PART's Perspective: Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, Everywhere Is War!-- Haile Selassie, Ethiopia
by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action L.A./People Against Racist Terror (ARA-LA /PART) Callously, on the anniversary of the US re-invasion of Iraq, the Obama administration orchestrated an invasion of Libya by French, British and US forces, using missiles, fighter planes, rockets and bombers under the guise of UN authorization for a so-called "humanitarian" no-fly zone. Already fighting two land wars in Asia in Iraq and Afghanistan, already sending troops to Colombia and flying drones over Mexico, the US has now extended its endless war to Africa. The hypocrisy of the attack on Libya was blatant, since the US did nothing to prevent government attacks on protesters in Ivory Coast, Yemen, or Bahrain (where US ally Saudi Arabia actually sent in troops to suppress opposition to the dictatorial monarchy). Even the controlled US media had to acknowledge that the US had carefully stage-managed the Arab League and UN calls for action. Many recognize that Libya's oil was a key factor, especially in the European response. Less obvious was the threat posed to the US by previously expressed intentions of the Gulf oil monarchies to abandon the dollar as the currency for pricing oil. Having cracked the whip and flexed its muscle, the US is now in a position to forestall any such move. It would have shattered the fragile US economic stabilization (impossible to call it a "recovery" given the massive on-going unemployment, deep slashes of social services, education and public employment, and the double-dip depression in the housing market). The US seized the opportunity provided by the democratic upsurge in North Africa and the Gulf region to reassert its domination, whether through covert operations, puppet regimes or open military intervention. By orchestrating a Euro-American attack on the most African-identified Arab regime, the US also served notice that a new era of re-colonization was underway in Africa and that the West would be resisting China's inroads there. Meanwhile Obama himself was carefully off-stage, washing his hands of responsibility like Pontius Pilate and touring "Latin" America to proclaim its strategic importance to the US economy. He went to fend off the threat of Chinese and Japanese investment and the rise of ALBA, the Venezuelan-led development bank. Yet neither his hosts nor the other nations in South and Meso-America could fail to see the military threat behind the velvet words. The response within the US to this latest imperial escalation and aggression has been anemic. Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader raised the issue of impeachment of Obama for failing to even consult Congressional leaders, let alone abide by Constitutional and legislative constraints on such armed acts of war. But street actions have been ritualistic. US labor unrest in Wisconsin and elsewhere, hyped by some as the insurgent equivalent of uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, have not drawn the obvious connection to opposing imperial war, and barely begun to make links with the immigrants battling other repressive measures by the same legislators. Insurrection, let alone revolution, is far off. Liberal Internet groups jumped on the humanitarian intervention bandwagon, even issuing calls for action to cut Libya off from satellite access. The massive labor-student-community rallies in Madison and growing organizing in Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere are certainly welcome. But it is troubling that these mostly-white rallies, defending the rights of a mostly white sector of labor, somehow galvanized laudatory left and union comment and solidarity in a way that the student-community-labor actions in Puerto Rico (facing the same type of attacks on public services, employees and unions) or the general strike of prison labor in Georgia did not. Yet they, like Tunisia, surely helped inspire mass action in Wisconsin. The shredding of collective bargaining rights, the slashing of education funding, social services and public employment in the midst of a prolonged and deep economic crisis, and the general program of austerity embraced by Republicans and Democrats alike, are undeniable manifestations within the US of the global state of war manifest more fully and bloodily in Libya. But the fight back against them must be conscious of that larger and bloodier war going on, including other aspects of the "war at home" of police terror, mass incarceration and political imprisonment and repression. LA's big labor rally studiously ignored the war funding that is bleeding social programs and public employment. Labor must show conscious solidarity with Black community partisans resisting police terror and racial profiling, with prisoners defying the new slave plantations, with migrants demanding their human rights, and with colonized people resisting the bombs, drones and missiles of the Empire. Otherwise, such bread-and-butter oriented labor rallies amount to little more than a mildly militant defense of privilege. It's applying a bandage to a sore while ignoring a deadly systemic infection. Elsewhere in this issue are reports on two Los Angeles efforts to develop anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist organizing around the concrete conditions of housing exploitation, lack of food and water sovereignty, police terror, and the imprisonment or custodial control of over 8 million people, mostly of color. Such grassroots base-building around immediate issues that exposes the true nature of this entire rotten system and begins to exert the power of the oppressed is a necessary component of seizing the time of the ongoing and deepening crisis of the Empire to marshal the popular forces capable of overturning and replacing it. Feedback welcome: antiracistaction...@yahoo.com The above editorial is from the April-June 2011 issue of "Turning the Tide: Journal of Anti-Racist Action, Research & Education," Volume 24 Number 2, now available from ARA-LA/PART, PO Box 1055, Culver City CA 90232. Subs are $16 payable to Anti-Racist Action at that address. Turning the Tide has been publishing for nearly a quarter-century as a grassroots voice of anti-racism and anti-colonialism without partisan subsidies, government grants, foundation funding or corporate advertising. It goes free to over 1300 prisoners around the US. But if you value its thought-provoking analysis and unique reportage from grassroots struggles, please subscribe and help keep it afloat. The current issue also features an analysis of the significance of land to anti-capitalist struggle and the housing issue, a defense of above-ground self defense work, "On Confrontational Politics," by the Black Riders Liberation Party, articles about Native land struggles 40 years apart, information on an May 14-15 "Peoples Justice Conference," three pieces by Mumia Abu-Jamal on revolution, Libya, and Japan, a survey of international women's struggles for liberation in South Africa, iraq, and Israel/Palestine by Susan Galleymore, and much more, including reports on recent and upcoming anti-fascist activity around the US and in southern CA. ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:laamn-unsubscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:laamn-subscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:laamn-dig...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:laamn-ow...@egroups.com?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:la...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/laamn@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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