye on our oceans, but of the 56 Commonwealth members, many of us are island states, so our whole life is dependent on our ocean. And so that’s when the fight back happened.”

This collaboration resulted in the establishment of the Commonwealth Blue Charter, a significant framework focused on ocean conservation.

“Fiji’s presidency at the UN Oceans Conference was a turning point. Critics said it would take years to establish an ocean instrument, but we achieved it in less than ten months.”

“We are not just talking; we are implementing solutions.”

Scotland also addressed the financial challenges faced by many small island states, particularly regarding climate funding.

“In 2009, $100 billion was promised by those who had been primarily responsible for the climate crisis, to help those of us who contributed almost nothing to get over the hump.

Hard for finance applications
“But the money wasn’t coming. And in those days, many of our members found it so hard to put those applications together.”

To combat this issue, the Commonwealth established a Climate Finance Access Hub, facilitating over $365 million in funding for member states with another $500 million in the pipeline.

“But this has caused us to say we have to go further,” she added.

“We’re using geospatial data, we have to fill in the gaps for our members who don’t have the data, so we can look at what has happened in the past, what may happen in the future, and now we have AI to help us do the simulators.

“The Ocean Ministers’ Conference highlighted the importance of ensuring that countries at risk of disappearing under the waves can maintain their maritime jurisdiction,” Scotland asserted.

“The thing that we thought was so important is that those countries threatened with the rising of the sea, which could take away their whole island, don’t have certainty in terms of that jurisdiction. What will happen if our islands drop below the sea level?

“And we wanted our member states to be confident that if they had settled their marine boundaries, that jurisdiction would be set in perpetuity. Because that was the biggest guarantee; I may lose my land, but please don’t tell me I’m going to lose my ocean too.

Target an ocean declaration
“So that was the target for the Ocean Ministers’ Conference. And out of that came the idea that we would have an ocean declaration.

“It is that ocean declaration that we are bringing here to Samoa. And the whole poignancy of that is Samoa is the first small island state in the Pacific ever to host CHOGM. So wouldn’t it be beautiful if out of this big blue ocean state, this wonderful Pacific state, we could get an ocean declaration which could in the future be able to be known as the Apia Ocean Declaration? Because we would really mark what we’re doing here.

“What the Commonwealth has been determined to do throughout this whole period is not just talk, but take positive action to help our members not only just to survive, but to thrive.

“And if, which I hope we will, we get an agreement from our 56 states on this ocean declaration, it enables us to put the evidence before everyone, not only to secure what we need, but then to say 0.05 percent of the money is not enough to save our oceans.

“Oceans are the most underfunded area.

“I hope that all the work we’ve done on the Universal Vulnerability Index, on the nature of the vulnerability for our members, will be able to justify proper money, proper resources being put in.

“And you know what’s happening in this area; our fishermen are under threat.

“Our ability to use the oceans in the way we’ve used for millennia to feed our people, support our people, is really under threat. So this CHOGM is our fight back.”

As the meeting progresses, the emphasis remains on achieving consensus among the 56 member states regarding the Apia Ocean Declaration.

Republished from the Samoa Observer with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Since the formation of the Government of National Unity there has been a huge increase in state attacks on shack settlements around Durban and elsewhere. This includes settlements in Belair and the Bluff, both formerly white suburbs, and the Lindokuhle Mnguni Occupation in Johannesburg, which is near to a middle-class area. In all these cases settlements in middle class areas are being targeted. There have also been evictions in KwaDebeka in Durban.

We have also been resisting evictions along the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal where the super-rich lived in mansions in gated communities. They employ violent and militarized security companies to police the poor. The police follow the lead of these security companies. The Hlanganani occupation in Salt rock, the Sihlalangenkani occupation in Umhlali and the Ekuphumleni occupation in Ballito are all resisting evictions. The Phola and Magebhula settlements, also on the North Coast, under the KwaDukuza Municipality, have also suffered violent evictions.

It seems clear that two things are driving this general attack on the poor. One is that the DA, which has been viciously evicting in the Western Cape, has pressured the ANC to step up its attacks on the poor. Another is that the state is cynically responding to the public outcry about the frightening levels of violence in the country, including kidnapping and extortion, with violent attacks on the poor and on migrants in the name of ‘fighting crime’. They are criminalising and abusing vulnerable people instead of dealing with the real crisis of violence.

In the case of the evictions from land near the gated communities on the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal the power of property, of wealth, is being mobilised to crush grassroots urban planning and decommodification of land organised via popular democratic power.

The ANC gives special preference to the super-rich in these gated communities. They were even given an exception for loadshedding. They have told us that we are living on ‘prime land’ and must be moved away to desolate human dumping grounds far from work and schools.

In our statement issued before the march in Ballito on 16 September we said that:

“The KwaDukuza Municipality is openly working with the rich to remove poor black people in Ballito and Umhlali. The ratepayers’ association and the ANC led municipality are working together to evict poor black people, to destroy our homes and communities.

They say that our presence reduces the value of the land, as if value is just a question of the price of the land and has nothing to do with the value of land for the human beings who live on it. They say that we must be removed because we are a health hazard as we must use the bush to relieve ourselves whereas the obvious solution to the lack of sanitation is to provide sanitation. They say that we are ‘chasing tourists away’. The strong element of racism driving all this is often openly displayed on the social media used by the white residents of the gated communities. The black elites who live in the gated communities are silent about this racism.”

Now the residents of the gated communities, the super-rich, have made their racism and contempt for the poor clear. The Dolphin Coast Residents & Ratepayers’ Association have released a viciously anti-poor and racist video in which we are said to be criminal, dangerous, unhygienic and polluting. These are old colonial stereotypes about impoverished black people, stereotypes that have long been used by governments and elites to justify state violence and the destruction of homes, communities and livelihoods.

The video aggressively criminalises impoverishment declaring that we are engaged in illegal occupation, illegal trading and illegal water electricity connections and demanding that the state ‘take action’ and that ‘the law be enforced’.

When it demands the enforcement of the law it is not demanding that the limited but important rights given to the poor in the Constitution are guaranteed. This is an open demand for violence against us by private security and the state, for the destruction of our homes, our community infrastructure and our livelihoods. It is a declaration of war against the poor by the rich, a declaration of war against the black poor by the white dominated elite in the area.

It is true that we are denied access to land, water, electricity, sanitation and refuse removal. The solution to this is to provide land and services, not to incite state violence against us when we make our own arrangements to build viable lives and communities.

We would like to note that not all the wealthy residents of the area are taking this hostile, anti-poor and racist position. One resident has publicly stood up to make the important point that our living conditions are due to state failure and that this is the problem that needs to be fixed. No doubt he is not alone and there are other decent people who also recognise our humanity.

The racist and anti-poor video put out by The Dolphin Coast Residents & Ratepayers’ Association must be condemned in the strongest terms. It should be investigated by the Human Rights Commission.

It is also important for us to note that according to the KwaDukuza Speaker’s office the Mayor has refused to respond to the People’s Memorandum submitted on the 16 September march. She has long been failing to engage people with respect, to take the dignity of the poor seriously and to run an efficient administration. This anti-democratic refusal to respond to the Memorandum is provoking the anger of the people.

We will continue to defend our right to live on the North Coast and to demand that our occupations be recognised and provided with all the services required for a decent and dignified life.

Our humanity is not negotiable. South Africa belongs to all who live in it, including the poor. There can be no compromise with racism. We will hold the land.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Abahlali baseMjondolo.

Right after we broadcast, Israel carried out “targeted strikes” in Beirut as it appears to be preparing for a ground invasion of southern Lebanon as an expansion of its war on Gaza.

Following deadly Israeli attacks that blew up walkie-talkies and pagers across Lebanon this week, killing at least 37 people and wounding around 3,000, Israeli officials have pledged to ramp up their campaign against Hezbollah. Hezbollah characterized the devastating pager explosions as a “declaration of war.” In Beirut, we hear from journalist Rania Abouzeid about the aftereffects of the attack and the prospects of war on the Lebanese front. “There is certainly a sense of heightened anxiety as people wonder what else, what other devices in their vicinity, may explode,” she says.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

“It’s brave to admit your fears” – Ukrainian recruiting poster. Photo credit: Ministry of Defense, Ukraine.

The Associated Press reports that many of the recruits drafted under Ukraine’s new conscription law lack the motivation and military indoctrination required to actually aim their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers.

“Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire. … That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.”

This is familiar territory to anyone who has studied the work of U.S. Brigadier General Samuel “Slam” Marshall, a First World War veteran and the chief combat historian of the U.S. Army in the Second World War. Marshall conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with U.S. troops in the Pacific and Europe, and documented his findings in his book, Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command.

One of Slam Marshall’s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of U.S. troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiers’ own lives in greater danger.

Marshall concluded that most human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human beings, often reinforced by our upbringing and religious beliefs, and that turning civilians into effective combat soldiers therefore requires training and indoctrination expressly designed to override our natural respect for fellow human life. This dichotomy between human nature and killing in war is now understood to lie at the root of much of the PTSD suffered by combat veterans.

Marshall’s conclusions were incorporated into U.S. military training, with the introduction of firing range targets that looked like enemy soldiers and deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiers’ minds. When he conducted similar research in the Korean War, Marshall found that changes in infantry training based on his work in World War II had already led to higher firing ratios.

That trend continued in Vietnam and more recent U.S. wars. Part of the shocking brutality of the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq stemmed directly from the dehumanizing indoctrination of the U.S. occupation forces, which included falsely linking Iraq to the September 11th terrorist crimes in the U.S. and labeling Iraqis who resisted the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country as “terrorists.

A Zogby poll of U.S. forces in Iraq in February 2006 found that 85% of U.S. troops believed their mission was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,” and 77% believed that the primary reason for the war was to “stop Saddam from protecting Al Qaeda in Iraq.” This was all pure fiction, cut from whole cloth by propagandists in Washington, and yet, three years into the U.S. occupation, the Pentagon was still misleading U.S. troops to falsely link Iraq with 9/11.

The impact of this dehumanization was also borne out by court martial testimony in the rare cases when U.S. troops were prosecuted for killing Iraqi civilians. In a court martial at Camp Pendleton in California in July 2007, a corporal testifying for the defense told the court he did not see the cold-blooded killing of an innocent civilian as a summary execution. “I see it as killing the enemy,” he told the court, adding, “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.”

U.S. combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (6,257 killed) were only a fraction of the U.S. combat death toll in Vietnam (47,434) or Korea (33,686), and an even smaller fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans killed in the Second World War. In every case, other countries suffered much heavier death tolls.

And yet, U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan provoked waves of political blowback in the U.S., leading to military recruitment problems that persist today. The U.S. government responded by shifting away from wars involving large deployments of U.S. ground troops to a greater reliance on proxy wars and aerial bombardment.

After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military-industrial complex and political class thought they had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” and that, freed from the danger of provoking World War III with the Soviet Union, they could now use military force without restraint to consolidate and expand U.S. global power. These ambitions crossed party lines, from Republican “neoconservatives” to Democratic hawks like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in October 2000, a month before winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton echoed her mentor Madeleine Albright’s infamous rejection of the “Powell Doctrine” of limited war.

“There is a refrain…,” Clinton declared, “that we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America has never and should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one.

During the question-and-answer session, a banking executive in the audience challenged Clinton on that statement. “I wonder if you think that every foreign country– the majority of countries–would actually welcome this new assertiveness, including the one billion Muslims that are out there,” he asked, “and whether or not there isn’t some grave risk to the United States in this–what I would say, not new internationalism, but new imperialism?”

When the aggressive war policy promoted by the neocons and Democratic hawks crashed and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should have prompted a serious rethink of their wrongheaded assumptions about the impact of aggressive and illegal uses of U.S. military force.

Instead, the response of the U.S. political class to the blowback from its catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was simply to avoid large deployments of U.S. ground forces or “boots on the ground.” They instead embraced the use of devastating bombing and artillery campaigns in Afghanistan, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, and wars fought by proxies, with full, “ironclad” U.S. support, in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and now Ukraine and Palestine.

The absence of large numbers of U.S. casualties in these wars kept them off the front pages back home and avoided the kind of political blowback generated by the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The lack of media coverage and public debate meant that most Americans knew very little about these more recent wars, until the shocking atrocity of the genocide in Gaza finally started to crack the wall of silence and indifference.

The results of these U.S. proxy wars are, predictably, no less catastrophic than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. domestic political impacts have been mitigated, but the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved are as deadly, destructive and destabilizing as ever, undermining U.S. “soft power” and pretensions to global leadership in the eyes of much of the world.

In fact, these policies have widened the yawning gulf between the worldview of ill-informed Americans who cling to the view of their country as a country at peace and a force for good in the world, and people in other countries, especially in the Global South, who are ever more outraged by the violence, chaos and poverty caused by the aggressive projection of U.S. military and economic power, whether by U.S. wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups or economic sanctions.

Now the U.S.-backed wars in Palestine and Ukraine are provoking growing public dissent among America’s partners in these wars. Israel’s recovery of six more dead hostages in Rafah led Israeli labor unions to call widespread strikes, insisting that the Netanyahu government must prioritize the lives of the Israeli hostages over its desire to keep killing Palestinians and destroying Gaza.

In Ukraine, an expanded military draft has failed to overcome the reality that most young Ukrainians do not want to kill and die in an endless, unwinnable war. Hardened veterans see new recruits much as Siegfried Sassoon described the British conscripts he was training in November 2016 in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: “The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable.”

Several months later, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Sassoon wrote Finished With War: a Soldier’s Declaration, an open letter accusing the political leaders who had the power to end the war of deliberately prolonging it. The letter was published in newspapers and read aloud in Parliament. It ended, “On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.”

As Israeli and Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Netanyahu and Zelenskyy are taking increasingly desperate risks, all the while insisting that the U.S. must come to their rescue. By “leading from behind,” our leaders have surrendered the initiative to these foreign leaders, who will keep pushing the United States to make good on its promises of unconditional support, which will sooner or later include sending young American troops to kill and die alongside their own.

Proxy war has failed to resolve the problem it was intended to solve. Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.

Neither the changes to U.S. military training since the Second World War nor the current U.S. strategy of proxy war have resolved the age-old contradiction that Slam Marshall described in Men Against Fire, between killing in war and our natural respect for human life. We have come full circle, back to this same historic crossroads, where we must once again make the fateful, unambiguous choice between the path of war and the path of peace.

If we choose war, or allow our leaders and their foreign friends to choose it for us, we must be ready, as military experts tell us, to once more send tens of thousands of young Americans to their deaths, while also risking escalation to a nuclear war that would kill us all.

If we truly choose peace, we must actively resist our political leaders’ schemes to repeatedly manipulate us into war. We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends and “allies” in other countries.

We must insist that our mis-leaders instead recommit to diplomacy, negotiation and other peaceful means of resolving disputes with other countries, as the UN Charter, the real “rules based order,” in fact requires.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Nicolas J.S. Davies.

circa 1830: A slave auction in America. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)

Through the centuries, the Republic that eventuated in North America has maintained a maximum of chutzpah and minimum of awareness in forging a creation myth that sees slavery and dispossession not as foundational but as inimical to the nation now known as the United States. But, of course, to confront the ugly reality would induce sleeplessness interrupted by haunted dreams, so far this unsteadiness has prevailed.
— Dr. Gerald Horne¹

When an origin story is considered sacrosanct, any challenge to it is sacrilege.
— Prof. Abby Reisman²

In most areas of the United States, school will be starting up in a few weeks. This reminds me of the song “What Did You Learn in School Today?” which was written by Tom Paxton and then recorded and released by Pete Seeger in 1963. Paxton’s lyrics mock the misinformation and lies provided by the public school system. This prompted me to wonder what would happen if today’s school children returned home from school and responded to Paxton’s question.

You’ll need to imagine that their teacher, (let’s call her, Ms Brown) is able to recast what follows in age appropriate language, a skill that lies far beyond my limited capacity and that he adopted a creative, critical thinking approach and not rote learning. Finally, how the precocious student conveys this information to parents might take the form of a jumbled response but we can hope the essential information is intact.

Okay. How about something along the following lines: “What did you learn in school today?” We discussed the America Revolution in 1776 and Ms Brown said that when she was in school, she was taught that the American Revolution was about besieged colonists courageously standing up against British tyranny and it was all about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. She said the textbook authors characterized it as a glorious confirmation of American exceptionalism.

One of countless celebratory examples that she was taught was from Joseph J. Ellis, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 (New York: Liveright 2021). According to Ellis and other myth-making historians, the greatest activity of this “Revolutionary generation” was their devotion to popular sovereignty and their “common sense of purpose.”³

Ms Brown said that she later learned that this devotion excluded the majority of people in the new nation and that slavery existed in all 13 British colonies and had begun at least in 1619. And Africans weren’t the only ones aware of specious reasoning in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Hutchinson, the last colonial governor of Massachusetts, queried that if the rights were “absolutely inalienable” how could the delegates deprive so many Africans of “their right to liberty?”⁴ And this apparently included George Washington’s order for the genocidal attack on the Haudenosaunee nation in upstate New York where more than 40 villages were burned to the ground and all crops and winter provisions destroyed. Those not killed or captured fled to Canada. This event was, in truth, an example of the Founder’s “common purpose.”

We learned that in 1700, roughly 75 percent of land in colonial New York state was owned by only 12 individuals. In Virginia, 1.7 million acres was held by seven individuals.⁵ In 1760, less than five hundred men in just five colonies controlled most of the shipping, banking, mining and manufacturing on the eastern seaboard and in1767 the richest 10 percent of Boston’s taxpayers had 66 percent of Boston’s taxable income while some 30 percent had no property at all.⁶ Ms Brown said that fifty-six of these propertied men later signed the Declaration of Independence.⁷

Many of the Founders were not only slave holders but obsessive land speculators This included George Washington who began acquiring land in 1752, while still a teenager. He eventually owned more than 70,000 acres in what became seven states and the District of Colombia. Ms Brown smiled and said, “I cannot tell a lie. George Washington became the richest person in America.” We also learned that even before King George III issued his Proclamation forbidding settlements from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi, individuals and colonial land speculators were staking claims to millions of acres of and were eager to push forward into Indigenous land. Ms. Brown said that we must consider the possibility that Native dispossession and exclusion played a key role in creating the country through speculative capitalism.⁸ The patriotic fantasy or fig leaf for all of this was that America was destined by God to expand democracy and the Protestant ethos to the native inhabitants.

Ms Brown said we should always look for other sources of information and rely on evidence. She learned from her own reading — outside of school — that there’s an entirely different view of the so-called Revolutionary War of 1776 and that it was actually part of a “counter-revolution,” a conservative movement that the “Founding Fathers” — Britain’s “revolting spawn” — fought to oust London. When the colonial elites broke with the Mother Country, the world’s first-ever apartheid state came into being.⁹ We learned that in the 1770s, the British Parliament was moving toward abolition and in 1773 there was the famous Somerset case in Britain in which Lord Mansfield banned slavery — calling it “odious” —within the country but not yet in the colonies. There was a real fear that Britain would soon cease to support slavery in the thirteen colonies. Simultaneously, Alexander Hamilton, another Founding Father, bought and sold slaves for his wife’s family, owned slaves himself and called Indigenous people “savages.”

More specifically, Ms Brown told us that “…In November 1775, Lord Dunsmore in Virginia issued his famous — or infamous, in the view of the settlers — edict offering to free and arm Africans to squash an anti-colonial revolt, he entered a pre-existing maelstrom of insecurity about the fate of slavery and London’s intentions. And by speaking so bluntly, Dunsmore converted the moderates into radicals.” Indeed, another expert on the Colonial period says that Dunsmore’s edict “did more than any another measure to spur uncommitted white Americans into the camp of rebellion.”¹⁰ Our teacher said that many more Africans — some estimates run as high as 100,000 — allied with the Red Coats rather than with their masters. Of course there were risks for the Africans because if the Revolution succeeded they would be considered traitors and punished as such. It was a terrifying choice and their fears were justified because after the 1776-1783 Revolutionary War, tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people were returned to enslavement.

We learned that in 1787, after the war, James Madison made sure that the Constitution guaranteed that the government would, in his words, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” He was firmly against agrarian reform of any sort and opposed to anything akin to actual functioning democracy. Why? Because the majority — the poor and landless — might use the political power they were granted to force a redistribution of wealth.

We learned that the British were jeopardizing numerous fortunes, not only based on slavery, but the slave trade. So, the war was necessary to protect the freedom of a small white elite to maintain slavery and further, not have any interference as they went ahead with dispossessing and exterminating indigenous people. In short, British colonialism was replaced with U.S. capitalist state colonialism.¹¹

Ms Brown said there was evidence strongly suggesting that the American Revolution was, in the words of historian William Hoagland, “The first chapter in an inter-imperial war between Great Britain and its dissident elite in North America.” We learned that the Euro-American elite ‘patriots” had only contempt and fear of actual democracy which they termed “The tyranny of the majority.” One historian pointed out that “The American state, even in its earliest incarnation was more concerned with limiting popular democracy than securing and expanding it.”¹² He told us that the Declaration’s phrase “Life, liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” was changed in the Constitution to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property.”

In support of this revisionist history, Ms Brown shared a few excerpts from Howard Zinn’s magisterial book, A People’s History of the United States, in which he cogently explains that over a relatively short period, the colonial elite were able to:

… take over land, profits and power from the British empire. In the process they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new privileged leadership. When we look at the American Revolution in that way it was a work of genius.

The Declaration of Independence was a wonderfully useful device because the language of liberty and equality could unite just enough whites to fight for the Revolution, without ending either slavery or inequality.

…the rebellion against British rule allowed a certain group of the colonial elite to replace those loyal to England, give some benefits to small holders and leave poor white working people and tenant farmers in very much the same situation.¹³

Finally, we considered that in 1776, nascent capitalists pulled off the ultimate coup and succeeded in “convincing the deluded and otherwise naive (to this very day) that this naked grab for land, slaves and power was somehow a great leap forward for humanity.”¹⁴

Just before the bell rang, one kid in my class asked the teacher, “If what we’ve previously been taught about the American Revolution may not be true what else may not be true?” Ms Brown said that was a good question and we’d talk about it next week and also do some role playing.

ENDNOTES:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Olson.

Image by Planet Volumes.

Chinese diplomacy has done it again.

By hosting a historic signing of a unity agreement between 14 Palestinian political parties in Beijing on July 23, China has, once more, shown its ability to play a global role as a peace broker.

For years, China has attempted to play a role in Middle East politics, particularly in the region’s most enduring crisis, the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

In 2021, China announced its four-point plan, aimed at “comprehensively, fairly and permanently” resolving the Palestinian question.

Whether the plan itself was workable or not, it mattered little, as neither the Israeli government nor the Palestinian Authority were prepared to ditch Washington, which has dominated Middle East diplomacy for decades.

For the Israelis, their interests lie largely within their historic alliance with the United States, which has translated into very generous aid packages, military support and political backing.

As for the PA, since its inception in 1994, it revolved largely within a US-foreign policy sphere.

With time, the Palestinian leadership grew even more reliant on American-western financial handouts and validation. Thus, allowing China to flex its diplomatic muscles in the Middle East, at the expense of the US, would be considered a violation of the unspoken agreement between Washington and Ramallah.

Consequently, the Chinese efforts yielded nothing tangible.

But China’s success in ending a seven-year rift between Saudi Arabia and Iran re-introduced Beijing as a powerful new mediator, in a region known for its protracted and layered conflicts.

The latest horrific war in Gaza has further highlighted the possible role of China in Palestine and the region at large.

For years, China attempted to find the balance between its historic role as a global leader, with clout and credibility in the Global South, and its economic interests, including those in Israel.

That balancing act began eroding soon after the start of the war.

The Chinese political discourse on the war was committed to the rights of the Palestinian people and their historic struggle for freedom and justice.

The above notion was highlighted in the words of China’s ambassador to the UN, Fu Cong, when he said that “the establishment of an independent state is the indisputable national right of the Palestinian people, not subject to questioning or bargaining”.

Such language, which came to define China’s strong stance against the war, the massive human rights violations and the urgent need for a ceasefire, continued to evolve.

On February 22, China’s representative to the Hague, Ma Xinmin, said that “in pursuit of the right to self-determination, Palestinian people’s use of force to resist foreign oppression (…) is (an) inalienable right well founded in international law”. His statement was made during the fourth day of public hearings held by the ICJ to address Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine.

The Chinese, and other countries’ efforts, paid dividends, as the ICJ released its Advisory Opinion on July 19, stating that “the sustained abuse by Israel of its position as an occupying Power” and “continued frustration of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, violates fundamental principles of international law”.

It is within this context that ‘The Beijing Declaration on Ending Division and Strengthening Palestinian National Unity’ was signed.

The agreement was not a mere document, similar to those signed between rival Palestinian parties in the past. It proposed a three-step initiative that includes a “comprehensive, lasting and sustainable ceasefire in Gaza”, followed by a post-conflict governance plan, which is itself predicated on the principle of “Palestinians governing Palestine.”

The final step seeks long-term peace, all of which is achieved through broad-based participation of regional and international players. In other words, ending the domination of a single country over the future of Palestine and her people.

There will certainly be attempts to undermine, if not cancel, the Chinese efforts entirely. But there are reasons that give us hope that the diplomatic push by China may, in fact, serve as a foundation for a change in the global attitude towards justice and peace in Palestine.

The fact that western European countries like Spain, Norway and Ireland have recognized Palestine shows that the US-dominated western diplomacy is breaking apart.

Moreover, the growing role of the Global South in supporting the Palestinian struggle suggests another seismic shift.

Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, much of the world has been sidelined from the struggle in Palestine. This is no longer the case.

China’s growing role in Palestinian and Middle East politics is taking place with changing global dynamics, and the practical end of the US traditional role as the ‘honest peace broker’.

The war on Gaza has presented China with the opportunity to play the role of an advocate for Palestine. This has given Beijing the needed credibility to achieve the most comprehensive agreement among Palestinian groups.

Time will tell if the agreement will be implemented or thwarted. But the fact remains that China is now officially a peace broker in Palestine and, for most Palestinians, a credible one at that.

The post The Beijing Declaration: How Chinese Diplomacy United Palestinian Groups appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

John Trumbull’s painting, Declaration of Independence – Public Domain

July 4, 2026 will mark the 250^th anniversary of the revolt against British rule by some of the settlers situated in the thirteen colonies clustered along the Atlantic Ocean.  It’s not a minute too soon to start preparing for the orgy of self-congratulation and remythologizing that is about to befall us.  Replete of course with gallons of there-is-still-a-lot-of-work-to-be-doneism.

Better still, as the rate of decline into chaos and confusion accelerates, it’s a perfect time to consider what can get us out of this mess.  By mess I mean what 1776 hath wrought.

A good place to begin that appraisal is with the document the Founders created to justify the project in the first place.  The Declaration of Independence has been misconstrued for a very long time. It’s taken me decades to penetrate the fog and I still have lots to learn.

The Declaration is a manifesto. Its purpose was to explain and justify violent opposition to British “occupation.”  By 1776 gendered and racialized violence was already deeply ingrained within the white settlers.  It was the product of what it took from 1619/20 forward to seize and hold territory, to enslave and keep enslaved at least 500,000 Black people and to control deviant white settlers. (For context as to the latter, the Salem Witch trials were in 1692/93.)

Accordingly, picking a fight with the British Army did not require creating a violent or militarized culture from scratch.  For that matter, since at least the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, violent conflict with British troops was already well underway.

In the first paragraph of this essay, I used the word project. I find it a useful lens or frame to view the arc of U.S. history.  By way of illustration, I thought the movie Oppenheimer did an excellent job at depicting the creation, testing, deployment and afterlife of the atomic bomb as a big project.  Putting a man on the moon was another big, fast USA national undertaking.

The 1960s partial dismantling of the Jim Crow system in the South can also be viewed as a project—an especially important and difficult one.  There are plenty of other examples, but within the U.S. all are subprojects of the gigantic, relentlessly violent work of creating and maintaining the modern nation state known as the United States of America.

Territorial conquest for natural resources and/or land for settlement is at the core of colonialism and thus also at the core of the very being of the USA.  What makes understanding the Declaration so useful is what it reveals about why some of the settlers took matters into their own hands.

That it was only some of the settlers is relevant because had there been a referendum on the matter, most would have voted to remain a British colony.  (Similarly, there was never a majority for ending slavery either.)  Those who had a different idea were a quite small group of white, male property owners with a vision.  And how comfortable they were using violence to achieve it.

For a long time, I accepted the canard that we are a nation of laws.  We aren’t.  Since Day One we have remained first and foremost a nation characterized and defined by violence.  The veneer of law comes separately.  Usually after the fact but sometimes before or concurrently.  The Declaration is itself a good example.  THE BLOODSHED WAS ALREADY UNDEDRWAY when it was adopted.

As a sidenote, most accept the myth that the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution ended racialized chattel slavery.  No.  Seven hundred thousand people killing each other came first.  Or to put it another way, had the laws been capable of resolving the conflict over slavery there wouldn’t have been a Civil War in the first place.

Where does the Declaration fit in the organic evolution of the whole arrangement?  Even though newspapers have run July 4 full page ads of the whole dang thing for years, going as far back when people still read newspapers, most U.S. Americans think the Preamble is the Declaration in its entirety.  It’s where the frequently quoted “…all men are created equal” occur.  Those words, however, are also profoundly misunderstood.

Ex post facto they are invoked to imply an aspiration among the Founders to equality among all humans or at least male humans. Strategically understandable perhaps.  It’s as though we want to believe the Drafters and Signers were just hypocrites.  They weren’t.  They genuinely did not consider Indians or Black people to be human.

When they said all men were created equal, they meant themselves, the British and other Europeans. Or, to put it another way, they were asserting that they were equal to their colonial masters.  White supremacy was already deeply implanted in their worldview. (Doesn’t matter, some may say, they let the “created equal” genie out of the bottle even if they did so by accident.  We’ll come back to that later.)

Transactional Democracy

Most of the Declaration isn’t the preamble. It’s a long list of grievances.  There are 27 in all.  Taken together they present a recipe for what I would call transactional democracy.  Meaning that the British were making decisions contrary to the wishes of the Founders.  It wasn’t that the British were making the decisions per se.  Rather it was that British decisions were at odds with what the white, property-owning men wanted to do.

This idea is so far from the idealized myth we have been taught it’s not easy to grasp.  So, I’ll say it again another way.  The Independence being sought was NOT for the purpose or reason of overcoming opposition to visionary and previously unimagined ideas of freedom and democracy.

Here’s how Britannica addresses this in their backgrounder on the Declaration.  “It can be said, as Adams did, that the declaration contained nothing really novel in its political philosophy, which was derived from John Locke, Algernon Sidney, and other English theorists.”  So, some old governing ideas were put into new bottles partly to seek support from a population mostly inclined to go along with British rule, not overthrow it.

What did the white, property-owning men really, really want to do? Several things one of which was territorial expansion on their terms.  It’s as though the Declaration is its own Doctrine of Discovery, its own license to kill, conquer and steal.  Its essence was to justify replacing British colonialism with U.S. based settler colonialism.

Two clauses from the Declaration:

He [referring to the King] has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

Sure enough, the very first legislation passed after the revolution succeeded was the Northwest Ordinance.  (Thanks to Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’s essential AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, for first making me aware of this timeline.)

Following the principles outlined by Thomas Jefferson in the Ordinance of 1784, the authors of the Northwest Ordinance (probably Nathan Dane and Rufus King) spelled out a plan that was subsequently used as the country expanded to the Pacific. (Northwest Ordinance of 1787 at archives.gov)

Here’s Smithsonian Magazine in its July/August 2024 edition.

Decades earlier, Thomas Jefferson had formed a vision for new territory west of the Appalachian Mountains: It would fuel the creation of an “empire for liberty.” He first used a version of this phrase during the Revolutionary War, in a 1780 letter that urged George Rogers Clark, a surveyor turned soldier, to head north to wrest more land from the British. The frontiersman proved unable to muster sufficient recruits for an expedition, but Jefferson never dropped the idea.

After the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, Britain ceded more territory that doubled the size of the U.S. Along with the original 13 colonies, the new country now included territory that stretched all the way to the Mississippi River, to the western edges of what would become Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and the northern part of Mississippi.

Anticolonial?  Not in the least.

Since 1776 has the allegedly “anticolonial” USA ever supported the struggle of any other nation or peoples against colonial power?  No. Never.

One of the more dramatic examples was the response to a plea from Ho Chi Minh in 1948.  (The same year Israel became a nation-state.) As Viet Nam sought independence from decades of French colonial rule, Ho Chi Minh appealed to then President Truman for support.  It wasn’t as unreasonable as might appear given the U.S. and Viet Nam had worked closely together against the Japanese in WWII.  Truman never responded. And as we know the U.S. went on to support French efforts to retain control, even to the point of offering them nuclear weapons to use against Viet Nam.

Fast forward to the present.  Further evidence that the transactional purpose of the rebellion against the King of England was to change the form of colonialism, not the content is on full display right this minute.  That would be demonstrated by the U.S. backing of the settler colony Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.  [Note: A photo of Nicki Haley autographing U.S. made bombs to be dropped on Gaza could go here.]

Does the Declaration mention slavery? 

Never.  However, just because it references “Indian Savages,” and not Blacks doesn’t mean slavery and anti-Black racial caste aren’t in there.  The absence of any such language speaks volumes.

The great Gerald Horne, Nicole Hannah Jones and others have done excellent work in exposing how the fear that British colonial masters would abolish slavery was a powerful motivator of the drive for independence.  (A good place to learn more is with Professor Horne’s THE COUNTEREVOLUTION OF 1776.)

Deep differences among the Founders over how best to manage slavery prevented explicit discussion on the topic in the final version of the Declaration.  Among other things, some slave-owners wanted to favor the domestic slave trade by restricting the Atlantic slave trade. Others didn’t.  Which doesn’t change the fact that racialized enslavement was fundamental to what Professor Horne has correctly identified as the world’s first-ever apartheid Nation-State.

How this is who we were then and who we still are. 

The assumptions made in the Declaration in 1776 are now even more deeply embedded.  Not only have they been passed from one generation to the next. They have become baked into the structure of well, everything.  How that happened is relatively simple.  Lots of practice.

Of all the things I’ve ever written, a line published for the first time in 1969 is the most frequently quoted to this day, “The reason the U.S. is in Viet Nam is because the U.S. is in California.”  Meaning that territorial expansion and control is the US. way of life.

In expanding from sea to shining sea and beyond, that project has created many intersecting subsystems.  Those systems include the lens through which we are all taught to view the world and the place of the U.S. in that world. The colonialization of our minds as Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin and others have described it.  I call it the white way of thinking.

For our purposes here, three examples are illustrative. Militarism, immigration and the never-ending thirst for racialized control of who can do what where.

Militarism

As to militarism, I have written here about the Culture of Violence in which we swim.  It’s impossible to overstate how much the military is embedded in our economy, politics and culture.  So, I won’t. I’ll just ask that instead of ignoring it please be on the lookout for how it shows up.

Where to start? Here are a few prompts.  Sporting events, advertising, the resumes of political candidates, most of the national holidays, parking and other special privileges for veterans, the military budget, parades of all kinds, obituaries…pretty much everywhere.  Other societies are not like this.

“Immigration”

In 2016 Trump came down the escalator to talk about immigration. Not just any immigration.  A surge from the South.  He did not propose building a wall at the Canadian border.

In Mexico, there is a joke that Mexico will willingly build a border wall AND pay for it.  Under one condition.  That it’s built at the border in place prior to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe.  Which would necessitate the return of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming to Mexican sovereignty.

Taking land and people away from Mexico by force was considered a great national achievement.  An essential building block in the sea-to-shining-sea project.  But when refugees from Mexico or other Southern hemisphere nations enter the U.S. in large numbers of their own volition?  That’s a crisis.

Why? Because it’s one of several factors contributing to white people having a panic over the loss of white people’s habitat.  That’s a topic for discussion in its own right.  For now, suffice to say Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World by Todd Miller and NOT A Nation of Immigrants by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz are indispensable reading.

The Sundown Town way of thinking

I live in a Sundown Town.  It’s an overwhelmingly white suburb of Detroit.  In truth, most white people live in Sundown Towns, whether it was ever formalized as such or not.  For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to cities that by legislation and/or practice limit the movement of people of color, most often Black people after 6PM.

At its core white hierarchy is about control over space and place.  You can go to this school, not that one. Or no school at all.  It’s up to us not you.

You can sit in the back of the bus, not the front.   You can walk or drive or jog on this street if we say so.  If we say no, your life and liberty are at risk.  You can hold this position in our company but not a higher one.  You can buy a house in this city but not these suburbs.  You could get a mortgage if you live in this zip code but alas, not the one you actually live in.

If the Declaration of Independence wasn’t about the control of space and place, then just what was it about?  Read it. Not just the preamble, the whole thing.  I think you’ll see what I’m talking about.

OK, so this is who are.  Is it who we must be forever?

Of those readers who have made it this far, many are probably thinking, but you left out all the good things.  This isn’t who we are—or not all of it anyway.  What about all the progress?  Women can vote now.  Barack Obama was President for two terms.  Millions have enjoyed good incomes, homeownership, college for their children, vacations and other nice things.  Our diversity has given us food options better than any other nation on earth.  We have lots of sports teams and other forms of entertainment. Surely the glass is more than half full.

Oh, and what about all the other nation states that are worse than the U.S. you ask.  Shouldn’t we take comfort in that?  (What those might be is its own conversation.)

Further there is no denying that support for various versions of the status quo is deep and broad. Also strong is the belief that Another World is definitely NOT possible.  Most U.S. Americans believe that There Is No Alternative. I get it.

Part Two will examine whether and how to get past all of that. 

The post Declaring Independence From the Declaration of Independence appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Frank Joyce.

John Trumbull’s painting, Declaration of Independence – Public Domain

July 4, 2026 will mark the 250^th anniversary of the revolt against British rule by some of the settlers situated in the thirteen colonies clustered along the Atlantic Ocean.  It’s not a minute too soon to start preparing for the orgy of self-congratulation and remythologizing that is about to befall us.  Replete of course with gallons of there-is-still-a-lot-of-work-to-be-doneism.

Better still, as the rate of decline into chaos and confusion accelerates, it’s a perfect time to consider what can get us out of this mess.  By mess I mean what 1776 hath wrought.

A good place to begin that appraisal is with the document the Founders created to justify the project in the first place.  The Declaration of Independence has been misconstrued for a very long time. It’s taken me decades to penetrate the fog and I still have lots to learn.

The Declaration is a manifesto. Its purpose was to explain and justify violent opposition to British “occupation.”  By 1776 gendered and racialized violence was already deeply ingrained within the white settlers.  It was the product of what it took from 1619/20 forward to seize and hold territory, to enslave and keep enslaved at least 500,000 Black people and to control deviant white settlers. (For context as to the latter, the Salem Witch trials were in 1692/93.)

Accordingly, picking a fight with the British Army did not require creating a violent or militarized culture from scratch.  For that matter, since at least the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, violent conflict with British troops was already well underway.

In the first paragraph of this essay, I used the word project. I find it a useful lens or frame to view the arc of U.S. history.  By way of illustration, I thought the movie Oppenheimer did an excellent job at depicting the creation, testing, deployment and afterlife of the atomic bomb as a big project.  Putting a man on the moon was another big, fast USA national undertaking.

The 1960s partial dismantling of the Jim Crow system in the South can also be viewed as a project—an especially important and difficult one.  There are plenty of other examples, but within the U.S. all are subprojects of the gigantic, relentlessly violent work of creating and maintaining the modern nation state known as the United States of America.

Territorial conquest for natural resources and/or land for settlement is at the core of colonialism and thus also at the core of the very being of the USA.  What makes understanding the Declaration so useful is what it reveals about why some of the settlers took matters into their own hands.

That it was only some of the settlers is relevant because had there been a referendum on the matter, most would have voted to remain a British colony.  (Similarly, there was never a majority for ending slavery either.)  Those who had a different idea were a quite small group of white, male property owners with a vision.  And how comfortable they were using violence to achieve it.

For a long time, I accepted the canard that we are a nation of laws.  We aren’t.  Since Day One we have remained first and foremost a nation characterized and defined by violence.  The veneer of law comes separately.  Usually after the fact but sometimes before or concurrently.  The Declaration is itself a good example.  THE BLOODSHED WAS ALREADY UNDEDRWAY when it was adopted.

As a sidenote, most accept the myth that the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution ended racialized chattel slavery.  No.  Seven hundred thousand people killing each other came first.  Or to put it another way, had the laws been capable of resolving the conflict over slavery there wouldn’t have been a Civil War in the first place.

Where does the Declaration fit in the organic evolution of the whole arrangement?  Even though newspapers have run July 4 full page ads of the whole dang thing for years, going as far back when people still read newspapers, most U.S. Americans think the Preamble is the Declaration in its entirety.  It’s where the frequently quoted “…all men are created equal” occur.  Those words, however, are also profoundly misunderstood.

Ex post facto they are invoked to imply an aspiration among the Founders to equality among all humans or at least male humans. Strategically understandable perhaps.  It’s as though we want to believe the Drafters and Signers were just hypocrites.  They weren’t.  They genuinely did not consider Indians or Black people to be human.

When they said all men were created equal, they meant themselves, the British and other Europeans. Or, to put it another way, they were asserting that they were equal to their colonial masters.  White supremacy was already deeply implanted in their worldview. (Doesn’t matter, some may say, they let the “created equal” genie out of the bottle even if they did so by accident.  We’ll come back to that later.)

Transactional Democracy

Most of the Declaration isn’t the preamble. It’s a long list of grievances.  There are 27 in all.  Taken together they present a recipe for what I would call transactional democracy.  Meaning that the British were making decisions contrary to the wishes of the Founders.  It wasn’t that the British were making the decisions per se.  Rather it was that British decisions were at odds with what the white, property-owning men wanted to do.

This idea is so far from the idealized myth we have been taught it’s not easy to grasp.  So, I’ll say it again another way.  The Independence being sought was NOT for the purpose or reason of overcoming opposition to visionary and previously unimagined ideas of freedom and democracy.

Here’s how Britannica addresses this in their backgrounder on the Declaration.  “It can be said, as Adams did, that the declaration contained nothing really novel in its political philosophy, which was derived from John Locke, Algernon Sidney, and other English theorists.”  So, some old governing ideas were put into new bottles partly to seek support from a population mostly inclined to go along with British rule, not overthrow it.

What did the white, property-owning men really, really want to do? Several things one of which was territorial expansion on their terms.  It’s as though the Declaration is its own Doctrine of Discovery, its own license to kill, conquer and steal.  Its essence was to justify replacing British colonialism with U.S. based settler colonialism.

Two clauses from the Declaration:

He [referring to the King] has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

Sure enough, the very first legislation passed after the revolution succeeded was the Northwest Ordinance.  (Thanks to Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’s essential AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, for first making me aware of this timeline.)

Following the principles outlined by Thomas Jefferson in the Ordinance of 1784, the authors of the Northwest Ordinance (probably Nathan Dane and Rufus King) spelled out a plan that was subsequently used as the country expanded to the Pacific. (Northwest Ordinance of 1787 at archives.gov)

Here’s Smithsonian Magazine in its July/August 2024 edition.

Decades earlier, Thomas Jefferson had formed a vision for new territory west of the Appalachian Mountains: It would fuel the creation of an “empire for liberty.” He first used a version of this phrase during the Revolutionary War, in a 1780 letter that urged George Rogers Clark, a surveyor turned soldier, to head north to wrest more land from the British. The frontiersman proved unable to muster sufficient recruits for an expedition, but Jefferson never dropped the idea.

After the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, Britain ceded more territory that doubled the size of the U.S. Along with the original 13 colonies, the new country now included territory that stretched all the way to the Mississippi River, to the western edges of what would become Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and the northern part of Mississippi.

Anticolonial?  Not in the least.

Since 1776 has the allegedly “anticolonial” USA ever supported the struggle of any other nation or peoples against colonial power?  No. Never.

One of the more dramatic examples was the response to a plea from Ho Chi Minh in 1948.  (The same year Israel became a nation-state.) As Viet Nam sought independence from decades of French colonial rule, Ho Chi Minh appealed to then President Truman for support.  It wasn’t as unreasonable as might appear given the U.S. and Viet Nam had worked closely together against the Japanese in WWII.  Truman never responded. And as we know the U.S. went on to support French efforts to retain control, even to the point of offering them nuclear weapons to use against Viet Nam.

Fast forward to the present.  Further evidence that the transactional purpose of the rebellion against the King of England was to change the form of colonialism, not the content is on full display right this minute.  That would be demonstrated by the U.S. backing of the settler colony Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.  [Note: A photo of Nicki Haley autographing U.S. made bombs to be dropped on Gaza could go here.]

Does the Declaration mention slavery? 

Never.  However, just because it references “Indian Savages,” and not Blacks doesn’t mean slavery and anti-Black racial caste aren’t in there.  The absence of any such language speaks volumes.

The great Gerald Horne, Nicole Hannah Jones and others have done excellent work in exposing how the fear that British colonial masters would abolish slavery was a powerful motivator of the drive for independence.  (A good place to learn more is with Professor Horne’s THE COUNTEREVOLUTION OF 1776.)

Deep differences among the Founders over how best to manage slavery prevented explicit discussion on the topic in the final version of the Declaration.  Among other things, some slave-owners wanted to favor the domestic slave trade by restricting the Atlantic slave trade. Others didn’t.  Which doesn’t change the fact that racialized enslavement was fundamental to what Professor Horne has correctly identified as the world’s first-ever apartheid Nation-State.

How this is who we were then and who we still are. 

The assumptions made in the Declaration in 1776 are now even more deeply embedded.  Not only have they been passed from one generation to the next. They have become baked into the structure of well, everything.  How that happened is relatively simple.  Lots of practice.

Of all the things I’ve ever written, a line published for the first time in 1969 is the most frequently quoted to this day, “The reason the U.S. is in Viet Nam is because the U.S. is in California.”  Meaning that territorial expansion and control is the US. way of life.

In expanding from sea to shining sea and beyond, that project has created many intersecting subsystems.  Those systems include the lens through which we are all taught to view the world and the place of the U.S. in that world. The colonialization of our minds as Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin and others have described it.  I call it the white way of thinking.

For our purposes here, three examples are illustrative. Militarism, immigration and the never-ending thirst for racialized control of who can do what where.

Militarism

As to militarism, I have written here about the Culture of Violence in which we swim.  It’s impossible to overstate how much the military is embedded in our economy, politics and culture.  So, I won’t. I’ll just ask that instead of ignoring it please be on the lookout for how it shows up.

Where to start? Here are a few prompts.  Sporting events, advertising, the resumes of political candidates, most of the national holidays, parking and other special privileges for veterans, the military budget, parades of all kinds, obituaries…pretty much everywhere.  Other societies are not like this.

“Immigration”

In 2016 Trump came down the escalator to talk about immigration. Not just any immigration.  A surge from the South.  He did not propose building a wall at the Canadian border.

In Mexico, there is a joke that Mexico will willingly build a border wall AND pay for it.  Under one condition.  That it’s built at the border in place prior to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe.  Which would necessitate the return of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming to Mexican sovereignty.

Taking land and people away from Mexico by force was considered a great national achievement.  An essential building block in the sea-to-shining-sea project.  But when refugees from Mexico or other Southern hemisphere nations enter the U.S. in large numbers of their own volition?  That’s a crisis.

Why? Because it’s one of several factors contributing to white people having a panic over the loss of white people’s habitat.  That’s a topic for discussion in its own right.  For now, suffice to say Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World by Todd Miller and NOT A Nation of Immigrants by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz are indispensable reading.

The Sundown Town way of thinking

I live in a Sundown Town.  It’s an overwhelmingly white suburb of Detroit.  In truth, most white people live in Sundown Towns, whether it was ever formalized as such or not.  For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to cities that by legislation and/or practice limit the movement of people of color, most often Black people after 6PM.

At its core white hierarchy is about control over space and place.  You can go to this school, not that one. Or no school at all.  It’s up to us not you.

You can sit in the back of the bus, not the front.   You can walk or drive or jog on this street if we say so.  If we say no, your life and liberty are at risk.  You can hold this position in our company but not a higher one.  You can buy a house in this city but not these suburbs.  You could get a mortgage if you live in this zip code but alas, not the one you actually live in.

If the Declaration of Independence wasn’t about the control of space and place, then just what was it about?  Read it. Not just the preamble, the whole thing.  I think you’ll see what I’m talking about.

OK, so this is who are.  Is it who we must be forever?

Of those readers who have made it this far, many are probably thinking, but you left out all the good things.  This isn’t who we are—or not all of it anyway.  What about all the progress?  Women can vote now.  Barack Obama was President for two terms.  Millions have enjoyed good incomes, homeownership, college for their children, vacations and other nice things.  Our diversity has given us food options better than any other nation on earth.  We have lots of sports teams and other forms of entertainment. Surely the glass is more than half full.

Oh, and what about all the other nation states that are worse than the U.S. you ask.  Shouldn’t we take comfort in that?  (What those might be is its own conversation.)

Further there is no denying that support for various versions of the status quo is deep and broad. Also strong is the belief that Another World is definitely NOT possible.  Most U.S. Americans believe that There Is No Alternative. I get it.

Part Two will examine whether and how to get past all of that. 

The post Declaring Independence From the Declaration of Independence appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Frank Joyce.

Cook Islands Prime Minister and Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) chair Mark Brown has written to the president of the government of New Caledonia to offer support in finding a way forward.

Brown said the political situation in the French territory — which is a full member of the PIF — remains deeply concerning to the Forum family.

He said there were a number of mechanisms and processes available to PIF members to help resolve “complex and historical issues” which remain “unsettled”.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: French Ambassador for the Pacific Véronique Roger-Lacan talks to Lydia Lewis
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

He also stressed implementing an agreed way forward “must not be rushed”.

“Our Pacific region is home to independent experts and skilled personnel, that are familiar with this region, its history, its people, and importantly, its context, that can support all parties to move this process forward,” Brown said.

“Pacific Islands Forum [is ready to] to facilitate and provide a supported and neutral space for all parties to come together in the spirit of the Pacific Way, to find an agreed way forward that safeguards the interests of the people of New Caledonia.”

French President Emanuel Macron came and left Nouméa last week without announcing a return to a freeze or scrapping of the controversial constitutional amendment, which indigenous Kanaks and pro-independence groups have been calling for.

Dialogue promised
He promised dialogue would continue, “in view of the current context, we give ourselves a few weeks so as to allow peace to return, dialogue to resume, in view of a comprehensive agreement,” he said.

Indigenous Kanaks have also called for Macron to investigate the death toll, with more young rioters feared dead, and for the proposed constitutional amendments to be withdrawn.

Concerns have also been raised around the Kanak population facing a great deal of inequity and poor health, education and job outcomes.

Vanuatu Climate Minister Ralph Regenvanu told the media at the fourth UN Small Islands Developing States conference that “everyone could see this coming three years ago”.

“France has caused this crisis by its failure to recognise the Kanaks’ call for the third referendum to be deferred,” Regenvanu said.

Regenvanu said Macron’s visit made no difference “because France has to withdraw its legislative change to open the electoral rolls to allow for a resolution through dialogue”.

He said if that did not happen it will push the situation back to the cycle of violence that was prevalent in the 1980s.

“We are calling on France to withdraw the legislative proposals, and come back to the table and set up a new accord with the indépendantistes and the anti-independentists in the territory,” Regenvanu said.

“If France does not withdraw the legislative amendments, the violence will continue.”

‘France’s credibility challenged’
Massey University Defence and Security Studies associate professor Dr Powles said the PIF had produced a “fairly scathing” report on the third and final New Caledonia referendum.

But the French President’s stand on the issue of the third self-determination referendum (held in December 2021 and boycotted by the pro-independence camp) is: “I will not go back on this.”

Dr Powles said there were options for the Forum Secretariat, including using the existing regional crisis mechanism under the Biketawa Declaration.

The declaration has been used on a number of occasions in the Pacific, in Nauru, in Solomon Islands, as well as in several other cases, she said.

“France’s credibility was strongly challenged by virtue of the fact that it is a colonial power in the Pacific,” Dr Powles said.

“A resilient Pacific is a Pacific in which all Pacific peoples are free and independent. And that is really the best type of resilience which will keep the region safe.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

In the course of little more than a century the attempts to aggregate popular demands within the channels of conflict resolution have led to the abolition of class-oriented and programmatic political parties. The last of these survived in the colonial/ neo-colonial environments of Central and South America until they were defeated in the last decade of the 20th century. Despite the preservation of conventional labels inherited from the French Revolution, the range of political ideologies available has been reduced to the West’s universal values of neo-liberalism. Liberalism and conservatism also mutated into forms that would be barely recognizable to those whose tracts laid the theoretical basis for these positions. This did not happen overnight. Nor was it a natural phenomenon. Counter-insurgency complemented by the infiltration and manipulation of the standard bearers of nationalism and socialism in Latin America ultimately subdued those few attempts to restore class and programmatic politics after 1945.

Of course there was also violent counter-insurgency waged (e.g., Gladio) by the covert operators of the State (and its owners) in the US and throughout the territories where Anglo-American power was projected, mainly through NATO and in the western peninsula of Eurasia also through its civil department the European Economic Community or European Union. By the time the official socialist states associated with the Soviet Union were defeated and transformed into Western vassals, the leadership—such as it was—of ostensibly left-leaning political organizations had been decapitated and or replaced by academically credentialed professionals indebted to corporate funding. Before the European Management Forum/ World Economic Forum initiated its cadre program, numerous transatlantic entities such as the German Marshall Fund, Fulbright and Rhodes Scholarships and other lesser-known programs recruited and indoctrinated the predecessors to today’s “global leaders”. Funds channelled through parastatal agencies, NGOs and corporate tax dodges promoted generations of scholars, journalists, teachers and bureaucrats enabling them to march through the institutions with competitive advantage over those with sincere political convictions.

Anyone paying attention to this process could see that parallel to this transfer of “leadership” academic literature and the publications of the so-called quality press were reshaping the language of post-war mass movements, turning activism into grant-funded research. Beneath the banner of postmodernism in the Anglo-American dominated humanities and social sciences the principles of empirical Marxist analysis were subsumed by a theological form of scholarship even more dogmatic than the much-maligned work of the state institutes for Marxism-Leninism in the so-called Soviet bloc. While the latter were explicitly responsible for regulating the application of core Marxist texts to state ideology, the sacerdotal caste of the postmodernist cult preached the dissolution of explicit state action in social management. Nationalism, racial equality, feminism and socialism itself were relegated to the dustbin of archaic ideologies for social formations that had been dissolved or rendered obsolete by the alleged maturity of identity-based humanism. Possessive individualism, both metaphoric and literal, emerged as the driving force behind the sublimation of citizenship and the exaltation of consumerism as its apogee. Social movements arising from resistance to centuries of Western domination were redefined as mere aggregates of individual ambitions that the new freedom would inevitably manifest. Hence fundamental changes in productive relations and the distribution of political power over whole classes of people were abandoned in favour of enhanced personal opportunities to participate in the pillage by the prevailing system of embedded power. The appointment of a single member of a previously oppressed or subordinated class was interpreted as a sign that the class was no longer the target of the domination against which it had arose in resistance. Class ceased to exist as a meaningful category of human interest. A myriad of excuses were provided to show that there was neither a society nor a power structure in control of it.

In the 1980s the academy-based political cadre, supported by covertly funded career tracks began redesigning all of the systemic criticism that had characterized liberation struggles in anticipation of the radically individualized mass media that would soon dominate the political and economic space contested by all those who, perhaps naively, expected that the United Nations Charter would guarantee their liberation and an end to “non-self-governing territories”. Then just as industrialization provided the means by which chattel slavery could be abandoned, the onset of digitalization began to render organized industrial workforces redundant, depriving them of their practical tools of asserting control over the means of production and the media for social organization necessary to convert that into social power. By the time formal decolonization had increased the membership in the United Nations from 51 in 1951 to 194 in 2024, the capacity of nation-states to develop and protect their citizens had been thoroughly undermined by the absolute corporate control over the intergovernmental body and its agencies. Instead of local industrialization and internal development augmented by fair trade, the blue flag with its wreath encircled polar projection of Earth not only represented the corporate ideal of its founders. It became the banner of a global public-private partnership for the monopoly in the traffic of labour, money, information and with blue helmets armed force.

This was enhanced by the redesign of human development. Instead of the liberation of peoples from centuries of exploitation, the vast majority of the world’s population became de-territorialized. Social development was translated into a mere aggregate of individual enrichment or impoverishment, subject to a global “free” market governed by corporate management on behalf of finance capital. Moreover this postmodern political economy was subjected to the neo-Malthusian strategy of competitive advantage by which nations were converted into warehouses for latent resources to be traded or bunkered according to the exigencies of discounted cash flows. The humanist democratic governance principles imperfectly asserted in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and expanded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were abandoned. Instead they were proclaimed as absorbed in the corporate governance doctrines formalized and propagated by the Anglo-American capitalist theocracy, housed in the leading Business faculties at mainly American universities and non-governmental organizations. It is perhaps no accident that the technology for surrogate childbirth—once highly controversial—was perfected at the same time as NGOs through “civil society” usurped citizenship for whole classes of disenfranchised persons.

As I have argued elsewhere, the political economy of surplus allocation associated with classical economics, e.g. Adam Smith, was transformed into the neo-classical analysis of scarcity at the same time that chattel slavery was abolished in the 1880s. Postmodernism expanded this doctrine to denounce human social development at the end of the Second World War. Instead the value of human society and collective development was reclassified in the global accounting regulations as a threat to an abstract planetary welfare. That planetary welfare, currently promoted in various forms such as Climate Change dogma or DIE (diversity, inclusion, equity) doctrine, is merely a euphemism for the ascendency of finance capital and its neo-feudal oligarchy. Applied to the human race, natural reproduction and economic activity in lived human communities are unacceptable costs, which the management of the global private-public partnership must reduce if the rate of profit and the magnification of centralized power are to be sustained. In cost accounting terms, every human being, excepting the caste of oligarchs and their retainers, is a unit cost that had to be eliminated if the capitalist enterprise is to remain sustainable.

The human development indices cease to reflect increases in the level of nutrition, education, healthy live births and sufficient living conditions in the places real human beings actually inhabit. The preservation of wildlife, whether plant or animal, is only important for sustaining the class of those who claim to own everything. The intergovernmental regime, discretely appropriated and managed by international corporations through their postmodern cadre, measure human development by success in reducing the number of exhaling lungs and depriving those still allowed to breath of the energy resources required to feed, clothe, house and otherwise carry on meaningful lives.

Not satisfied with crushing national independence and development efforts worldwide, local autonomy is to be subverted by means of a pseudo-healthcare regime that grants carte blanche to pharmaments manufacturers and other branches of the armed forces to incarcerate indefinitely or even to poison the population wherever cyclical mayhem and destruction leaves survivors.

In order to preserve the veneer of coherence with the ideals espoused in the UN Charter, the social structures of historical communities are aggressively deprived of their material base. Here “civil society” performs a chimeric function facilitating the current manifestation of global parasitism. Just like the keyboard attached to a computer imitates the function of the manual typewriter, the hyper-individualism embedded in the NGO surrogate pronounces social values of the obsolete modernist humanism while driving computational processes created and controlled by the software and ultimately the hardware of the new feudal estate.

Within this constellation the terms “left”, “right” and “centre” have retained nothing of their original associations. They are entirely inadequate to describe the positions, program, loyalties, or motives of the bureaucratic-sacerdotal class still recruited to perform electoral charades. While those who still go to the polls may try to discern what words are really meant in the storm of gestures and synthetic sound bites, they can be sure that the solution to the riddle their vote has offered is wrong. They may see the hand waving or grimace as an allusion to a tradition they value. They may interpret the high-minded slogan escaping through the lips of some young LSE graduate or a legacy party functionary as a sign that their interest in a decent life and future are supported. They may paint one clown with a red nose and the other with a blue, green or brown one. Yet by the end of the performance, the clowns will remain and they, the audience, will be swept away like so many empty popcorn bags or cold drink cups on the ground. It is a truism that whenever there is some accident or mishap in the midst of a circus performance—they send in the clowns. Unfortunately on the eve of great destruction there are no laughing matters.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

Indigenous support for Palestine around the world has been overwhelming — and Aotearoa New Zealand is no exception, says a leading Māori environmental and human rights advocate.

Writing on her Kia Mau – Resisting Colonial Fictions website, Tina Ngata (Ngati Porou) says that week after week, tangata whenua have been showing support for Palestine since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began last October 7.

“This alone is a mark to the depth of feeling New Zealanders have about this matter, not just that they show up, but that they KEEP showing up, every week,” she wrote.

• READ MORE: Make no mistake – there is no indigenous support for Israel
• Jerusalem opens world’s first ‘Indigenous embassy’
• Israel’s war on Gaza live: Israeli forces kill 6 aid seekers, wound dozens

“In an age where wrongdoers rely on the public to get bored and move on — that hasn’t happened,” said Ngata, an East Coast activist writer who highlights the role of settler colonialism in climate change and waste pollution.

“Quite the opposite, actually — with every week passing, more and more tangata whenua are committing time and effort to understanding and opposing the genocide being carried out by Israel, first and foremost as a matter of their own humanity, but also as a matter of Indigenous solidarity.”

She was responding to publicity over a counter protest earlier this month by Destiny Church members who performed a haka in the middle of a Gaza ceasefire protest in Christchurch.

Thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters have been taking part in weekly rallies across New Zealand in support of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an independent state of Palestine.

More than 31,000 killed
More than 31,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza so far and at least 28 people have died from malnutrition as starvation starts to impact on the besieged enclave due to Israeli border blocks on humanitarian aid trucks.

“As we’ve seen here in Aotearoa (and in so-called United States/Canada and Australia as well), there are always a few Indigenous outliers who are co-opted into colonial agendas, and try to paint their colonialism as being Indigenous,” Ngata wrote.

FARC’s Derek Tait & his gleeful public dehumanising of Palestinian protesters in the name of Destiny Church’s Tu Tangata thugs during a standoff in Ōtautahi yesterday, his racist behaviour & misappropriated haka managing to make last nights lead story on 1 News no less. pic.twitter.com/LodBTMwfNV

— Kelvin Morgan (@kelvin_morganNZ) March 3, 2024

“In Aotearoa, those outliers have names, they are Destiny Church (and their political arm, the ‘Freedom and Rights Coalition’), and the ‘Indigenous Coalition for Israel’.

“This is not Indigenous support for Israel. It is Indigenous people, recruited into colonial support for Israel. It is easily debunked by the following facts:
– Israel is a product of Western colonialism
– Both groups are centered on Euro-Christian conservatism
– Both groups are affiliated with the far-right and white supremacists
– Māori have made it very clear, on our most important political platforms, that we stand with Palestine.”

Ngata wrote that when news media profiled these groups as “Indigenous support for Israel”, it was important to note that a “hallmark of Western domination is the tendency to see Indigenous peoples as a homogenous group”.

“Even the smallest cohort of Indigenous peoples are, within a Western colonial mind (and to Western media), cast as representative of the whole,” she said.

“Equally important to note is that Indigenous people, through the process of colonialism, are regularly co-opted into colonial agendas, and this is often platformed by media to suggest Indigenous support for colonialism.

NZ’s ‘colonial project’
“The most energy-efficient model of colonialism is Indigenous people carrying it out upon each other, and New Zealand’s colonial project has relied heavily upon a strategy of aggressive assimilation and recruitment.”

Ngata wrote that it was clear Israel’s claims of Indigeneity were “unpractised, clumsy [and] unconnected to the global Indigenous struggle and unconnected to the global Indigenous community”.

“This is a natural consequence of the fact that they are colonisers, and up until very recently, proudly claimed that title,” she said.

Unsurprisingly, she added, Israel did not participate in the 2007 UN vote to endorse the Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Researching this story took me down some wild rabbit holes and the challenge was making it all make sense. Israel has been maneuvering in the Pacific for decades.

Israel and the Pacific – a surprisingly close ‘friendship’https://t.co/mUpa3qMtyb

— Indira Stewart (@Indiratweets) March 10, 2024

While 143 countries voted in favour for the declaration at the UN, four voted against — Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, with 11 abstentions, including Samoa. Recent articles and video reports have highlighted some groups in the Pacific supporting Israel, including the establishment of an “Indigenous Embassy” in Jerusalem.

“You know who DOES have a record of showing up at the United Nations as Indigenous Peoples?” asked Ngata.

“Indigenous Palestinians and Bedouin, both of whom have decried the colonial oppression of Israel.”

• Read the full article ‘Make no mistake – there is no Indigenous support for Israel’

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A leading West Papuan advocate has welcomed this week’s launch of the Brussels Declaration in the European Parliament, calling on MPs to sign it.

“The Declaration is an important document, echoing the existing calls for a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights visit to West Papua made by the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), the Organisation of African, Caribbean, and Pacific States (OACPS), and the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG),” said United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) president Benny Wenda.

“I ask all parliamentarians who support human rights, accountability, and international scrutiny to sign it.”

• READ MORE: European Parliament MPs demand UN visit to West Papua
• The Brussels Declaration on West Papua

The Brussels Declaration, organised by the International Parliamentarians for West Papua (IPWP), has also launched a new phase in the campaign for a UN visit.

European parliamentarian Carles Puigdemont, formerly president of the state of Catalonia that broke away illegally from Spain in 2017 and an ex-journalist and editor, said during the meeting that the EU should immediately halt its trade negotiations with Indonesia until Jakarta obeyed the “will of the international community” and granted the UN access.

“Six years have now passed since the initial invite to the High Commissioner was made — six years in which thousands of West Papuans have been killed and over 100,000 displaced,” said Wenda.

“Indonesia has repeatedly demonstrated that words of condemnation are not enough. Without real pressure, they will continue to act with total impunity in West Papua.”

‘Unified call’
Wenda said the call to halt European trade negotiations with Indonesia was not just being made by himself, NGOs, or individual nations.

“it is a unified call by nearly half the world, including the European Commission, for international investigation in occupied West Papua,” he said.

“If Indonesia continues to withhold access, they will merely be proving right all the academics, lawyers, and activists who have accused them of committing genocide in West Papua.

“If there is nothing to hide, why all the secrecy?”

Since 2001, the EU has spent millions of euros funding Indonesian rule in West Papua through the controversial colonial “Special Autonomy” law.

“This money is supposedly earmarked for the advancement of ‘democracy, civil society, [and the] peace process’,” Wenda said.

“Given that West Papua has instead suffered 20 years of colonialism, repression, and police and military violence, we must question where these funds have gone.

‘Occupied land’
“West Papua is occupied land. We have never exercised our right to self-determination, which was cruelly taken from us in 1963.

“States and international bodies, including the EU, should not invest in West Papua until this fundamental right has been realised. Companies and corporations who trade with Indonesia over our land are directly funding our genocide.”

Wenda added “we cannot allow Indonesia any hiding place on this issue — West Papua cannot wait any longer”.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The campaign started two weeks ago with an open call for people to join in a petition and letter-writing campaign urging countries to invoke the genocide convention and charge Israel with genocide in the International Court of Justice. Since then, over 30,000 people signed the petition, accompanied by an impressive 118,290 letters sent to various countries urging support of the cause.

The nationwide delegations of “grassroots diplomats” took on this campaign because officially appointed U.S. diplomats continue to insist on supporting Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, rejecting the sentiments of a majority of people in the U.S. and around the world who want a ceasefire and an end to the slaughter.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby calls South Africa’s 84-page suit accusing Israel of genocide “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.” Notably, the United States supported Ukraine invoking the Genocide Convention last year in the International Court of Justice with far less evidence.

In the first week of January, delegations of grassroots diplomats embarked on a petition and letter delivery campaign across the United States, urging missions, consulates, and embassies to support South Africa’s legal action against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) under the U.N. Convention on Genocide. While the visits and deliveries varied from city to city, the overall reception by staff and representatives in each U.N. Mission, Embassy, and Consulate was encouraging and supportive, with some delegations able to meet directly with country representatives.

The NYC delegation visited around 30 U.N. missions, engaging in significant diplomatic efforts. They had a positive meeting with Colombia’s U.N. Ambassador, Arlene Tickner, exploring the potential for a Declaration of Intervention to support South Africa’s legal action. Another meeting took place with the Deputy Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the U.N. At the Bolivia Mission, the delegation received a warm reception, providing a letter and petition. A productive meeting occurred with the Bangladesh U.N. Consul, who expressed interest in connecting with legal experts. The NYC team met African Union diplomats who offered support and suggested additional efforts for South Africa. A meeting at the South Africa Mission involved discussions with the counselor and Deputy Permanent Representative. The delegation expressed their gratitude and support to the South African government. The South African representative acknowledged and appreciated the delegation’s work in their peace work.

The D.C. team engaged in diplomatic efforts, meeting with the Deputy Minister at the Colombian Embassy to encourage the Colombian government’s continued stance against Israeli actions and to join South Africa’s case. They visited and submitted their petition to the Ghanaian, Chilean, and Ethiopian Embassies, urging support for South Africa’s case against Israel. The team also had discussions with the Bolivian Embassy. Currently, they are arranging a meeting with the Turkish ambassador to further their diplomatic initiatives.

Three delegations from Miami divided their efforts to visit ten consulates, including those of Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, France, Honduras, Ireland, Spain, and Turkey. The delegations had the opportunity to meet with consular generals from Bolivia, Honduras, and Turkey, all notably welcoming and receptive. In addition, the Miami team reached out to the Turkish ambassador in Washington, D.C., further extending their diplomatic efforts. The Türkiye Consulate in Miami emphasized the visit on their social media platform, underscoring the significance of the engagement.

The Tampa team focused on a single visit to the Greek Consulate, accompanied by a representative from CAIR Florida, based in Tampa. CAIR is a nationwide federation of legally independent chapters dedicated to safeguarding the civil liberties of Americans. The Greek Consulate warmly received the delegation, expressing appreciation for a gift of olive oil. Furthermore, they assured the team they would forward the petition and letter to the Embassy of Greece in Washington, D.C., indicating a positive reception and willingness to address the delegation’s concerns.

Orlando engaged with five consulates representing Mexico, Italy, Brazil, Haiti, and Colombia. The meeting at the Haitian Consulate was mainly positive, with a productive discussion with an Assistant Consul urging support for South Africa’s case against Israel. Similarly, the delegation met with the Vice Consular of Colombia, delivered a petition, and urged their support for South Africa’s case against Israel, indicating a proactive approach in advancing their diplomatic efforts.

In Houston, the delegation reported successful engagements during their visits. They met with the Consulate of Belize staff and spoke with Consulate General Francisco Leal of Chile. The Honduran consulate staff extended kindness during their visit. The delegations also visited the Pakistan consulate as part of their diplomatic efforts.

The San Francisco delegation visited three consulates – Chile, Brazil, and Colombia. They engaged with the staff at the Chilean and Brazilian consulates, delivering the petition and letter at the Colombian Consulate, situated in the same building as the Israeli Consulate. Security at the building instructed the delegation to wait outside for a representative. However, the doors were subsequently locked, preventing entry. In response, the delegation affixed the petition and letter to the building’s door to convey their message.

The delegation in Los Angeles visited nine foreign consulates in the city, including Belize, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Turkey, Chile, Colombia, and Kuwait. The delegation expressed gratitude to the staff at the South African Consulate for South Africa’s filing in the ICJ that charges Israel with genocide. As a goodwill gesture, the activists brought flowers, a simple yet well-received token of peace and unity. They also had an encouraging meeting with Bolivian Consulate Gabriella Silva, who supported the delegation’s effort.

Delegations from Detroit, Chicago, Boston, and San Antonio also made visits to their local Consulates. Prior to deliveries, Turkey, Malaysia, and Slovakia publicly came out in support of South Africa’s filing. Since then, Jordan announced that they will file a “Declaration of Intervention” supporting South Africa’s case.

This grassroots diplomatic effort represents a unified plea for justice, demanding global solidarity against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The tireless advocacy seeks to bridge nations in support of South Africa’s pursuit of justice in the International Court of Justice.

Deliveries will continue into the first of next week with the hopes of engaging with as many missions, consulates, and embassies as possible before the start of the ICJ hearing on Jan. 11.

The oral argument of South Africa will take place on Thursday 11th January 2024 and Israel’s oral argument on Friday 12th January 2024. The hearings will be streamed live and on demand on the ICJ’s Website and on the UN Web TV.

The oral argument of South Africa will take place on Thursday 11th January 2024 and Israel’s oral argument on Friday 12th January 2024. The hearings will be streamed live and on demand on the ICJ’s Website and on the UN Web TV.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Melissa Garriga.

This December, as the world marks the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of  Human Rights, which guarantees the basic right to receive and impart information (Article 19), it is vital that everyone can exercise that right. Similarly, international humanitarian law states that journalists are civilians who must be respected and protected by all warring parties. The deliberate targeting of journalists or media infrastructure constitutes a war crime.

Failing to protect journalists in the Israel-Gaza war would be a resounding failure to protect press freedom and our collective right to be informed. The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on the international community, particularly on the 50 countries that make up the Media Freedom Coalition, who have committed to promoting media freedom at home and abroad, to support the following calls to action: 

Protect the lives of journalists

1. Media credentials and press insignia must be respected by all warring parties, who should abstain from obstructing, harassing, shooting, or detaining journalists, who are civilians doing their jobs. As Israel’s intense bombing and ground operations in Gaza continue, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) must follow transparent, rigorous rules of engagement to avoid targeting or causing journalist killings, injuries, and arbitrary arrest. This includes the practice of “administrative detention” or incarceration ordered by an Israeli military commander without charge or time limit, alleging that a person plans to commit an offense.

2. Israel should facilitate access to humanitarian aid and the safe delivery of personal protective equipment to journalists in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.  Journalists, like all civilians in Gaza are struggling to obtain the essentials – such as food, water and sanitary supplies – necessary to live, let alone to report. Israel deems standard protective items, such as helmets and flak jackets, which offer a modicum of safety in a raging conflict, to be military equipment and prevents its transportation to journalists in the Palestinian territories. 

Provide access and the ability to report

3. Egypt and Israel should grant international news organizations access to Gaza so that they may directly cover the hostilities on the ground and related news stories, including the humanitarian toll. More than 2,800 international journalists have arrived in Israel to cover the conflict and received accreditation, according to the Israeli government. 

4. Israel should refrain from imposing further communications blackouts and maintain internet and mobile service. This will allow journalists to continue to report and obtain information from local sources. 

5. All parties should refrain from any legal or regulatory curtailment of media operations. Israel should not pursue restrictions such as the emergency regulations that allow for the shutdown of news organizations and the imprisonment of journalists and others who “hurt national morale,” which would amount to a censorship regime.

  Investigate attacks and end impunity

6. Israel must break its longstanding pattern of impunity in cases of journalists killed by the IDF and investigate all attacks on journalists during the ongoing war. These investigations should be swift, transparent, and thorough, following internationally accepted standards in line with the Minnesota Protocol. Cases where there are credible claims of IDF culpability, such as the attack that killed Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and injured six others in southern Lebanon on October 13, should be prioritized. Where appropriate, other countries should offer technical or other relevant assistance.  

At this dark hour, CPJ stands with journalists, whose daily work keeps us informed with facts that shed light on the human condition and help to hold power to account. We ask that leaders across the world uphold their international commitments, preserve human rights, and defend the rule of law by supporting journalists and press freedom.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

This December, as the world marks the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of  Human Rights, which guarantees the basic right to receive and impart information (Article 19), it is vital that everyone can exercise that right. Similarly, international humanitarian law states that journalists are civilians who must be respected and protected by all warring parties. The deliberate targeting of journalists or media infrastructure constitutes a war crime.

Failing to protect journalists in the Israel-Gaza war would be a resounding failure to protect press freedom and our collective right to be informed. The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on the international community, particularly on the 50 countries that make up the Media Freedom Coalition, who have committed to promoting media freedom at home and abroad, to support the following calls to action: 

Protect the lives of journalists

1. Media credentials and press insignia must be respected by all warring parties, who should abstain from obstructing, harassing, shooting, or detaining journalists, who are civilians doing their jobs. As Israel’s intense bombing and ground operations in Gaza continue, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) must follow transparent, rigorous rules of engagement to avoid targeting or causing journalist killings, injuries, and arbitrary arrest. This includes the practice of “administrative detention” or incarceration ordered by an Israeli military commander without charge or time limit, alleging that a person plans to commit an offense.

2. Israel should facilitate access to humanitarian aid and the safe delivery of personal protective equipment to journalists in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.  Journalists, like all civilians in Gaza are struggling to obtain the essentials – such as food, water and sanitary supplies – necessary to live, let alone to report. Israel deems standard protective items, such as helmets and flak jackets, which offer a modicum of safety in a raging conflict, to be military equipment and prevents its transportation to journalists in the Palestinian territories. 

Provide access and the ability to report

3. Egypt and Israel should grant international news organizations access to Gaza so that they may directly cover the hostilities on the ground and related news stories, including the humanitarian toll. More than 2,800 international journalists have arrived in Israel to cover the conflict and received accreditation, according to the Israeli government. 

4. Israel should refrain from imposing further communications blackouts and maintain internet and mobile service. This will allow journalists to continue to report and obtain information from local sources. 

5. All parties should refrain from any legal or regulatory curtailment of media operations. Israel should not pursue restrictions such as the emergency regulations that allow for the shutdown of news organizations and the imprisonment of journalists and others who “hurt national morale,” which would amount to a censorship regime.

  Investigate attacks and end impunity

6. Israel must break its longstanding pattern of impunity in cases of journalists killed by the IDF and investigate all attacks on journalists during the ongoing war. These investigations should be swift, transparent, and thorough, following internationally accepted standards in line with the Minnesota Protocol. Cases where there are credible claims of IDF culpability, such as the attack that killed Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and injured six others in southern Lebanon on October 13, should be prioritized. Where appropriate, other countries should offer technical or other relevant assistance.  

At this dark hour, CPJ stands with journalists, whose daily work keeps us informed with facts that shed light on the human condition and help to hold power to account. We ask that leaders across the world uphold their international commitments, preserve human rights, and defend the rule of law by supporting journalists and press freedom.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

Solitude for the Romantic movements emerged as a process of disengagement. By withdrawing from the noise of society artistic (creative) potential could be enhanced. Contemplation was often focused on nature or introspection. The work produced in the process, whether in literature or visual arts, created an iconography for human isolation and alienation. At the same time, nature served as a source of potential redemption from all those sources of alienation found in society. Nature in various forms also became a repository of the divine. The paintings of Caspar David Friedrich are well-known examples for this process in the visual arts. The Prelude, by William Wordsworth, is certainly exemplary in the literary arts.

Wordsworth began The Prelude in 1799 and finished it in 1805, although he made several revisions in the course of his life. The poem can be understood as a literary investigation into the forces and events that shaped the personality of the author and his poetical labour. In Book Four he wrote:

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude-
How potent a mere image of her sway!
Most potent when impressed upon the mind
With an appropriate human centre: hermit,
Deep in the bosom of the wilderness;
Votary (in vast cathedral, where no foot
Is treading, where no other face is seen)
Kneeling at prayers; or watchman on the top
Of lighthouse, beaten by Atlantic waves;
Or as the soul of that great Power is met
Sometimes embodied on a public road,
When, for the night deserted, it assumes
A character of quiet more profound
Than pathless wastes.[1]

Wordsworth began as a great supporter of the French Revolution and ended greatly disappointed by it. The poem examines the path that transformed him into a revolutionary and led him away from revolution in the end. The revolution had promised to reorganise society along principles of equality as articulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Wordsworth and others felt it had failed. The dictatorship and imperial ambition of Napoleon Bonaparte were proof that it was impossible to create a society based on New Testament equality by removing the divinely ordained monarchy.

It is important to add here that these judgements were based on reports scarcely more circumspect than found in today’s mass media. Wordsworth would not have been able to see the results of the Jacobin societies in the provinces or to measure the violence with which the changes introduced were opposed by the counter-revolution with its foreign supporters. The rejection of the French Revolution by much of the English intellectual caste and England’s emergent cultural power in the 19th century constitute a bias which still overshadows the appreciation of the 1789 revolution beyond the English-speaking world. Even today very little attention is given to the counter-revolution and foreign intervention. Almost all school and university texts focus on the Jacobins and the so-called Terror, although the “White Terror” killed substantially more people.

At the same time the foundation of what we once recognized as modern science, evolving as it did from the same cultural context, emerged as the product of solitary investigation. In fact by the end of the 19th century the image of the scientist and the artist merged as solitary investigators, discoverers and innovators were ranked among the upper strata of Western society and the artistic creator/ scientific genius became clichés.

The solitude, whether in science or the arts, was in many ways a recovery of the penitentiary tradition in the Latin Church. In order to discover god and attain grace it was necessary to exercise as close to purity as possible. If artistic or scientific truth approached that of the divine or substituted for it, then it was also to be obtained by the investigator isolated from sources of corruption thus able to perceive pure data. The scientist sought this isolation in research performed in private laboratories that were sometimes associated with university faculties. The concept of academic freedom—a secularization of monastic privileges—was interpreted to assure the necessary solitude for unbiased research and pursuit of truth. Thus although scientific research is inevitably a collective activity, the fiction of solitary research was created by formally isolating the university from daily political and commercial interests.

The artist sought places in the countryside or abandoned his native land for a self-imposed exile or quest. George Gordon Byron’s death in the Greek war of independence in 1824 is only the most notorious.

By the end of the 19th century the literary-artistic and scientific-scholarly caste was endowed with its own ethic and processes for transforming the pure into the true. This ideal was based on a critique of society’s corruption and the striving to transcend it. The bearer of this ideal was to become the autonomous self, solitude incarnate.

Following the defeat of Napoleon the Congress of Vienna not only restored the monarchical system, if somewhat “embourgeoised”, it reinstalled the deification of truth and knowledge as something otherworldly in origin. As Nietzsche observed at the end of the century, god was restored in all but name, while the name of “god” became an empty category, a mere symbol for the will to power.

The emergence of the autonomous Self, whose access to identity and truth derived from exercises in solitude, derived from two traditions. One, already mentioned, was the penitentiary. The individual withdraws from society as a source of sin and by contemplation, absorption and submission to God attains a higher degree of grace and eventually redemption from the sins with which society has soiled him.

The other tradition is that of natural divinity. The individual withdraws in order to contemplate and then engage the creative forces of nature. By comprehending them the artist becomes an agent of creation. Like nature he becomes capable of producing exemplifications of truth. The truth-value of these exemplifications is claimed by virtue of the method applied to create them. This is sometimes called “scientific method” or “artistic creativity”. Until recently it has been assumed that integrity of the respective methods was essential to the value of the product.

The Romantics found that solitude created the conditions by which they could contemplate the problems with which they had been confronted in society. The psychic isolation of the countryside or a foreign environment permitted them to focus on what remained in them when they were no longer influenced by daily social interaction. The longer the isolation continued the more they were exposed to themselves. In some cases this resulted in a “stripping” of their personalities down to the basics, e.g. the interaction of the human with nature unmitigated by social instructions. At some point the artist or scholar would arrive at an essence from which his personality could be redesigned, primarily through the creative or investigative work. The principle can be illustrated simply enough. If anyone has been left alone with a problem long enough, especially one which is highly conventionalized but for which there is no external solution available, there is at least a tendency for the person to use whatever means are at his disposal to solve the problem—even if they are unconventional. If a person is left in a group with the same problem and attempts to use that unconventional method, he will likely feel enormous pressure to abandon it in favour of the approach used by everyone else in the group.

One of the additional products of this solitude, voluntary psychic isolation, is to develop the strength of persona necessary to reproduce the solution created even under social pressure. Thus solitude is not only a strategy for stripping but for clothing the Self. There is certainly enough anecdotal evidence to justify statements like “he is too headstrong because he has been working alone too long.” One of the Romantic contributions to cultural transformation has been the adaptation of solitude to the modern scientific construction of the Self.

The Self as envisioned by the Romantics was a liberated personality, freed from the oppressive social structures and thus able to act as an agent of social transformation. However another Self was developed in response to the revolutionary impulses.

In 2002, British filmmaker Adam Curtis produced a television documentary, roughly based on a book by Stuart Ewen, called The Century of the Self. [2] Curtis’ central thesis is that the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, initiated and for a while led a movement that would turn the concept of the Self into the central instrument of social control in the West. In his study of public relations, the euphemism for propaganda Bernays introduced after World War I, Ewen explains how the culture of the Self was appropriated and exploited by corporate and political communications actors (Business and Government) to produce a society of individuals who believe themselves to be autonomous but are in fact manipulated in their every thought and move. Bernays drew on his uncle’s theories of the unconscious to show that control could be exercised over people by speaking to what they “really” thought and felt as opposed to what they actually said.

Instead of individuals—as the Romantics imagined—creating an authentic Self and entering society to act on the basis of this authenticity, Bernays and his successors devised methods they believed would suggest to the masses of isolated individuals ways they could reconstruct themselves in the interests of those who rule society. This presumed that one could create individuals in isolation that could be sufficiently alienated to engage in searching strategies. The aim was to exploit industrial and especially post-war psychic distress among masses of people whose lives had been irreversibly affected by the world war. These people would be encouraged in their sense of alienation. That alienation would be labelled individualism. The emotional duress would be sustained by graduated fear. This fear was sublimated in the reconstitution of groups of alienated individuals.

Curtis’s 4-episode film continues with a focus on commercial activity. Edward Bernays argued if he was able to produce advertising that would persuade people to go to war and fight he ought to be able to do this to sell products. After World War I ended the US was faced with massive overproduction. There were just too many goods that had been produced just to be wasted in war and now the plant lay idle and the goods collected dust in warehouses. Modern advertising was initiated to move those goods and restore the enormous profitability of wartime industrial manufacturing. He shows that creating desires and fears were complementary aims. On one hand the individual has to be freed from inhibitions like thrift, morality, social responsibility, or just a realistic assessment of his financial condition. The objective impositions of society are to be stripped from him so that he can feel his true nature as a desiring subject. Then he is intensively exposed to the prefabricated objects he ought to desire. This process is stimulated by fear, either the inability to satisfy those desires or the injection of ever more desires for which he has not yet the means of satisfaction. Dissatisfaction and fear are the constant state in which the individual is to be confined. Society does not offer him comfort, whether as routine or sustenance. Instead it exposes him to continuous competition for the satisfaction of the desires cultivated in him during his enforced isolation. Society becomes a machine for enforcing the private desires and the cycles of satisfaction – dissatisfaction, safety – fear that are translated into spending and consumption.

This process of alienation could not have become industrialized without political force. At the same time as individualism was being encouraged, Business and the State were waging vicious war against any genuinely autonomous collectivities like labour unions and popular movements, especially communism in the industrialized world and anti-colonialism/ nationalism among the peoples subjugated by colonial and imperial rule. Although Business was certainly enamoured with Bernays’ approach to mass marketing of products and services, there was also great demand for technologies of the “Self” by state actors.

The State’s interest in the Self, as opposed to the citizen, has not ceased. Curtis shows how the CIA and other covert agencies of the State promoted large-scale experimentation with the technology for creating or modifying the “Self”. One of the most notorious was the work of Dr Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal during the 1950s and 1960s. There experiments were performed on people who were subjected to pharmaceutical treatment in combination with electro-shocks and various degrees of sensory deprivation. The principle driving this work was that humans could have their consciousness erased and be “reprogrammed” on demand.

Although the Allan Memorial was eventually closed and Dr Cameron’s work denounced, there is no evidence that this kind of involuntary psychic isolation for political and social engineering goals has discontinued. The rudimentary descriptions available of programs run by the CIA and US military at the Guantanamo Detention Center, US Naval Base Guantanamo Cuba since the beginning of the century bear similarities to those run by Dr Cameron so great that they ought to be equally disturbing. Yet despite numerous pledges this center remains in operation with some 700 persons incarcerated at last count.[3]

The mass incarceration, appropriately denoted with prison jargon as “lockdowns”, organized and enforced to varying degrees from March 2020 to the end of 2021 has been excused by medical grounds discredited almost as soon as the public health authorities proposed them. Studies are only beginning to emerge that raise the question: what were the real reasons for these forced isolations, in innumerable cases, solitude and involuntary psychic isolation.

One of Dr Cameron’s experiments was to use covert media, e.g. hidden audio recordings, to introduce thoughts and verbalization to the brain of his presumably erased subject. The recordings would be played during the sleep sessions.

When the first reports and complaints about torture in Guantanamo Detention Center became public there was frequent mention of forced exposure to loud music and audio-visual material the prisoner would presumably find offensive. Sensory deprivation was combined with saturation exposure to foreign stimuli.

During the so-called “lockdowns” I was particularly struck by the closures and domestic incarceration in Portugal. In 2005, I was in Fatima for the first time. My friend and I were amazed at the people assembling there. Cripples of all sorts, people visibly disfigured or disabled by every conceivable illness made their way to the sanctuary. They were on their way to ask for the blessing and healing power of the Holy Virgin, Mother of God. Who knows if any of them had infectious illnesses? The power of the Almighty was present and able to heal. Yet during the mass incarceration the Shrine of Fatima was closed. Had I still been a practicing member of the Latin Church I would have been in uproar. How could the State presume to be more powerful than Our Lord and the Mother of God? How could anyone presume to keep me from the omnipotent divine?

To end, again with Wordsworth:

Oh, yet a few short years of useful life,
And all will be complete, thy race be run,
Thy monument of glory will be raised!
Then, though (too weak to tread the ways of truth)
This age fall back to old idolatry,
Though men return to servitude as fast
As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame
By nations sink together, we shall still
Find solace—knowing what we have learnt to know,
Rich in true happiness if allowed to be
Faithful alike in forwarding a day

Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the work
(Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe)
Of their deliverance, surely yet to come.
Prophets of Nature, we to them speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blessed by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which, mid all revolution in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine.
(“The Prelude,” Book fourteen, 430-454)

ENDNOTES

[1] William Wordsworth, “The Prelude” cited from The Prelude and other Poems, Alma Classics (2019)

[2] Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin, New York, 1996; Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, originally released on BBC Two in 2002. Available on YouTube.

[3] From the time the US Government announced its program of “extraordinary renditions” and incarceration of “terrorists” at its illegally occupied south-eastern Cuba naval station, Guantanamo Bay aka as GITMO, there have been estimates and official claims ranging between 1,500 and 20 over the past two decades. Thus far there is no way to be certain exactly how many prisoners were or are held at this high security naval base. Therefore 700 is considered a conservative number, even if it may exceed current official claims.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

Photograph Source: El contenido de Pixabay se pone a su disposición en los siguientes términos (“Licencia de Pixabay”) – CC0

At the conclusion of the Second World War, debates raged on how best to regulate the destructive power of the atom.  Splitting it had been used most savagely against the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, thereby ending, to date, the globe’s costliest war.  Visions also abounded on the promise and glory of harnessing such energy.  But the competitive element of pursuing nuclear power never abated, and attempts at international regulation were always going to be subordinate to Realpolitik.  Yet even at such a tense juncture in human relations, it would have been absurd, for instance, to have excluded such a major power as the Soviet Union from such discussions.

Over the first few days of November, at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, we saw something akin to that parochial silliness take place regarding discussions on the safe development of artificial intelligence (AI).  While the People’s Republic of China was not entirely barred from attending proceedings at UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s widely advertised AI Safety Summit, it was given a shrunken role.

The very fact that China has any role to play was enough to send Liz Truss, Britain’s stupendously disastrous, short-lived former Prime Minister, into a state of spluttering agitation.  In a failed effort to badger her successor via letter to rescind the initial invitation to Beijing, she revealed how “deeply disturbed” she was that representatives from the evil Oriental Empire would be participating.  “The regime in Beijing has a fundamentally different attitude to the West about AI, seeing it as a means of state control and a tool for national security.”

Seeing the Middle Kingdom was uniquely disposed to technological manipulation – because liberal democratic governments apparently have no interest in using AI for reasons of controlling their subjects – she failed to see how any “reasonable person” could expect “China to abide by anything agreed at this kind of summit given their cavalier attitude to international law.”

Sunak, to his credit, showed some mettle in parrying such suggestions.  In a speech delivered on October 26, he owned up to his belief that China needed to be invited.  “I know there are some who will say they should have been excluded.  But there can be no serious strategy for AI without at least trying to engage all of the world’s leading AI powers.”

Despite this, Sunak was hardly going to give Beijing unfettered access to each and every event.  Some minor form of segregation would still be maintained.  As UK Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden stated with strained hospitality, “There are some sessions where we have like-minded countries working together, so it might not be appropriate for China to join.”  Largely because of that sentiment, Chinese delegates were, for the most part, excluded at public events for the second day of the summit.

From within the summit itself, it was clear that limiting Beijing’s AI role would do little to advance the argument on the development of such technologies.  A number of Chinese delegates attending the summit had already endorsed a statement showing even greater concern for the “existential risk” posed by AI than either the Bletchley statement or President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI issued at the end of October.  According to the Financial Times, the group, distinguished by such figures as the computer scientist Andrew Yao, are calling for the establishment of “an international regulatory body, the mandatory registration and auditing of advanced AI systems, the inclusion of instant ‘shutdown’ procedures and for developers to spend 30 per cent of their research budget on AI safety.”

For the Sinophobe lobby, one awkward fact presents itself: China has made giddy strides in the field, having made it a policy priority in its New Generation AI Development Plan in 2017.  The policy goes so far as to acknowledge, in many ways providing a foretaste of the Bletchley deliberations, the need to “[s]trengthen research on legal, ethical, and social issues related to AI, and establish laws, regulations and ethical frameworks to ensure the healthy development of AI.”  Some of this is bound to be aspirational in the way that other documents of this sort are, but there is at least some acknowledgment of the issue.

Precisely for its progress in the field, China is being punished by that other contender for AI supremacy, the United States.  Despite some forced sense of bonhomie among the delegates, such fault lines were nigh impossible to paper over.  On October 17, the US Department of Commerce announced that further restrictions would be placed on advanced AI chips along with the imposition of additional licensing requirements for shipments to 40 countries to prevent resales to China.  One company, Nvidia, was told directly by the department that it had to immediately cease shipping A800 and H800 chips to the Chinese market without licensed authorisation from the US.

The final Bletchley Declaration opens with the view that AI “presents enormous global opportunities: it has the potential to transform and enhance human wellbeing, and prosperity.”  With that in mind, the signatories affirmed “that, for the good of all, AI should be designed, developed, deployed, and used, in a manner that is safe, in such a way as to be human-centric, trustworthy and responsible.”  But the vision risks being irreparably fractured, contaminated by such fears so crudely expressed by Truss.  The view from the signatories present is that the AI frontier presents ecstatic opportunity and potential calamity.  But how that vision is duly realised will depend on what is decided upon and whether those rules will be observed.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

… while Lord Sydenham warned: “What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

It extends all the way to this horror-show 106 years later.

What the latest phase of the Palestine-Israel struggle teaches us is that UK and other Western media are determined to bully anyone with pro-Palestine views into condemning Hamas as terrorists.

Even the Palestinian ambassador to Britain, Husam Zomlot, was cruelly treated in this way by a BBC interviewer only hours after several of the poor man’s family had been indiscriminately killed in an Israeli revenge attack.

And political leaders, acting like the Zionist Inquisition, are threatening anyone who voices criticism of Israel with expulsion from their party.

Even the BBC has been pressured by the Government’s culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, to call Hamas “terrorists” instead of “militants”. The BBC (so far) has resisted her silliness. Ms Frazer is Jewish and served an internship with the Israeli Ministry of Justice.

And while our Government was projecting an image of the Israeli flag onto the front of 10 Downing Street to emphasise solidarity with the apartheid regime our home secretary, Suella Braverman, was threatening Palestinian flag wavers with prosecution.

Our monarch King Charles III has graciously favoured us with a royal opinion. “His Majesty is appalled by and condemns the barbaric acts of terrorism in Israel,” a palace spokesperson said. And a spokes for Prince William and his wife, Kate, said they were “profoundly distressed by the devastating events that have unfolded in the past days. The horrors inflicted by Hamas’ terrorist attack upon Israel are appalling; they utterly condemn them. As Israel exercises its right of self-defence, all Israelis and Palestinians will continue to be stalked by grief, fear and anger in the time to come.” No mention of the “barbaric” day-to-day terror tactics by Israel which led up to the present crisis. Or the Palestinians’ right of self-defence.

A response to these attempts to humiliate and punish could simply be: “and when did you last condemn Israel for its 75 years of atrocities?” Or “if Hamas committed war crimes why is Israel responding with even bigger war crimes?”

The crisis has brought from the US an unforgettably half-witted speech which conjured up the priceless image of Biden supergluing himself to Netanyahu’s backside in a pathetic show of undying unity.

And after all the nonsense uttered in high places sincere thanks go to Moeen Ali, the England cricket vice-captain, who posted on social media a quote from Malcolm X: “If you’re not careful the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Sadly it has already happened.

So what exactly is driving our Establishment élite to defend and revere a criminal regime whose inhumane policies disgust ordinary folk?

Who started it all?

Should we go back 106 years and pin it on Balfour? Or 75 years when Zionist militias rampaged through Palestine massacring, pillaging and driving local residents from their homes as they pursued ‘Plan Dalet’, their ethnic cleansing blueprint for a violent and bloody takeover of the Holy Land? Or 2006 when Israel (backed by US and UK) began the siege of Gaza after Hamas won the 2006 elections fair and square according to international observers.

It helps to understand a little of the earlier history too. There was a Jewish state in the Holy Land some 3,000 years ago, but the Canaanites and Philistines were there first. The Jews, one of several invading groups, left and returned several times, and were expelled by the Roman occupation in 70AD and again in 135AD. Since the 7th century Palestine has been mainly Arabic, coming under Ottoman rule in 1516.

During the First World War the country was ‘liberated’ from the Turkish Ottomans after the Allied Powers, in correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon and Sharif Hussein ibn Ali of Mecca in 1915, promised independence to Arab leaders in return for their help in defeating Germany’s ally, Turkey. However, a new Jewish political movement called Zionism was finding favour among the ruling élite in London, and the British Government was persuaded by the Zionists’ chief spokesman, Chaim Weizman, to surrender Palestine for their new Jewish homeland. Hardly a thought, it seems, was given to the earlier pledge to the Arabs, who had occupied and owned the land for 1,500 years – longer than the Jews ever did.

The Zionists, fuelled by the notion that an ancient Biblical prophecy gave them the title deeds, aimed to push the Arabs out by populating the area with millions of Eastern European Jews. They had already set up farm communities and founded a new city, Tel Aviv, but by 1914 Jews still numbered only 85,000 to the Arabs’ 615,000.

The infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 – actually a letter from the British foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, to the most senior Jew in England, Lord Rothschild – pledged assistance for the Zionist cause with no regard for the consequences to the native majority.

Calling itself a “declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations”, it said:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing and non-Jewish communities…

Balfour, a Zionist convert and arrogant with it, wrote: “In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now occupy that land.”

There was opposition, of course. Lord Sydenham warned: “The harm done by dumping down an alien population upon an Arab country may never be remedied. What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

And Lord Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the Cabinet, was strongly opposed to the whole idea and to Zionism itself, which he called “a mischievous political creed”. He wrote to his Cabinet colleagues:

…I assume that it means that Mahommedans [Muslims] and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.

Nevertheless his Zionist cousin Herbert Samuel was appointed the first High Commissioner of the British Mandate of Palestine, a choice that showed impartiality was never a priority.

The American King-Crane Commission of 1919 thought it a gross violation of principle. “No British officers consulted by the Commissioners believed that the Zionist programme could be carried out except by force of arms. That, of itself, is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist programme.”

There were other reasons why the British were courting disaster. A secret deal, called the Sykes-Picot Agreement, had been concluded in 1916 between France and Britain, in consultation with Russia, to re-draw the map of the Middle Eastern territories won from Turkey. Britain was to take Jordan, Iraq and Haifa. The area now referred to as Palestine was declared an international zone.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration and the promises made earlier in the McMahon-Hussein letters all cut across each other. It seems to have been a case of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing in the confusion of war.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 Lenin released a copy of the confidential Sykes-Picot Agreement into the public domain, sowing seeds of distrust among the Arabs. Thus the unfolding story had all the makings of a major tragedy.

And now another spanner has been tossed into the works. Law expert Dr Ralph Wilde argues that Article 22 of the 1923 League of Nations ‘Mandate Agreement’ for Palestine required provisional independence to be conferred on Palestine and that this could not be lawfully bypassed. Britain’s failure, as the Mandated power, to comply was a violation of international law then with ongoing consequences now, and is therefore a basis for action today.

Article 22 says that those colonies and territories which, as a consequence of World War 1, ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and are not yet able to stand by themselves should come under the tutelage of “advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position can best be exercised by them as Mandatories on behalf of the League…. Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognizedsubject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatoryuntil such time as they are able to stand alone.”

So Britain’s underhandedness is exposed again.

And who started the Palestine-Israel war that inevitably broke out 25 years later? Read the history – it’s all documented. And no, they don’t teach it in schools, it’s far too embarrassing for this ‘great power’.

The slaughter has been horrific

Today, propaganda would have us believe that Israelis have continuously suffered at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. But it’s actually the other way around. Don’t take my word for it, just look at the figures supplied by Israeli NGO B’Tselem which was established in 1989 by a group of Israeli lawyers, doctors and academics to document human rights violations in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and combat any denial that such violations happened. The previous year had seen the First Intifada (uprising) in which Israeli forces killed 311 Palestinians, 53 of whom were under the age of 17.

The figures compiled by B’Tselem run from 29 September 2000 (the start of the Second Intifada) to 27 September 2023.

• Palestinians killed by Israeli forces 10,555
• Palestinians killed by Israeli civilians 96
• Palestinians Killed by unknowns 16
• Total 10,667
• Israeli forces killed by Palestinians 449
• Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians 881
• Total 1,330

So Israelis are far more proficient at killing fellow humans and they’ve been killing Palestinians at the rate of 8:1. Worse still is the butchery of children. The figures show 2,270 Palestinian children killed versus 145 Israeli children, a ratio of nearly 16:1. And when it comes to women it’s 656 Palestinians to 261 Israelis, about 2.5:1.

These statistics are available to everyone. What’s extraordinary is the large number of senior politicians who, with one voice it seems, condemn Hamas and sympathise with Israel. Why would they rush to protect the feelings of an apartheid state that has been brutally oppressing, murdering, dispossessing and generally making life unbearable for Palestinian in their own homeland?

That said, nobody is approving Hamas’s methods (if they have been reported accurately) which may have alienated a lot of otherwise sympathetic supporters and damaged the Palestinian cause. But the facts show that what they did a few days ago was nothing compared to the Israelis’ 75 years of terror and oppression.

Israel is notorious for its disinformation, or ‘hasbara’, and Hamas say their fighters have been targeting Israeli military and security posts and bases – all of which are legitimate targets – and seeking to avoid hurting civilians. They call on Western mainstream media “to seek both truth and accuracy in reporting on the ongoing Israeli aggression against the besieged Gaza Strip”.

But this is an era of false flags, deception and plain bad journalism, as we’ve seen from Ukraine, so mainstream media cannot be trusted. I’ve watched the media eagerly interviewing Israeli families who live close to the Gaza border and commiserating their loss. But, on reflection, what do you think of people who have spent years nextdoor to a security fence on the other side of which their government has cruelly incarcerated another people for 17 years, denying them essential power supplies, water, food, medicines, goods, and freedom of movement, while bombing them regularly in a diabolical policy called “mowing the grass”, and even limiting access to their own coastal waters and blocking access to their marine gasfield…. and don’t seem in the least concerned that such hideous crimes are perpetrated in their name? How innocent are they?

Self-defence?

Then there’s the endlessly repeated claim the Israel has a right to defend itself. But Israel is illegally occupying the Palestinians’ homeland and using military force to maintain its grip and to tightly control every aspect of the Palestinians’ increasingly miserable lives. As for Israel’s armed squatters, they have been implanted outside their own territory and are classified as war criminals. Like Israel’s army of ongoing occupation they are the aggressors and have no right of self-defence. The Palestinians on the other hand, being subjected to an illegal military occupation, are the ones with the right under international law to defend themselves.

What gives them that right is United Nations Resolution 37/43 of 3 December 1982 which is concerned with “the universal realization of the right of peoples to self-determination and of the speedy granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples for the effective guarantee and observance of human rights…. Considering that the denial of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, sovereignty, independence and return to Palestine and the repeated acts of aggression by Israel against the people of the region constitute a serious threat to international peace and security, [the Resolution]

1. Calls upon all States to implement fully and faithfully all the resolutions of the United Nations regarding the exercise of the right to self-determination and independence by peoples under colonial and foreign domination;

2. Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for their independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”

It goes on to strongly condemn “the constant and deliberate violations of the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, as well as the expansionist activities of Israel in the Middle East, which constitute an obstacle to the achievement of self-determination and independence by the Palestinian people and a threat to peace and stability in the region.”

That we are still waiting after 40+ years for these fine principles to be implemented shows how useless the UN really is and how little the major powers value international law unless it happens to suit their own often questionable purposes.

Jewish voices

JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace) has sent me their latest statement:

We wholeheartedly agree with leading Palestinian rights groups: the massacres committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians are horrific war crimes. There is no justification in international law for the indiscriminate killing of civilians or the holding of civilian hostages.

And now, horrifyingly, the Israeli and American governments are weaponizing these deaths to fuel a genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, pledging to “open the gates of hell.” This war is a continuation of the Nakba, when in 1948, tens of thousands of Palestinians fleeing violence sought refuge in Gaza. It’s a continuation of 75 years of Israeli occupation and apartheid.

Already this week, over 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed. The Israeli government has wrought complete and total devastation on Palestinians across Gaza, attacking hospitals, schools, mosques, marketplaces, and apartment buildings.

As we write, the Israeli government has shut off all electricity to Gaza. Hospitals cannot save lives, the internet will collapse, people will have no phones to communicate with the outside world, and drinking water for two million people will run out. Gaza will be plunged into darkness as Israel turns its neighborhoods to rubble. Still worse, Israel has openly stated an intention to commit mass atrocities and even genocide, with Prime Minister Netanyahu saying the Israeli response will “reverberate for generations.

And right now, the U.S. government is enabling the Israeli government’s atrocities, sending weapons, moving U.S. warships into proximity and sending U.S.-made munitions, and pledging blanket support and international cover for any actions taken by the Israeli government. Furthermore, the U.S. government officials are spreading racist, hateful, and incendiary rhetoric that will fuel mass atrocities and genocide.

The loss of Israeli lives is being used by our government to justify the rush to genocide, to provide moral cover for the immoral push for more weapons and more death. Palestinians are being dehumanized by our own government, by the media, by far too many U.S. Jewish institutions. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Israel is “fighting human animals” and should “act accordingly,” As Jews, we know what happens when people are called animals.

We can and we must stop this. Never again means never again — for anyone. [bold added]

Thank you JVP. Amen to that.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

After all, don’t the continuing wars in Africa, the still pending “United Nations” war against the DPRK (where there is only a 70-year-old armistice since 1953), and the innumerable economic wars being waged in places and ways we do not even know, deserve to end too?

Like the war in the Ukraine, one will hear how complicated these wars are. They cannot be simply ended. Yet they are all simple in one material way: without the US and its NATO cut-outs—often the principal aggressor in violation of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty—many of these wars would never have started or would have long ago been resolved. So why not demand that the US stop waging wars and why not apply sanctions to the US for its belligerence and violations of the law of nations? How can the United Nations end wars when it cannot even end the one it started in 1951? Could it be that too many of the parties among those who convene to call for peace, really need and want just a piece of the action?

The two military veterans probably best known for criticising US policy in Ukraine, Colonel Douglas MacGregor USA and Major Scott Ritter USMC, have said loud and clear that at least from a military standpoint the Ukrainian armed forces have lost the war against Russia. There have been numerous voices calling for an end to the conflict, not least because the more than USD 46 billion and counting in military aid alone, has yet to produce any of the results announced as aims of what has finally been admitted is a war against Russia.ⁱ If Mr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine’s government in Kiev, is to be taken at face value, then the hostilities can only end when Crimea and the Donbas regions are fully under Kiev’s control and Vladimir Putin has been removed from office as president of the Russian Federation. To date no commentator has adequately explained how those war aims are to be attained. This applies especially after the conservatively estimated 400,000 deaths and uncounted casualties in the ranks of Kiev’s forces since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in February 2022.

Before considering the political and economic issues it is important to reiterate a few military facts, especially for those armchair soldiers who derive their military acumen from TV and Hollywood films. As MacGregor and Ritter, both of whom have intimate practical knowledge of warfare, have said: Armies on the ground need supplies, i.e. food, weapons, ammunition, medical care for wounded, etc. These supplies have to be delivered from somewhere. In ancient times, armies could live off the land. Essentially this was through looting and plunder—stealing their food from the local population as they marched. To prevent the local population from becoming the enemy in the rear and avoid early exhaustion of local supply, generals started paying for what was requisitioned. Defending forces would often withdraw the civilian population and destroy what could not be taken to avoid supplying their enemies. In fact, this kind of rough warfare against civilians still occurs although it has been forbidden under the Law of Land Warfare.ⁱⁱ Naturally the soldier in the field can no longer make weaponry. Even less can they be plundered from the local inhabitants—unless one comes across some tribe the US has armed with Stingers. All the weapons the Ukrainian armed forces deploy have to be imported from countries with manufacturing capacity. As the two retired officers, among others, have said, such capacity is unavailable to the Ukraine. Obviously it would also be unavailable to NATO forces were they to deploy in Ukraine in any numbers. It is illusory to believe that a NATO army can do what the Wehrmacht could not some eighty years ago with three million men under arms and the most modern army of its day. This was so obvious from the beginning that one has to wonder why this war ever started. Is it possible that wars are started without any intention of winning them? If winning the war is not the objective, then what is?

Forgery and force: Explicit and implicit or latent and expressed foreign policy

Historical documents are essential elements in any attempt to understand the past and the present. However, this is not because they are necessarily true or accurate. Forgeries and outright lies are also important parts of the historical record. Perhaps the most notorious forgery in Western history is the so-called Donation of Constantine. This document was used to legitimate papal supremacy and the primacy of the Latin over the Greek Church. Although it did not take long for the forgery to be discovered, the objective was accomplished. Even today most people in the West have learned that the part of the Christian Church called Orthodoxy is schismatic when the reverse is true, namely the Latin Church arose from a coup d’état against Constantinople.

There is now no shortage of evidence that the British Empire forced the German Empire into the Great War and with US help justified the slaughter of some four million men, ostensibly to expel German forces from Belgium. There is systematically suppressed testimony by commanders in the field and others in a position to know that the Japanese attack on the US colonial base at Pearl Harbor was not only no surprise but a carefully crafted event exploited to justify US designs on Japan and China. Yet to this day the myth of surprise attack against a neutral country prevails over the historical facts. Even though there is almost popular acceptance that the US invasion of Iraq was based on entirely fabricated evidence and innuendo, the destruction of the country was not stopped and continues as of this writing.

What does that tell us about historical record and official statements of policy? Former POTUS and CIA director, George H.W. Bush expressed the principle that government lies did not matter because the lie appears on page one and the retraction or correction on page 28. In short, it is the front page that matters. That is what catches and keeps the public’s attention. Truth and accuracy are immaterial.

Let us consider for a moment one of the most durable wonders of published state policy—the Balfour Declaration. This brief letter signed by one Arthur Balfour on 2 November 1917 was addressed to the Lord Rothschild, in his capacity as some kind of conduit for the Zionist Federation. Carroll Quigley in his The Anglo-American Establishment strongly suggests that Lord Rothschild, also in his capacity as a sponsor of the Milner Round Table group, presented the letter for Mr Balfour to sign. As Quigley also convincingly argues the academic and media network created by the Round Table has successfully dominated the writing of British imperial history making it as suspicious as the Vatican’s history of the Latin Church.

This “private” letter to the British representative of the West’s leading banking dynasty is then adopted as the working principle for the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine awarded to the British Empire. From this private letter an international law mandate was created, continued under the UN Charter, to convert a part of the conquered Ottoman Empire into a state entity for people organized in Europe who imagined that some thousand(s) of years ago some ancestors once inhabited the area.ⁱⁱⁱ The incongruence of this act ought to have been obvious—and in fact it was. The explicit policy with which the British Empire had sought to undermine Germany and Austria-Hungary was that of ethnic/linguistic self-determination of peoples. So by right—even if the fiction of a population in diaspora were accepted—this could not pre-empt the right of ethnic/linguistic self-determination in Palestine where Arabic was the dominant language and even those who adhered to the Jewish religion were not Europeans.

As argued elsewhere there has been a century of propaganda and brute force applied to render the dubious origins and the legitimation for the settler conquest that was declared the State of Israel in 1948 acceptable no matter how implausible. Like the Donation of Constantine, the Balfour Declaration served its purpose. No amount of rebuttal can reverse the events that followed.

Motors and motives

However, the question remains what is then the policy driving such acts? What is the motive for such seemingly senseless aggression against ordinary people? Why does an institution supposedly based on national self-determination deny it so effectively to majorities everywhere whose only fault appears to be living on land others covet? By the time the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was finally adopted in 1960, there was no question of reversing the de facto colonisation practiced by the mandatory powers under the League. Moreover the Declaration was only an act of the UN General Assembly, a body wholly dominated by the three permanent imperial members of the Security Council, each with their veto powers.

To understand that and perhaps to better illuminate the principal subject—Ukraine—it is helpful to recall that of the five permanent members of the Security Council, the two most powerful are not nation-states at all. The United Kingdom is a colonial confederation as is the United States.

Russia, France, and China are all states derived from historical ethnic-linguistic determination. Beyond doubt they were formed into such unitary states through wars and revolutions. As de Gaulle famously said, “France was made with the sword”. However, there is no question that these three countries are based explicitly on ethnic-linguistic and cultural congruity within continental boundaries, in the sense articulated by the explicit text of the Covenant and the Charter. On the contrary, Great Britain and the United States are commercial enterprises organised on the basis of piracy and colonial conquest. There is not a square centimetre of the United States that was not seized by the most brutal force of arms from its indigenous inhabitants. “Ethnic-linguistic” among the English-speaking peoples is a commodity characteristic. It is a way to define a market segment.

Great Britain gave the world “free trade” and liberalism and the US added to that the “open door”. Nothing could be more inimical to the self-determination of peoples than either policy.^iv How can a people be independent and self-determined when they are denied the right to say “no”? The Great War and its sequel, the war against the Soviet Union and Communism, aka World War 2, were first and foremost wars to establish markets dominated by the Anglo-American free trade – open door doctrine. One will not find this explicitly stated in any of the history books or the celebratory speeches on Remembrance Day (Memorial Day in the US) or the anniversary of D-Day, to which properly the Soviet Union and Russia ought not to be invited. After all D-Day was the beginning of the official war by Anglo-America against the Soviet Union after Hitler failed. More of Italian, French and German industrial and domestic infrastructure was destroyed by aerial bombardment from the West than by anything the Wehrmacht did—since its job was to destroy Soviet industry. This will not be reported in schoolbooks and very few official papers will verify this open secret. That is because like the Donation much of what counts as history was simply “written to the file”. The facts, however, speak for themselves. When the German High Command signed the terms of unconditional surrender in Berlin-Karlshorst, the domestic industry of the West, except the US, had been virtually destroyed leaving it a practical monopoly not only in finance but manufacturing that would last well into the late 1960s.^v Only the excess demand of the war against Korea accelerated German industrial recovery. No one can say for sure how much of German, French, Italian, Belgian, or Netherlands capital was absorbed by Anglo-American holding companies. Hence those that wonder today about the self-destruction of the German economy have to ask who owns Germany in fact. To do that one will have to hunt through the minefield of secrecy jurisdictions behind which beneficial ownership of much of the West is concealed.

It is necessary to return to the conditions at the beginning of the Great War to understand what is happening now in Ukraine. One has to scratch the paint off the house called “interests” and recall some geography. F. William Engdahl performed this task well in his A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (2011). It would do well to summarise a few of his points before going further.

Geography and aggrandizement

Continental nation-states need secure land routes. Pirate states need secure sea-lanes. Britain succeeded in seizing control ruling the waves after defeating the Spanish and Portuguese fleets. It reached a commercial entente with the Netherlands, which helped until the Royal Navy was paramount. The control of the seas meant that Britain could dominate shipping as well as maritime insurance needed to cover the risk of sea transport. So it was no accident that Lloyds of London came to control the financing of maritime traffic. Geography dictated that the alternative for continental nation-states was the railroad. Germany was building a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad which would not only have delivered oil to its industry but allowed it to bypass the Anglo-French Suez Canal and the British controlled Cape route. Centuries before the predecessors to the City of London financed crusades to control the trade routes through the Middle East, propagandistically labelled the Holy Land, whereby this was wholly for commercial reasons. The Anglo-American led NATO captured Kosovo not out of any special loyalty to Albanians but because of geography. Camp Bondsteel lies at the end of the easiest route to build pipelines between Central Asia and the Mediterranean. In short there is not a single war for “self-determination” waged by the Anglo-American special relationship that was not driven by piratical motives, for which ethnic-linguistic commodities are expendable.

In 1917, the “interests”, for whom Lord Rothschild spoke and no doubt provided financial support, coincided with the pre-emptive control over real estate that had been desired by the banking-commercial cult at least since the establishment of the Latin Church. It is no accident that serious investigations have established that the state created from the British Mandate in Palestine was a commercial venture like all other British undertakings. Moreover it has been able to use its most insidious cover story to veil itself in victimhood and thus immunity for those criminal enterprises, both private and state, that use it as a conduit: money laundering, drug and arms trafficking, training of repressive forces for other countries on contract, etc. all documented and protected by atomic weapons. Moreover this enterprise has been the greatest per capita recipient of US foreign aid for decades. Its citizens are able to use dual citizenship to hold high office in the sovereign state that funds it, too. Any attempt to criticize or oppose this relationship or its moral justification by a public official or personality with anything to lose can lead to the gravest of consequences. Its official lobby in the US, AIPAC, is only one instrument by which any act that could interfere with the smooth flow of cash or influence between Washington and Tel Aviv can be prevented or punished. It draws on an international organisation that does not even have to be organised. The status of ultimate victimhood combined with mass media at all levels committed to protecting “victims” can summon crowds just as Gene Sharp predicted in his works.^vi

A business too innocent to fail

Now we come to the issues with which this essay began. What is the aim of the war in Ukraine? Will it end when the military operations have failed?

In April 2022, i.e. just over a month after the Russian intervention, Volodymyr Zelenskyy described “the future for his country”. He used the terms “a big Israel”. In Haaretz it was reported that Zelenskyy wanted Ukraine to become “a big Israel, with its own face”. Writing for the NATO lobby, the Atlantic Council, Daniel Shapiro elaborated what Zelenskyy might mean: the main points are security first, the whole population plays a role, self-defence is the only way, but maintain active defence partnerships, intelligence dominance, technology as key, build an innovation ecosystem, maintain democratic institutions.^vii The stories depict this stance for better or worse as the creation of a state under permanent military control, always giving priority to existential threats—presumably from the East.

But is that really what Zelenskyy meant? Or perhaps that is what he was just supposed to say. What about those who have directed nearly all of NATO armament and so many billions through the hands of the Kiev regime—one notorious even before 2022 as the most corrupt in Europe, if not anywhere? Maybe another construction is to be applied. Perhaps Zelenskyy is talking, like some latter day Balfour, on behalf of his sponsors whose Holocaust piety never prevented them from subjecting nearly entire populations to forced medical experiments starting in 2020. Perhaps he is talking about the extensive participation in all sorts of international trafficking, either as agent or protection for the principals. Perhaps he is talking about the permanent and undebatable foreign aid contributions from the US and the extortion from other countries, e.g. as Norman Finkelstein documented.^viii There is no doubt that Ukraine has become a major hub for human trafficking, arms smuggling, and biological-chemical testing. They have atomic reactors and have asked for warheads.^ix

Add to this the potential of a large and potentially self-righteous diaspora spread throughout the West, heavily subsidised and already equipped with influence in high places. A “Ukraine Lobby” was already in preparation in 1947 when the British shipped some eight thousand POWs of the SS Galizia Division (a Ukrainian force) from Italy to Britain without a single war crimes investigation.^x From there they were able to spread throughout the Empire as Canada amply indicates.

Much of the debate about the Ukraine war remains confused because of the successful obfuscation around the term “Nazi”. Essentially a Hollywood story has been substituted for analysis of the historic development of the ideology and government that prevailed in Germany between 1933 and 1945.^xi Nazism is treated as sui generis based on criteria that are not unique at all. For example, great attention is given to uniforms and insignia. In fact, after the Great War all the major political factions and parties, e.g. the SPD and DKP, had uniformed paramilitary organisations formed mainly of front veterans. When the NSDAP was able to ban all opponents those uniforms also disappeared. Contemporary fascism also uses current fashion and language. Only the nostalgic retain antiquated uniform and language styles. However repulsive the ideology may be these so-called neo-Nazis are equivalent to the historical re-enactment units found throughout the US for example.

After WW2 much of Europe was a wasteland, especially the East. Refugees understandably fled as far west as they could because getting to North or South America meant living in territories unscathed by war. The British and US secret services deliberately exploited these refugee waves to cover the removal into safety of the residue of their fascist allies. There they were to prepare for the continuation of war against the Soviet Union by other means. These formations often hid behind ethnic front groups, as the fascists did in occupied West Germany. Hence when an embarrassing discovery was made—usually some low or middle grade Nazi veteran—then he could be disgraced, tried or deported while leaving the bulk of the clandestine organisation in tact. These Nazis were obviously the result of careless immigration oversight but by no means a reflection of state policy.

Together, historical re-enactment Nazism and “exposed” single Nazi veterans distracted from the large scale programs supporting and expanding anti-communist forces both domestically and for expeditionary deployment. Much more seriously, these two “shows” and the deliberate suppression of meaningful debate about fascist policies and practices—always reduced to anti-Jewish attitudes and actions alone—have successfully prevented any coherent analysis and debate about the relationship between Anglo-American monopoly capital and the cartels that backed the NSDAP regime or the relationship between US/ NATO policy and its consistent support of fascist regimes in Spain, Portugal and throughout the world. It has prevented coherent debate about the long forgotten but documented participation of reconstructed Nazis in the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and their active participation in the Ukrainian war against the Soviet Union after 1945.

Zelenskyy and his fellow travellers cannot be blamed for their self-confident fascism. It is not an anomaly but a historical product of decades of Anglo-American/ NATO business plans—including the distraction of “Nazi” from the substance of those plans. Given how successful Lord Rothschild’s model for Israel has been, one can scarcely blame a patriot like Volodymyr Zelenskyy for seizing the opportunity to apply it to his own country. The model has been so successful that no one in public dare oppose it. Why not establish another such parasitic machine? Russians just like Arabs provide the permanent enemies with which to sell the permanent victim status at the expense of millions of displaced Ukrainians.

In other words, there is a very successful business model to be implemented wholly consistent with free trade and the open door and all those other slogans, which have anointed plunder and pillage by the occasionally alpine commercial cult in their campaign to assure that all of us own nothing and they will be happy.

• Read related articles: “Missionary Strategy for Social Engineering,” “Poverty and Grace,” and “Policing and Policy.”

Endnotes

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa says the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is focused on how they will approach the next seven years to achieve the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Addressing the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) on Sustainable Development in New York on behalf of AOSIS, PM Fiame said world leaders needed to leave nationalism behind and urgently put action to the rhetoric they had been propagating for the past eight years.

“Climate change, the global financial crisis, the covid-19 pandemic and geopolitical tensions have taught us that we are even more closely connected than we wish to acknowledge, and that choices made on one end have far and wide reaching devastating impacts on those of us who are many, many miles away,” told the UN High Level Political Forum.

• READ MORE: Other UN SDG reports

“If we are going to uphold and deliver on our strong commitment to ‘leave no one behind’ and ‘reaching the furthest behind first’ we will have to leave nationalism behind and urgently put action to the rhetoric we have been propagating for the past eight years.”

PM Fiame said it was “time to stop kicking the can further down the road and doing bandage fixes”.

“We have to begin to earnestly address our global development issues, if we are going to begin speaking of a ‘summit of the future’ and ‘for future generations’.

“The sad reality is if we do not take care of today, for many of us, there will be no tomorrow or future.

‘We can do this together’
“We believe we can do this together, as the international community, if we return to the strong resolve, we had following the MDGs and knowing that if nothing drastic was done we would be worse off than we were as a global community in 1992 in Rio when we spoke of “the future we want,” Fiame said.

Faced with continuous and multiple crises, and without the ability to address these in any substantial and sustainable way, SIDS were on the “proverbial hamster wheel with no way out”, the Samoa Prime Minister said.

Therefore what was needed was to:

“Firstly, take urgent action on the climate change front — more climate financing; drastic cuts and reduction in greenhouse emissions, 1.5 is non-negotiable, everyone is feeling the mighty impacts of this, but not many of us have what it takes to rebounded from the devastation.

“This forthcoming COP28 needs to be a game changer, results must emanate from it — the Loss and Damage Fund needs to be fully operationalised and financed; we need progressive movement from the global stocktake; and states parties need to enhance NDCs.

“Secondly, urgent reform of the governance structure and overall working of the international financial architecture. It is time for it to be changed from its archaic approach to finance.

“We need a system that responds more appropriately to the varied dynamics countries face today; that goes beyond GDP; that takes into account various vulnerabilities and other aspects; that would look to utilise the Multi-Vulnerability Index, Bridgetown Initiative and all other measures that help to facilitate a more holistic and comprehensive insight into a country’s true circumstances.

‘More inclusive participation’
“This reform must also allow for a more inclusive and broader participation.

“Thirdly, urgently address high indebtedness in SIDS, this can no longer be ignored. There needs to be a concerted effort to address this.

“As we continually find ourselves in a revolving door between debt and reoccurring debt due to our continuous and constant response to economic, environmental and social shocks caused by external factors,” Prime Minister Fiame said.

“I appeal to you all to take a pause and join forces to make 2030 a year that we can all be proud of,” she said.

“In this vein, please be assured of AOSIS making our contribution no matter how minute it may be. We are fully committed. We invite you to review our interregional outcome document, the ‘Praia Declaration’ for a better understanding of our contribution.

“And we look forward to your constructive engagement as together we chart the 10-year Programme of Action for SIDS in 2024,” she said.

Fiame said the recently concluded Preparatory Meetings for the 4th International Conference on SIDS affirmed the unwavering commitment of SIDS to implement the 2030 Agenda as they charted a 10-year plan for a “resilient and prosperous future for our peoples”.

A ‘tough journey’
“We do recognise that the journey for us will be tough and daunting at times, but we are prepared and have a strong resolve to achieve this. However, we do also recognise and acknowledge that we cannot do this on our own.”

The summit marks the mid-point of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It will review the state of the SDGs implementation, provide policy guidance, mobilise action to accelerate implementation and consider new challenges since 2015.

The summit will address the impact of multiple and interlocking crises facing the world, including the deterioration of key social, economic and environmental indicators. It will focus first and foremost on people and ways to meet their basic needs through the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.

This is the second SDG Summit, the first one was held in 2019.

Republished from Pacnews.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

• Biden approves disaster declaration for Florida after Hurricane Idalia sweeps through.
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This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

The leaders of five Melanesian countries and territories avoided a definitive update on the status of the United Liberation Movement of West Papua’s application for full membership in the Melanesian Spearhead Group in Port Vila.

However, the 22nd MSG Leaders’ Summit was hailed as the “most memorable and successful” by Vanuatu’s prime minister as leaders signed off on two new declarations in their efforts to make the subregion more influential.

As well as the hosts, the meeting was attended by Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and the pro-independence FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) of New Caledonia.

• READ MORE: ‘The world is watching’ – it’s a test for Melanesian leaders over West Papua, says Wenda
• Other MSG reports

But the meeting had an anticlimactic ending after the leaders failed to release the details about the final outcomes or speak to news media.

The first agreement that was endorsed is the Udaune Declaration on Climate Change to address the climate crisis and “urging countries not to discharge potentially harmful treated nuclear contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean”.

“Unless the water treated is incontrovertibly proven, by independent scientists, to be safe to do and seriously consider other options,” Vanuatu Prime Minister Alatoi Ishmael Kalsakau said at the event’s farewell dinner last night.

The leaders also signed off on the Efate Declaration on Mutual Respect, Cooperation and Amity to advance security initiatives and needs of the Melanesian countries.

This document aims to “address the national security needs in the MSG region through the Pacific Way, kipung, tok stori, talanoa and storian, and bonded by shared values and adherence to the Melanesian vuvale, cultures and traditions,” Kalsakau said.

He said the leaders “took complex issues such as climate change, denuclearisation, and human rights and applied collective wisdom” to address the issues that were on the table.

Stefan Armbruster reporting from Port Vila.  Video: SBS World News

No update on West Papua
The issue of full membership for the United Liberation Movement of West Papua (ULMWP)  was a big ticket item on the agenda at the meeting in Port Vila, according to MSG chair Kalsakau.

However, there was no update provided on it and the leaders avoided fronting up to the media except for photo opportunities.

ULMWP leader Benny Wenda (above) told RNZ Pacific late on Thursday he was still not aware of the result of their membership application but that he was “confident” about it.

“I don’t know the outcome. Maybe this evening the leaders will announce at the reception,” Wenda said.

“From the beginning I have been confident that this is the time for the leaders to give us full membership so we can engage with Indonesia.”

According to the MSG Secretariat the final communique is now expected to be released on Friday.

Referred to Pacific Islands Forum
However, it is likely that the West Papua issue will be referred to the Pacific Islands Forum to be dealt with.

Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape said after the signing: “on the issues that was raised in regards to West Papua…these matters to be handled at [Pacific Islands Forum]”.

“The leaders from the Pacific will also visit Jakarta and Paris” to raise issues about sovereignty and human rights,” he said.

Kalsakau said he looked forward to progressing the implementaiton of important issue recommendations from the 22nd MSG Leaders’ Summit which also include “supporting the 2019 call by the Forum Leaders for a visit by the OHCHR to West Papua”.

Indonesia ‘proud’
Indonesia’s Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, Pahala Mansury, said Indonesia was proud to be part of the Melanesian family.

Indonesia is an associate member of MSG and has said it does not accept ULMWP’s application to become a full member because it claims that this goes against the MSG’s founding principles and charter.

During the meeting this week, Indonesian delegates walked out on occasions when ULMWP representatives made their intervention.

Some West Papua campaigners say these actions showed that Indonesia did not understand “the Melanesian way”.

“You just don’t walk out of a sacred meeting haus when you’re invited to be part of it,” one observer said.

However, Mansury said Indonesia hoped to “continue to increase, enhance and strengthen future collaboration between Indonesia and all of the Melanesian countries”.

“We are actually brothers and sisters of Melanesia and we hope we can continue to strengthen the bond together,” he said.

Australia and China attended as special guests at the invitation of the Vanuatu government.

China supported the Vanuatu government to host the meeting.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The leaders of five Melanesian countries and territories avoided a definitive update on the status of the United Liberation Movement of West Papua’s application for full membership in the Melanesian Spearhead Group in Port Vila.

However, the 22nd MSG Leaders’ Summit was hailed as the “most memorable and successful” by Vanuatu’s prime minister as leaders signed off on two new declarations in their efforts to make the subregion more influential.

As well as the hosts, the meeting was attended by Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and the pro-independence FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) of New Caledonia.

• READ MORE: ‘The world is watching’ – it’s a test for Melanesian leaders over West Papua, says Wenda
• Other MSG reports

But the meeting had an anticlimactic ending after the leaders failed to release the details about the final outcomes or speak to news media.

The first agreement that was endorsed is the Udaune Declaration on Climate Change to address the climate crisis and “urging countries not to discharge potentially harmful treated nuclear contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean”.

“Unless the water treated is incontrovertibly proven, by independent scientists, to be safe to do and seriously consider other options,” Vanuatu Prime Minister Alatoi Ishmael Kalsakau said at the event’s farewell dinner last night.

The leaders also signed off on the Efate Declaration on Mutual Respect, Cooperation and Amity to advance security initiatives and needs of the Melanesian countries.

This document aims to “address the national security needs in the MSG region through the Pacific Way, kipung, tok stori, talanoa and storian, and bonded by shared values and adherence to the Melanesian vuvale, cultures and traditions,” Kalsakau said.

He said the leaders “took complex issues such as climate change, denuclearisation, and human rights and applied collective wisdom” to address the issues that were on the table.

Stefan Armbruster reporting from Port Vila.  Video: SBS World News

No update on West Papua
The issue of full membership for the United Liberation Movement of West Papua (ULMWP)  was a big ticket item on the agenda at the meeting in Port Vila, according to MSG chair Kalsakau.

However, there was no update provided on it and the leaders avoided fronting up to the media except for photo opportunities.

ULMWP leader Benny Wenda (above) told RNZ Pacific late on Thursday he was still not aware of the result of their membership application but that he was “confident” about it.

“I don’t know the outcome. Maybe this evening the leaders will announce at the reception,” Wenda said.

“From the beginning I have been confident that this is the time for the leaders to give us full membership so we can engage with Indonesia.”

According to the MSG Secretariat the final communique is now expected to be released on Friday.

Referred to Pacific Islands Forum
However, it is likely that the West Papua issue will be referred to the Pacific Islands Forum to be dealt with.

Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape said after the signing: “on the issues that was raised in regards to West Papua…these matters to be handled at [Pacific Islands Forum]”.

“The leaders from the Pacific will also visit Jakarta and Paris” to raise issues about sovereignty and human rights,” he said.

Kalsakau said he looked forward to progressing the implementaiton of important issue recommendations from the 22nd MSG Leaders’ Summit which also include “supporting the 2019 call by the Forum Leaders for a visit by the OHCHR to West Papua”.

Indonesia ‘proud’
Indonesia’s Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, Pahala Mansury, said Indonesia was proud to be part of the Melanesian family.

Indonesia is an associate member of MSG and has said it does not accept ULMWP’s application to become a full member because it claims that this goes against the MSG’s founding principles and charter.

During the meeting this week, Indonesian delegates walked out on occasions when ULMWP representatives made their intervention.

Some West Papua campaigners say these actions showed that Indonesia did not understand “the Melanesian way”.

“You just don’t walk out of a sacred meeting haus when you’re invited to be part of it,” one observer said.

However, Mansury said Indonesia hoped to “continue to increase, enhance and strengthen future collaboration between Indonesia and all of the Melanesian countries”.

“We are actually brothers and sisters of Melanesia and we hope we can continue to strengthen the bond together,” he said.

Australia and China attended as special guests at the invitation of the Vanuatu government.

China supported the Vanuatu government to host the meeting.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

1. Sun Tzu said: In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.

2. Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

— Sunzi, “Chapter 3: Attack by Stratagem,” The Art of War

Chinese wisdom from 6th century BCE explains why China, barring the crossing of a redline by separatists in Taiwan, has no inclination to attack. Why would China want to destroy a part of itself? Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, the country has navigated bumps in the road while pursuing a path of supreme excellence.

In the late 1940s, in the latter stages of the Chinese civil war, after the Communists had defeated the Guomindang (KMT) on the mainland, the KMT escaped across the Taiwan Strait. Because the US 7th fleet was patrolling the waters and protecting the KMT, and because the Communists lacked a formidable navy, an aquatic pursuit was ruled out for the Communists.

The US interjecting itself into a far flung conflict was not unusual. Author William Blum wrote about this, remarking about American untrustworthiness toward erstwhile allies in his book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (pdf available online).

The communists in China had worked closely with the American military during the war, providing important intelligence about the Japanese occupiers, rescuing and caring for downed US airmen.¹ But no matter. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek [of the KMT] would be Washington’s man. (p 20)

Fervent anti-communism in Washington and Langley, saw the CIA aiding the KMT against the mainland. But the US would have to address One China:

The Generalissimo, his cohorts and soldiers fled to the offshore island of Taiwan (Formosa). They had prepared their entry two years earlier by terrorizing the islanders into submission—a massacre which took the lives of as many as 28,000 people.¹⁵ Prior to the Nationalists’ escape to the island, the US government entertained no doubts that Taiwan was a part of China. Afterward, uncertainty began to creep into the minds of Washington officials. The crisis was resolved in a remarkably simple manner: the US agreed with Chiang that the proper way to view the situation was not that Taiwan belonged to China, but that Taiwan was China. And so it was called. (p 22)

Thus it was that the anti-Communist US had a dog in this fight, and that dog was (and still is) Taiwan. The US backed Jiang Jieshi (aka Chiang Kai-shek), and the CIA trained, organized, and conducted military incursions across the Taiwan Strait against the mainland. (p 23)

Manifestly, the big fish for the imperialist hegemon to try and fry is the One-China policy, to which the US is a signatory, which acknowledges there being only one China and that Taiwan is a province of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Such is the fervor of the diminishing imperial US that it unabashedly is in violation of an agreement it signed by de facto treating Taiwan as a separate country by selling arms to it and sending political representatives and military personnel without seeking the approval of the government in Beijing. How would the US feel if China sent political representatives to meet with the Hawaiian sovereignty movement? If China sold or gave arms to this movement? After all, the Apology Resolution — passed in 1993 by a Joint Resolution of the US Congress 100 years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy — “acknowledges that the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished to the United States their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands.”

Canadian and American media reported on 4 June “that a Chinese warship came within 150 yards of colliding with an American destroyer in the Taiwan Strait during a joint U.S.-Canada exercise.” Of note: the US media report mentions that the US-Canadian warships were “allegedly in international waters.” If not allegedly in international waters, then presumably they were in Chinese waters.

Of concern to US militarists is the realization that China’s navy is larger than the US navy and the gap is widening. More foreboding for any potential attacker are China’s hypersonic anti-ship missiles.

Even if the warships were enforcing freedom of navigation (FON), an analysis, published on 15 May by the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI) at Peking University, questions what exactly FON means for the Taiwan Strait.

SCSPI argues that the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea “ultimately aims to maintain a balance between the interests of maritime powers and coastal states. There has never been an unrestricted right of navigation in the Convention or in general international law.”

Although foreign ships enjoy the right of innocent passage in the territorial sea, Article 25 of the Convention provides that the coastal state may take the necessary steps to prevent passage which is not innocent. That is, the coastal States have the right to decide whether the passage of a foreign ship is consistent with the “right of innocent passage” under Article 19. The Convention also provides that the coastal State may adopt domestic law on innocent passage and may require a foreign warship that disregards any request for compliance with domestic law to leave the territorial sea immediately…. U.S. warships may exercise the right of innocent passage, but at the same time must respect the coastal state’s determination of whether the passage is innocent and comply with the laws and regulations of the coastal State concerning passage through the territorial sea.

If China was a militaristic country, then people ought to consider when would be the most opportunistic time for China to militarily reincorporate Taiwan back into the motherland. How about when the US is on the verge of an embarrassing defeat in Ukraine, having sunk almost $115 billion into losing a proxy war and having depleted much of its weapons stores, having its missile defense batteries destroyed, HIMARS defended against, anti-tank Javelins brushed aside, Bradley tanks rendered nugatory, etc?

What conclusion then can one draw from the fact that militarily powerful China has not launched any attack against Taiwan during this period of time?

The US seeks to keep Taiwan separate from the mainland, as a reincorporated Taiwan would open strategic access to the Pacific for the PRC. Thus, president Joe Biden has doubled down on his pledge to intervene in any fighting between China and its province Taiwan. Two problems with Biden’s tough-guy posturing: 1) words are cheap; and 2) aside from making clear its redlines, the talk of China attacking its province of Taiwan is all from the US side. It is clearly not in the mainland’s interest to kill its own citizens or cause damage to the island. China has pledged itself to peace.

I asked Wei Ling Chua, the author of Democracy: What the West can learn from China and Tiananmen Square “Massacre”? The Power of Words vs. Silent Evidence, his analysis of what US interventions hold for the One-China policy.

*****

Kim Petersen: Taiwan became part of the Chinese Qing dynasty in 1683. That is almost a century before European natives destroyed several Indigenous nations and dispossessed them of their land, resources, culture, language — i.e., genocide — and established the ill-begotten United States of America in 1776.

Yet the US encourages the separatist movement in Taiwan led by the Democratic Progressive Party. Importantly, the Republic of China (ROC, Taiwan) also claims that there is one China and that the mainland, Tibet, and, until 2002, even outer Mongolia constituted the ROC.

Why is Taiwan outside the direct control of the PRC? This is because despite being aided by the US, Jiang Jieshi and the Guomindang (KMT) were defeated by the Communist forces led by Mao Zedong. The US 7th Fleet, however, protected the escape of the KMT to Taiwan, as China at that time had a minuscule navy. If not for that, the Communists might well have brought Taiwan fully back into the motherland’s fold long ago.

The US and western-aligned media serially warn that the PRC is poised to invade Taiwan. The US says it stands poised to blow up Taiwan’s critical chip producer TSMC in case of a Chinese attack. Why would the PRC militarily attack a valuable part of the motherland, especially given that the vast majority of the planet’s 190 or so countries recognize the one-China policy whereby Taiwan is a province of the PRC?

Wei Ling Chua: To explain clearly a series of essential facts (including not widely noticed facts) about the relations between Taiwan Province, China, and the USA, I need to breakdown the information as follows:

Ignorance of Taiwan Youth about their own Constitution

Recently, a number of street interviews were conducted in Taiwan province asking young Taiwanese “Do you know the relationship between the Republic of China and Taiwan?”, the reply shocked the interviewer as the majority of the youth in Taiwan didn’t even know their political entity’s official name is the Republic of China (ROC), and that the ROC’s constitution regards the mainland of China and Taiwan being parts of the ROC sovereign territory. For example:

• A street interview in June 2023 asked: “What is the relationship between Taiwan and the ROC?” The reply: “…Enemy…”;  The interviewer then asked: “Have you heard of ROC? Do you know where is ROC?” The reply: “The other side of the Taiwan Straits? … I don’t know, I don’t know…” During the interview, almost all interviewees didn’t know the ROC, some later replied: “Taiwan” (with a guessing element after observing the interviewer’s tone);
• A street interview in May 2023 asked: “What is the relationship between Taiwan and the ROC?” The reply: “… looks like the relationship is not too good…”; The interviewer then asked: “According to the ROC constitution, Taiwan sovereignty includes the mainland of China, do you know that?” The reply: “No”.

The above interviews demonstrated the success of the ongoing brainwashing tactics used by the current ruling party (the DPP) in Taiwan province by modifying historical facts in school textbooks in the past 2 decades. One needs just to search under “DDP modify Taiwan history textbook” to learn about the issues. If one uses simplified Chinese or traditional Chinese to search the subject, one will get even more examples and news on the topic of young Taiwanese being heavily brainwashed into believing that they are not a part of the Chinese civilization despite their shared history, culture, tradition, values, food habits, ethnicity, religions, and languages (spoken and written). This reflects the scary effect of what fake news and propaganda could do to divide society and create conflict across the world.

The one-China wording in the ROC Constitution

It is important to note that the content of the ROC Constitution is still the same today as before the Nationalist government lost the internal war to the Communist Party and escaped to Taiwan Province in 1949. It is also important to note that all the incoming Taiwan Presidents and MPs have to be sworn in under the Constitution of The ROC before taking office. So, what does the ROC Constitution say about the relation between the mainland of China and Taiwan island? The full text of the ROC’s Constitution is on the current Taiwan (Province) government’s official website. The following points shown that the ROC Constitution includes the entire mainland of China as it sovereign territory:

• Point 4 of the Constitution: The territory of ROC based on its inherent boundaries, cannot be changed without a resolution of the National Assembly;
• Point 6 refers to the design of the ROC flag used since 1928 (which is still in use today across Taiwan Province by whoever is in power);
• Point 26: Outline the number of Representatives based on the population in an area/region for the National Assembly (with special mention of the Mongolia and Tibet regional representatives);
• Point 64: About the makeup of representatives for law-making: this point also mentioned the minority population representative with special mention of Mongolia and Tibet regions.
• Point 91: About the makeup of representatives in the Government Supervisory Body: again Mongolia and Tibet regions are mentioned.

If we search for a map of the ROC, one will notice that the ROC territory in the map includes the entire People’s Republic of China (PRC) territory. That means the territory outlined in the Constitution of both the PRC and ROC includes Taiwan province and the Mainland of China. Both documents are the legal foundation of one-China. So:

• Any Western media wording that suggests Taiwan province is not a part of China is without any legal foundation under both the ROC and the PRC Constitutions.
• The Western media and politicians’ ongoing warning that “China is going to invade Taiwan” is preposterous because what they are warning is that China is about to invade itself.
• America named the war between the South and the North (12 April 1861 to 26 May 1865) as the American Civil War revealing the double standard regarding the use of the term “invasion” to describe a possible future China reunification process through military action.

Therefore, the dispute between the PRC and ROC is a yet-to-settled historical event. It is purely a domestic issue between the 2 governments. Former Singapore Foreign Minister George Yao is right to point out in a recent interview that “China sees the Taiwan issue as a matter of historical justice”; he warns the Western powers about the danger of interfering in the reunification process.

The territory still under ROC control includes islands only 2 km away from the PRC-governed Mainland

Many people did not notice that the territory under the control of today’s ROC includes not only Taiwan Island itself but a number of islands right next to the mainland of the PRC. See the following screenshot map of the ROC (the purple territory in the bottom right-hand corner below is still under the control of the ROC):

One should note from the above map of the ROC-controlled (purple) territory that there are islands located right next to the mainland of China:

• • Kinmen Islands: The nearest part of the Kinmen group of Islands is just 1.8 km from the PRC (mainland China); it is 210 km from Taiwan Island. Former Chinese World Bank Chief Economist Justin YiFu Lin was a ROC army official stationed in Kinmen Islands. He is the man who in 1979, swam 2130 meters to mainland China to call the PRC home;
  • Matsu Islands: The nearest part of this group of islands is 18.5 km away from the Mainland of China and 203 km away from Taiwan Island;

• As for Taiwan Island itself, the nearest part to the mainland is 126 km away.

The above distance information between the ROC-controlled territory and the PRC-controlled mainland tells us a lot about the intention of the PRC government working towards a peaceful reunification:

• If China (PRC) wanted to take those islands right next to the mainland by force, they would have done it a long time ago. There is no reason to doubt the PRC military capability to do so given their ability to force the US-led military coalition back more than 500 km from the China-DPRK border to the 38th parallel and stop the US-led military coalition’s further aggression in the 1950-1953 Korean War;
• Even Taiwan Island (province) itself is so close to the mainland that a modern short-range missile and artillery are good enough to do the job of crippling the island’s economy and forcing a surrender; some contend that the current military technological capability of the PLA may be more advanced than the USA.
• Therefore, the ongoing Western media articles and news with headings that suggest China’s pending aggression and possible invasion of Taiwan to justify US/Japan/NATO/Australia/Canada militarism on the Chinese doorstep is nothing more than a smear campaign against China.

The History of Taiwan Island’s relation with the Chinese dynasties dates back to 230AD 

The history of Taiwan being a part of China was far earlier than 1683. This site (English) and this site (Chinese) provide a detailed Timeline of Taiwan’s relations with the Chinese dynasties beginning as early as the year 230AD: During the 3 kingdoms era, a written record of （沈莹） Shen Ying under the title 《临海水土志》 (direct transaction word by word: “surrounding seas water lands record”) already mentioned the Island of Taiwan. And that is almost 1800 years ago.

The trouble for many people who haven’t researched much about Chinese history is that they may be susceptible to Western media propaganda that portrays China as historically backward compared to the West, hence the ongoing smear campaign that China steals Western technology. So, it may be hard for some people to believe that in 230 AD, the Chinese already had the shipping technology to explore islands hundreds of km away in the rough sea. So, it is important for one to note the following facts about the Chinese being far more advanced than the West in shipping technology for thousands of year:

• One should note that the compass used by Columbus to “discover” America in 1492 AD was a Chinese-invented compass (invented during the Han Dynasty between 202 BC – 220 AD);
• 2500 years ago, China not only had a great military strategist Sun Zi (The Art of War) for land battles but also had a navy war strategist (伍子胥) Wu Zi Xu for water battles 《水战兵法》 (direct word by word translation “Water war military strategy”).

One should also take note that before Columbus “discovered” America in 1492 (as if the Indigenous peoples on the continent at that time were not regarded as “human beings” and so, the land has to be “discovered” by a “higher being” from Europe), the Ming Dynasty Navy General Zheng He had already led 7 ocean expeditions traveling the world (1405 to 1433), with “hundreds of huge ships and tens of thousands of sailors and other passengers. More than 60 of the 317 ships on the first voyage were enormous Treasure Ships, sailing vessels over 400 hundred feet long, 160 feet wide, with several decks, 9 masts, 12 sails, and luxurious staterooms complete with balconies.”

It is important to note that, despite such a scale of world voyages, China did not do what Columbus and Captain Cook’s voyages did to the Indigenous population in what would become America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Ming Dynasty Imperial Voyages led by General Zheng He (a Chinese Muslim) were peaceful in nature.

There is also a well-researched book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (including America) by Gavin Menzies (a former British Royal Navy Submarine Commanding Officer) who spent 15 years tracing the astonishing voyages of the Ming Dynasty’s fleet, visited over 900 museums across the world, engaged in conversations and correspondence with Universities professors specialized in Asia Study, and reading hundreds of titles in European country’s libraries that mentioned the Chinese voyages. Despite the fact that Gavin’s compelling narrative pulls together ancient maps, precise navigational knowledge, astronomy, and the surviving accounts of Chinese explorers and the later European navigators, and that Gavin’s research also brings to light the artifacts and inscribed stones left behind by the emperor’s fleet, the evidence of the Ming Dynasty’s sunken junks along its route, and ornate votive offerings left by the Chinese sailors wherever they landed, Gavin’s book still discredited by the Western propaganda machine as “fiction” and “controversy”. As a reader of Kevin’s book to the last word, I am convinced by the incontrovertible evidence presented in regard to the Ming Dynasty Imperial Voyages, however, other readers’ opinions are also important. Please read the thousands of reader comments here, here, and here.

So, for those who are interested to know in detail about the 1800 years of history of Taiwan Island’s relation with the Chinese dynasties, please click here (English) and here (Chinese).

One should note that, in July 1894, Japan launched a war of aggression against China. In April 1895, the defeated Qing Dynasty government was forced to cede Taiwan, etc, to Japan in an unequal treaty  (Treaty of Shimonoseki in Japanese, also known as Treaty of Maguan in Chinese).

International Treaties by US, UK, China, and Japan recognized Taiwan as China’s territory 

1943 Cairo Declaration (Image of the original document): Signed by President Roosevelt (USA), Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek (ROC President), and Prime Minister Churchill (UK) as military allies against the Japanese military aggression. The objective of the Cairo Declaration is to “procure unconditional surrender of Japan,” and that “all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa (known as “Taiwan” in Chinese), and … shall be restored to the Republic of China” (The Chinese government at that time).

(Note: It seems that the US government history document website (https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments) has removed the Cairo Declaration document)

1945 INT Potsdam Declaration (image of the original document) Point 8 stated: “The terms of the Cairo Declaration shall be carried out and Japanese sovereignty shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku, and such minor islands as we determine.” And again, this international treaty was entered into by the US, China, and UK governments, and agreed upon by the Japanese government after the US dropped the 2 atomic bombs on Japan.

Note: the US government history document website shows the full content of this 13-point document including point 8.

So, the above two international documents entered into by the US, China, UK, and Japan recognized Taiwan as a part of China, and Japan’s territory is limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine.” 

UN Resolution replaced ROC with PRC as the only legitimate government of China

UN Resolution 2758: passed on 25 October 1971: “Recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations” and removed “the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek” (referring to the ROC)  from the United Nations.

Since then, as of June 2023, out of the 193 UN member nations, only 12 smaller nations recognize the ROC government, and 181 recognize the PRC government. (Including the US and all other Western governments. This is the condition for establishing diplomatic relations with the PRC.)

As a result, the ROC (in Taiwan) needs the PRC’s approval to get access to any international organizations or institutions such as the Olympics, WHO, etc. The PRC’s sovereignty over Taiwan is officially recognized by the UN document and 181 UN member states.

Blood is Thicker than Water: The Policy of Peaceful Reunification Since Mao’s Era

If one searches on the Internet for “台湾 血比水浓” (Taiwanese Blood is Thicker than Water), one will notice that there are millions of articles and news headlines over the decades describing the feeling of the Chinese people in the PRC towards the Chinese people in the ROC (Taiwan Province). They regard people in Taiwan as their brothers and sisters and hope for peaceful reunification.

Since the founding of the PRC, the Chinese leadership (from Mao to Xi) has been working hard toward a peaceful reunification with Taiwan Province. Just to name a few examples as follows:

Example 1:

During the Chinese Revolution, the then Nationalist Party government led by ROC President Chiang Kai-shek killed 6 of Chairman Mao’s relatives including Mao’s beloved wife (Yang Kaihui). In 1957, Chairman Mao wrote a touching poem in remembrance of his late wife with a description of his grief when he heard the news of her murder by the Nationalist government: “bursting into tears like rainwater” (泪飞顿作倾盆雨). Despite such personal grief in losing his loved one, Chairman Mao put the interest of the people and the Chinese nation first: For example:

After China and DPRK won the Korean War against the US-led 16-nation military coalition, there was a perception of Western nations trying to break Taiwan away from the motherland to create two Chinas, like the two Koreas (North and South Korea), and the two Germanys (East and West Germany). To prevent that, in 1956, Mao wrote a personal letter to Chiang Kai-shek, telling him the importance of Taiwan’s geographical position in accessing the Pacific Ocean for the Chinese nation, and urged him to safeguard the interest of the Chinese civilization to maintain the principle of a one-China policy. That is Taiwan province and the Mainland as integrated parts of one China. He then raised the idea of negotiation toward a peaceful reunification under the following principles:

• Foreign Power should be out of Taiwan;
• Taiwan must recognize the Central People’s Government as the only legitimate government of the PRC.
• Both the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party have to uphold the principle of a one-China policy;
• Chiang Kai-Shek will enjoy a special privileged status once Taiwan is unified with the mainland;
• Once unified, besides Foreign Affairs and Defence, Chiang Kai-Shek will retain the power of administering Taiwan in all other aspects such as the power for the appointment of officials and their removal in Taiwan, the treasury in Taiwan, and Chiang is allowed to keep his arm forces, and the central government will fund the development of Taiwan.
• Once unified, both sides will stop covert operations and propaganda against each other, and will not do anything to damage the relationship of both political parties.
• In the letter, Mao also enclosed a photo of Chiang’s ancestor’s grave in China, telling him that they are well maintained. (Photo below):

Unfortunately, for Chiang, it was a hard decision.

Chiang died in 1975; to this day, his coffin is still not buried. According to his son Chiang Jing-guo’s Diary: Chiang wished to be buried on the mainland: at Nanjing, Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Zijin Mountain, Zhengqi Pavilion. Therefore, they are waiting for the day when the political climate is such that Chiang can be so interred.

Example 2:

In 1981, the PRC spelled out a 9 points policy toward peaceful reunification under a One-China policy (below is a translation from the Chinese text):

• The Communist Party and the Nationalist Party can negotiate on an equal footing;
• The two parties reached an agreement on postal, commercial, air, family visits, tourism, and academic, culture, and sports exchanges;
• After reunification, Taiwan can retain the military and enjoy special autonomy as a special administrative region;
• Taiwan’s society, economic system, way of life, and economic and cultural relations with other foreign countries remain unchanged; private property, houses, land, business ownership, legal inheritance rights, and foreign investment are inviolable;
• Political leaders in Taiwan can serve as leaders of the national political institutions and participate in national management;
• When Taiwan’s local finances are in difficulty, the central government can subsidize them at its discretion;

1. 1. Taiwanese who wish to return to the mainland to live are guaranteed to make proper arrangements, come and go freely, and not be discriminated against;

• Welcome Taiwanese businesses’ investment in the mainland, their legal rights and profits are guaranteed;
• People and organizations from all walks of life in Taiwan are welcome to provide unified suggestions and discuss state affairs together.

One should acknowledge that no other nation in world history ever went to such length, patience, inclusiveness, and generosity in pursuing a nation’s peaceful reunification with an offer like this. The PRC government always believes that given time, they will be able to develop China into a better and better society, and will eventually unify every heart and mind in Taiwan.

Has any other nation in world history ever gone to such lengths, patience, inclusiveness, and generosity in pursuing peaceful reunification with an offer like this? The PRC government has always believed that given time, it would be able to develop China into a better and better society, and would eventually unify with the hearts and minds in Taiwan.

Of course, the Western mass media will never tell the world the above generous 9 points offered to Taiwan for peaceful reunification. They will only tell the world China is bullying Taiwan.

Example 3:

After years of negotiations, in 1992, the PRC Communist Party and the ROC Nationalist Party reached an agreement in Singapore to deepen the exchange of people between both sides. Both Parties agree to the principles of One China, and any other issues can be negotiated with flexibility. The term used for such a historic agreement is “1992 Consensus.”

Example 4:

In order to win the hearts and minds of the brothers and sisters in Taiwan province, the PRC has been very generous to Taiwan’s farmers and businesses and allowed Taiwan to enjoy an enormous trade surplus of up to $104.68 billion a year. About 44% of Taiwan’s exports go to mainland China. Without the PRC’s economic support, Taiwan’s economy would likely have fallen into a negative GDP like most parts of the Western world.

Again, the Western mass media is uninterested in reporting the above trade statistics.

Example 5:

The ROC-controlled Kinmen (Jinmen) Islands with a rising population and water shortage problem. Between 2006 and 2022, the population of the Jinmen Islands increased from 76,000 to 141,500.  To help the brothers and sisters in Jinmen solve their water problem, the PRC government invested heavily over a period of 22 years in infrastructure to lay an underground and undersea pipeline to deliver water from the mainland to the islands. And sell the water to the islands at a subsidized price of 9.89 Taiwan dollars per unit of water, which is cheaper than the charges per unit of water supplied by the local authority on the islands.

Again, the Western media won’t report news like this. They will only keep spreading the message to the world: “China bullies Taiwan” and “China is going to invade Taiwan”.

Example 6:

Like the US, after decades of political infighting, corruption, and incompetency in managing the economy and infrastructure upgrade, Taiwan suffered a series of issues including an electricity shortage that requires rationing from area to area. So, power Rationing Information is made available for residents to check when their area power will be cut off and for how long. Such a situation has been the new normal for a number of years already. It has badly affected business activities and damaged foreign investment. As a result, Taiwan’s youth unemployment rate has been consistently above 10%. And nearly 60% of the Taiwanese working overseas went to China. A report in 2017 by TVBS Taiwan showed that: over a period of 35 years, Taiwan startup wages remained almost the same, 70% of Taiwan youth refused to be trapped by low wages and wished to start their own business in order to make more money. Forbes Magazine reported the issue: “Workers in Taiwan are struggling. They took home an average of $1,510 per month in 2016, according to Taiwan’s National Development Council, which is low for an industrialized Asian economy that has developed a lot like Singapore and South Korea over the decades.”

In response to such low wages and employment problems faced by Taiwanese youth, Chairman Xi canceled the work permit requirement for Taiwanese people to seek employment on the mainland.

In fact, as early as 2016, the China People’s Congress had already set up an RMB40 billion fund, to help facilitate Taiwan Youth intent on setting up their own business in China.

Again, the Western mass media is uninterested in this kind of news. They will keep telling the world that China is bullying Taiwan.

Example 7:

There are too many stories of the PRC government (from Chairman Mao to Chairman Xi) extending goodwill to the Taiwanese people and awaiting eventual peaceful reunification. It is impossible to list them all. So, just to provide a couple more examples below:

• Whenever an overseas emergency happens, such as an outbreak of war, the Chinese embassies and military will immediately evacuate all Chinese citizens, including any Taiwanese who apply to the PRC with a Taiwan Compatriot ID document. Click here for a few dozen short news and videos.
• Any Taiwanese who run into trouble while overseas can easily seek help from any of the Chinese embassies in the respective country. A number of Taiwanese friends I met, while I was working in Eastern Europe based in Hungary in the 1990s, told me that the PRC embassy staff are more helpful than the ROC commercial office representative.

In 2022, China released a White Paper titled “The Taiwan Question and China’s Reunification in the New Era” (Here is the full text in English and Chinese).  It is a bit lengthy but worth reading. The policy document outlines the intention to reintegrate Taiwan by all possible peaceful means, and the many benefits  Taiwan people will enjoy in the process, including all the tax revenue collected in Taiwan will be used solely for the social well-being of the Taiwanese people and the economic development of Taiwan.

China: There is no Taiwan problem, only an American-caused problem.

China is a country with a very long history of peace culture. Examples:

• Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir said: “We always say, we have had China as a neighbor for 2000 years, we were never conquered by them. But the Europeans came in 1509, and in two years, they conquered Malaysia.”
• East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta defended China’s role as a growing strategic and economic power in Asia-Pacific in the National Press Club of Australia (2022), arguing: “China has hardly ever invaded other countries and was unlikely to do so in the future.”
• Indonesia’s Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto said in Singapore (2022) during an interview with Aljazeera: “But China has also helped us. China has also defended us and China is now a very close partner with Indonesia. And actually, China has always been the leading civilization in Asia. Many of our sultans, kings, our princes in those days would marry princesses from China. We have hundreds of years of relationship.”

The above 3 positive comments about China are from leaders of three of China’s neighboring countries in Asia. Their country’s experience with China since ancient times tells a lot about the peaceful nature of China. The question here is: will Latin American countries, African countries, other Asian countries, and Middle Eastern countries say the same about their country’s experience with the US and Europe? Or perhaps, will European countries say the same about their own neighboring countries in Europe?

The reality is that: Western imperialism is not dead after the 2 World Wars; in particular, the USA has always been a troublemaker for the rest of the world. The following examples should provide us with a good picture of how the US is threatening peace in Asia, and its main target since 2008 is China:

• US: Chinese are not allowed to be wealthy

During the 2008 GFC, US Secretary of Finance Henry Paulson visited China almost every month to seek help to stabilize the dollar’s status as a reserve currency. As a result, China bought almost an extra $600b in US Treasury debts in 2008, which accounted for over half the total issued by the US government to bail out the too-big-to-fail banks and the US economy that year.

Once the US economy stabilized, the world stopped dumping the dollar due to China having injected ($600b) confidence in US treasury debts, the only positive thing China received from America in return for its support of the US economy is open praise from Henry Paulson in the New York Times on 22 Oct 2008 “Thanking China’s cooperation in easing the Financial Crisis“.

Since then, in 2010, Obama said in Australia: “If over 1 billion Chinese citizens have the same living patterns as Australians and Americans do right now, then all of us are in for a very miserable time. The planet just can’t sustain it.”

In 2011, an opinion piece in the New York Times suggested that Obama “should enter into closed-door negotiations with Chinese leaders to write off the $1.14 trillion of American debt currently held by China in exchange for a deal to end American military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan and terminate the current United State-Taiwan defense arrangement by 2015.” Years later, a Wikileaks leaked email revealed the then Secretary of States Hillary Clinton wanted to discuss ditching Taiwan in exchange for China to erase US debts.

In 2013, a Jimmy Kimmel Live show on ABC asked some kids what to do about the $1.3 trillion of debts the US owes to China, a very young boy suggested that “The US kill everyone in China instead of repaying its debts.”

In 2021, Joe Biden said in a press conference: “China wants to become the most wealthy, powerful country but it’s ‘not gonna happen on my watch’.”

In 2023, under the excuse of an imaginary “China threat” and to “Protect Taiwan from China invasion”, US politicians proposed a series of bipartisan bills aiming to restrict how China can use its money, restricting China’s rights in International Financial Institutions, and a plan to confiscate China’s sovereign fund and Chinese citizens’ overseas bank accounts and assets like the way the US and Europe did to the Russians in 2022.

Please click the following links for details of their proposed “looting” bills:

• H.R.554, the “Taiwan Conflict Deterrence Act of 2023”, sponsored by Rep. French Hill;
• H.R.510, the “Chinese Currency Accountability Act of 2023,” sponsored by Rep. Warren David;
• H.R.839, the “China Exchange Rate Transparency Act of 2023,” sponsored by Rep. Dan Meuser;
• H.R.803, the “Protect Taiwan Act,” sponsored by Rep Frank Lucas;

From the above series of behavior and statements made by two US Presidents, a Secretary of State, a very young boy, the US media, and 4 politicians who sponsored anti-China bills, it is hard not to come to the conclusion about the ungrateful nature of Americans. It would appear to me that the robber DNA is deep in the blood and bone of many people in the US society (I hate to generalize my comment unless someone can convince me that the above-named series of behaviors within the US society are merely coincident!).

• US military threat to China at China’s doorstep

Let’s put aside the various issues from a reported 2012 US plan to deploy 60% of the US Navy fleet to the Asia Pacific by 2020, and the 2011 Obama Pacific Pivot with a secret plan to start a war against China by 2030 with a coalition of nations to militarily control commercial shipment to and from China via the South China seas to limit China freedom to trade with the rest of the world, and should China resist, the US-led military coalition would begin to attack China.

John Pilger is an award-winning journalist who produced a 2 hours documentary with details of US military bases around China and how the US may plan to start a war with China.

In 2017, US Admiral Scott Swift assured everyone he was ready to follow President Trump’s orders to launch a nuclear missile against China.

In 2022, former US National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien suggested destroying Taiwan’s semiconductor factories rather than letting them fall into China’s hands.

In 2023, US talk show host Garland Nixon wrote on Twitter that White House insiders said that US President Joe Biden had warned about a plan for “the destruction of Taiwan” when asked if there could be any greater disaster than the Ukraine crisis.

There are endless US military activities and arrangements targeting China in recent years. Just to list a few more examples below:

• While the Western media and politicians keep telling the world that the PLA is increasingly aggressive against Western countries’ (military) freedom of navigation in the South and East China Seas, a recent report by the US Department of Defence revealed that “the US has conducted around 120 military exercises a year with allies and partners in the region.” Ironically, such statistics of US military aggression on China’s doorstep failed to attract the interest of the Western Media.

• In 2017, the US deployed the THAAD missile system in South Korea with total disregard for China’s protest.

• In 2021, Australia reached a deal with the US and UK on a $386b nuclear submarine deal with China as their target.

• In 2022, US Defense Secretary Austin announced that: “The US is at a pivotal point with China and needs military strength to ensure that American values, not Beijing’s, set global norms in the 21st century.” He then talked about the need to align the US budget as never before to the China Challenge. He then mentioned a $1.2 trillion estimated cost as part of a major nuclear triad overhaul underway by the Congressional Budget Office.

One should note that such an additional budget for military expenses is on top of the fact that the US military already spent more than the next 10 countries combined.

• In July 2023, USS Kentucky, a US nuclear submarine (capable of firing nuclear ballistic missiles) suddenly arrived in Busan, South Korea.
• Again, in July 2023, Nato head Jens Stoltenberg pushed to increase ties with Asia with the intention to form an Asia NATO alliance. Former Australia PM Paul Keating labeledStoltenberg a ‘supreme fool’ and ‘an accident on its way to happen’.

To justify NATO’s intention to set up its military presence in Asia, NATO engaged in a series of smear campaigns against  imaginary Chinese threats based on NATO’s own past behavior across the world. The latest smear campaign was in the NATO Vilnius Summit Communique. As a result, China’s Permanent Representative to the UN refuted NATO’s false accusations against China, and challenged NATO if it can make the same claims as China on the following 6 points:

1. China has never invaded other countries;
2. China has never engaged in proxy wars;
3. China has never carried out military operations around the world;
4. China did not threaten other countries with force;
5. China did not export ideology
6. China did not interfere in other countries’ internal affairs

The reality is that the US initiated an all-out hostility against China after China helped the US out of the 2008 GFC [Global Financial Crisis]. Examples:

1. Obama’s Pacific Pivot;
2. Obama’s TPP to Exclude China from International Trade;
3. Trump and Biden all-out trade Wars;
4. Trump and Biden all-out technological wars;
5. US military deployments, and military activities surrounding China. Despite the US already having 313 of its 750 worldwide military bases surrounding China, the US continued to expand by another 4 recently via the Philippines with 3 of them close to Taiwan.

The Ukrainization of Taiwan

Despite the past US administrations (1972, 1979, 1982) entering into 3 Joint Communiques with China over the Taiwan question (The One-China agreements), the US politicians have over the years, through their own acts, brutally violated all the written agreements with China re the One-China Policy. The latest developments are the worst:

In July 2023, US House of Congress passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to ban Pentagon maps from depicting Taiwan and its major outlying islands, Kinmen, Penghu, Mazudao, Wuchudao, and Ludao (etc) as part of China. (Here is the content of the original amendment bill).

Below is just a quick list of examples of US violating all its signed One-China documents with China to provoke a war over Taiwan:

• In 2021, Taiwan English News reported the news of “Pentagon doubled the number of US troops in Taiwan”,

• In 2022, VOA (Chinese news) reported that the US has again increased the number of its military personnel in Taiwan. The intention is to help coordinate both militaries in a possible future war with China.

• In April 2023, US lawmaker, Chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul pledged to help provide training for Taiwan’s armed forces and to speed up the delivery of weapons.

• In June 2023, Taiwan (ROC) Foreign Affair website issued a press release titled “US government officially notifies Taiwan of latest arms sales.”

• In July 2023, it was widely reported in Taiwan that the U.S. wants Taiwan to set up a P4 Biological Laboratory. Yahoo Chinese News pointed out that Taiwan Chinese newspaper (联合报) is the first to break the detail of the Biological Weapons Lab story. Taiwan CTI TV news reported in detail that the Lab is to test biological weapons using Chinese DNA as “the DNA of the Taiwan population can represent Chinese DNA.” Not surprisingly: the Western media is very much silent on this kind of news despite the fact that the US State Department later denied the Taiwanese report that the US asked Taiwan to develop weaponized biological agents.

• Perhaps to justify a possible preemptive war against China under the Bush Doctrine in the foreseeable future, the US Congress passed a $500m anti-China propaganda bill in February 2022. How much of this $500m goes to brainwashing Taiwanese?

In a recent interview, Jeffrey Sachs describes a series of US actions against China as a “Path to War With China.”

DPP politicians prepare for war and an escape route while Taiwanese people reject war

The trouble with Western forms of so-called democracy is that to win an election, one needs to build an election war chest. That is to seek political donations in return for favors when one is in a position of power. It usually involves an under-the-table deal between politicians and their donors. As a result, corporate donors, billionaires, foreign cash, and foreign powers could easily penetrate domestic politics.

Since the beginning of Taiwan having a Western form of election, dark money, corruption, bribery, and scandals news become a part of the social norm within the Taiwanese political circle. If we search for the name of any DPP senior politicians (especially Ministers and Prime Ministers) with the term “Dark-Money”, “corruption”, or “scandals”, one should notice almost no innocent people in the system. As Western media usually self-censored negative news linked to the Pro-independent party, so, the best way to search for such news is to search in the Chinese language. For examples,

• Search in Chinese for corruption of the Current Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen;
• Search her deputy (the coming DPP presidential candidate) Lai Ching-te;

Corruption and democracy often go hand in hand. Here are some hyperlinks to examples of how the US interferes in foreign elections:

• Foreign electoral intervention
• The US is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries
• “Stop US interference”: Interview with the Labour Party of Taiwan

Those who follow the Taiwan issue via the Taiwan media should notice that, while those Taiwan politicians ally with the US foreign policy and campaign for independence, most of their family members (including themselves) already have US or other Western countries’ citizenship, bank accounts, and assets. For examples,

• A report in Taiwan media in 2015 revealed half of current Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen family members have foreign citizenship;
• As for the Vice President (the coming DPP presidential candidate) 赖清德 (Lai Ching-te), his son and grandson are American citizens;

The irony is that, while these pro-independence politicians eagerly ally with the US to provoke war with the PRC by promoting Taiwan independence, their family members have on the other hand migrated overseas during this time. This is a bit like President Zelensky acting in the interest of the USA, and allowing the entire Ukraine to be bombed and destroyed, because, according to OCCRP (Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project): “Zelensky and his inner circle have unexplained $ billions overseas.”

In fact, during Taiwan’s military exercises, one of their programs is on how the president could safely escape if a war breaks out. (Of course, whenever the Taiwan media reports such escape details, the Ministry of Defense will deny it.)

The tragedy for the average Taiwanese person is that the island economy is already damaged before such a war would begin. According to a recent Financial Times report: “‘People are nervous’: Taiwan’s wealthy shelter money overseas in fear of China conflict.” The same thing happened to foreign companies in Taiwan with “half of the foreign companies in Taiwan making contingency plans due to evacuations and supply chain disruptions concerns.”  The latest Taiwan GDP is down 3.02%.

The reality in Taiwan is that many young people refuse to join the army, and the DPP government is having a problem recruiting new soldiers. As a result:

• The DPP government decided to extend serving time of the existing soldiers by an additional year;
• In June 2023, Taiwan amend the military recruitment regulation to include recruits from Hong Kong and Macao people working and living in Taiwan;
• Again, in June, the DPP government reportedly worked with the Ministry of Education to impose a 3 + 1 university program. That is 3 years of study plus a year of military training.

In February 2023, Jinmen Island local lawmakers voted to declare Jinmen a non-military zone, and Jinmen governor Li Zhufeng (李炷烽) suggests using Jinmen Island as a pilot program for the One Country Two Systems and expanding gradually thereafter.

Professor John V. Wash in a recent article titled “Arming Taiwan is an Insane Provocation” cited a hyperlink to a 2022 polling that showed that an overwhelming majority (82.1%) of Taiwanese now would like to preserve the status quo with only 5.3% wanting immediate independence.”

How much longer will China tolerate the US’s endless escalating military provocations?

In July 2023, Hungary Prime Minister Orban observed that “Beijing managed to develop as much in 30 years as other countries in 200 years. Therefore, they can claim their “place under the sun”. However, Washington does not accept that quick development, the fact that China preceded them in many sectors… As a result, a clash between the two world powers is inevitable…. War is not inevitable, but the USA does not accept that it has become the world’s second most powerful nation, Orbán added.”

An article on Education Monitor News rightly pointed out that “The Greatest Threat to the USA is not China, but Peace.”

In 2014, the New York Times put up an article titled ‘The Lack of Major Wars may be Hurting Economic Growth.’

One should bear in mind that the USA was created on the foundation of invasion, massacre, looting, and enslavement of others. Not a single thing the US possesses today is through peaceful means including every inch of its current territory.

Since 2008, China has already realized that its kindness towards the US will only be perceived as a weakness. That will only encourage more aggression and greed from the US imperialist rulers. So, the first thing Chairman Xi did after taking office in 2012 is to visit a PLA military base. He openly called upon the PLA to prepare for war and to win the war.

In February 2023, China released a report titled “US Hegemony and Its Perils,” and in May “America’s Coercive Diplomacy and its Harm” outlining the many crimes committed by the US against the world and that China is no longer interested in accommodating the US crimes and behaviors.

In March 2023, a Chinese government website reported that Chairman Xi Jinping told a group of more than 300 high-ranking government officials that: “History has repeatedly proven that if we seek security through resolve, security will prevail; If we seek security through concessions, security will perish; If we seek development through resolve, development will prosper; If we seek development through compromises, our development will suffer.”

In June 2023, China released The Law on Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China outlining the country’s attitude toward foreign relations, UN Charters, International Laws, and possible counter-action against any hostile foreign policy and behavior that harms Chinese interest and security.

In July, China called NATO “a trouble-maker”, and issued a warning to NATO: “Beijing doesn’t cause trouble, but is not afraid of trouble”. Days later, the Chinese ambassador to the US issued a direct warning to Washington: “If people violate me, I will hit back.”

So, how long will China continue to tolerate US provocation? How long will China allow the US military to continue to violate its sovereignty in Taiwan? Will China allow the US more time to arm Taiwan like what they did in Ukraine before Putin would no longer tolerate the threats and was forced to take military action?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

The newsreel is rolling, words are at an all-time cheap. The more they are talking, the less it means to me.

— Brand New Kind of Blue – Gold Motel

Culture is a plot to hide this fact from you…that there are doorways out of ordinary reality into worlds impossible to describe and too strange to suppose.

— Terence McKenna

Commonplace dialog in politics, academia, and news-media feels like it’s missing something; leaving out rudimentary areas of investigation that have become taboo for polite society to question. Those aforementioned groups occasionally cite problems as “systemic,” but when it comes to defining what that means exactly or asking what alternatives there might be to the present system there is a collective hush that speaks loudly to tacit boundaries in place.

Instead the solution-set primarily discussed is limited to what amounts to band-aids for gaping wounds, or symptomatic responses that serve primarily to pander to a particular issue or crowd that often are a bridge too far themselves for the powers that be. The so called pundits of all flavors tend to stay in the safe intellectual territory usually defined by those who use leverage to become an authority; e.g., nation states, corporations and such. The authority will define what is in the acceptable limits of conversation while typically journalists and academics reactively talk along predefined lines.

Like take, for instance, Biden’s attempt at student debt relief. There was no participative democratic inquiry as to what to do about the ungodly sums of student loan debt accrued. Rather power offered what amounts to a conciliatory gesture to address the issue mostly all by itself. The proposed band-aid only applies to some, and it only removes a portion of the debt, and ends up being even less comprehensive than initially proposed.

The plan also entirely ignored larger issues that no one with a significant voice in the public sphere brings up. Like, why is academia allowed to price gouge people for rather flimsy educations in the first place?  Especially when many large universities are extraordinarily wealthy having multiple streams of income and receive large donations along with federal and state funding? Or why aren’t corporations footing the bill for training people, which they once commonly did, but as it is, universities are effectively charging the masses an eye watering premium to be better tools for corporate use. Expanding out, there are even larger issues to delve into around the legitimacy of capitalism, or how debt sure seems like it’s just rebranded indentured servitude, or how arguably these educational systems serve as instruments of domestication for the human mind that may be doing more harm than good.

However, the typical reaction to dissenting ideas in public dialogue, even if they are ideas that are obvious solutions and quite workable, is that if it’s not aligned with status quo thoughts stemming from central power it’s shunned, mocked, and thrown out with laughable disdain. Sadly, it’s often journalists, so called experts, and academics who are at the vanguard of contempt against all that color outside the lines of the discussion offered by those in power.

I feel compelled to note that bringing up Biden has nothing to do with partisanship, merely an example of how power defines what is pragmatic conversation in public dialogue and how punditry fails to be anything other than a babbling reactionary.

What’s at the Forefront of Public Ignorance?

I believe the crux of the ignored conversation is a simple straight forward questioning of good faith. Are these nation states, corporations, and other contemporary social hierarchies of power benevolent entities as they claim to be, or are they primarily self-serving with wildly different agendas than what they sell to the masses? If they prove to be the latter, then the tone of public debate will have to shift from trying to tweak a system, to suggesting forms of radical change to the status quo, because if the status quo is at fundamental odds with peace or unable to bring forth meaningful conversation that actually reflects the will of the people, then another way of being must be found or the real felt quality of life will never improve.

What is evident is that those that have power always tout their supposed accomplishments and how they are going to offer plenty of hope and change, how they are going to make everything great or build something better, and yet nearly the exact same type of system remains that has always been there despite the empty promises of politicians, which is a top down society where money buys a voice and hence power. A society with conspicuous inequality that manages to always find some method of segregation that amounts to awarding a few with incredible luxuries while others struggle to find food and housing, and even when such things are bountiful the basics of life will are withheld, arguably so that those at the top of the hierarchy can control the behavior of those beneath them in the hierarchy. Without manufacturing desperation or the fear of being desperate, centralized power would find it difficult to hold their system together, so it seems desperation is a built-in feature in our socioeconomic system that allows for people to be more easily manipulated.

Our collective problems are not recent developments either, they are long standing. If you read the writings of radicals from a hundred years ago, for instance, take anarchists Alexander Berkman or his close friend Emma Goldman, it’s evident that society was grappling with eerily similar problems in their time and if you push back further in the writings of dissidents of western society, you’ll find the same kind of critiques. Showing that those who have ruled in the past use the same basic methods of oppression they use now, like a magician the powers that be merely use sleight of hand in semantics to rebrand old world barbarism to hide the fact that systemic forces which govern our lives today are just as intransigent and ravenously opportunistic as the rulers of old.

People are led to believe that something else magical happened when European Enlightenment took hold in the 17^th century; however, upon further review it was actually only a great enlightenment for power, who learned a critical lesson that it’s easier to sell people the idea they are free to keep them docile and confused than it is to rule via direct fear and threat, which is prone to causing more direct uprisings. Power now works through various forms of leverage.  They’ll use whatever is convenient at any moment to get the results that are beneficial to those at the top of the hierarchy. It’s applied game theory, which intelligence agencies openly employ as noted by game theory expert Dr. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita who himself has assisted the CIA and is the exact kind of academic I’m referring to here in this writing that simply ignores other ways of cooperating together as possibilities, which leaves him with a rather naive childlike outlook believing the US is innately a force for good that just occasionally gets some things wrong here and there.

The fact that the US is applying game theory means they have agendas and are playing a contrived game of one-upmanship with the rest of the planet, that is unless one is to believe it’s all just for defensive purposes. This doesn’t seem to be the case, though, considering the CIA has overthrown leadership of other sovereign countries, meddled in people’s lives all over the world, tortured and every other horror imaginable to the degree that it’s nearly impossible to rest on the idea that they are simply playing a defensive game. They are able to get away with all that because of power imbalances economically and militarily that create the leverage they need to continue with their wretched ways.

The Problems With Asking Others to Think for Us

Sage Ramana Maharshi often spoke of the value of self inquiry and quieting the mind so we can become more open in a state of flow; freeing ourselves of prejudices and limiting narratives. I’d argue that without the ability to see what the mind is doing that we are little more than grim bio-computers running programs we’ve been behaviorally conditioned to learn. While running our programs there is no real choice, only a limited selection of rote reactions.

Journalists and academics have been designated as our collective self inquiry for the entire global civilization, and the overlay of a socioeconomic system is our bewildering nattering ego based mind running a program from the past. The problem that arises here is that the ego has hired a portion of the ego to inquire about the legitimacy of the agendas of our socioeconomic system.

Turns out that the majority of academics and journalists aren’t immune from aspects of careerism, which is little more than creating an egoic identity through their work. So if asking particular questions are socially frowned upon or will negatively impact the ego they’ve been working so hard to construct, they’ll usually refrain from doing so and hold in an avoidance pattern sticking to doing what’s comfortable or culturally acceptable. They might point out problems that might need to be fixed, but rarely will they argue towards ideas that could impinge on their own agendas or might threaten the larger system that has given them a special status.

So it should come as no surprise that you’ll probably never see the New York Times run an article questioning if a monetary system can ever produce a balanced peaceful society living in symbiosis with nature. A valid question since over a couple thousand years in western “civilization” every monetary system looks a lot more of a tool to control the actions of the majority of the population than a system that is freeing us to live better lives, not to mention how nearly every western society that has used the dark art of monetary exchange has also caused ecological havoc to the environment often leading to their collapse, could be a coincidence, but it does seem that when the world is reduced through an abstract lens seen through profit craven eyes that there are major implications that go along with it.

Money, after all, directly translates into people doing things for you in a slavish manner often doing things they wouldn’t ordinarily do but are simply doing so to earn money, which makes the bulk of us liars who must go to these jobs. We all know lawyers are paid to lie, and look at the social distrust they spawn. How many sales people believe everything they are telling their prospective customers? How many politicians lie for fundraising? How many people are in jobs that will offer a polite smile while internally feeling undulating waves of quiet desperation wishing they could say how they really feel to their employers or clients?

Money and capitalism as a whole make us all liars of sorts. And this is the society we want? One based on rewarding people for telling lies? A bunch of insincere liars trying to get ahead of one another while chasing cheap thrills and useless luxuries that result in heinous externalities. In many jobs people amount to servants for those who hold currency. They clean their toilets, cook their meals, and chauffeur them around. The end goal of what is termed success in this materialistic capitalist society is to sit around like a demanding turd only moving for the sake of recreation or to diddle the lower class on private jets, and their primary job is simply managing their money, writing checks, and telling someone what to do for it. This is the useless life so many lie, manipulate, and even murder to obtain.

What we have long given up is real community where there are strong social bonds. We’ve given up the bulk of our free time to be in a labor camp called employment by polite society, but it’s stuff you better do or else you’ll be cut off from food and housing resources. We’ve given up having a say and letting real human intelligence and creativity emerge that’s not coerced. We’ve given up seeing nature during the day to be in some dreary building, given up being close to our loved ones so we can mingle among acquaintances in high pressure situations where we embarrassingly ingratiate ourselves to people we’d rather tell to screw off.

Is it so hard to question for a moment that the money system may be completely contrived and controlled by a small in-group that is vying for power and control, just like happens in any social hierarchy? Is it not possible that our entire western based civilization is simply based on a cheap form of opportunism?

All things considered I believe this to be a highly pertinent line of questioning, yet academics and journalists won’t touch it.

How is it that something that seems so rife with problems, like the monetary system, can go almost unquestioned in public discourse in terms of asking if there are alternatives. Are these minds just closed or disinterested? In either case that’s a real problem in itself since authentic curiosity, meaning non-self serving motives with an open disposition, are major factors when it comes to intelligent decision making.

I have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive.

— Albert Einstein

The monetary system and what is called capitalism today was initiated and maintained by a group of people whose collective mindset appears to be sketchy based on how they treated people over thousands of years even though capitalism, itself, is said to be a recent invention, threads of it reach much further back in time.

When you control all the land and offer it at a premium to live there, that means those people must do some level of work which they owe to the system just to live on the land. And we call this “freedom,” and “free markets.” Working to live on the land where one can’t escape systems originating from centralized power and unable to live on your own terms smacks of feudalism. Coercion. A centralized authority planning your life for you.

People, in fact, are capable of forming complex voluntary communities living outside a centralized economic system with tighter communal bonds and drastically more fulfilling lives with more free time of their own. This has all happened before, and can happen again and be even better than before if we’d let it happen.

They got the remedy
But they won’t let it happen

Eternal Summer — The Strokes

A monetarily wealthy class is able subvert any idea of democracy when the money allows them to hire armies of people to represent their voice over a myriad of different mediums. Under this economic way of being representative democracy is a total sham, likely a sham wherever a central hierarchy is formed that is noncooperative as ours is, but especially in a two party system that is beholden to the donor-ship class, where payoffs and backroom deals are made daily; it’s a pay to play democracy in name only, that functions as a system of quid pro quo favors.

The mindset of the money changers can’t be ignored any longer. They formed their systems while also engaged in colonialism, genocide, imperialism, warfare, slavery, and basically any awful thing that gives them more of what they crave. So based on the emotional thrust of a competitive domination ownership society where prominent players in this game of deceit vie for global hegemonic rule there is little reason to think that such people with imperialist agendas who start wars under false pretenses are going to create an economic system that is fair and beneficial to the masses and every reason to think based on patterns long established that the economic system itself is nothing more than an evolution of chattel slavery, except in modernity they claim you’re free even though most people still end up working close to the same amount of hours they would have worked as serfs, slaves, and servants. The material accouterments have improved overall, yet all that makes us is a better treated servant class.

Thus, perhaps it’s a good idea to question if the monetary system isn’t just a ruse to control human behavior.

The same analysis can be applied to every part of the systems created by power; e.g., the military industrial complex, prisons, hierarchical government, the “educational” institutions, or the chosen paths of scientific research…there’s reason to question if it’s all just part of an overall system created as a method to corral people into spending their lives doing the activities organized power desires instead of people living truly free allowing them to organize their own communities without a parental oligarch meddling with their lives from hundreds if not thousands of miles away.

Big money from oligarchs fund both major corporate news media and academia, fuels political powers and allows for their message to be pumped through public dialogue while others who have significantly less financial resources have an extremely limited or no ability to voice their opinions. I know, that sounds very conspiratorial of me to say such things, but that’s just the way things work and given that the powers that be will militarily occupy a country like Iraq without any good reason for doing so, killing at least a million Iraqis in the process, then I think it’s fair to question authority’s intentions at every moment. Once someone is willing to kill massive amounts of people for selfish reasons there’s not much they wouldn’t be capable of doing.

Returning to my point on academia and journalism, corporate news media at times work hand in hand with the government, some getting first dibs at information and interviews with politicians if they agree not to ask questions that are inconvenient to power. Further, when news media have corporate sponsors they are very unlikely to bite the hand that is feeding them, hence remaining unbiased becomes an impossibility. Of course, let’s not forget that Noam Chomsky wrote a book with lead author, Edward S. Herman, entitled Manufacturing Consent detailing how news media is sold-out. Chomsky is an academic himself who is also sold-out in many ways, but he makes some astute observations regarding how media overall operates in complicity with the establishment.

Further, journalists and haughty academics are often considered to be essential parts of maintaining what is often referred to as “institutions of democracy.” A vague important sounding phrase that glazes completely over questioning if the system is democratic at all in the first place. The phrase is commonly used and rarely, if ever, does anyone define what those institutions are or what it is they are really doing.

In fact, these quasi protectors of something we don’t actually have, democracy, aren’t even bold enough to investigate if this system is actually holding up to what was stated in the founding documents. The beginning of the Declaration of Independence is so radical there’s not a major media outlet even willing to measure our current condition against its words:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…

The “consent of the governed” doesn’t sound like something our government cares about at all when it comes to every war fought, every act of taxation legislated, every handout to the military industrial complex, every country and segregated group meddled with for oligarchs’ own selfish gain. Further, how much of the population must agree for change to happen and how is that measured? Just because an election was held didn’t mean that any of those questions were put up for debate, or even functionally could be in this brand of pseudo-democracy. A sizable faction of people may want to be free of their system, but it doesn’t matter, they will be forced into the system that top down power demands regardless of how unjust that system is.

The Declaration of Independence then goes super radical and says that it’s the right of the people to alter or abolish government if it’s known they are not holding up the aforementioned values. However, just try creating a movement to abolish this beast and you’ll be labeled a terrorist, likely to be incarcerated for a long time as a result. There are no thresholds set for when or how the people could validly force their government to change. It simply states rebellion is valid in extremely vague terms that has no real teeth to it or allows for the people to have sufficient traction to implement such changes thus rendering it to be nothing more than a hollow gesture.

The constitution has the same vague wording throughout and the Bill of Rights is equally as useless as a rebuke to the demands of power, since power does what it wants via leverage and interprets words that best fits their agenda de jour. Each amendment has laws underneath that drastically changes the meaning of its logical antecedent making the entire thing a statement of rights that you have with a barrage of convenient exceptions allowing those in power to sidestep any constitutional right at their convenience.

Journalists and academia, these so called protectors of our democracy do offer some positives by exposing holes in the system; however, no matter how much evidence of corruption is found and how deep it runs, no matter how mendacious the lies told by power are, the validity of the entire system is rarely put into question. There are, of course, exceptions, but this is about the majority, and the majority are too afraid of saying anything that falls outside accepted avenues of thought often for fear of career or financial repercussions.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that you don’t even need to dig that deep in order to make valid arguments exposing the flaws of the socioeconomic system. The proof of a perpetually corrupt system of thought is right on the surface in how things work and the consistent end results, which are endless war, the promotion of greed (a concept many capitalists deny exists), and the forced poverty innate to a system that doesn’t pay out enough collectively through middle class labor to cover rents for the total population. Creating a game of musical chairs for the entire society where some will inevitably be homeless and likely to be forever in debt till their last days. Despite the cumbersome work hours many must adhere to in order to keep their jobs they somehow still owe something after decades of labor to the upper class, who have more than they could ever use.

The only way the majority can have access to land is by performing tasks for money and even then most will have to take on long term debt to pay a mortgage, and when that is done you still owe taxes on that land in perpetuity. It takes about thirty years of wage labor, or indentured servitude as it was once called, before you can live on land without huge payments made, but even then they can take it from you the second you don’t pay property taxes. Free access to land is the cornerstone of liberty and not a whisper of this sort of discussion is had by any major media outlet or academic institution.

You can spend your whole life working for something,

Just to have it taken away.

— Ain’t No Reason, Brett Dennen

How is it that this way of being can be considered freedom when there are so many forced into doing things they’d rather not be doing simply because the economic system insists they prioritize money in their lives over all else. There are so many that would opt for a different way of living altogether but this system allows for no other choice. This relatively obvious line of question gains no traction, though, in mainstream discussions.  In fact, discussions over alien invasions from outer space are taken more seriously than changing something that is completely under human control to do and that could instantly make lives more free, less stressful, and could potentially create a truly better felt quality of life than what is here now.

Final Thoughts…

The most pertinent questions are often deemed to be impractical, yet if the system is never fundamentally questioned then how would we ever know if it’s broken beyond repair, or, in fact, if we’ve been sold on a system that is doing what it always intended and will never be honest with the people. Journalists and academics are unwittingly complicit with power when they are failing to ask any real questions regarding the feasibility of the system itself or dare to present radical alternatives as an option.

Corporate journalists seem to have plenty to say about a full range of asinine subjects. They’ll comment on what socialites are up to, discuss the president’s last sneeze, or endlessly speculate on who is going to run public office in a few years like it meant anything at all when there are so many larger areas of investigation commonly ignored yet deserving of consideration.

The academics will follow in nerd like fashion to critique journalism with their own pointless contributions about the trending banal subject of the day, like how the president’s sneeze was technically a cough and a sneeze at the same time followed by a fart and how it was misleading journalism to say otherwise. This is obviously on the satirical side, but the point here is that what is actually being addressed on the public stage is every bit as useless as debating the nature of bodily emissions from world leaders while failing to question the basic reason-for-being of a system that looks to be domination oriented and consistently lying to manipulate people for self serving egotistical purposes. There’s some serious questioning of the legitimacy of the whole thing that is somehow deemed irrelevant and out of the bounds of pragmatism to ask when they are some of the most important discussions to be had.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jason Holland.

The post NATO’s Declaration of War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

An Australian advocacy group for West Papua self-determination has condemned yesterday’s arrest by Indonesian security forces of 10 West Papua National Committee (KNPB) members.

The activists were arrested “simply because they were handing out leaflets informing people of a rally to be held today” to show support for West Papua becoming a full member of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), said the Australia West Papua Association (AWPA) in a statement.

The security forces detained the activists and took them to the Jayapura Resort Police station in Sentani for questioning.

• READ MORE: Other West Papua-MSG reports

They were eventually released after being detained for eight hours.

It was reported that the police were threatening the KNPB activists and asking therm to make a statement not to carry out West Papuan independence struggle activities.

“Yet again we have peaceful activists arrested for simply handing out leaflets about an upcoming rally, which is their right to do under the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” said Joe Collins of AWPA:

Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

“Hopefully any rallies that take place today will be allowed to go ahead peacefully and there will not be a repeat of the brutal crackdowns that occurred at other peaceful rallies in the past.”

The Melanesian Spearhead Group is due to meet in Port Vila, Vanuatu, this month, although the dates have not yet been announced.

The MSG consists of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) of Kanaky (New Caledonia).

West Papua has observer status while Indonesia has associate membership and Jakarta has been conducting an intense diplomatic lobbying with MSG members over recent months.

The United Liberation Movement of West Papua (ULMWP) has applied for full membership.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The US-Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance began in 1953, at the end of the Korean War. Now 70 years later, President Biden and Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol met to cement and expand the alliance, issuing a Washington Declaration that contains strong expressions of mutual support and severe warnings to Pyongyang in the event of a nuclear attack by North Korea. Both domestic political and alliance considerations drive the Declaration. But two questions must be asked: Are such warnings necessary? Do they add to security on the Korean peninsula?

Nuclear Alliance

On the strategic side, this summit sought to reaffirm US extended deterrence in the event of a North Korean nuclear attack. With Yoon at his side, Biden warned that a North Korean attack would “result in the end of whatever regime” authorized it.

Yoon added: “Our two countries have agreed to immediate bilateral presidential consultations in the event of North Korea’s nuclear attack and promised to respond swiftly, overwhelmingly and decisively using the full force of the alliance, including the United States’ nuclear weapons.”

The US will regularly deploy nuclear-armed submarines to Korean waters as a demonstration of its commitment. The two countries also agreed to strengthen consultations on nuclear strategy, in particular through “the establishment of a new Nuclear Consultative Group (NCG) to strengthen extended deterrence, discuss nuclear and strategic planning, and manage the threat to the nonproliferation regime posed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).”

Back to my question: Are such statements and actions necessary to deter North Korea? There is no evidence that the North questions the willingness and ability of the US to respond devastatingly to a North Korean attack, nuclear or conventional. Nor, despite North Korea’s increasing capability to deliver a nuclear weapon to targets in the US, is there reason to think it would do so except in response to being attacked first.

Yet, according to numerous reports, some South Koreans are having their doubts about US reliability—enough doubts that around 77 percent of those polled want an independent South Korean nuclear capability. Before visiting Washington, President Yoon himself had raised the possibility of South Korea having its own nukes, which it surely can produce, and fairly quickly.

The Political Backdrop

Biden’s statement was intended to put to rest a South Korean nuclear option or reintroduction of US nuclear weapons to South Korea. (Recall that President George W. Bush ordered their removal in 1991.) That was a win for Biden, especially since the Declaration recommits the ROK to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and to reliance on the US in any scenario that involves use of a nuclear weapon against North Korea. What Yoon got in return was also a win: Biden’s commitment on extended deterrence and close consultations on nuclear weapons.

The domestic political motivations for the Washington Statement are clear. Biden probably wanted to quiet accusations in Congress that he is ignoring the North Korean threat. The lavish reception for Yoon and the ensuing declaration may now make North Korea policy less of a target of right-wing criticism.

For Yoon, facing historically low approval ratings at home and anger over his trade policies, tightening the alliance with the US may quiet conservative critics who argue that North Korea’s frequent ballistic missile tests require an independent nuclear capability. Continued US control over nuclear weapons on Korean soil doesn’t look as reliable to them as it once did.

Other Koreans worry about Yoon’s close alignment with the US for different reasons: alienation of China, the ROK’s top trading partner and major customer for semiconductor exports that Biden wants to restrict; strengthened US defense ties with Japan, despite unresolved issues with South Korea that date to World War II; and pressure that forced Yoon to agree to military aid to Ukraine despite Russia’s considerable popularity among the Korean public.

Threats Instead of Diplomacy

Further stoking the fire with talk of nuclear war, the creation of new joint US-ROK planning and coordination groups on nuclear weapons, and another US nuclear-weapon deployment to South Korea may only magnify tensions on the peninsula.

Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s sister, cited the Washington Declaration’s threat of total destruction in saying it demonstrated the “most hostile and aggressive will of action” against the North, posing “more serious danger” for regional peace.

North Korean military leaders surely noticed reports that the US submarines slated to be deployed to South Korea will be Ohio-class vessels armed with Trident II (D5) ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.

We can expect still more North Korean missile tests in coming weeks, and quite possibly their long-expected seventh nuclear test. Only in the final sentence of the Declaration do Biden and Yoon address a nonnuclear option: diplomacy. “In parallel, both Presidents remain steadfast in their pursuit of dialogue and diplomacy with the DPRK, without preconditions, as a means to advance the shared goal of achieving the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

As I have said many times, the nuclear standoff in Korea requires dedicated, creative diplomacy, not further militarization, if we are to avoid war by accident or miscalculation. Let’s not forget: More than 75 million people live in the two Koreas, not to mention more than 28,000 US troops currently stationed there. If there is a nuclear threat, all three countries—not just one—are contributing to it.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mel Gurtov.

“COVID-19 may no longer be classified as the highest level of international emergency, but the virus has not gone away. There are billions of people in developing countries who still cannot access affordable COVID-19 tests and treatments. They need action from governments to remove the intellectual property barriers that prevent the widespread production of generic medicines.

“Rich countries behaved shamefully in this pandemic, upholding pharmaceutical monopolies and grabbing vaccines, tests and medicines for their people, pushing developing countries to the back in the line. And pharmaceutical companies are the biggest winners, achieving the biggest profit from a single medical product in history, while people died without access.

“The institutions set up to support developing countries, like COVAX and ACT-A, failed to involve developing countries in their creation or decision-making, and failed to deliver an equitable response. For future pandemics, preparation and response must be led by the Global South, instead of creating more global platforms dominated by donors.

“People in developing countries should never again wait for the ‘good will’ of rich countries, nor charitable actions of pharmaceutical companies. The world needs transformative commitments in the Pandemic Treaty and International Health Regulations to ensure knowledge and technology are shared, remove intellectual property barriers, and to support medical research and manufacturing in developing countries.

“Just as with HIV, the global response to COVID-19 failed the world’s most vulnerable, prioritising windfall profits ahead of public health. World leaders must now learn from the last three years, and make structural changes in global health. Or else, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of this pandemic in the next.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

On World Press Freedom Day the world remembers the importance of a free and independent media as the cornerstone of thriving and healthy democracies.

For our developing and developed Pacific nations of the Blue Continent, the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day is also an opportunity to acknowledge the role of journalists whose first rule is to uphold the news creed — to tell the truth without fear or favour, to serve the public interest, to hold power to account.

For our Forum leaders, the primacy and importance of independent reporting and communication of Forum decisions goes back to our beginnings.

One of the key decisions in those early years more than five decades ago was the mandate to communicate, recognising the benefits of sharing information about the leaders meetings and decisions.

I am pleased to note our strong relationship with Pacific media continues to this day.

Across our key regional leader meetings, we actively partner with and brief news journalists to ensure quality reporting of the issues shaping our world. We recognise that editorial independence and quality journalism rely on strong access to facts, information, and certainty.

The watchdog and public interest role of the press as the Fourth Estate complementing the other three — the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary, has never been more important to public accountability, transparency, and good governance.

Together, they ensure engaged, active, and informed Pacific citizens. This level of empowerment sets the basis for a Pacific future that is safe, secure, and peaceful.

From the Biketawa Declaration on Good Governance to the Boe Declaration on Regional Security and the Teieniwa Vision on Anti-Corruption, our leaders are demonstrating their understanding that independent and free media are part of the work we do.

The digital age, amid times of covid and climate crisis, has also brought a new layer of transformative disruption and opportunity.

A free, thriving, and diverse Pacific press is a key partner to our Blue Pacific strategy to 2050. Today we can all celebrate the independence and impact of quality news journalism led by news and media practitioners across the Pacific and globally.

Despite often harsh work conditions, they continue a vocation for a news agenda of truth, transparency, and accountability.

The global rights-based theme of this year’s World Press Freedom Day is a timely recognition that in serving the public interest, the journalist is often the implementing arm of the people’s right to know. Independent truth telling and investigation is not an easy or popular calling.

World Press Freedom Day allows us to reiterate the safety and the rights of journalists, particularly women in journalism.

Without this ability to do their work without fear or favour, we cannot count on the facts that matter, that stand out in a world of fake news, misinformation, and noise.

Today, I join those who pay tribute to all journalists who frame the stories of our times in the values of truth, balance, and our collective right to know. Vinaka vakalevu, thank you.

PIF Secretary-General Henry Puna gave this message for the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day on 3 May 2023. It has been republished from The Fiji Times with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Just over a year into a "state of exception" in El Salvador, Amnesty International on Monday accused all three branches of government of enabling "the systematic, massive, and sustained violation of the human rights of the Salvadoran population" in a supposed effort to crack down on gang violence.

Since the Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele requested and the Legislative Assembly approved the state of emergency that suspended certain civil liberties in March 2022, lawmakers have repeatedly extended it, most recently last month. The policy has "allowed the arbitrary detention and imprisonment of more than 66,000 people," according to the global human rights group.

"The international community is alert to the grave human rights consequences of the state of emergency in El Salvador," said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty's Americas director. "The compliance of the institutions responsible for ensuring and administering justice in the country has led to the criminal justice system being weaponized to punish people, the majority of whom are from historically marginalized areas, when there is no evidence that they have committed a crime."

Specifically, according to the organization:

On the one hand, the executive, through the police, the armed forces, and the Ministry of Security, has designed and implemented a security strategy based on the excessive use of force, indiscriminate arbitrary detention, and the practice of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment including torture.

For its part, the legislature has for a year continued to approve and extend the period that the state of emergency, a measure whose nature is temporary and extraordinary, remains in force. In addition, it has supported a series of legal amendments that contravene international human rights standards ratified by the country.

Finally, the judiciary is not acting independently, is violating the right to due process, and is failing to combat impunity for the violations committed. The courts and auxiliary entities as well as those attached to the Public Prosecutor's Office are flagrantly failing in their duties in criminal proceedings.

"The deaths of 132 people in state custody, arbitrary detention, mass criminal prosecutions, and the indiscriminate imprisonment of tens of thousands of people are incompatible with an effective, fair, and lasting public security strategy," said Guevara-Rosas. "The systematic violation of human rights and the dismantling of the rule of law are not the answer to the problems facing the country. On the contrary, they set very dangerous precedents."

While the confirmed death toll as of last month is 132, Amnesty noted that "Salvadoran human rights organizations believe that there is underreporting because of reported cases of exhumations of victims from mass graves after families were finally able to learn of the deaths of individuals who had died months earlier."

In one case highlighted by the group, a 45-year-old man with mental disabilities was apprehended at his home in April 2022. His family spent months trying to locate him. In September, someone who claimed to have shared a cell with the man called his family and advised them to go to the Forensic Medicine Institute, because he believed the man died after being beaten by guards.

"He told us: 'Your relative vomited blood through his mouth and nose. I think he died, because they took him to the hospital and they never brought him back,'" the family said. The Forensic Medicine Institute informed them that he died after 36 days in custody and was buried in a mass grave. The family had his remains exhumed in October but is unaware of any investigation into his death.

That's part of a trend, according to Amnesty. Guevara-Rosas said that "in none of the 50 cases we have documented has it been possible to verify that there were investigation processes regarding the conduct of public officials. The fact that there are widespread human rights violations and virtually no ongoing criminal proceedings evidences the control exercised from the highest level so that all state powers obey this policy of indiscriminate imprisonment."

Along with documenting abuse by police and prison guards sometimes resulting in deaths from "beatings," "mechanical asphyxiation," and "multiple unidentified traumas," Amnesty interviewed people subjected to "extreme overcrowding in cells holding more than 100 people." Detainees disclosed a "lack of sanitation and access to basic services such as water, adequate food, medicines, and medical care," and said they were cut off from communicating with family.

"We see with alarm how overcrowding and torture continue to claim the lives of innocent people, with the complicity of all the institutions that are supposed to uphold their rights," said Guevara-Rosas. "The dehumanization that thousands of unjustly imprisoned people are suffering is intolerable and must be urgently addressed by international human rights protection mechanisms."

"Given the systematic nature of grave human rights violations, we call on international protection mechanisms to intervene urgently to avoid a major crisis in El Salvador," she added. "The Salvadoran state must know with certainty that the international community will not tolerate these kinds of policies."

Amnesty's findings and demands echo those of other advocacy groups, including Human Rights Watch, which released a lengthy report on the state of exception in December. Juanita Goebertus, the organization's Americas director, said at the time that "to put an end to gang violence and human rights violations, El Salvador's government should replace the state of emergency with an effective and rights-respective security policy that grants Salvadorans the safety they so dearly deserve."

Goebertus also argued that "the international community should redouble its efforts to help ensure that Salvadorans are safe from heinous crimes by gangs, human rights violations by security forces, and other abuse of power."

Al Jazeera reported Monday that "such criticism has done little, however, to deter Bukele, whose popularity has surged as the crackdown exerts pressure on networks of gangs that have brought violence and exploitation to many areas of the country for years."

The president, the outlet noted, "recently unveiled a new, megaprison to hold people rounded up under the state of emergency," saying in February that "this will be their new house, where they will live for decades, all mixed, unable to do any further harm to the population."

Bukele's five-year term is set to end next year. The president confirmed in September his intention to seek reelection despite arguments that doing so would be unconstitutional.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Hypocrisy and humanity's failure to "unite around consistently applied human rights and universal values" expose a system unfit to tackle global crises, according to a report published by Amnesty International on Monday, the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"The West's robust response to Russia's aggression against Ukraine contrasts sharply with a deplorable lack of meaningful action on grave violations by some of their allies including Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt," Amnesty said in an introduction to its annual global human rights report.

"As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 75, Amnesty International insists that a rules-based international system must be founded on human rights and applied to everyone, everywhere," the group asserted.

None

— (@)

Amnesty continued:

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 unleashed numerous war crimes, generated a global energy and food crisis, and sought to further disrupt a weak multilateral system. It also laid bare the hypocrisy of Western states that reacted forcefully to the Kremlin's aggression but condoned or were complicit in grave violations committed elsewhere...

Double standards and inadequate responses to human rights abuses taking place around the world fuelled impunity and instability, including deafening silence on Saudi Arabia's human rights record, inaction on Egypt, and the refusal to confront Israel's system of apartheid against Palestinians.

The report also highlights China's use of strong-arm tactics to suppress international action on crimes against humanity it has committed, as well as the failure of global and regional institutions—hamstrung by the self-interest of their members—to respond adequately to conflicts killing thousands of people including in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Yemen.

"Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a chilling example of what can happen when states think they can flout international law and violate human rights without consequences," Amnesty International secretary general Agnès Callamard said in a statement.

"The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created 75 years ago, out of the ashes of the Second World War. At its core is the universal recognition that all people have rights and fundamental freedoms," she added. "While global power dynamics are in chaos, human rights cannot be lost in the fray. They should guide the world as it navigates an increasingly volatile and dangerous environment. We must not wait for the world to burn again."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on Monday urged the Biden administration to consider rescinding its proposed anti-asylum rule, which critics have compared to former President Donald Trump's "transit ban" that denied asylum to anyone who had traveled to the United States through a third country.

The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security last month proposed the new rule, which would subject asylum seekers to prompt deportation if they don't have "documents sufficient for lawful admission."

Migrants who pass through other countries en route to the U.S. without first claiming asylum there will be labeled ineligible to claim asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border—a violation of the internationally recognized right to seek asylum, said the UNHCR, echoing a number of refugee rights groups.

"As proposed, the regulation would restrict the fundamental human right to seek asylum for people who passed through another country and arrived in the United States without authorization," said the agency, which is headed by Filippo Grandi. "UNHCR is particularly concerned that, even with the regulation's grounds for rebuttal, this would lead to cases of refoulement—the forced return of people to situations where their lives and safety would be at risk—which is prohibited under international law."

"Key elements of the proposal are incompatible with principles of international refugee law," said the agency.

The UNHCR submitted comments on the proposed rule as part of the U.S. government's federal rule-making process. The public comment period for the proposal ends Monday.

The new rule, titled Circumvention of Legal Pathways, has been proposed to go into effect for two years after the expiration of Title 42, the pandemic-era policy which gave border agents the authority to expel immigrants at the southern U.S. border. Title 42 is currently scheduled to expire in May.

The UNHCR noted that the United States' mass denial of asylum for people arriving in the country after Title 42 expires would put strain on other countries which are already hosting millions of refugees.

"In line with the goals of the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection and other international commitments, it is essential that countries work together to secure collaborative and coordinated responses to increasing movements of refugees and migrants in the Americas," said the agency, referring to the 2022 agreement between Western Hemisphere countries that aimed to "create the conditions for safe, orderly, humane, and regular migration and to strengthen frameworks for international protection and cooperation."

The agency added that it is committed to supporting "broader reform efforts" regarding the U.S. immigration system aimed at improving "the fairness, quality and efficiency of the asylum system."

The UNHCR included recommendations for the U.S. system in its public comment, including:

• Introducing integrated border processing, reception, and registration to ensure asylum-seekers are identified as soon as possible after entering the U.S. and can be directed to the services they need, as well as helping to reduce overcrowding at ports of entry and minimizing delays and inefficiencies;
• Providing legal information, aid, and representation at the earliest possible stage to contribute to fairness and efficiency;
• Providing "non-adversarial adjudication," in which authorities could work with asylum applicants to "establish necessary facts and analyze them in accordance with international standards";
• Introducing "differentiated case processing modalities," in which straightforward cases with fewer legal or factual questions could be "streamed into accelerated and/or simplified procedures," allowing authorities "to enhance protection and build efficiencies by dedicating greater resources to the adjudication of complex claims."

"UNHCR stands ready to support these efforts throughout the region, including with the United States," said the UNHCR, "with a focus on genuine responsibility sharing, strengthening asylum systems and building safe pathways to protection and solutions."

The UNHCR has denounced the Biden administration's immigration policies in the past, warning in January that the president's expansion of Title 42—in which up to 30,000 people from specific countries would be sent to Mexico each month unless they met certain requirements—was "not in line with refugee law standards."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

More than 120 mostly English lawyers on Friday published a "declaration of conscience" pledging to withhold their services from "supporting new fossil fuel projects" and "action against climate protesters exercising their democratic right of peaceful protest."

The United Kingdom has in recent years faced protests from numerous climate groups, including those with more pronounced direct actions like Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain, and Extinction Rebellion. As part of those protests, participants have filled the streets, blocked fossil fuel facilities, glued scientific papers and themselves to a government building, called out major law firms for "defending climate criminals," and even, controversially, tossed tomato soup on one of Vincent van Gogh's glass-protected paintings.

Released on the heels of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, the lawyers' statement notes the U.K. Parliament's 2019 climate emergency declaration, the International Energy Agency's warning against future oil and gas development, and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres' proclamation that "investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness."

The attorneys' declaration also recognizes that the world is on track to breach the 2015 Paris climate agreement's 1.5°C goal and the "dire consequences" of doing so, pointing out that "in the U.K. alone, we are already seeing unprecedented heatwaves, wildfires, flooding, and coastal erosion. In other parts of the globe the effects are already far worse."

Along with vowing to restrict their services, the lawyers:

• Called upon the U.K. government and other attorneys to take action;
• Advocated for law and litigation reform related to mitigating and adapting to global warming;
• Expressed support for the democratic right to peaceful protest, which is under attack in the United Kingdom; and
• Committed to donating their time and money to climate causes.

The attorneys, collectively calling themselves Lawyers Are Responsible, are supported by the groups Good Law Project and Plan B.Earth—whose director, Tim Crosland, highlighted that "the U.N. has said we're on a 'highway to climate hell' and that to get off it, we need to stop new fossil fuel developments now. But behind every new oil and gas deal sits a lawyer getting rich."

"Meanwhile, it's the ordinary people of this country, taking a stand against this greed and destruction that the British legal system prosecutes and imprisons, jailing them just for talking about the climate crisis and fuel poverty," Crosland said. "The rule of law has been turned on its head. Lawyers are responsible. It's time to take a stand."

Taking a stand is not without risk. In the United Kingdom, generally, solicitors advise clients on specific issues and barristers argue in court—and the former are able to choose their cases and clients while the latter are subject to the "cab rank rule," obligating them to provide services as long as they are qualified, even if the case or client is objectionable.

As Lawyers Are Responsible's website details in response to some right-wing outrage over the declaration:

The classic example of the cab rank rule in action is of a criminal barrister who accepts a brief to represent a person accused of murder, against whom there is strong evidence of guilt. In that situation, there is no conflict between the cab rank rule and the interests of justice. The barrister is agreeing to perform his or her role within a system of justice that produces, on the whole, just outcomes. By representing the accused, the barrister is merely helping to ensure that there is a fair trial and is serving the greater good.

The signatories to the declaration are convinced that at the present time offering their services in support of new fossil fuel projects or action against peaceful climate protesters would not serve the greater good.

Good Law Project director and declaration signatory Jolyon Maugham wrote in a Friday opinion piece for The Guardian that "like Big Tobacco, the fossil fuel industry has known for decades what its activities mean. They mean the loss of human life and property, which the civil law should prevent but does not."

"The scientific evidence is that global heating, the natural and inevitable consequence of its actions, will cause the deaths of huge numbers of people. The criminal law should punish this but it does not," Maugham continued. "Nor does the law recognize a crime of ecocide to deter the destruction of the planet. The law works for the fossil fuel industry—but it does not work for us."

"Today's history books speak with horror about what the law of yesterday did, of how it permitted racism, rape, and murder," he added. "And tomorrow's history books will say the same about the law as it stands today, of how it enabled the destruction of our planet and the displacement of billions of people."

The Guardianreported that "18 barristers, including six king's counsel, have signed the declaration" and "will now self-refer to the Bar Standards Board." The newspaper noted that while barristers can face fines for rule-breaking, "the consequences can be more far-reaching for junior members of the profession, who can find themselves blocked from receiving the 'silk' awarded to king's counsel, or from promotion to the judiciary."

In a statement from Plan B, one junior lawyer who wished to remain anonymous said that "young lawyers are being placed in an impossible position. We're being told by our firms and regulators it's a professional obligation to act for fossil fuel projects, knowing that doing so will poison our own future and all of life on Earth."

"That's wrong on every level. It's indefensible," the lawyer added. "If the profession doesn't look out for my generation, how does it expect to survive?"

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Last month, we joined more than 1000 representatives from all sectors of civil society who came together in Santiago de Chile to debate the future of – and threats to – public services the world over.

Participants discussed the chronic underfunding which continues to drive economic inequality, injustice and austerity, and the neocolonial policies that maintain the status quo.

Today those debates have resulted in the launch of “Our Future is Public: The Santiago Declaration for Public Services” – a momentous agreement signed by more than 200 organisations vowing to work to “transform our systems, valuing human rights and ecological sustainability over GDP growth and narrowly defined economic gains.”

One of the most damaging initiatives that has deeply affected the delivery of public services and infrastructure projects on all continents is the rise of public-private partnerships, or PPPs.

They have long been promoted by institutions such as the World Bank as a silver bullet to close the so-called gap to finance investments in services and infrastructure. The premise is that the private sector can deliver these services more efficiently and to a higher standard than the public sector, despite extensive evidence to the contrary.

We lay the pitfalls of PPPs bare in our new report History RePPPeated II: Why public-private partnerships are not the solution – the second in a series of investigations documenting the impacts of PPPs across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe.

Launched at the Santiago conference with some of the partners responsible for investigating and authoring the case studies, the report not only highlights negative impacts of PPPs, but sets out recommendations for how to better finance infrastructure and public services in the face of false solutions that have been proposed given the context of the current polycrisis.

These narratives wholly reflect red flags that are raised in the Santiago Declaration.

Through these investigations, we discovered failures on multiple levels in PPPs covering infrastructure such as roads and water supplies, as well as vital public services like healthcare and education.

From escalating costs for the stretched public sector to environmental and social impacts, we found time and again that communities had been ignored, displaced, and had their basic rights violated by thoughtless projects designed and implemented in the pursuit of profit.

A prime example is that of the the Melamchi Water Supply Project (MWSP) in Nepal. First announced nearly a quarter of a century ago, the project’s aim was to deliver clean, reliable and affordable water to 1.5 million people in Kathmandu.

And yet, 24 years later, residents are still waiting, while communities at the Melamchi water source are facing scarcity of water and eroded livelihoods. Instead of safe, clean drinking water – an internationally recognised human right – they have witnessed an extraordinary revolving door of private companies and institutional funders, including the World Bank, who have each failed to deliver.

To add to the MWSP’s colossal failure, 80 hectares of farmland have been lost to the project, a heavy blow to local residents, and up to 80 households have been forcibly displaced due to construction.

Who owns and controls our resources and public services became even more vitally important with the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in March 2020. Market-based models cannot be relied upon to deliver on human rights or the fight against inequalities as they are accountable only to their shareholders and not to their users.

This resulting focus on profit is overwhelmingly apparent in our case study from Liberia. Here, US firm Bridge International Academies (now NewGlobe) ‘abandoned’ its students and teachers during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, shutting down schools and cutting teachers’ salaries by 80-90 per cent, despite being paid by the government.

And yet, in 2021 the Liberian government indefinitely extended the project, effectively subsidising a US for-profit firm at a cost that is at least double government spending on public schools.

In Peru, the Expressway Yellow Line has emerged as one of the most controversial projects ever carried out. This toll road was supposed to ease congestion issues in the capital city Lima, but instead toll rates have been unreasonably increased on at least eight occasions.

This generated almost $23 million for the private company involved and transpired with the complicity of public officials. Meanwhile, the Peruvian state suffered economic damages of US$1.2 million due to under the table negotiations between public officials and the private company, which led to the incorrect implementation and improper modifications of the contract years after it was initially signed.

Today, questions regarding the project and conflicts surrounding its implementation remain, while Lima residents’ expectations of quality road infrastructure to improve living conditions for those who have been most affected, continue to go unmet.

The human cost of the PPP projects showcased by History RePPPeated II is self-evident, but they are far from the exception. Rather they serve to illustrate common failures with the PPP model that risk compromising fundamental human rights and that undermine the fight against climate change and inequalities.

Their continuing promotion is one of the many reasons why we support the Santiago Declaration. Together with all its signatories, we will strengthen resistance to PPPs with their focus on private-led interests and promote public-public or public-common partnerships for a future that is public.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Océane Blavot.

Delegates to the Havana Congress on the New International Economic Order—a gathering organized by the Progressive International and attended by more than 50 scholars and policymakers from 26 countries across all six inhabited continents—agreed over the weekend on a declaration that outlines a "common vision" for building an egalitarian and sustainable society out of the wreckage of five decades of neoliberal capitalism.

"The crisis of the existing world system can either entrench inequalities," the declaration asserts, or it can "embolden" popular movements throughout the Global South to "reclaim" their role as protagonists "in the construction of a new world order based on justice, equity, and peace."

Delegates resolved to focus their initial efforts on strengthening the development and dissemination of lifesaving technologies in low-income nations.

"Delegates agreed that a key priority must be to secure science and technology sovereignty."

This decision comes one year after Cuban officials announced, at a press conference convened by the Progressive International (PI), their plan to deliver 200 million homegrown Covid-19 vaccine doses to impoverished countries abandoned by their wealthy counterparts and Big Pharma—along with tools to enable domestic production and expert support to improve distribution.

It also comes as Cuba assumes the presidency of the Group of 77 (G77), a bloc of 134 developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where "the combined crises of food, energy, and environment" are escalating, PI noted.

"What is the common vision to guide the Global South out of this crisis?" the coalition asked. "What is the plan to win it? What is the New International Economic Order for the 21st century?"

"After two days of detailed discussions about how to transform our shared world, delegates agreed that a key priority must be to secure science and technology sovereignty," PI general coordinator David Adler said Sunday at the conclusion of the Havana Congress. "From pharmaceuticals to green tech, from digital currencies to microchips, too much of humanity is locked out of both benefiting from scientific advances and contributing to new ones. We will, as today's declaration calls for, work to build 'a planetary bloc led by the South and reinforced by the solidarities of the North' to liberate knowledge and peoples."

Speaking at the January 12 ceremony during which Cuba ascended to the G77 presidency, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla emphasized the need for coordinated action across the Global South on science and tech, arguing that "scientific-technical development is today monopolized by a club of countries that monopolize most of the patents, technologies, research centers, and promote the drain of talent from our countries."

The G77 Summit on Science, Technology, and Innovation, scheduled for September in Havana, seeks to "unite, complement each other, integrate our national capacities so as not to be relegated to future pandemics," said Parrilla.

During his speech on the first day of the Havana Congress, meanwhile, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis called for a new non-aligned movement to "end the legalized robbery of people and Earth fueling climate catastrophe."

Read the full Havana Declaration on the New International Economic Order:

The Havana Congress,

Recalling the role of the Cuban Revolution in the struggle to unite the Southern nations of the world, and the spirit of the 1966 Havana Tricontinental Conference that convened peoples from Asia, Africa, and Latin America to chart a path to collective liberation in the face of severe global crises and sustained imperial subjugation;

Hearing the echoes of that history today, as crises of hunger, disease, and war once again overwhelm the world, compounded by a rapidly changing climate and the droughts, floods, and hurricanes that not only threaten to inflame conflicts between peoples, but also risk the extinction of humanity at large;

Celebrating the legacy of the anti-colonial struggle, and the victories won by combining a program of sovereign development at home, solidarity for national liberation abroad, and a strong Southern bloc to force concessions to its interests, culminating in the adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO);

Acknowledging that the project of decolonization remains incomplete, disrupted by concerted attacks on the unity of the South in the form of wars, coups, sanctions, structural adjustment, and the false promise that sovereign development might be won through integration into a hierarchical world system;

Emphasizing that the result has been the sustained divergence between North and South, characterized by the same dynamics that defined the international economic order five decades prior: the extraction of natural resources, the enclosure of 'intellectual property,' the plunder of structural adjustment, and the exclusion of the multilateral system;

Recognizing that despite these setbacks, the flame of Southern resistance did not die; that the pursuit of sovereign development has yielded unprecedented achievements—from mass literacy and universal healthcare to poverty alleviation and medical innovation—that enable a renewed campaign of Southern cooperation today;

Stressing that this potential for Southern unity is perceived as a threat to Northern powers, which seek once again to preserve their position in the hierarchy of the world system through mechanisms of economic exclusion, political coercion, and military aggression;

Seizing the opportunity of the present historical juncture, when the crisis of the existing world system can either entrench inequalities or embolden the call to reclaim Southern protagonism in the construction of a new world order based on justice, equity, and peace;

The Havana Congress calls to:

• Renew the Non-Aligned Movement: In the face of increasing geopolitical tensions born from a decisive shift in the global balance of power, the Congress calls to resist the siren song of the new Cold War and to renew the project of non-alignment, grounded in the principles of sovereignty, peace, and cooperation articulated at the 1955 Bandung Conference, 1961 Non-Aligned Conference, 1966 Tricontinental Conference, and beyond.
• Renovate the NIEO: To accompany the renewed non-aligned movement, the Congress calls to renovate the vision for a New International Economic Order fit for the 21st century; a vision that must draw inspiration from the original Declaration, but also account for the key issues—from digital technology to environmental breakdown—that define the present conditions for sovereign development; and to enshrine this vision in a new U.N. Declaration on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.
• Assert Southern Power: The Congress recognizes that economic liberation will not be granted, but must be seized. As the original call for a New International Economic Order was won through the exercise of collective power in the coordinated production of petroleum, so our vision today can only be realized through the collective action of the South and the formation of new and alternative institutions to share critical technology, tackle sovereign debt, drive development finance, face future pandemics together, as well as coordinate positions on international climate action and the protection of national sovereignty over the extraction of natural resources.
• Accompany Cuba in the G77: The Congress recognizes the critical opportunity afforded by Cuba's presidency of the Group of 77 plus China to lead the South out of the present crisis and channel the lessons of its Revolution toward concrete proposals and ambitious initiatives to transform the broader international system.
• Build a Planetary Bloc: The Congress calls on all peoples and nations of the world to join in this struggle to definitively achieve the New International Economic Order; to build a planetary bloc led by the South and reinforced by the solidarities of the North, whose peoples recognize their obligation to resist the crimes committed in their names; and to bring the spirit of this Havana Congress into the communities that we call home.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

An international coalition made up of more than 200 trade unions and progressive advocacy groups on Thursday published the Santiago Declaration, a manifesto for "a complete overhaul of our global economic system."

The undeniably anti-neoliberal document proclaiming that "our future is public" is the product of a meeting held in Chile—the "laboratory of neoliberalism" where Milton Friedman and his University of Chicago acolytes' upwardly redistributive economic model was first imposed at gunpoint by Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military junta.

From November 29 to December 2, more than 1,000 organizers from over 100 countries gathered in Santiago and virtually to germinate a left-wing movement against "the dominant paradigm of growth, privatization, and commodification."

"Who owns our resources and our services is fundamental. A public future means ensuring that everything essential to dignified lives is out of private control."

"We are at a critical juncture," the manifesto begins. "At a time when the world faces a series of crises, from the environmental emergency to hunger and deepening inequalities, increasing armed conflicts, pandemics, rising extremism, and escalating inflation, a collective response is growing."

"Hundreds of organizations across socioeconomic justice and public services sectors—from education and health services, to care, energy, food, housing, water, transportation, and social protection—are coming together to address the harmful effects of commercializing public services, to reclaim democratic public control, and to reimagine a truly equal and human rights-oriented economy that works for people and the planet," reads the document. "We demand universal access to quality, gender-transformative, and equitable public services as the foundation of a fair and just society."

The Santiago Declaration continues:

The commercialization and privatization of public services and the commodification of all aspects of life have driven growing inequalities and entrenched power disparities, giving prominence to profit and corruption over people's rights and ecological and social well-being. It adversely affects workers, service users, and communities, with the costs and damages falling disproportionately on those who have historically been exploited.

The devaluation of public service workers' social status, the worsening of their working conditions, and attacks against their unions are some of the most worrying regressions of our times and a threat to our collective spaces. This is deeply linked with the patriarchal organization of society, where women as workers and carers are undervalued and absorb social and economic shocks. They are the first to suffer from public sector cuts, losing access to services and opportunities for decent work, and facing a rising burden of unpaid care work.

Austerity cuts in public sector budgets and wage bills are driven by an ideological mindset entrenched in the International Monetary Fund and many ministries of finance that serve the interests of corporations over people, perpetuating dependencies and unsustainable debts. Unfair tax rules, nationally and internationally, enable vast inequalities in the accumulation and concentration of income, wealth, and power within and between countries. The financialization of a wide range of public actions and decisions hands over power to shareholders and undermines democracy.

Against the heavily privatized status quo, "we commit to continue building an intersectional movement for a future that is public," the document says. "One where our rights are guaranteed, not based on our ability to pay, or on whether a system produces profit, but on whether it enables all of us to live well together in peace and equality: our buen vivir."

According to Global Justice Now, the Transnational Institute, and other signatories, the creation of an egalitarian and sustainable society hinges on ensuring universal access to life-sustaining public goods delivered by highly valued workers.

"We need to take back control of decision-making processes and institutions from the current forms of corporate capture to be able to decide for what, for whom, and how we provide."

"Who owns our resources and our services is fundamental," the manifesto argues. "A public future means ensuring that everything essential to dignified lives is out of private control, and under decolonial forms of collective, transparent, and democratic control."

As the Santiago Declaration explains:

A future that is public also means creating the conditions for enabling alternative production systems, including the prioritization of agroecology as an essential component of food sovereignty. To that end, we need to take back control of decision-making processes and institutions from the current forms of corporate capture to be able to decide for what, for whom, and how we provide, manage, and collectively own resources and public services.

The public future will not be possible without taking bold collective national action for ambitious, gender-transformative, and progressive fiscal and economic reforms, to massively expand financing of universal public services. These reforms must be complemented by major shifts in the international public finance architecture, including transformations in tax, debt, and trade governance.

Democratizing economic governance towards truly multilateral processes is critical to overhaul the power of dominant neoliberal organizations and reorient national and international financial institutions away from the racial, patriarchal, and colonial patterns of capitalism and towards socioeconomic justice, ecological sustainability, human rights, and public services. It is equally essential to enforce the climate and ecological debt of the Global North, to carry out an expedited reduction of energy and material resource use by wealthy economies, to hold big polluters liable for their generations-long infractions, to accelerate the phasing-out of fossil fuels, and to prioritize finance system change.

The call to build "a sustainable social pact for the 21st century," the coalition observes, "follows years of growing mobilization around the world."

It also comes as a complimentary alliance convened by Progressive International meets in Havana, Cuba to map out an emancipatory "new international economic order."

During Friday's opening session, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis called for the establishment of a movement capable of dismantling "the existing, exploitative, catastrophically extractive imperialist international economic order so as to build a new one in its place... in which people and planet can breathe, live, and prosper together."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.