Musing from the Margins #3; Their Crimes are Coming Home Again

Black Agenda Report Editor and Columnist Ajamu Baraka has thoughts on September 11, Haiti, white supremacy in Biden’s Ukraine policy, the criminalization of dissent, and other issues.

• September 11. Less than two years after the infamous “Powell Memo” that called the capitalist rulers to action to protect their system by launching a more coherent counterrevolution, the U.S. inspired and supported coup in Chile that ended the government of socialist Salvador Allende in 1973, imposed a right-wing neoliberal regime and signaled that the U.S. was committed to war abroad and domestically to maintain the capitalist order.

• Why is it so difficult for liberals to recognize the role played by democrats in undermining the legitimacy of U.S. institutions and “liberal” values? Liberals seem unable to accept that the era of liberal reformism is over and that their party has been taken over by neoliberals coming out of the right-wing Reagan revolution.  By blindly embracing neoliberalism liberals ensured that classical reform liberalism would become anachronistic and open the way for rightist demigods like Obama and Trump – both representing competing, right-wing fractions of the U.S. ruling class.

• I wonder why people don’t see the obvious and that is most “Karen’s” are not republican Trump supporters but liberals!!

• Neoliberals created Russiagate that established the ideological and political foundation for the expansion of the totalitarian power of the state. With the collaboration of the capitalist press and tech companies, the government produced and disseminated an “official line” on issues from Russia, the Ukrainian war and China to what would constitute the acceptable modes of political dissent – defending forest land shutting down highways, opposing the Biden war in Ukraine are increasingly forbidden and can not only get you murdered but can get you a legal case.

• It is important to keep in mind that the foundation for Russiagate was erected on the repressive legislative superstructure under the Bush and Obama Administrations. The result? Today, opposition is systematically criminalized in the U.S.  The indictments of the Uhuru 3 for opposing Ukraine war, charges of domestic terrorism and conspiracy in the fight against Cop-City, and the ongoing attempts to extradite Julian Assange represent the consolidation and normalization of bipartisan totalitarian power.

• White supremacist ideology is not reducible to race. Some of the most virulent white supremacists that I have encountered have been non-Europeans.

• There is something to what I call the psychopathology of white supremacy. It is a “racialized narcissistic cognitive disorder that centers so-called white people’s and European civilization and renders the afflicted with an inability to perceive objective reality in the same way as others. This affliction is not reducible to the race of so-called whites but can affect all those who have come in contact with the ideological and cultural mechanisms of the Pan-European colonial project.”

• When Zelensky, Biden, Macron, talk about “common European values,” Africans and all non-European peoples understand its real meaning. It is a call for white Western solidarity in response to the global shift of power away from the West. It is essentially an appeal to support white supremacy through the maintenance of white material power that is based on the extractivist, parasitic relationship between the “West” and the rest of us.

• RICO charges in Atlanta. This is what fascism looks like. Activists charged with felony intimidation for distributing flyers calling a state trooper a “murderer” for his involvement in the fatal shooting of an environmental protester in the woods?

• Sanders says progressives must “demand that the Democratic Party, not just Biden, have the guts to take on corporate greed and the massive levels of income and wealth inequality that we see today.” Huh? Like supporting Build Back Better and then caving to party bosses and separating it from the infrastructure legislation that they really wanted because it was another corporate giveaway. And what made that surrender to the party bosses so insulting for many democrats is the pretending like they were really going to pass BBB later after they passed the infrastructure bill.

• Sanders demonstrates why he was revealed as the sheepdog that he was. He was never committed to struggling for real power in the democrat party. That is why he sold out his supporters and surrendered. Sanders is nothing more than an opportunist democrat and a fraud.

• Haiti!! Oppose the racist military assault on Haiti orchestrated by Joe Biden and supported by his coterie of uncle toms from CARICOM to the mother of all handkerchief head, buck-dancing toms in the country – Hakeem Jeffries.

• The democrats are the party of war, wall street and white power. To pretend otherwise is to be dishonest and immoral. Smash the duopoly! Both parties are fascist but neoliberals who control the state apparatus are the real leading edge of a particular historic form of neofascism in the U.S.

• Liberal race hustlers pretend they love all “Black” people. African revolutionaries don’t play that game. In the U.S. the fascist convergence of the state and white colonial/capitalist power and expressed in the strengthening of the repressive apparatus of the state is taking place in cities run by “Black” democrats – and more specifically, Black neoliberal democrats. This is why I argue that democrats are more dangerous fascists than republicans because they face no real opposition.

• We must continue to oppose the racist anti-Chinese bashing and Russia phobia that is becoming normalized in the U.S., but as Africans we will never forget that China and Russia threw Libya under the imperialist bus. Save the bullsh*t that you didn’t know that with a UN Security Council authorization to establish a no-fly zone that the U.S. and NATO would expand that authorization into a regime change operation and destroy the country in the process.

• Do not lose your minds and anti-imperialist sensibilities with the expansion of BRICS. Multipolarity as represented by structures like BRICS is important and reflects the necessary alteration of the international balance of power away from the 500 year dominance of the Pan European colonial/capitalist project. However, a peoples-centered revolutionary project that places power in the hands of the oppressed classes, nations and peoples of the world as part of the transition to socialism is still the historic objective.

• U.S. and NATO Out of Africa, Shut Down AFRICOM!

• Defend the Uhuru 3!!

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Ajamu Baraka is Chairman of the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.