Dispossession

I first saw this on Kai Chang's blog. It says it all, doesn't it?


















It has to be said, though, that while Israeli settler-colonialism (and its racialized logic of dispossession) is as bad as its white South African cousin, neither are as bad as the white American version. And I say that as a white American who descends from settlers who got "Indian grants" in 1880s California, after the U.S. military and various vigilante groups had grabbed the land through a series of outright massacres and dirty tricks. (I only found out about the "Indian grants" in the last year, from my mother.) The point is that the land theft that took place in the U.S. was even worse because it involved a more thorough process of genocide--reducing the indigenous population north of the Rio Grande by around 95% in less than three hundred years. See this documentary.

A good summary of the genocidal (and ecocidal) consquences of the conquest of what became the USA is provided in the essay "Beyond Pipe Dreams: What the West Was Not" by Scott William Hoefle, in The Journal of Peasant Studies (30:10). Here is an excerpt:

"According to the first US census in 1851, there were some 388,229 Native Americans in the United States, and as late as 1981 the total number of indigenous people north of the Rio Grande at the time of European contact was estimated at only 1 million inhabitants [Hawgood, 1967, The Times, 1981]. More recent calculations, based on new archaeological evidence from the eastern United States, put the original figure for the Native American inhabitants much higher, at between 2.5 million and 5 million. As there were only 237,196 Native Americans left at the time of the 1900 census, it is clear that around 95 per cent of the indigenous population died from introduced diseases, was killed off or assumilated: the result is that Native American depopulation is now considered to have been one of the world's worst demographic disasters [Butzer, 1994; Hine and Faragher, 2000; Kunitz, 1994; Livi-Bacci, 1992].


As almost all US frontiers were defined on the basis of exclusion, very few Native Americans were assimilated into the general population. When disease did not kill Native Americans fast enough, first colonists and then the professional army would attack Native American villages at dawn and slaughter all inhabitants without mercy. There is some debate as to whether the frontier phalanx of Scots and Irish settlers were the main perpetrators, or whether the professional US army was the main agent of genocide [Leyburn, 1962; Bellesiles, 2000]: irrespective of who was responsible, genocide was the result and intention. The ideology of 'the only good Indian is a dead Indian' and of substituting 'indolent natives,' who were considered to be racially inferior, with productive settlers was espouses by political and military leaders [Faragher, 1998; Hine and Faragher, 2000]."

Read more!

De facto apartheid, Desertification, Extinction, Airstrikes...Another beautiful day!

It has been noted by many commentators that 9/11 is not only a notorious day in the United States. On 9/11/1973, in a military operation coordinated with the CIA, the Chilean military bombed the Chilean presidential palace, precipitating the suicide of Salvador Allende and allowing General Augusto Pinochet to take power.

On 9/11/1977, white South African security forces beat black activist Steve Biko in his prison cell in Port Elizabeth. He was found dead the next day. South African president Thabo Mbeki paid tribute to Biko on the 30th anniversary of his murder by the apartheid regime in a memorial lecture in Cape Town yesterday. He said:

"I speak here of the challenge to defeat the centuries-old attempt to ... treat us as children, to define us as sub-humans whom nature has condemned to be inferior to white people, an animal-like species characterised by limited intellectual capacity, bestiality, lasciviousness and moral depravity."
[...]
"We must ask ourselves whether the majority of our people, for whose freedom Steve Biko sacrificed his life, are truly aware that they too are people and whether they do not still regard themselves as appendages of our self-appointed superiors.
"Has the majority taken advantage of its victory in 1994 to repudiate the practice of resorting to forced gestures of friendship it does not desire?"

Forced gestures, indeed. Who can make "friends" when white economic domination continues in South Africa today, 13 years after the official end of apartheid? According to a UN FAO report from July 2007, some 57,000 white South African farmers currently own 80% of the arable land in the country. White-owned farms in South Africa take up 1,300 hectares on average, and are 250 times the size of the average black-owned farm (which is usually on more arid land). They employ over a million workers, or about 11% of the entire formal sector workforce in South Africa. Meanwhile, about half of all black South Africans fall below the government's official poverty line of R354, or the equivalent of less than $50 per month. While over 60% of black South Africans are poor, only 1% of white South Africans are poor.

Similarly, the white minorities in Namibia and Zimbabwe still own about half the arable land in those countries. In Zimbabwe, what land reform has taken place under Mugabe has elicited political interference from Britain and the U.S., including funds for opposition parties and perhaps coup attempts. (Not to mention bizarro-world tantrums about Mugabe's "reverse racism" in the Euroamerican media. It's as if the descendants of black colonizers controlled half the arable land in western Europe and the U.S.) Just imagine what they'd do if land reform in South Africa became an actuality?

These issues will only become more urgent in the coming years, as (largely Northern-induced)climate change decreases the quantity of arable land on Earth. Last Friday, M.V.K. Sivakumar of the U.N. Meteorological Organization told a U.N. conference in Madrid that desertification caused by climate change would threaten the global food supply in the 21st century:

"Today we feed the present world population of 6.3 billion from the 11 per cent of the land surface that can be used for serious food production. The question is: Will we be able to feed the 8.2 billion that we expect to populate the globe in 2020 if even less land is available for farming?" he said.
[...]
Sivakumar said that in some regions the spread of deserts and the salination of once arable land was already well under way. In the future it would be most widespread in drier areas of Latin America, including in farming giant Brazil.

In Africa, increasing climate variability would create major problems for farmers, who are likely to see their growing seasons getting shorter and crop yields cut, especially in areas near already arid and semi-arid regions. [end quote]

Simultaneously, "development" experts continue to push the cultivation of cash crops for export rather than food crops for consumption. As Iain Boal pointed out in an interview published at Counterpunch, people are starving in Zimbabwe while planes full of cut flowers leave Harare for the European market.

In other climate change-related news, The World Conservation Union just published its annual Red List, according to which over 16,300 species (out of the 41,415 species considered) are threatened with extinction. List manager Craig Hilton-Taylor told Reuters that the estimate, which calculates an extinction rate 100-1,000 times higher than normal, is "just the tip of the iceberg."

And it turns out that Syrian accusations about an Israeli airstrike on September 6th were true. U.S. officials told Reuters that the strike was aimed at Iranian weapons being smuggled to Hezbollah through Syria. According to CNN, the strike was coordinated with Israeli ground forces, apparently explaining the mobilization at the Golan border. The above-quoted "U.S. officials" also practically announced that U.S. forces helped coordinate, or at least were privy to, the operation: "Sources in the U.S. government and military confirmed to CNN's Barbara Starr that the airstrike did happen, and that they are happy to have Israel carry the message to both Syria and Iran that they can get in and out and strike when necessary." Or: our attack dog is ready to bite again. Read more!

The Father of All Bombs, Israeli Spy Flights, Pax Amerafrica, Apartheid Nuke Smugglers

There has been a great deal of speculation about how Russia will respond to the Eastern European missile defense system the U.S. is planning. This "defense" system is being widely interpreted in Russia as an offense system, not a means of preventing a Russian first strike, but of disabling a Russian retaliatory strike in the event of a U.S. first strike. This is exactly how the testing of a Chinese missile defense system was interpreted in the U.S. media last summer, although mainstream commentators wouldn't dream of applying the same standards to US we apply to THEM.

Anyway, now we know. According to Reuters:
"Russia has tested the world's most powerful vacuum bomb, which unleashes a destructive shockwave with the power of a nuclear blast, the military said on Tuesday, dubbing it the "father of all bombs". The bomb is the latest in a series of new Russian weapons and policy moves as President Vladimir Putin tries to reassert Moscow's role on the international stage."

The article goes on to say that:

"The main destruction is inflicted by an ultrasonic shockwave and an incredibly high temperature," the reports said. "All that is alive merely evaporates."
[Deputy Armed Forces Chief of Staff Alexander] Rukshin said: "At the same time, I want to stress that the action of this weapon does not contaminate the environment, in contrast to a nuclear one."

Good to know that it evaporates flesh in an eco-friendly way.

Meanwhile, Israel is playing with fire again. A few weeks ago, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced that Israeli troops would be withdrawing from the Golan border. Since July, the Israeli government has deployed thousands of IDF reservists to the border of the Golan Heights, a piece of Syrian territory Israel siezed during the 1967 war, for military exercises. Rumors of war with Syria have been heating up in recent months, and it appeared that Barak's announcement was a sign of eased tensions. Then, on September 6th, four Israeli warplanes, travelling faster than the speed of sound, invaded Syrian airspace after midnight. They reportedly entered from the south and reached the vicinity of Tal Abyad, on the northern Syria-Turkey border. There are conflicting accounts of what happened next. Syrian officials at the U.N. on Tuesday said that the craft engaged in an airstrike against an unspecified target, while Israeli officials said they were on a reconnaissance mission, but were forced to drop their munitions in order to increase speed and altitude after being fired on by Syrian troops.

So what were they doing? According to Sami Boubayed at Asia Times, Syria recently purchased ballistic missiles from Russia. He quotes Israeli "counter-terrorism expert" Boaz Ganor's statement that Israel was "collecting intelligence" for long-range missile installations in the north. If a Lebanon-style conflagration erupts, Israel may find itself simultaneously at war with Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinans in Gaza and the West Bank.

U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops continued their offensive inside Somalia on Tuesday, bombing the Mogadishu international airport and siezing towns all through southern and central Somalia. The U.S. is participating in many of these operations, and is even carrying out airstrikes inside Somalia. The perception that the U.S. is extending its sphere of occupation from Afghanistan and Iraq to the Horn of Africa is, inevitably, leading to an extension of the resistance it provokes. General John Abizaid recently made a visit to Addis Ababa, and there are other visitors. According to McClatchy, "Hundreds of foreign fighters, primarily from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Asian peninsula, reportedly have arrived in recent days to bolster the CIC [Council of Islamic Courts]."

Oh, and the South African government has uncovered evidence of a nuclear smuggling ring operating in 30 countries. Members include engineers involved in the apartheid regime's nuclear weapons program, which was dismantled in 1994. Read more!