“They Will Not Take the Street”: Ferguson and Colonial Histories

Paddy O'Halloran, CounterPunch

Last week, activists staged protests in Ferguson, Missouri to memorialize the death of unarmed, black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of an armed policeman a year ago. The protesters marched and shouted, publicly challenging the legitimacy of the police department. The police response shows continuity with a longstanding logic and practice of colonialism in regard to protest and space.

The Legacy of Frantz Fanon

Hamza Hamouchene, CounterPunch

Frantz Fanon died a few months before Algeria’s independence in July 1962. He did not live to see his adoptive country becoming free from French colonial domination, something he believed had become inevitable. This radical intellectual and revolutionary devoted himself, body and soul to the Algerian National liberation and was a prism, through which many revolutionaries abroad understood Algeria and one of the reasons the country became synonymous with Third World revolution.

Police and Plunder

Peter Linebaugh, CounterPunch

In December 2014 the discussion of “police” began to look at the roots of the institution. Peter Gelderloos concluded a three part study in CounterPunch flatly stating, “The police are a racist, authoritarian institution that exists to protect the powerful in an unequal system.”[1] Sam Mitrani, a scholar of the Chicago police, concluded similarly, “The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it.” [2] Yet a physician in Ann Arbor, Catherine Wilkerson, caused a local stir when she stated “that neither racism nor racist police violence can be abolished under this economic system, i.e. under capitalism”.

I am a 20th Century Escaped Slave

Assata Shakur

Assata Shakur, CounterPunch

My name is Assata Shakur, and I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the US government’s policy towards people of color. I am an ex-political prisoner, and I have been living in exile in Cuba since 1984.

American Blowback

by GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER and MIKE KING, CounterPunch

Yesterday was not simply a day like any other, and yet an entire system is grinding into motion to ensure that the peculiarities of the day be promptly forgotten: another crazy person lost it and committed unthinkable acts. The act of killing stands in and speaks for the person: look what he has done, of course he must be crazy. Case closed.

What they want you to see is just another Adam Lanza, just another inexplicable act, and when the act speaks for the assailant, words are secondary and there is no need to listen. But this is not, and has never been, a good way to understand reality.

Climbing Jacob’s Ladder

Richard Pithouse

by RICHARD PITHOUSE, CounterPunch

Durban, South Africa.

Christmas in Durban is all glorious blue skies, litchis, mangoes, fish curry, white beaches and the shimmering ocean. Of course the ocean, beautiful and inviting as it is, is full of shit because shack dwellers are denied sanitation. And this Christmas two of the shack settlements up in the hills burnt because shack dwellers are denied electricity and decent housing. Its the holidays though and there’s celebration everywhere, meat and beer everywhere, and down on the promenade along the beach, the city’s only really inclusive public space, it feels like we’re all in this together.

On Rape and Neocolonialism

by JULIAN VIGO, CounterPunch

“Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.”

― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

In the United Kingdom 400,000 women are sexually assaulted and 80,000 are raped each year (2010/2011).  These statistics do not include rape victims who are male, whose aggressors are both male and female.  The population of the United Kingdom is 20 times smaller of India’s population.  Yet living in the UK and reading its media, one could easily think that rape solely existed in India and that there is only injustice against women in the subcontinent and other ‘developing countries.’  During the past week I have had many conversations with friends and colleagues about the twenty-three-year-old rape victim, now nick-named ‘Damani’ (lighting in Hindi). A few of these discussions have proven to be productive terrains for analysing rape as a social problem in the world today. However the majority of these discussions have served as cathartic moments for the Westerner to express her disdain for those ‘other countries that do not respect women’s rights’ while proclaiming her own country’s superiority in this area. Facebook comments as well have replicated this neo-colonial gaze towards other countries and in recent days India has been rendered a monolith in human rights abuses; yet the country in which I am currently living has aided my own country (the USA) to amass over 1,000,000 Iraqi, Afghani and Pakistani deaths. (Of course, nothing is mentioned about these women’s rights to live in these countries.)  As such, I am gravely concerned by the focus placed by Westerners upon rape outside of their own borders since rape is not a problem unique to India.  Violence against women is a global problem that needs to be discussed honestly and without pigeon-holing certain cultures as more culpable.

The Assault on Democracy in Haiti: Jeb Sprague interviewed by David Zlutnick

The Marikana Massacre: a Premeditated Killing?

by Benjamin Fogel, CounterPunch

“Two hundred thousand subterranean heroes who, by day and by night, for a mere pittance lay down their lives to the familiar `fall of rock` and who, at deep levels, ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 feet in the bowels of the earth, sacrifice their lungs to the rock dust which develops miners` phthisis’ and pneumonia.”

- Sol Plaatjie, first Secretary of the African National Congress, describing the lives of black miners in 1914

Orientalism

Edward Said, CounterPunch 

Nine years ago I wrote an afterword for Orientalism which, in trying to clarify what I believed I had and had not said, stressed not only the many discussions that had opened up since my book appeared in 1978, but the ways in which a work about representations of "the Orient" lent itself to increasing misinterpretation. That I find myself feeling more ironic than irritated about that very same thing today is a sign of how much my age has crept up on me. The recent deaths of my two main intellectual, political and personal mentors, Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, has brought sadness and loss, as well as resignation and a certain stubborn will to go on.

Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements & States in Latin America

Dancing with Dynamite

Written by Benjamin Dangl, published by AK Press.

“Ben Dangl breaks the sound barrier, exploding many myths about Latin America that are all-too-often amplified by the corporate media in the United States.  Read this much-needed book.”—Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!

In the past decade, grassroots social movements played major roles in electing left-leaning governments throughout Latin America, but subsequent relations between the streets and the states remain uneasy. In Dancing with Dynamite, award-winning journalist Benjamin Dangl explores the complex ways these movements have worked with, against, and independently of national governments.

Frantz Fanon Fifty Years Later

by Richard Pithouse, South African Civil Society Information Service & CounterPunch

Some days ago we saw a sunset that turned the robe of heaven a bright violet. Today it is a very hard red that the eye encounters. 
- Frantz Fanon, Towards the African Revolution

Frantz Fanon, the Caribbean philosopher and revolutionary who joined the Algerian Revolution, died of leukaemia at the age of 36 on the 6th of December 1961. His last book, The Wretched of the Earth, was published soon after his death and so we are fifty years on from both Fanon and the first major attempt to think through the limits of newly independent Africa.

The Coming War on the Occupy Movement

by George Ciccariello-Maher, CounterPunch 

As I begin to write this, Occupy Oakland circulates in a by-now familiar pattern: forced from the camp at the break of day, the occupiers reconvened as they have done before on the steps of the Public Library. Later, they will attempt to close a repeating circuit that stretches a short six blocks along 14^th Street between City Hall and the Library.

On the Wall Street Occupation

by Richard Pithouse, CounterPunch

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's novel about the Great Depression, Tom Joad, the novel's central character, a man who has been made poor and who is on the run from the law, tells his mother in the climactic scene that: “I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin' fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin'. And I been wonderin' if all our folks got together....”

Flashmob Hysteria

by George Ciccariello-Maher, CounterPunch

The character of our present moment is undeniable, and the tangled web of causes and consequences is the same from London to Cairo to Santiago: budget cuts in the name of “austerity,” rising unemployment, increasing popular resistance, and an upsurge in racist violence and policing measures like “stop-and-frisk.” The failure of an economic system in the short and long term has generated an entire class of undesirables, living proof of that failure who must be contained, controlled, and silenced.

Planet of Slums, Age of Riots

by George Ciccariello-Maher, CounterPunch

Tottenham, Chile, Tunis…

There are too many to count

Oakland, Brixton, Taybat al-Imam…

No Easy Path Through the Embers

by Richard Pithouse, CounterPunch

In Texaco, his novel about the history of a shack settlement in Martinique, Patrick Chamoiseau writes of a “proletariat without factories, workshops, and work, and without bosses, in the muddle of odd jobs, drowning in survival and leading an existence like a path through embers.” But Texaco is also a novel of struggle, of struggle with the “persistence of Sisyphus”- struggle to hold a soul together in the face of relentless destruction amidst a “disaster of asbestos, tin sheets crates, mud tears, blood, police”. Texaco is a novel of barricades, police and fire, a struggle to “call forth the poet in the urban planner”, a struggle to “enter City”. It's about the need to “hold on, hold on, and moor the bottom of your heart in the sand of deep freedom.”

An Amazing Disgrace

by Peter Linebaugh, CounterPunch

W.E.B. DuBois taught us that the slave trade and the struggle against it were magnificent dramas superior even to the Greek tragedies. This year is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade by the English Parliament, and the bicentennial is celebrated in the movie, Amazing Grace. Far from being a majestic human drama involving millions of human beings on three continents in the protracted and mighty struggle of greed and cruelty against liberation and dignity, Amazing Grace presents an English story of pretty people either having tedious tea-parties at various country estates or compromising with one another in boring rhetoric in that exclusive British men’s club, the House of Commons.

Frantz Fanon 50 Years On

by Richard Pithouse, CounterPunch

On 6 December 2011, 50 years will have passed since the death of Frantz Fanon. Around the world people are getting together in universities, trade union offices, shack settlements, prisons, church halls, and other places where people try to think together, to reflect on the meaning of an extraordinary man for us and our struggles here and now.