Issued on World Environment Day, UNIVAJA’s open letter calls for “more than promises” as Brazil prepares to host the COP30 climate change conference in Belém, the capital of the state of Pará, in November. “We demand protection for the guardians of the forest. We demand real, urgent and transformative action.”

Phillips and Pereira went missing during a reporting trip in the Indigenous territory of the Javari Valley, and their remains were found 10 days later, with gunshot wounds.

Read the full manifesto in Portuguese.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Orientation
International political economy at a crossroads

As most of you know the world economy is peppered with fault lines. On one hand we have the rising in the East of a new economic block, the BRICS nations and their friends. On the other hand, in the West we have a rapidly declining Yankeedom and its European vassals on. What are socialists in the West to do with this malestream, this great turning point? Is it not clear whether to support BRICS or not? After all, the BRICS countries have only one clear socialist country and two countries that are Hindu fundamentalists (India) as well as a theocracy (Saudi-Arabia). So does it make sense for socialists to support Russia, India, and Saudi-Arabia that are conservative politically? This article proposes that Western socialists need to give up their purist ideologies and accept that while the BRICS countries may be lacking in socialist policies domestically,they still should be supported because of their international attempts to follow Marx and Engels’ exhortation to “develop the productive forces”. This means striving to create material abundance through technological innovation.

Who am I
I am no academic socialist nor am I a red diaper baby. In fact, reading and school for me were mutually exclusive opposites. When I was a young adult I couldn’t stand reading and dropped out of community college. I only started to care for reading after I left and began hitchhiking across the country. Because I am self-educated, I did not have the benefits of being systematically educated in all the different schools of socialism, what socialist organizations were like and where and how socialism was applied all over the world. So I eclectically dabbled with books and organizations. I eventually found my way and this article is the result of conclusions I’ve come to after 50 years. Twelve years ago my partner and I started our own website and Facebook page which now has 10,000 followers. We each work 20-25 hours per week in various aspects of this work. Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism is our baby!

What do I Mean by Socialist Purist?
By the term socialist purist I mean someone who holds out for the most extreme, utopian form of socialism, whether it is defined by Marx, Engels, Lenin or an anarchist hero like Kropotkin. For Leninists socialism means no capitalism with the state which controls all economic transactions, the society is classless and does not use any currency. For the anarchists the ideal is no state, no capitalism, no classes and no money. If actually existing socialism has any of these things it is treated, not as part of a long process of development, but as a sign of a) betrayal of the party or a bureaucracy (Trotskyists) and b) corruption or some kind of pollution from the original source. That source is most often treated like a bible. It is more or less the same as the old ruling law in Louisiana that if a person had 1/32 of what was considered African American blood, they were considered black.

China
If I support China, I will be told that China isn’t really socialist or communist. If the state-controlled enterprises compose 60% of the Chinese economy I will be told that the 40% of the economy that is in private hands matters more. It will also be pointed out that in China strikes are outlawed and independent labor unions are illegal. I would prefer that strikes in China were legal and workers were allowed to form unions. There are labor unions in China but under the auspices of the state. Also, there are plenty of strikes in China. But for the purists this is enough for the entire country to be dismissed as a socialist project. For me it is not. Where do the purists get their definitions? I will be told that Marx and Engels defined socialism and communism in a particular way and that is the definition we should work with despite the fact that the definitions were intentionally sketchy and they were written over 150 years ago. If I point out China’s great work on the Belt and Road Initiative of building infrastructures and harnessing energy all over the world, I would be told they are still deriving a profit from them. Profits are bad! From anarchists for whom all states are bad, I will be told that China is really just continuing Western imperialism. For anarchists, helping to develop the productive forces in another country is nothing more than a “debt trap”. For them all capitalist and state socialist societies are imperialist the moment they engage with a country on the capitalist periphery.

Russia
There is no country in the world which has been more brutally and tenaciously demonized than Russia and that was so before, during and after the Russian Revolution. If we post a story on our website or social media pages about the Russian economy now being the fourth strongest in the world, we will be told by Trotskyists or Social Democrats that Russia is, after all, a capitalist country, as if that should end all discussion. Anarchists will tell me that Putin is a dictator. These folks don’t understand that Russia has at least four or five parties and that in the last election, Putin’s party got 49% of the vote and the Community party got 20%. I will be told by other purists that much of Russia’s spending is on its own and others’ military, not so much on producing goods and services for a better life for its citizens. The anarchists will tell me that anarchists and other dissidents are rotting away in Russian prisons. For them it doesn’t seem to matter that Putin has 80% approval ratings and Russia has built up its domestic economy even more since US sanctions. For socialist purists, the fact that Russia has been investing in the northern Arctic Silk Road which will increase trade in regions that have not been connected seems not to matter to them. The domestic economy is first and geopolitics is second. I believe the reverse to be true.

The International Proletarian Revolution Around the World at the Same Time

For anarchists any power at a national level is against socialism. So what do they advocate? An international revolution of workers’ councils that overthrows all states and is linked up locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. How realistic is this? As we stand now in the history of the United States we have never had a general strike that encompassed more than one local state. If we face this fact it is ludicrous to propose that workers’ councils are going to spontaneously arise, spread across an entire country then link up to other countries until the whole system is global. Doesn’t it seem ridiculous to assume this is going to happen in the near future? In Europe, the English, French and German heads of state are hated. Germany is de-industrializing, the French and English living standards have declined, still we have yet to see a general strike among the working classes of all countries that can drive them from power. It has struck me that:

• Since these European rulers are all bitterly against Russia;
• Russia possesses that cheap natural gas which could improve working class living standards; and
• the working classes could unite against their rulers and demand to have cheap Russian gas shipped to them.

How likely is even this semi-continent alliance? Unfortunately, not very. It has taken the rulers of states and capitalists roughly 300 years to convince people that their nation-state deserve more loyalties than their previous loyalties to provinces, principalities, regions and city states. How likely are the citizens today to give that national loyalty? Marx and Engels naively thought that workers would give up their fatherland for the international loyalty of the working class. All socialists found out the hard way through the results of two world wars that workers of the world uniting is not something workers across states have any intention of doing. So whether we like it or not, the real fight for the foreseeable future is between the rulers of capitalist states and their working classes. That is the best we can do for now and in the near future.  

World-Systems Theory and the Long View of Capitalism
In Giovanni Arrighi’s great book The Long Twentieth  Century, in world systems terminology, over the last 500 years capitalism has jumped all over the world from Italy, Holland, England and to the United States. Each ‘hegemon’ has ruled from between 220 to 100 years before its decline. In every case when the hegemon has fallen it has been replaced by a country on the capitalist semi periphery. The United States has been in decline for over 50 years. What’s next? Well, China certainly qualifies as a semi-periphery country that is still rising. But something much deeper is going on. Not only China, but all the other BRICS countries – Russia, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been in the semi-periphery world system. Can it be that after 500 years in Europe, we are witnessing the world economy shifting from the West to the East? It certainly looks that way. Every member of BRICS is a country on the capitalist semi-periphery.

The Rise of BRICS
I celebrate the emergence of a block of anti-imperialist countries that have broken away from the Anglo-American Empire. China, Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent India have resisted using the dollar as a world trade currency. Further, they have insisted on using their own local currency in trade transactions. With the exception of China Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia are capitalist countries, but their commitment has not been primarily to make a profit on war or forms of fictious capital such as stocks, bonds, derivatives or stock options as does the United States. Following the Chinese great Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) these countries have traded with each other in exchanges of energy systems, infrastructures such as roads and trains as well as in agricultural products and military defense.

The BRICS economic agreement between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa was established as an alternative to the imperialist World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This breakaway movement is growing stronger by the day as the United States and the rest of the West sinks into decay. As a socialist I support this breakaway movement even if it is not explicitly socialist. In answer to my support of BRICS, I will be told that most of its members are capitalist and that socialism can never come from it. So how is socialism supposed to come about?

Nationalism as a Revolutionary Force in a BRICS Dominated World

For traditional socialists, nationalism has been the enemy. After all, historically it keeps workers from uniting with other workers around the world and it propagandizes them into aligning with the capitalist class rather than their own class. These are all reasons to be against nationalism. But the problem in today’s world is that we are fighting against a global capitalism that sets up continental systems such as the European Union which is organized to encourage the free flow of capitalism across the entire European continent. The EU does big business for the European capitalist class, a kind of Bilderberg economic union. The EU has no working-class representation. In my opinion, it is an advance for the working class of nation states to fight for independence from this European parasitic organization.

Conservative parties are moving towards nationalism – socialists are not

The problem for socialists is that in Europe and other parts of the world the  traditional conservative parties have taken positions of supporting the nation-state against the European Union and are not anti-Russian. This includes Le Pen in France, the AFD in Germany and Orban in Hungary. Sadly, to my knowledge there is not even an intermediate scale socialist party in Europe that has taken a nationalist stance. So am I advocating support of these conservative parties?

The linear political spectrum is bankrupt in the 21st century
In order to align ourselves with the current BRICS program we badly need a new political spectrum, one that leaves behind the current linear version. On this topic, please see my article of 2 ½ years ago which is still highly relevant.  As I said in my article, Are Socialists Going to let Neoliberals Define Fascism: Why the Linear Political Spectrum is Bankrupt this spectrum must be:

• inclusive of many more combinations than the communism-liberalism-conservative, fascist and libertarian, linearly strung out;
• economic as well as political;
• must account for qualitative leaps – which is the difference between socialism and capitalism;
• decentered so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable under certain conditions. This means that all political tendencies would have to be seen as having pros and cons. The way it stands now liberals and conservatives are seen as virtuous and communism and fascism are seen as having vices;
• the spectrum must be flexible enough to make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum such as China and Saudi Arabia or between India (fundamentalist) and China and
• not limited to ideologies that are next to each other on the political spectrum.

BRICS Leads the Way in Revolutionizing the Linear Political Spectrum                      

This is where things get messy. If we follow the lead of China, Xi Ping does not form alliances based on loyalty to socialism. He is committed to building communism but has formed alliances with a Hindu fundamentalist nationalist in India and with the theocratic state of Saudi Arabia. Putin is no socialist yet his strongest ally is to a country that wants to build communism. Modi, a right-winger is ok doing business with communist China. Cuba and Venezuela would be happy to do business with any of the BRICS countries whether they are socialist or not. So what united these BRICS countries that might make socialists of the West support them?

• They are anti-imperialist.
• They are anti-war.
• They are anti-finance capital.
• They want to develop the productive forces of the world.

Importance of Technological Innovation
Let me develop the last point. In the Communist Manifesto Marx spent a good deal of time praising the capitalist system for developing industry – building railroads and factories and upgrading the standing of living for the middle classes and parts of the working class. These are the very activities the BRICS countries are engaged in now. In Marxian terms, what is so good about this? It is based on the idea that socialism must be founded on abundance. It means increasing the ratio between freedom and necessity. This means maximizing productivity while decreasing the numbers of work hours. For me this is a more important goal to fight for even if internally the countries of BRICS suffer from class, race and gender inequalities.

Siege Socialism
Typically in the West, when socialist countries are compared to capitalist countries they are criticized in terms of standard of living, varieties of political parties and freedom of expression. In the first place, socialist countries should be measured in comparison to what these countries were like before the socialist revolution. Capitalist countries have had 300 years to develop themselves unopposed after they defeated feudalism. Socialist countries have had a little more than 100 years to develop yet they have done so in spite of constant capitalist attempts at sabotage, assassinations and betrayal. It is way too soon to make sweeping generalizations about the viability of socialism. In fact, based on the last 35 years of the “triumphant” West, when we look at the world around us, it is capitalism that is either is in deep trouble or has failed.

Secondly, capitalist critics fail to understand that Western concepts of freedom are not shared around the world. What matters to working-class people most is the ability to read and write, have low-cost health care and free education. In terms of housing, socialism either provides low-cost housing or makes it possible for people to buy their house outright. Socialist countries like China and Cuba have a higher percentage of home ownership than the United States. As far as the variety of political parties, I can well understand that the socialist leaders who have come to power may be extremely cautious about allowing many political parties to form. When we consider the ability of capitalist spies to turn alternative parties into organs of counter revolution, the concerns of socialist leaders is completely understandable. The best book I know which makes a case for actually existing socialism, is Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet
What’s wrong with anarchism?

I do not share the criticism of anarchists by Marxists and or Marxist-Leninists. For the most part they were not “petite bourgeois individualists.” Most of the 19th and 20th  century anarchists were working classpeople who were very influential during the revolutions in Russia, 1917-1921, and Spain, 1936-1939. I respect many of their leaders from Bakunin to Louise Michel to Kropotkin to Malatesta, to Emma Goldman and to Buenaventura Durruti. However socialism must be based on abundance, not scarcity. Many anarchists don’t believe material abundance is a necessity. For those anarchists who support material abundance, a decentralized economy is not going to deliver the goods. A kind of promethean socialism requires some state centralization coordination of the distribution of water, heat, gas and electricity and other infrastructural projects.

Following Pannekoek and Gorter I agree that workers’ councils should be the micro unit of a communist society. But local workers’ councils plans for production need to be linked up regionally and then nationally. Centralization is necessary but it must be open so that there is a dialectical relationship from workers’ councils to the top and from the state back down to the bottom. Anarchists are hostile or cynical about centralization. The way political organs are organized today, a political body has to be a state in order even gain recognition. What do anarchist expect to do? Dismantle the entire state system founded at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648? It’s completely unrealistic.

Secondly, anarchism and workers’ councils have always been hostile to parties. The heart of politics is to steer, to develop social policy. Workers’ councils or radical unions cannot be solely economic organizations. Whatever their production goals they have to be coordinated by social needs outside of work. This includes consumer groups with community needs, family needs, social and psychological needs where there is an ongoing dialectic in which plans are first made and monitored. Political parties are necessary for both directing our future and learning from our past.

Lasty, there needs to be room for markets. As many of you know markets are much older and much different than capitalist exchange. They go all the way back to horticultural societies and even existed among complex hunter-gatherer societies. Markets will continue to exist among small traders who do not hire workers for wages. The possible relationship between workers’ councils, the state and markets is well laid out in David Schweickart’s  book After Capitalism.

What is Wrong with Stalinism
By themselves workers can only achieve trade union consciousness (more money and better working conditions)
I do not share Trotskyist evaluations of Stalin as some kind of bureaucratic madman implying that Trotsky wanted more party democracy. Neither do I share anarchist dismissal, not only of Stalin, but also equating Stalin, Lenin and even Marx as all authoritarian. My criticism of Stalin as a political leader can be broken down into the following parts. As far back as 1905 with the founding of the Bolshevik party, they claimed that left to their own devices working class people can attain only a trade union consciousness. They ignored what the workers did during the Paris Commune which went way beyond trade union consciousness. Workers  created revolutionary organs of self-management without much, if any, input from any socialist or socialist parties at the time. This leads me to my second criticism.

This is that the Communist Party, not just Stalin, but also Lenin never trusted the workers’ councils that formed in Russia. They did not trust workers’ own creativity. “All power to the Soviets” was a slogan the Bolsheviks used before they came to power. After that the factory committees in the cities and the self-organization of the peasants were treated as rivals rather than comrades. In addition, Stalin actively destroyed workers’ councils during the Spanish revolution when he saw he could not control them. Devoted Leninists will state that it was the war against Western capitalist parties that forced the communist parties into a narrower, heavy-handed approach. I agree with this up to a point, but I don’t think it could explain all the more repressive behavior. The anarchists have every right to despise the Communists for what happened to them and their comrades.

The limits of vanguard parties
Marx and Engels never talked about vanguard parties. In fact, they made fun of the secret revolutionary societies of August Blanqui. However, it makes sense to me that a secret party was necessary in Russia in the early 20th century, a society without even a liberal party, no constitution and a monstrous secret police. But Leninist parties that continued to build vanguard parties that operated under relatively liberal stable conditions in the West, where a legal party was possible and political activity could be public is just mechanically holding  onto a theory that longer fits in Western conditions. In their hands Leninist theory became a dogma.

The scholastic treatment of the sciences and philosophy

There were a number of areas where dialectical materialism became dogmatic rather than scientific. I will mention two. In anthropology, Marxist-Leninist, with or without Stalin preserved Marx and Engels’ stage theory of social evolution for 100 years in spite of real empirical data from anthropologists that challenged Marxism. There were new stages of simple and complex horticulture societies that came between hunter-gatherers and the emergence of the state. In addition, slavery and feudalism were not  universal stages of social evolution. Also, in the field of psychology, the communist psychology of Vygotsky was banned in Russia for 20 years. One his most creative followers, Evald Ilyenkov was forbidden to publish and was harassed to the point of committing suicide.

Every school in the history of philosophy was crammed into the categories of objective idealism, subjective idealism or materialism. See my article which shows philosophy can be grouped into six different schools: Out on a Limb With Dialectical Materialism. Lastly the various schools of 20th century philosophy are crudely labelled based on whether the school of philosophy – pragmaticism, logical atomism, analytical philosophy – was for or against imperialism. In addition to which class the school represented. This was the case even if the school of philosophy never made any political statements.

Lastly it was very short-sighted for Stalin to insist on controlling all communist parties of the world in the service of Russia. In the case of the United States, the American Communist Party lost many opportunities to move the Yankee working class towards communism because the American communist leaders were never allowed to adapt communist theory to their own conditions. It makes complete sense to me that on a world scale, smaller communist parties should defer to the party that had achieved state power. But that doesn’t mean the party that achieved state power should dictate the strategies and tactics of countries with different political and economic conditions. We need a mass socialist party, not a secret vanguard party.

What Stalin did right
Internationally Stalin was a great politician. For 25 years the Communist Party outfoxed the entire Western world of the United States, England, France and Germany that were all in cahoots to destroy state socialism in Russia. Also the Communist Party practically single-handedly defeated the Nazis. Nationally Stalin raised the standard of living for workers and peasants compared, not to Western societies, but under the conditions of that existed under the czars until the Revolution.

There are issues that in the West Stalin is regularly attacked about:

• the treatment of peasants on the collective farms;
• the famines in Russia;
• the notion that Stalin was a dictator;
• that Russia operated in totalitarian way and
• the political trials of the 1930s.

Ludo Martens in his book Stalin: Another View, talks about each of these issues and exposes the typical Western ideology about this. It is important to remember that the statistics about the collective farms and famines were mostly written by CIA agents. Further, Martens does not take the position of idealizing everything that Stalin did. He simply presents facts that show Western propaganda as either wrong at worst or exaggerated at best.

So What are Messy Transitions?
The world of BRICS is a messy world. As I said before, China is the only country moving in a clear socialist direction. It has to work with two right wing countries – Hindu fundamentalist India and a theocracy in Saudi Arabia. Russia and Iran are clearly locked in with China but they are not socialist. Secondly, there is the class struggle going on within BRICS countries. None of these countries are supporting radical labor unions so the class struggle will go on within BRICS. Thirdly, workers cooperatives are a growing but small movement around the world. They represent potential dual forms of power. It is unclear how the heads of the BRICS countries will deal with worker co-ops as radical forms of economic exchange. Fourthly there are the ecological problems of extreme weather, accumulation of toxins, desertification and species extinction that the human species face. BRICS countries will deal with this in various ways. Lastly, there is the collapsing empire of the United States whose ruling class will fight to the death to keep it from slipping even to a minor power status. It will take all the ingenuity to navigate in, around and through this ruling class before it takes down half of the world with them.

Over many years organizations such as the United Nations have developed world programs for abolishing poverty and world hunger, increasing political participation and many other improvements. Those plans continue to gather dust because the world capitalist class is dead set against them. These plans can be potentially put into practice by some of the more progressive members of BRICS. In short it will be a messy bitches’ brew for the next century. We socialists have to accept messes and attempt to be more dialectical, not only in how we deal with the messes but also the bitterness of all socialists groups to each other.

Cooling Out the Socialist Family Feuds

For the past 170 years socialist groups have fought each other bitterly, sometimes justified and sometimes not. But we might do better if we understand each other as having various tensions that were there from the beginning, specifically:

• What is the role of the state?
• What is the role of a socialist party?
• What is the role of self-organizing workers? and
• What is place of markets?

To begin with, Leninists of all types need to face the fact that they don’t have the answers to everything. In fact, workers’ councils have shown that workers are far better at co-creating than they have been given credit for. On the other hand, anarchists and Council Communists need to come to terms with the fact that the state is a necessary part of socialism and for socialists to compete with capitalism on a world scale, some infrastructural industries require a state. In addition, council communists and anarchists cannot exist by themselves in economics organizations with no party. We need socialist parties to navigate political direction. Lastly, both anarchists and Council Communists need to appreciate that what the USSR, Cuba and Venezuela have achieved with their population is to be admired, not just criticized.

Finally, all these groups have to respect what the social democratic parties in the Scandinavia countries achieved domestically, at least before the rise of neoliberalism. They made some real improvements domestically for the populations in terms of standard of living, wages, health care and housing.  On the other hand Social Democrats internationally should be roundly condemned for actively or passively not standing up to the imperialist powers of the West with a sense of international solidarity with other socialist countries against capitalists. Finally, while Social Democrats have given far too much power to capitalists domestically in their own country, they have also shown that local markets can be productive contributors to socialism and that markets are not synonymous with capitalism.

What is the Opposite of Purity?
Throughout this article I have criticized socialist purity. But the opposite of purity is enmeshment. In psychological terms, enmeshment is a process by which a person cannot easily tell where their boundaries end and another’s begin. The worst example of enmeshment politically are the actions of the social democratic parties of the world since the end of World War II. They allowed themselves to become entangled with capitalism. Their boundaries were enmeshed. They couldn’t tell the difference between domestic socialism and international imperialism

The worst example of socialist enmeshment is the Democratic Socialists of America. This organization for 60 years has been devoted to “moving the Democratic Party to the left”. In reality the Democratic Party has been moving right despite whatever interventions they’ve made. The Democratic Party has continuously moved to the right, today being a center-right party. Yet the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of American continue to support the Democratic Party. Today it is difficult, if not impossible to tell the difference between Social Democrats and left liberals.

Conclusion
I began my article by defining what I meant by socialist purity. I said it could apply to both the anarchist as well as the Leninist left – Trotskyists, Stalinists or Maoists. At the end my article I said that the opposite of socialist purity was socialist “enmeshment”. It is the Social Democrats in Europe and the Democratic Socialists in the United States that are the best example of this. I pointed out examples of socialist purity in attitudes towards two countries, China and Russia. I argued why BRICS holds the best hope for a socialist future and I based this partly on World Systems Theory of the history of capitalism. I pointed out the Utopian nature of the wish for a workers’ revolution all over the world at the same time. I argued that based on how they behave today, workers fighting for socialism within their nation-states is the best we can do. I also claimed that these days nationalist loyalties in the West is an advance against regional institutions like the European Union on the one hand  or global institutions like the IMF or the World Bank on the other. I proposed that nationalism is an advance, whether it comes from countries such as Cuba or Venezuela on the left or European nationalists on the right including Le Pen’s party in France, the AfD in Germany or Orban in Hungary.

I attempted to be dialectical in weighing both anarchism and the varieties of Leninism for their pros and cons. I defended what has been called siege socialism against the purists, using Michael Parenti’s book Black Shirts and Reds and Ludo Martens book, Stalinism: Another View as two sources.

For over 50 years I have drawn from some very unlikely bedfellows. Some of these groups I joined and some I was on the periphery of and only knew them from their writings:

• beginning with historical anarchists culminating with Murray Bookchin (2 years);
• The Situationists of Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord culminating in Pannekoek and Gorter’s council communism (3 years);
• National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) converging in Lyndon Larouche’s book Dialectical Economics (1 year). More recently I’ve been influenced by William Engdahl, Matthew Ehret and Cynthia Chung, also in the Larouche orbit;
• world-systems theory following the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Giovanni Arrighi;
• communist psychology of the Soviet Union whose main practitioners were Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev. Also one year’s involvement with Social Therapy founded by Fred Newman and Lois Holtzman in New York City;
• in 2000 the anti-war movement headed by ANSWER (8 years);
• the Occupy movement from 2011-2012;
• the founding of our own organization Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism from 2012 to today; and
• one year with anarchists from Olympia Assembly and the Industrial Workers of the World.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein joins us to discuss the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as he walked to a shareholders conference in New York City earlier this month, and his accused killer, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione. Thompson’s vigilante-inflected death has inflamed public discourse over the predatory practices of the private healthcare industry. “People working these call centers are themselves upset at having to deny claims,” says Klippenstein. Last week, he published what is believed to be Mangione’s “manifesto,” which details Mangione’s anger at the industry and his motivation for the killing. Meanwhile, healthcare companies appear to be scrambling to protect their public reputation. “I speculate that it is the absence of discourse around our healthcare system that fed into the rage we’re seeing now,” adds Klippenstein. “To miss that as part of this story is just malpractice.”

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

Aghast at the use of nuclear weapons in August 1945 to obliterate the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein threw himself into efforts to prevent worldwide nuclear annihilation.  In September, responding to a letter from Robert Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago, about nuclear weapons, Einstein contended that, “as long as nations demand unrestricted sovereignty, we shall undoubtedly be faced with still bigger wars, fought with bigger and technologically more advanced weapons.”  Thus, “the most important task of intellectuals is to make this clear to the general public and to emphasize over and over again the need to establish a well-organized world government.”  Four days later, he made the same point to an interviewer, insisting that “the only salvation for civilization and the human race lies in the creation of a world government, with security of nations founded upon law.”

Determined to prevent nuclear war, Einstein repeatedly hammered away at the need to replace international anarchy with a federation of nations operating under international law.  In October 1945, together with other prominent Americans (among them Senator J. William Fulbright, Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, and novelist Thomas Mann), Einstein called for a “Federal Constitution of the World.”  That November, he returned to this theme in an interview published in the Atlantic Monthly.  “The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem,” he said.  “It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one….  As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.”  And war, sooner or later, would become nuclear war.

Einstein promoted these ideas through a burgeoning atomic scientists’ movement in which he played a central role.  To bring the full significance of the atomic bomb to the public, the newly-formed Federation of American Scientists put together an inexpensive paperback, One World or None, with individual essays by prominent Americans.  In his contribution to the book, Einstein wrote that he was “convinced there is only one way out” and this necessitated creating “a supranational organization” to “make it impossible for any country to wage war.”  This hard-hitting book, which first appeared in early 1946, sold more than 100,000 copies.

Given Einstein’s fame and his well-publicized efforts to avert a nuclear holocaust, in May 1946 he became chair of the newly-formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, a fundraising and policymaking arm for the atomic scientists’ movement.  In the Committee’s first fund appeal, Einstein warned that “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

Even so, despite the fact that Einstein, like most members of the early atomic scientists’ movement, saw world government as the best recipe for survival in the nuclear age, there seemed good reason to consider shorter-range objectives.  After all, the Cold War was emerging and nations were beginning to formulate nuclear policies.  An early Atomic Scientists of Chicago statement, prepared by Eugene Rabinowitch, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, underscored practical considerations.  “Since world government is unlikely to be achieved within the short time available before the atomic armaments race will lead to an acute danger of armed conflict,” it noted, “the establishment of international controls must be considered as a problem of immediate urgency.”  Consequently, the movement increasingly worked in support of specific nuclear arms control and disarmament measures.

In the context of the heightening Cold War, however, taking even limited steps forward proved impossible.  The Russian government sharply rejected the Baruch Plan for international control of atomic energy and, instead, developed its own atomic arsenal.  In turn, U.S. President Harry Truman, in February 1950, announced his decision to develop a hydrogen bomb―a weapon a thousand times as powerful as its predecessor.  Naturally, the atomic scientists were deeply disturbed by this lurch toward disaster.  Appearing on television, Einstein called once more for the creation of a “supra-national” government as the only “way out of the impasse.”  Until then, he declared, “annihilation beckons.”

Despite the dashing of his hopes for postwar action to end the nuclear menace, Einstein lent his support over the following years to peace, nuclear disarmament, and world government projects.

The most important of these ventures occurred in 1955, when Bertrand Russell, like Einstein, a proponent of world federation, conceived the idea of issuing a public statement by a small group of the world’s most eminent scientists about the existential peril nuclear weapons brought to modern war.  Asked by Russell for his support, Einstein was delighted to sign the statement and did so in one of his last actions before his death that April.  In July, Russell presented the statement to a large meeting in London, packed with representatives of the mass communications media.  In the shadow of the Bomb, it read, “we have to learn to think in a new way….  Shall we … choose death because we cannot forget our quarrels?  We appeal as human beings to human beings:  Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”

This Russell-Einstein Manifesto, as it became known, helped trigger a remarkable worldwide uprising against nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s, culminating in the world’s first significant nuclear arms control measures.  Furthermore, in later years, it inspired legions of activists and world leaders.  Among them was the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, whose “new thinking,” modeled on the Manifesto, brought a dramatic end to the Cold War and fostered substantial nuclear disarmament.

The Manifesto thus provided an appropriate conclusion to Einstein’s unremitting campaign to save the world from nuclear destruction.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Lawrence Wittner.

Image by Museums Victoria.

History will not forgive those who have remained silent, exhibited or expressed ‘balanced’ positions – or worse, defended Israel’s ongoing genocide in an already besieged, impoverished and overcrowded Gaza.

This is not a cliché declaration, a desperate attempt aimed at jolting the world, especially the Western world, to show a degree of morality as Palestinians are dying in their thousands, as the pulverized bodies of children are scattered in every neighborhood in Gaza.

No, this is about history.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, Washington and its Western allies wanted to impose a new history on the Middle East, in fact, the Muslim world, a history in which the West is fighting a civilizational ‘war against terror’.

Since then, it has been stated numerous times, directly or otherwise, that the culprits, the ‘bad guys’ in this American scenario, are Muslims – their religion, their languages, their cultures, their very societal make-up.

In truth, there was no collective enemy. That is why it had to be invented. Muslims were not united. They had their own regional, political and even sectarian conflicts. In fact, most Muslim governments were considered ‘US allies’, beholden to American diktats and agendas, however destructive and violent.

In this make-belief world, the Middle East was made up of ‘radical Islamists’, who, out of sheer ‘jealousy’ of Western progress and civilization, signed a social contract to defeat democracy and enlightenment.

The West, including Israel and many other agents, jumped on board. They all wanted to be part of this ‘war on terror’, and the ample strategic opportunities it offered.

But that history was fabricated. America fought a war for its own selfish reasons: oil, gas, strategic maneuvering and geostrategic great games.

Meanwhile, Israel was fighting against a Palestinian liberation movement that existed decades before 9/11 and will remain in existence until Palestinians recover and return to their colonized homeland.

Many chauvinists and racists in the West, ultimately clustering into the far-right formations we see today, used Islam and Muslims as a scapegoat to justify their independently existing racism, hate for immigrants and refugees, and as fodder in their political war against the so-called liberals.

Not that the latter group fared any better. Statements that justify Israel’s genocide on Gaza uttered by Joe Biden in Washington or Emmanuel Macron in Paris, or Olaf Scholz in Berlin, are hardly distinguishable from any fascist ideologue in their own countries or anywhere else.

This is the uncomfortable truth that Americans and Westerners, in general, must now contend with. Their internal ideological war is but a farce. Liberalism and conservatism can only mean something when they are put to the test. And the whole Western establishment, with its various ideological colors – with very minor exceptions – has failed the moral test on Palestine, and miserably so.

But, luckily for Palestinians, the West does not hold all the cards. At least, not anymore. This is not 1990-91, or 2003, when the US carried out major wars in the Middle East, largely uncontested, and was allowed to reshape the region to fit its expectations and those of Tel Aviv and Brussels.

A new Middle East is emerging, indeed, and it promises to be Washington’s worst nightmare, because those who are solidifying behind Palestinians are no longer linked by race, color or creed.

There is a new Islamic world that is emerging, one that includes Shia and Sunni, one that has no space for terrorism and random violence against innocent people.

This new principled Middle East is now uniting around Gaza, this tiny little stretch of land with a seemingly never-ending humanitarian crisis, one that was created by Israel, and Israel alone.

When Israel decided to besiege Gaza following the democratic Palestinian elections of 2006, they must have never expected that the Palestinians there would be able to hold on for this long, would be able to fight back and would be able to assert themselves as the center of the struggle for Palestinian freedom – in fact, the struggle against American imperialism in the entire region.

This is what Gaza has demonstrated to us and to anyone who is willing to liberate himself from decades of US indoctrination in the Middle East or beyond it:

One, no peace, stability, security, or prosperity in the Middle East is possible without justice for Palestine and freedom for the Palestinian people.

Two, though the Arabs have largely failed Palestine, and continue to do so, Muslim nations are finding a common ground around their support for the Palestinian people. If this momentum continues – and it should – it will be a game changer.

Three, Israel is militarily weak and, despite all assurances by Tel Aviv throughout the years, it is nothing but a vassal, a client regime for Washington. Its survival is linked to Washington’s support in every possible way.

Four, the US no longer holds all the cards. With the unity of Resistance throughout the Middle East, the growing clout of Iran, the refusal of Arab countries to play the role of lackeys for Washington and the strong position from China, Russia, Iran, Turkey and others, the region is no longer an American playbook.

Five, armed resistance is not a fantasy, as many have believed and repeated throughout the years. True, while Gaza, on its own, will not be able to defeat Israel, the combined power of the Resistance is demonstrating that Israel is no longer the all-powerful country that, single handedly – with American support, of course – defeated several Arab armies in 1967.

Six, and perhaps, the most important of all these realizations, is that Gaza has ended the sectarian war in the Middle East, a decades-long conflict that has been stirred by numerous parties, including the US, Israel, Middle Eastern governments and many terrorist groups.

When the US launched its war on Afghanistan in 2001 and, again, on Iraq in 2003, it hardly expected that the Middle East, merely two decades later, would reinvent itself beyond American definitions and expectations.

And to think that tiny little Gaza is the spark that has refocused the energies of the whole region is a political miracle, that many political scientists will find difficult to understand, let alone explain.

The post The Gaza Manifesto: Why America’s Old Middle East is Crumbling  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka has already started work to achieve the People’s Alliance-led coalition 100-day plan outlined in its manifesto.

He recognises that things such as cost of living, water and electricity outages are existing issues that can be solved after a thorough review and consultative process.

In its manifesto, the party had stated it would consult on price control on basic and zero-rated VAT food items.

• READ MORE: Christmas gift for Fiji: New political era balanced on a knife-edge
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During an interview with The Fiji Times, he also voiced plans to grow the economy to a level whereby the revenue and expenditure could “harmonise continuously”.

“We cannot immediately effect reductions because the revenue forecast has been done in the last budget,” he said.

“At the moment, we do not see any signs of any sudden increase in our revenue so we do not want to suddenly increase some of the expenditures and we’ll probably run out this budget according to the forecast, and then bring in those measures that we would like to achieve [with] the budget target for the full budget year.

“But that’ll be after the 100 days. Those that can be done within the 100 days, we’ll have to do.”

Rabuka said he had already met with the permanent secretary of the Prime Minister’s Office and expected an informal Cabinet sitting on Thursday where they would be briefed on the country’s economic situation.

Shayal Devi is a Fiji Times journalist. Republished with permission.

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

Deforestation in the Maranhão state of Brazil. Photo: Ibama.

Why a manifesto?

In the terrible state it’s now in, planet Earth is screaming out for a movement from small to big, but not in the usual sense of the small begging the big (= powerful) for help because the big powers are hellbent on making matters worse. We mean big in terms of everyone coming together to fix this disaster: Indigenous rainforest communities, sinking islands like Tuvalu, occupied countries like West Papua, and millions upon millions of individuals, young and old, who all share the same concerns and fears. This planet is ours and “ours” includes all species. It’s not the private property of the powers that are ravaging it with a global economic system that has produced “its own grave-diggers”.

It began a long time ago. For capitalism to exist, beliefs linking people to animals, soil, sun, stars, moon, seas, rivers, and rocks had to be destroyed. It also required a separation of humans and the animals they exploit. Today, contempt for animals and their habitat is at the core of the global system that has caused the climate crisis. In their sterile, high-rise (literally away from the earth), airconditioned offices with fake exotic plants, the people who are making decisions about the fate of the planet are also the most alienated from nature, most responsible for the attacks on nature. In 1932, eleven angry Francophone authors wrote that the powers-that-be, knowing “their days to be numbered and reading the doom of the system in the world crisis … rely more than ever on their traditional methods of slaughter to enforce their tyranny”. It’s still happening.

Where’s the solution?

It’s not with the big powers. It could come from one of the Earth’s most castigated nations, the occupied country of West Papua, with the Green State Vision of its government-in-waiting, a statement of intention that spells out how “to restore, promote and maintain balance and harmony, amongst human and non-human beings, based on reciprocity and respect toward all beings”. The West Papuan people, in the direst of circumstances after more than half a century of Indonesian military occupation, violent repression, and out-and-out genocide have managed to organise a government-in-waiting and, not only that, but to produce an official plan of action for “Making Peace with Nature in the 21st century” and “to restore, promote and maintain balance and harmony, amongst human and non-human beings, based on reciprocity and respect toward all beings”. The rest of us need to be equally determined and creative.

If the big states and institutions choose to ignore this vision of harmony we, The People, must insist on its implementation. If any state wishes to set an example and join this project as one of the “international partners” it shouldn’t be as a leader but as a listener and learner, like everyone else, giving its best, according to its abilities. This Manifesto is a call to all the people who are systematically marginalised and ignored, especially Indigenous peoples, to come together in a Rainforest Defenders International. It’s an invitation to city-numbed people to find a way back to nature, to try to learn how to live as part of, and not dominators of nature. It means abandoning consumption habits that are destroying the Earth but, then again, this could mean living more fulfilled lives.

States won’t save rainforests

State power is based on support for and from the corporate powers that are destroying nature. In the desperate situation the planet is facing, the best the powers-that-be can think of is COP(out)27, with some 33,449 registered, mostly male participants all locked up in a tourist resort on the Red Sea, Sharm El-Sheikh. Egypt has at least 65,000 political prisoners and Sharm El-Sheikh is heavily policed with aggressive surveillance of attendees in a system they themselves made. If the Cop26 summit spewed about 100,000 metric tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere, this one is bound to be bigger and better.

The usual approach to such a delicate, crucial task as saving the rainforests—which is recognised by scientists as essential for saving the planet—is “the bigger the better”. It’s tempting to think like this. At first, we wondered whether an alliance of the Indigenous peoples of countries with the three biggest rainforests (Brazil, the Congo, and West Papua), representing and including all the world’s rainforests, might be a good way to go. But, once again, big power diplomacy put paid to such dreams with the announcement of an alliance between Brazil, Indonesia, and the Congo, which they are thinking of calling (of all things!) an “OPEC for Rainforests”. This is all about interests of state. But now, right now, we must listen to the voices of rainforest defenders who have long been ignored, marginalised, silenced, and murdered.

Interests of state

So, what are Indonesia’s rainforests of this alliance? Uncritically repeated by prominent environmental journalists in The Guardian and elsewhere, the story goes that the three countries are “home to the Amazon, Congo basin and Borneo and Sumatra forests”. What? And West Papua? If Indonesia has cancelled West Papua in this project, it’s not because it’s repented and recognised that its occupation is illegal in international law and is finally going to grant independence. Rather, president Joko Widodo, is desperate to hide his country’s brutal 50+ years of war against the Indigenous people of West Papua, the world’s longest military occupation. This is the result of a sham UN-supervised referendum, after which the General Assembly formally “took note” that it didn’t represent the will of the people, but went ahead anyway to recognise Indonesian sovereignty, and then to cover up the killing of up to (or more than) ten percent of the population since the 1960s. We can’t know how many have been killed because it’s not in Indonesia’s interests to have accurate censuses. And, by the way, the former head of the Indonesian Intelligence Agency, advocated on 6 January 2021 the forcible removal of two million West Papuans from their homeland and their replacement with Indonesians.

The problem of the global system

It’s not only Indonesia. Its allies, the United States, European governments, Australia, et cetera, are complicit by remaining silent about the genocide and helping to conceal it. Everyone pussyfoots around Indonesia, which plays an increasingly dominant role in global affairs, partly because of its strategic position at the intersection of the Pacific Ocean, the Malacca Straits, and the Indian Ocean. More than half the world’s shipping passes through Indonesian waters, including US nuclear attack submarines in a dangerously gung-ho facing-off against China. Effectively, any country that joins a coalition with Indonesia to protect rainforests (except those of West Papua), will also, willy-nilly, be part of the internationally orchestrated coverup.

Surely a “global system” must include everyone. But the words “global system” usually refer to the G8, or maybe the G20. They don’t refer to us, The People. One thing for sure is that rainforests and all the species that dwell in them won’t be protected if the human rights of their Indigenous inhabitants—the 5% of the world’s population who care for 85% of its biodiversity—aren’t included in the project of saving the rainforests. Their human rights are crucial for those of everyone else, as the climate crisis is encouraging the rise of neofascism everywhere. They’re the ones who must lead the project.

State deals won’t cut it

In Brazil, president-elect Lula has promised to protect the Amazon, and the presidents of Colombia and Venezuela, Gustavo Petro and Nicolás Maduro, together with the president of Suriname, Chan Santokhi, have launched a call for a broad rainforest alliance that would have to include Brazil. However, Petro recognises that sub-soil hydrocarbon reserves in the Amazon, starting with Venezuela, might stymie the plan, and the Colombian Indigenous leader, Harol Rincón Ipuchima of the Maguta people points out that, “Not only Venezuela, but Colombia too has many oil companies in these territories. Likewise Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador”.

Talk of carbon credits and markets is neoliberal guff. Governments are part of a global system that’s destroying everything. The only moral clarity is coming from the most afflicted people, the forest defenders themselves. Any emancipatory project, “needs to look into the margins of our society and ask how we are treating people there”. If protecting and nourishing rainforests isn’t an emancipatory project, it will only be a catastrophic farce. By definition, an emancipatory project must include human rights. Almost all humans crave, in their own lives, the three basic principles of human rights: freedom, justice, and dignity. And the ones who understand most about them are those who painfully suffer them in their absence.

A new (Green State) vision

Only one country in the world envisages becoming a truly green state, respecting all the rights of humans and other species involved. It’s totally outside the international system (except for the internationally supported military occupation): West Papua. “As laid out in our Provisional Constitution, a future republic of West Papua will be the world’s first green state and a beacon of human rights.” This Vision is based on three main pillars, environmental and social protection, customary guardianship, and democratic governance and envisages making ecocide a serious criminal offence, restoring stewardship of natural resources to Indigenous authorities, combining Western democratic norms with Indigenous systems, and requiring all extraction companies to adhere to international environmental standards. The Green State Vision is a truly emancipatory project. As the first Indigenous (interim) government project of this nature, it’s also one that understands rainforests first-hand because it’s written by Indigenous people who know, in their own life experience as nature’s custodians, what must be done if rainforests are to be protected.

Indigenous knowledge

One huge stumbling block to westerners’ understanding of how Indigenous people experience their rainforest habitats, source of their sustenance, is that their food is divorced from social life. Sanitised, plastic-wrapped, genetically manipulated, it’s trucked in from around the globe to be sold in supermarkets where you queue by numbers and the cashier barely has time to look up and say hello. By contrast, rainforest communities are organised around fishing, hunting, gathering, and planting. The environment is essential for their health, so they love, understand, and care for it. Human nature is part of this cosmos, and the cosmos is part of human nature, language, and culture. They’re inseparable. Indigenous peoples know the rainforests because they’re part of them.

Of course, Indigenous knowledge isn’t homogenous. In the world’s different rainforests, people interact with their environment in historically diverse ways, which means that general, quick-fix solutions must be avoided, and proper attention must be given to particular ecosystems which, in turn, will benefit biodiversity. However, with its solid general principles, the Green State Vision can serve as a foundational document for a Rainforest Defenders International while, at the general, international level, also tackling the question of ecocide (and its associated genocide).

Change the system

Saving rainforests isn’t going to happen within the system. Small nations and little creatures are almost always overlooked. Insects, for example, mainstay of ecosystems and food source for animals and birds, are in dramatic decline, which will eventually cause food chains to collapse and the extinction of large species. Since 1997, Tuvalu’s leaders have been officially pleading for help as their small country is sinking. And in 2022, Prime Minister Kausea Natano has had to point out yet again, “if we can save our islands, we can save the world”.

Change must come from rebellion against the system. In the West people are sadly isolated from each other but we can still use social media. If everyone who reads this manifesto sent it to 50 contacts, it would take just four rounds of 50 x 50 x 50 x 50 to reach 6,250,000 people. And what could these potential exponentially growing circles of people do? They can boycott polluting industries, engage in civil disobedience, picket, go on strike, start graffiti campaigns especially among young people (from writing the words rainforest , floresta, selva, hutan hujan …. everywhere to painting works of art, or denouncing governments on walls and buildings), block roads, give legal aid, hassle MPs, demonstrate, occupy, pressure town and city councils to phase out cars and introduce urban versions of a Green State Vision, translate it and this Manifesto into as many languages as possible, call for taxing billionaires out of existence, demand a universal basic income … and any other kind of defence of rainforests (and thus of the world and all its human and other creatures) that occurs to anyone, any group, anywhere. Humans aren’t innately stupid, passive “resources” to be dumbed down and kept docile by unreal life presented on screens and popping tranquilisers. We can be imaginative. We can rebel. And we are part of nature. In the Amazon, a Runa hunter instructs anthropologist Eduardo Kohn to sleep face up because if a jaguar sees him as a self like herself, a you, she won’t attack. If he sleeps face down and cannot return her gaze she’ll see him as prey, an it, dead meat. The animal, the predator who recognises Kohn as another self and determines his survival, isn’t the it. The self-blinded human is.

A sense of wonder

In 1929, another Manifesto proclaimed that “the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful”. This is about a sense of wonder, but we need to join nature in a mutually loving gaze to achieve it. We need a Green State Vision. If we can’t acquire this, all the signs are telling us that we’re looking away and are therefore “dead meat”.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Benny Wenda, Jean Wyllys, and Julie Wark.

In the media and politics, we hear constantly about the problem of assimilation. How will “migrants” assimilate to our culture? How do we encourage people who have moved here to adapt to our way of life? How do we encourage “refugees” to become part of the local culture?

One problem with these anxieties is that they presume there is a unified identity within certain borders. If we wonder how migrants will adapt to German culture, we presume that “German culture” is a real referent, that there is something that unifies the eighty-three million people in Germany.

But culture is the intersection of many different forms of social meaning, including religion, race, language or dialect, gender, sexuality, profession, class, life experience, trauma, sports interests, hobbies, skills, and addictions. These social codes create an overlapping network of meanings that cannot be reduced to a single “culture”. So which one should newcomers adapt to?

By presuming a single unifying culture, we also assume that something unifies everyone who moves to a particular place. The words “immigrant” and “native” or “local” help to produce this confusion, as they assign an absolute identity to movement.

But what do these words really say about people? “Immigrants” are people who move to a place where they were not before, and “emigrants” leave the place they have lived in, while the “native population” or “local citizens” stay in place. So, rather than these ideological and tainted words, we propose a much more neutral distinction: movers and stayers. Those who move are called movers, those who stay are called stayers.

In European languages other than English, this distinction also works. For example:

Spanish: instead of inmigrante and el pueblo, movedores and quedadores.

Italian: instead of immigrata/o and cittadina/o, spostatore/i and rimanetore/i

Swedish: instead of invandrare and lokalbefolkningen, flyttare and stännare.

2—Social life

The terms stayers and movers help us to understand that these are not permanent conditions of people’s identities, but things that people do, and have always done.

People have always moved, always packed up their things and tried to find a better life. In Europe, until the early twentieth century there was no such thing as immigration law or border restrictions. People moved wherever they could find work and a way to live, which was necessary to both the movers and the stayers, since the movers needed jobs and housing, and the stayers needed employees, colleagues, residents, and houses to be built.

Since then, however, we have begun to believe the fantasy that there is a pure population to protect and a completely different population arriving. Included in that fantasy are other fantasies: that the stayers have always been here and been unaffected by movement; that borders and cultural identities are permanent and unchanging; that a “local culture” is developed by the people already inside it rather than the people moving into it; that there are such things as “bad” and “good” movers and that the stayers have to discern between these two groups.

Many of the movers to Europe, moreover, are not moving away from conditions that they created. Their need to move away was created by European movers. Since the fifteenth century, Europeans have moved through colonization, extracting value from other places, and leaving them not only without the value they produce, but also dependent on the system of value-production which is called capitalism.

In one sense, the terms stayers and movers take away the different types of agency involved in moving between places. People going on holiday, people fleeing war and persecution, people seeking what they consider a better life, people taking a temporary job position, people travelling for travelling’s sake—all of them are movers in various ways.

Having a single term for all the people who move in these different ways risks simplifying the different ways that stayers have to adapt to each of these situations. Of course, backpackers and refugees are not the same kind of mover. However, having different terms for each kind of movement creates different legal frameworks for each, and once someone (and their particular form of movement) is recognized in the law, their movement becomes a condition that defines them. “Refugee” becomes the ontological ground of the person in movement.

Denise Ferreira da Silva speaks about the law as the collective agency given the specific task of reducing complexity. The law necessarily universalizes, creating a simple symbolic order in which one stimulus always equals one decision. In the history of European colonialism, for example, the social wound of enslavement is imposed on African people, and that wound becomes a symbol of enslavement: being black means being exchangeable as a commodity. The wound appears as skin colour, and by the law it is assigned the symbolic order of race. The law then responds to racial difference, repeating the scene of enslavement constantly by affirming the symbolic code of black equals slave.

Developing the thinking of Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, Ferreira da Silva maintains that what happens simultaneously, alongside this legal reduction, is the social life of those people who are reduced to simplified symbols by the law. Those people sustain ways of surviving despite the law.

It is this capacity to produce social ways of being despite the appropriation of social meaning by the law that makes the lives of movers so important to everyone, whether stayers or movers. It is also what makes legal recognition undesirable, since legal recognition only means that movers can represent themselves within the reductive framework of the law.

That is why, despite its problems and its own reductionism, we propose only two terms to encapsulate every form of movement: movers and stayers. With these terms, the law will not be able to distinguish forms of movement, and so the regulating power of the state will not be able to reduce the complexity of movement’s meaning and the survival of ways of life that it maintains.

3—Integration

In liberal politics, what is pursued is not usually assimilation but rather integration. Integration allows the private maintenance of a mover-culture, while publicly becoming part of the stayer-culture, whereas assimilation assumes a loss of mover-culture.

Integrated Muslims in Europe are those who go to the pub but drink a soft drink. Integrated refugees are those who never mention their new country’s historical, economic, and political involvement in the war they fled. To be an integrated mover is to exist on the borderline between performances of home: allowing enough remnants of a mover-culture that stayers remember they are different, but not so many remnants that stayers have to change.

One of us set up a Bangladeshi restaurant, but no one came for dinner. They changed the sign to “Indian” restaurant, and it was full. The performance of movers’ home is allowed as long as it is the expected performance prescribed by the stayers.

In this example, two problems occur simultaneously in the minds of stayers: they presume that all movers are absolutely different to the stayers, and that all movers are absolutely alike.

Firstly, the logic of integration believes in the same definition of culture as assimilation: that there are coherent unifying identities among groups of people which are exclusive to that group, distinguishing all its members from the members of another group. It presumes that a neat separation exists between Muslim and Christian cultures, and that this separation can be maintained.

Secondly, it similarly assumes that cultures are not formed necessarily through the nonexistence of the boundaries between them. The many ways of being Muslim are constructed in response and interplay with the many ways of being Christian, and vice versa.

What is misunderstood by integrationist stayers is that “home” is not the demarcation of a boundary. Home is not the walls and closures of the architecture that surrounds you. That is the definition of the house, of the nation, or archetypally in Ancient Roman law—of the city as distinct from the forest.

“Home” is quite the opposite. It is the relations that form on the boundary between “mine” and “yours”. It is the place that is always given meaning by the presence of an other. It is the site that is always given away, so given away that all it reveals is the impossibility of giving it away: there was never anything to give away, because all it ever meant was this shared moment at the boundary of possession.

My home means my four siblings sharing a tiny space and passing food to each other. My home means the smell of burning oil before the eggs are fried. My home means the tears and laughter of my nieces and nephews. My home means the slight burn of the rug as we kneel for morning prayers. My home means the friends who always know where to find me, where the spare key is hidden, where to stay when they need a place to stay.

4—Fantasies of similitude

There is a profound illusion in European societies that stayers are unified in their similitude and movers are unified in their difference. This illusion produces the discourse of assimilation, setting up a whole national infrastructure to turn movers into convincing performers of the stayers’ identity. In Sweden, a huge amount of money and effort is put into the SFI school system, which stands for Svenskundervisning för invandrare, meaning Swedish language teaching for immigrants.

“Immigrants” (“invandrare” in Swedish), including refugees, have to attend these schools full-time in order to learn Swedish. The problem, however, is that speaking the language is not equivalent to being part of the culture. Swedes are infamously reserved. At the end of one of these year-long SFI language courses, one of us was told by the Swedish teacher (who was a mover, too): “Well done, you have now learnt a language that you will never be able to practice because Swedes will never speak to you.”

It does not matter if you learn the language because the fantasy that there is a unifying Swedishness and a unifying foreignness is stronger than the performance of words. Assimilation is a scam.

Even if there was such a thing as a meaningful cultural similarity that connected all the stayers of a particular place, and a meaningful cultural difference that connected all the movers arriving there, the notion that this divide could be transcended is illusory, since the very idea of that difference is rooted in the notion of independent cultures. If cultures develop independently of each other, and what produces a strong culture is its separation from the influence of movers, then adaption within a single generation is a fantasy. The idea of assimilation is impossible even from within the logic of assimilation.

5—Education programme

What if assimilation is all a misunderstanding? What if there was never any identity to protect? What if the fault lay with the stayers who presume that there is anything to adapt to?

Fred Moten says that sympathy is normally understood as the ability to see someone else reflected in ourselves. To feel sympathy, I have to see myself in the other and the other in me. Which means that to feel sympathy I first have to separate myself from the other. I have to establish an absolute difference between us, in order to then imagine a closing of that difference in our mutual reflection.

But this presumes that there is a border to suffering, that my pain is separated from the world, and that nothing connects my sadness with everyone else’s. It presumes that my suffering is fundamentally disconnected from yours.

What we should realize instead, Moten says, is that sympathy is the sharing of a general pain. Sympathy is the understanding that there is no unifying self to protect, that I am not a singular being who can be closed off from the general feeling of the world. I am the unique performance of a particular response to general conditions. I am one example of how to bear and live with a general pain.

When we feel sympathy, the boundary that we are crossing is this: from the fantasy of our individual separation to the awareness of our sharing of a general pain.

This general pain is displayed in the movers by the fact of having moved. That movement is their sharing of a general pain. In the place they move to, the sharing of a general pain must be opened by the stayers, since, by having stayed, they have not yet shared that general pain of movement.

How do the stayers share a general pain with the movers? What we propose is the inverse of the Swedish SFI system. Instead of Svenskundervisning för invandrare (Swedish language teaching for immigrants), we propose MO.LE.S: Mover Learning for Stayers.

These MOLES will be schools where stayers can learn about movers and exchange experiences. The teachers of these schools will be movers, and the students will be stayers. However, not all movers have to teach at these schools. It is open to those who want to take on the job, which will be paid at the rate of the national living wage. No mover is obliged to take on the responsibility of teaching the stayers about movement.

What will be taught and learnt in the MOLES is not the illusion of a permanent condition. The mover-teachers will not be mover-teachers forever, and if the stayers decide to move then they stop being stayers. What will be worked on, instead, is the possibility of performance. The movers and stayers will together develop an understanding of each other’s way of making social meaning.

Through this MOLES system, many social changes will result. 1. The stayers’ way of making meaning will change, constantly developing a new kind of stayer-society. 2. The movers will become stayers as they stay in that place, working as mover-teachers until they consider themselves stayers, or until they move again. 3. The legal framework that responds differently to different kinds of movers will be unable to keep certain movers in prisons (in the UK euphemistically called “detention centres”, making it sound more like a short stay during a school break), or force certain movers to the place they moved from, or reward certain movers with tax cuts or access to properties and passports.

6—Whose work is this?

This manifesto is written as a provocation to elicit questioning of received ideas around assimilation and integration. What we do not have—what is both not yet developed and not desirable—is a set of policies that proposes precise legal action. What we propose is the destruction of the logic of policy. We propose a mode of questioning that never ends, that is always pursuing contradiction and incommensurability, not looking for universalizable laws that withdraw people’s ability to plan and form meaningful social lives by asserting sovereign authority.

In order to achieve constant questioning, we have to also question ourselves. One question we ask ourselves in response to the Anti-Assimilationist Manifesto is: whose work is it to educate the stayers? The movers have already had to move, and then, rather than getting settled and making the conditions for a changed life, they are obliged to teach stayers about the numerous practices of movers. But is it the duty of the movers to undertake this work?

7—Manifesto

As anti-assimilationists, we call for the replacement of the discourse of “immigration” with the terms movers and stayers.

As anti-assimilationists, we call for the abolition of schools and learning centres that attempt to subsume the practices of movers into the illusory culture of the stayers.

As anti-assimilationists, we call for the creation of schools for Mover Learning for Stayers, where movers teach stayers how to adapt to the many ways of making social meaning that movers bring to the places where they move.

As anti-assimilationists, we call for the end to the legal distinction between forms of movement that reduce movers to permanent conditions, calculating their punishment or reward for moving based on these ideological presumptions.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by General Waste.

Photograph Source: Archiwum Kancelarii Prezydenta RP – www.prezydent.pl – GFDL 1.2

These are a selection of the ideas of a circle of independent critical thinkers that shall for now go by the name “critical advocates for a European foreign policy.” Our small group came together in Belgrade one autumn, in 2018 under the auspices of the reformist Diem25 (“Democracy in Europe by 2025”) movement. From that point onward, we have been discussing the current social, economic, security and foreign policy of the European Union with a global perspective and have since respectfully moved on from past membership in Diem25, which we thank for having introduced us.

The text below encapsulates our philosophy followed by our views on some core issues identified during our debates.

Europe needs a new non-aligned movement. Let’s start by imagining its manifesto. What would it look like? Here, in this text, we refer to an as-yet undefined, imagined “we”: the members of a pan-European socialist movement concentrated on changing Europe’s shameful, hollow, and often atrocious foreign policy.

The philosophy guiding our work is as follows:

1. We strive for a democratic, non-aligned Europe, independent from imperial pressures, a federation of nations promoting peace in Europe and the world: a federation based on mutual respect and cooperation rather than confrontation, in the fight for social justice, against climate change, in which conflict-prevention and resolution, disarmament and a trust-basis for de-nuclearization rank among the top priorities.

2. We strive for a responsible all-European Federation fully committed to solidarity, and the eradication of poverty and gross inequalities within Europe and beyond. A federalist model of organic coordination and cooperation based on subsidiarity within the Federation, would allow decisions taken from bottom-up and from the lowest possible level, to resound and take effect in a newly implemented model of politics. This model of democracy promotes decentralization of power and of space, self-management, returning autonomous power to local communities, municipalities and cooperatives.

3. A new people-centered model must guarantee the well-being of all citizens, countries and peoples: their dignity, self-determination, and their quality of life (“buen vivir“) via just sustainable and socioeconomically re-distributive policies, adapted to each country, caring for all people. We share a vision of an open Europe, which puts an end to its colonial and neo-colonial history. This will be a Europe centered on people, instead of the current neo-liberal consensus based on unlimited free markets, exploitative trade, arms trade, conformism to the Washington Neo-Conservative agenda, and financial speculation. We want Europe open not only for exchanging resources, ideas, arts and culture but also enabling the dignified mobility of people.

4. All European states must fully respect the UN Charter and international law and actively promote a solidarity-based international system governed by the precepts and limits of international law. An international common ground needs to be created that facilitates respectful and peaceful coexistence and joint efforts to tackle global human security concerns posed by gross inequality, global warming, violence, organized crime, health pandemics, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), nuclear disaster and other threats.

5. The EU can finally learn from its history and ban war as a means of politics and renounce the rule of force. This does not mean passivity or looking away when people are threatened. That does not mean resorting to sanctions that collectively punish populations as a cruel and righteous substitute for war. To the contrary, the EU should stress its civilian character and actively ensure the peaceful mediation of all disputes, seeking to reconcile interests with more than chatter and instead of military confrontation, respecting the rights and culture of all countries in the international arena.

6. We strive for a European security system inspired by the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and replacing NATO. Since its inception, the US has used NATO as an instrument to dominate Europe and turn it against Russia and other nearby regimes, thus endangering our continent. A future European Common Foreign Security Policy (CFSP) must be under full parliamentary control, restricted to a peaceful and solidarity-based foreign policy, strengthening its civil conflict-resolution capacities, promoting disarmament and sustainable development.

We know that there is a long road ahead of us but are ready to engage on this path with all of you. Kindly let us know your views.

I. Europe and the World

I.1 Reinventing Europe

Europe must reinvent itself as a peaceful federation, independent from foreign imperial interests, while committed to a relationship of mutual interdependence between its members and with the world. This federation should embrace internationalist politics towards progress, a future without warfare or poverty.

We feel an ethical imperative to recapture the federalist spirit of visionaries like Altiero Spinelli, and predecessors among the socialists who stood against the cartel conservatives, at the inception of the European Union at the end of the Second World War (WWII). Reclaiming this federalist tradition means rebuilding a federation, in order to not only defuse the possibility of war among European states, but also in the rest of the world.

There cannot be true transformation and peace in Europe if other parts of the world live in misery, conflict, and war. There will be no peace as state actors increasingly resort to militarized and surveillance tools to maintain the neoliberal status quo. No peace as long as the trade-rules perpetuate old colonial exploitative patterns, as long as externally enforced austerity and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank “structural adjustment” regimes exacerbate poverty and inequality. No peace as long as trade and even “development” aid are tied to market liberalization conditions – biased against both the poor and working classes, the poorer nations and former colonies of the earth.

II. Peace and Security

Supporting peace and opposing war means, simply, favoring life– a life in dignity, a life worth living. We put at the center of our analysis the main factors which threaten our lives and put humanity at risk of extinction, factors generated or amplified by neoliberalism: gross wealth inequality, global warming and weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s).

Human security is not about militarism. Human security is about health, education, decent work and equal opportunities. Human security is the recognition of diversity, it is about “el buen vivir” (a good life). Nuclear, chemical, bacteriological, explosive or autonomous weapons will not make us safer but could lead to extinction of the human race.

The recent pandemic allows a new perspective on the threats facing humanity. The futility of conventional and nuclear weapons was never more obvious. The war rhetoric does not change the fact that the common invisible “enemy” is not a molecule, so much as the ideology that hollowed out public healthcare systems in Europe and abroad while accumulating weapons.

II.1 Undemocratic Foreign and Security Policy Fueling Insecurity

The current Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) lacks democracy. Militarization in the form of the EU Defense Union and the deterrence industry of “Fortress Europe” in the Mediterranean, in Africa and elsewhere, are no substitute for sound social policy and the response to the authoritarian right-wing resurgence in several EU member states like Hungary or Poland. Militarization is poor means of guaranteeing our security. Further vast rearmament – as proposed by the EU president and fulfilled by the American-spurred race to intensify the Ukraine conflict – points in the wrong direction: towards Europe again becoming a theater for Great Power wars with WMDs.

II.2. Dismantling NATO

The anachronism of an anti-Soviet alliance system called NATO, which persists and expands after the fall of the USSR, could also be replaced by what Mikhail Gorbachev originally proposed: a “Eurasian security system” without military blocs, called a Common European Home. As Noam Chomsky explains the C.E.H: “No military blocs, no Warsaw Pact, no NATO, with centers of power in Brussels, Moscow, Ankara, maybe Vladivostok, other places. Just an integrated security system with no conflicts”.

We view with great concern the rapid militarization of the EU, the metastatic growth now booming past NATO’s old 2% target–which was bad enough–the current EU “defense union”, the reflections on a “nuclear EU” or an “intervention army”, the EU’s refusal to deploy its powerful diplomatic instruments with Russia in order to aid the exploited, impoverished and brave Ukrainian people in the only way that Europe truly can. We call for an end to EU military participation in missions such as those in the Sahel zone, the Mediterranean or the Horn of Africa.

II.3. Booming Military Industries

Military industries have boomed in the last years. “The US government, along with its NATO partners as well as US and European weapons manufacturers, continue to flood the world with the deadliest weapons. The top five arms exporters (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics) are located in the United States. These five firms alone account for 35% of the top 100 of the world’s arms dealer sales in 2018 (the most recent figures); the total US arms sales account for 59% of all arms sales that year. This was an increase of 7.2% over the US sales in 2017. These weapons are sold to countries that should instead spend their precious surplus on education, health, and food programs. For example, in West Asia and North Africa, the greatest threat to the people is not only the terrorist in his Toyota Hilux, but it is also the arms dealer in an air-conditioned hotel room”.

These industries threaten humanity with extinction and promise continued armed conflict. “The United States accounts for almost 40% of global military spending, it already has the largest military arsenal and the widest military footprint in the world. The US government spent at least $732 billion in 2019 on its military (not counting secret disbursements of funds to the massive intelligence wings). From 2018 to 2019, the US increased its military budget by 5.3%, the amount of which is the same as the total German military budget. The United States has a combined total of more than 500 military bases in almost every country on the planet. The United States Navy has 20 of the world’s 44 active aircraft carriers, while other US allies have 21 of them; this means that the US and its allied states have 41 of the 44 aircraft carriers (China has two and Russia has one). There is no question about the overwhelming superiority of US military force”.

Importantly, and less known, military industries are also a great environmental polluters. The United States, insisted on an exemption for reporting military emissions in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but is polluting more than 140 world countries combined. The US Air Force (USAF) is the largest single consumer of jet fuel in the world. Military bases create ecological havoc, with no provisions for environmental cleanup. European armies, especially UK and French troops, being nuclear powers, together with the non-nuclear but militarily involved abroad Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark are also great polluters.

II.4. Banning Arms Exports

As a matter of fact, EU States have increased their exports of conventional weapons to countries committing genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and serious human rights violations. European countries must put an end to exporting violence abroad and must abstain from hiding themselves–the true motivations of European elites, based not in rational forces, so much as in deep fears rooted in history–behind the counterterrorism and national security narratives.

II.5 Surveillance and Democracy

Since the beginning of the 21st century, digital giants and intelligence agencies have built, in secret and without our consent, a system of near-universal surveillance with the tacit approval if not connivance of the imperial powers (US political establishment, Silicon Valley, and US client-states, allies and allies-turned-enemies such as ipso facto Russia). This Western alliance produces disinformation and propaganda, subverts and contravenes national and international law in order to control us better; and the military and weapons industry are their privileged associates.

The “war on terror” acted as a catalyst for these developments and led to the securitization of our lives and the steady erosion of basic rights and freedoms all over the world.

More recently, those seeking to exploit our (in large part justified) panic over Covid-19 heralded the promise of a new “shock therapy”, an even deeper descent into control and authoritarianism with the aid of digital technologies and sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, such as facial and pattern recognition: we might be soon “facing the nightmare of a world of total automated law enforcement”, a world ruled by the entrenched and unelected digital and intelligence elites, with the connivance of our own governments.

We can no longer remain in small dissenter ghettos, in a reactive mode, denouncing the oppressive and repressive neoliberal systemic misuse of technology. Instead we should be building alliances with all those who resist compliance in grass-roots, worldwide post-capitalist movements for digital decolonization. Indeed, the information whistle-blowers have provided opened the eyes of many the world over. (Perhaps we would have all greatly benefited, had a Chinese Assange reported on developments in Wuhan.)

Edward Snowden writes: “The privacy of our data depends on the ownership of our data. However, there is no property less protected, and yet no property more private”.

In spite of the 2016 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which promised whistle-blower protection, EU states continued cooperating with the US surveillance efforts. The EU states, posing as human rights and the rule of law defenders, have not contested the inhuman abuse that the UK government and the UK and Swedish judiciary have inflicted on Julian Assange. The EU appears colonized by the imperial tech corporations.

Moreover, now for more than a decade, the EU is following the US steps in strengthening its defense and security sectors, and like the US, privatizing these. This helps to implement faux quick-fix surveillance solutions to political problems. For instance, the “solution” to migration-related issues consists in “guarding” and “fending off” migrants and refugees fleeing war, conflict, and deprivation with total disregard of their fundamental human rights. This new “security” concept has also infiltrated development assistance as discussed further on.

1. The visionary founder of the European Federalist Movement, Altiero Spinelli was a Communist resistance fighter jailed in 1927, when he was 20, and released in 1943. Spinelli abandoned Communism and devoted his life to Federalism in thought and action; he saw a future European Federation as the only path towards permanent peace in Europe and as a step towards a world federation. Since the 1940s, he defended a European Political Union built through a Constituent Assembly method, composed of representatives of the citizens. He formed a militant federalist movement which had a crucial influence in the process of European integration. ↑

2. www.express.co.uk/news/world/1232290/european-union-eu-army-ursula-von-der-leyen ↑

3. www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/03/most-of-the-world-is-just-collapsing-in-laughter-on-claims-that-russia-intervened-in-the-us-election-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky/ ↑

4. www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/21-2020-bouficha-appeal/ ↑

5. www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/21-2020-bouficha-appeal/ ↑

6. https://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.com/2019/07/us-military-is-bigger-polluter-than-as.html ↑

7. https://climateandcapitalism.com/2015/02/08/pentagon-pollution-7-military-assault-global-climate/;
www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2019/world-military-expenditure-grows-18-trillion-2018; www.military.com/daily-news/us-military-budget ↑

8. An AI-equipped surveillance camera is no more a mere recording device but an automated police officer, a true “robo-cop” actively seeking out “suspicious activity”, Snowden, page 196 ↑

9. Edward Snowden, Permanent Record, Mcmillan 2019 ↑

10. https://euobserver.com/investigations/136310 ↑

11. https://euobserver.com/priv-immigration/121454; www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/04/drones-replace-patrol-ships-mediterranean-fears-more-migrant-deaths-eu ↑

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Arturo Anguiano.

Calls are growing for heavier restrictions on social media platforms after a white supremacist live-streamed his shooting spree in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday, resulting in 10 deaths and three wounded. While the video was removed from Twitch within minutes, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook allowed it to circulate for days and gain over a million views. The 18-year-old shooter was radicalized through online forums such as 4chan, according to a racist screed he authored. “What we are dealing with is the backend business models that are creating a structure where certain things are being able to be profited from, certain things travel differently, and hate-filled content has more of a space to be engaged with,” says Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change. Color of Change has called for social media platforms to institute changes to their terms of service and urged Twitch to conduct a racial equity audit.

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

Opposition National Federation Party leader Professor Biman Prasad is confident there will be a change of government in Fiji this year and his party will be part of the new line-up giving the people a genuine choice for an optimistic future.

“The people of Fiji are fed up with the lies and propaganda that they have seen with this government,” he told listeners today on Pacific Media Network’s Radio 531pi.

“Why we are very optimistic is that we feel that the people are going to make a definite choice [in the general election] to reject this government that has been in power for the past 15 years.”

• READ MORE: Other Fiji elections reports

The current FijiFirst government has been in power since then military commander Voreqe Bainimarama seized power in a coup in 2006 and was then elected to office in a return to democracy in 2014.

Economist Professor Prasad said that his NFP partnership with the People’s Alliance Party (PAP), formed last year and led by former 1987 coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka, was committed to bringing back a “sense of good governance” to Fiji with transparency and accountability.

Responding to public discussions about democracy, he told Pacific Days host Ma’a Brian Sagala that Fiji was “far, far away from a genuine democracy”.

“We have articulated this very well over the last three or four years,” he said.

‘Ambush’ discussion
His interview with PMN today had a very different and more informative tone compared to a hostile “ambush” discussion yesterday with Radio Tarana’s host Pawan Rekha Prasad, who kept insisting on an NFP party manifesto when the election writs have not yet been issued and campaigning has yet to start.

Professor Prasad eventually walked out of that interview, complaining that he was not being “listened to”.

He later told Fijivillage that it was a set-up and a plan to try to “discredit him”.

Professor Prasad also spoke to a media briefing yesterday that included Indian Newslink editor Venkat Rahman and Māori and Pacific journalists at the Whānau Community Hub when he commented about plans for the “first 100 days” if elected.

Asked by Sagala what the major election issues would be, Professor Prasad said: “The situation in Fiji with respect to the economy, with respect to poverty levels, with respect to health issues, education, infrastructure, and the contraction of the economy — that we even had before the covid pandemic — has been of serious concern to the people.”

He said Fijians “want a choice in the next election”.

“They want to see the last of the current government in Fiji and we in the NFP and the People’s Alliance, and the partnership agreement that we have signed, provide a definite distinction and choice for the people.”

Issues for the election
These issues would be the ones that NFP would be taking into the election. A date has yet to be set, but the election writs are due on April 26 with the ballot to be set between July 9 and January 2023.

Professor Prasad said the mood at the recent NFP convention when people gathered again after two years of the pandemic was confident.

“We had a sense of exuberance, and a sense of optimism. Everyone is looking ahead to the election and a change of government,” he said.

Asked by Sagala what would the partnership do if successful in the election, Professor Prasad said a coalition was only possible after the election. But the partnership agreement between the NFP and PAP would be a good basis for forming a coalition.

However, Professor Prasad also pointed to the 2018 NFP manifesto as a good indicator.

Asked about a recent “heated exchange” in a parliamentary debate about the Fiji Investment Bill and a claim by Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum that the partnership was a “naked grab for power at any cost”, Professor Prasad said:

‘Ironical and hypocritical’
“This is ironical and the height of hypocrisy when coming from a man who himself with Frank Bainimarama nakedly grabbed power together in 2006 through the barrel of a gun.

“And they stayed in power with the support of the military from 2006 to 2014 when we had an election under an imposed constitution by them.

“So it is quite ironical and hypocritical of the de facto prime minister or leader of the FijiFirst party to say that this partnership is about a naked grab for power.

“Far from it, this partnership gives a clear choice, an alternative for the people of Fiji, and they have been looking for one.

“This partnership is the alternative.”

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

The post Peter Kuznick and The Global Covid 19 Solidarity Manifesto appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

HANAU, Germany — A 43-year-old German man who posted a manifesto calling for the “complete extermination” of many “races or cultures in our midst” shot and killed nine people of foreign background, most of them Turkish, in an attack on a hookah bar and other sites in a Frankfurt suburb, authorities said Thursday.

He was later found dead at his home along with his mother, and authorities said they were treating the rampage as an act of domestic terrorism.

The gunman first attacked the hookah bar and a neighboring cafe in Hanau at about 10 p.m. Wednesday, killing several people, then traveled about 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) and opened fire again, first on a car and then a sports bar, claiming more victims.

The bloodshed came amid growing concerns about far-right violence in Germany and stepped-up efforts from authorities to crack down on it, including last week’s detention of a dozen men on suspicion they were planning attacks against politicians and minorities.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said the shootings exposed the “poison” of racism in Germany, and she pledged to stand up against those who seek to divide the country.

“There is much to indicate that the perpetrator acted out of far-right extremist, racist motives,” she said. “Out of hatred for people with other origins, other faiths or a different appearance.”

Hookah lounges are places where people gather to smoke flavored tobacco from Middle Eastern water pipes, and Metin Kan, who knew many of the victims, said it was obvious why the gunman chose the neighborhood.

“Look, a hookah bar there, a gaming parlor there, a doner kebab place there — it’s a place frequented by immigrants,” he said. “Why this hatred of foreigners? We all get along here.”

People of Turkish background make up Germany’s single largest minority, and Turkey’s ambassador said five of the people killed in the attack were Turkish citizens.

Germany’s federal prosecutor, Peter Frank, said that all nine people killed were of foreign backgrounds and that six others were injured, one seriously.

Investigators said it appeared the gunman acted alone, but Frank said the “goal of the investigation is to find out whether there were, or are, people who knew of, or supported” the attacks. He added that his office was looking into any contacts the killer may have had inside Germany and abroad.

Kadir Kose, who ran over from a cafe he runs nearby after hearing the first shots, said he was shocked at the extent of the violence. While fights or stabbings aren’t unheard of, he said, “this is a whole other level, something we hear about from America.”

Witnesses and surveillance videos of the getaway car led authorities quickly to the gunman’s home, said Peter Beuth, interior minister for the state of Hesse. Both the attacker and his 72-year-old mother had gunshot wounds, and the weapon was found on him, Beuth said.

Frank identified the gunman only as Tobias R., in line with German privacy laws, and confirmed he had posted extremist videos and a manifesto with “confused ideas and far-fetched conspiracy theories” on his website.

The man identified himself as Tobias Rathjen on the website, which has now been taken down, with a mailing address matching that where the bodies of the killer and his mother were found.

In the manifesto, Rathjen claimed to have approached police several times with conspiracy theories, but Beuth said it does not appear the gunman had a criminal record or was on the radar of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency.

Among the documents posted to the man’s website, which has since been taken down, was a 24-page, rambling manifesto in German detailing, among other things, fears that he has been under government surveillance for years. He blamed the surveillance for his inability to have a relationship with a woman. He also called for genocide.

“We now have ethnic groups, races or cultures in our midst that are destructive in every respect,” he wrote. He said he envisioned first a “rough cleaning” and then a “fine cleaning” that could halve the world’s population.

He wrote: “The following people must be completely exterminated: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, the complete Arabian Peninsula, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Usbekistan, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and the Philippines.”

The attack was quickly condemned by many organizations, including the Central Council of Muslims, the Confederation of Kurdish Associations in Germany, and the Central Council of Jews.

“Everything will be done to investigate the circumstances of these terrible murders,” Merkel pledged, declaring: “Racism is a poison. Hatred is a poison.”

“This poison exists in our society and its is responsible for far too many crimes,” she added, citing the killings committed by a far-right gang known as the NSU, the fatal shooting last year of a regional politician from her party, and a deadly attack on a synagogue in Halle in October.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called it a “heinous attack” and expressed confidence that German authorities “will exert all kinds of effort to shed light on all aspects of this attack.”

German police were examining a video the gunman may have posted online several days before the attack in which he detailed a conspiracy theory about child abuse in the United States, Germany’s dpa reported. The authenticity of the video couldn’t immediately be verified, but the YouTube account was under the same name as the website containing the gunman’s manifesto.

In the video, the speaker said he was delivering a “personal message to all Americans” that “your country is under control of invisible secret societies.” In a slow and deliberate voice in accented English, he said there are “deep underground military bases” in which “they abuse, torture and kill little children.”

He made no reference to the far-right fringe QAnon movement in the U.S., but the message was similar to the movement’s central, baseless belief that U.S. President Donald Trump is waging a secret campaign against enemies in the “deep state” and a child sex trafficking ring run by satanists and cannibals.

In his manifesto, he made one reference to Trump, writing: “I doubt that Donald Trump knowingly implements my recommendations.” He suggested that “mind control” might be at work.

On the website, Rathjen wrote that he was born in Hanau in 1977 and grew up in the city, later training with a bank and earning a business degree in 2007.

Geir Moulson in Berlin, Michael Probst and Christoph Noelting in Hanau, and Suzan Fraser in Ankara contributed to this report. Rising and Jordans reported from Berlin.