Chris Hedges: The Empire Does Not Forgive

 

 

 Source: ConsortiumNews

The Carthaginian general Hannibal, who came close to defeating the Roman Republic in the Second Punic War, committed suicide in 181 BC in exile as Roman soldiers closed in on his residence in the Bithynian village of Libyssa, now modern-day Turkey. It had been more than thirty years since he led his army across the alps and annihilated Roman legions at the Battle of Trebia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae, considered one of the most brilliant tactical victories in warfare which centuries later inspired the plans of the German Army Command in World War I when they invaded Belgium and France. Rome was only able to finally save itself from defeat by replicating Hannibal’s military tactics. 

It did not matter in 181 BC that there had been over 20 Roman emperors since Hannibal’s invasion. It did not matter that Hannibal had been hunted for decades and forced to perpetually flee, always just beyond the reach of Roman authorities. He had humiliated Rome. He had punctured its myth of omnipotence. And he would pay. With his life. Years after Hannibal was gone, the Romans were still not satisfied. They finished their work of apocalyptic vengeance in 146 BC by razing Carthage to the ground and selling its remaining population into slavery. Cato the Censor summed up the sentiments of empire: Carthāgō dēlenda est (Carthage must be destroyed). Nothing about empire, from then until now, has changed.

Imperial powers do not forgive those who expose their weaknesses or make public the sordid and immoral inner workings of empire. Empires are fragile constructions. Their power is as much one of perception as of military strength. The virtues they claim to uphold and defend, usually in the name of their superior civilization, are a mask for pillage, the exploitation of cheap labor, indiscriminate violence, and state terror.

The current American empire, damaged and humiliated by the troves of internal documents published by WikiLeaks, will, for this reason, persecute Julian Assange for the rest of his life. It does not matter who is president or which political party is in power. Imperialists speak with one voice. The killing of thirteen U.S. troops by a suicide bomber at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Thursday evoked from Joe Biden the full-throated cry of all imperialists: “To those who carried out this attack … we will not forgive, we will not forget, we will hunt you down and make you pay.” This was swiftly followed by two drone strikes in Kabul against suspected members of the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K), which took credit for the suicide bombing that left some 170 dead, including 28 members of the Taliban.

The Taliban, which defeated U.S. and coalition forces in a 20-year war, is about to be confronted with the wrath of a wounded empire. The Cuban, Vietnamese, Iranian, Venezuelan and Haitian governments know what comes next. The ghosts of Toussaint Louverture, Emilio Aguinaldo, Mohammad Mossadegh, Jacobo Arbenz, Omar Torrijos, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Juan Velasco, Salvador Allende, Andreas Papandreou, Juan Bosh, Patrice Lumumba, and Hugo Chavez know what comes next. It isn’t pretty. It will be paid for by the poorest and most vulnerable Afghans. 

The faux pity for the Afghan people, which has defined the coverage of the desperate collaborators with the U.S. and coalition occupying forces and educated elites fleeing to the Kabul airport, begins and ends with the plight of the evacuees. There were few tears shed for the families routinely terrorized by coalition forces or the some 70,000 civilians who were obliterated by U.S. air strikes, drone attacks, missiles, and artillery, or gunned down by nervous occupying forces who saw every Afghan, with some justification, as the enemy during the war. And there will be few tears for the humanitarian catastrophe the empire is orchestrating on the 38 million Afghans, who live in one of the poorest and most aid-dependent countries in the world.

Since the 2001 invasion the United States deployed about 775,000 military personnel to subdue Afghanistan and poured $143 billion into the country, with 60 percent of the money going to prop up the corrupt Afghan military and the rest devoted to funding economic development projects, aid programs and anti-drug initiatives, with the bulk of those funds being siphoned off by foreign aid groups, private contractors, and outside consultants.

Grants from the United States and other countries accounted for 75 percent of the Afghan government budget. That assistance has evaporated. Afghanistan’s reserves and other financial accounts have been frozen, meaning the new government cannot access some $9.5 billion in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank. Shipments of cash to Afghanistan have been stopped. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced that Afghanistan will no longer be able to access the lender’s resources.

Things are already dire. There are some 14 million Afghans, one in three, who lack sufficient food. There are two million Afghan children who are malnourished. There are 3.5 million people in Afghanistan who have been displaced from their homes. The war has wrecked infrastructure. A drought destroyed 40 percent of the nation’s crops last year. The assault on the Afghan economy is already seeing food prices skyrocket. The sanctions and severance of aid will force civil servants to go without salaries and the health service, already chronically short of medicine and equipment, will collapse. The suffering orchestrated by the empire will be of Biblical proportions. And this is what the empire wants.

UNICEF estimates that 500,000 children were killed as a direct result of sanctions on Iraq.  Expect child deaths in Afghanistan to soar above that horrifying figure. And expect the same imperial heartlessness Madeline Albright, then the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, exhibited when she told “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children because of the sanctions was “worth it.” Or the heartlessness of Hillary Clinton who joked “We came, we saw, he died,” when informed of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s brutal death. Or the demand by Democratic Senator Zell Miller of Georgia who after the attacks of 9/11 declared, “I say, bomb the hell out of them. If there’s collateral damage, so be it.” No matter that the empire has since turned Libya along with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen into cauldrons of violence, chaos, and misery. The power to destroy is an intoxicating drug that is its own justification.

Like Cato the Censor, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies are, if history is any guide, at this moment planning to destabilize Afghanistan by funding, arming, and backing any militia, warlord or terrorist organization willing to strike at the Taliban. The CIA, which should exclusively gather intelligence, is a rogue paramilitary organization that oversees secret kidnappings, interrogation at black sites, torture, manhunts, and targeted assassinations across the globe. It carried out commando raids in Afghanistan that killed a large number of Afghan civilians, which repeatedly sent enraged family members and villagers into the arms of the Taliban. It is, I expect, reaching out to Amrullah Saleh, who was Ashraf Ghani’s vice president and who has declared himself “the legitimate caretaker president” of Afghanistan. Saleh is holed up in the Panjashir Valley.  He, along with warlords Afgand Massoud, Mohammad Atta Noor and Abdul Rashid Dostum, are clamoring to be armed and supported to perpetuate conflict in Afghanistan.

“I write from the Panjshir Valley today, ready to follow in my father’s footsteps, with mujahideen fighters who are prepared to once again take on the Taliban,” Ahmad Massoud wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post. “The United States and its allies have left the battlefield, but America can still be a ‘great arsenal of democracy,’ as Franklin D. Roosevelt said when coming to the aid of the beleaguered British before the U.S. entry into World War II,” he went on, adding that he and his fighters need “more weapons, more ammunition and more supplies.”

These warlords have done the bidding of the Americans before. They will do the bidding of the Americans again. And since the hubris of empire is unaffected by reality, the empire will continue to sow dragon’s teeth in Afghanistan as it has since it spent $9 billion—some estimates double that figure—to back the mujahedeen that fought the Soviets, leading to a bloody civil war between rival warlords once the Soviets withdrew in 1989 and the ascendancy in 1996 of the Taliban.

The cynicism of arming and funding the mujahedeen against the Soviets exposes the lie of America’s humanitarian concerns in Afghanistan. One million Afghan civilians were killed in the nine-year conflict with the Soviets, along with 90,000 mujahedeen fighters, 18,000 Afghan troops, and 14,500 Soviet soldiers.  But these deaths, along with the destruction of Afghanistan, were “worth it” to cripple the Soviets.

Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, along with the Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, oversaw the arming of the most radical Islamic mujahedeen groups fighting the Soviet occupation forces, leading to the extinguishing of the secular, democratic Afghan opposition. Brzezinski detailed the strategy, designed as he said to give the Soviet Union its Vietnam, taken by the Carter administration following the 1979 Soviet invasion to prop up the Marxist regime of Hafizullah Amin in Kabul:

We immediately launched a twofold process when we heard that the Soviets had entered Afghanistan. The first involved direct reactions and sanctions focused on the Soviet   Union, and both the State Department and the National Security Agency prepared long lists of sanctions to be adopted, of steps to be taken to increase the international costs to the Soviet Union of their actions. And the second course of action led to my going to Pakistan a month or so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for the purpose of coordinating with the Pakistanis a joint response, the purpose of which would be to   make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible; and we engaged in that effort in a collaborative sense with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the British, the Chinese, and we started providing weapons to the Mujaheddin, from various sources again — for example, some Soviet arms from the Egyptians and the Chinese. We even got Soviet arms from the Czechoslovak communist government, since it was obviously susceptible to material incentives; and at some point we started buying arms for the Mujahedeen from the Soviet army in Afghanistan, because that army was increasingly corrupt.

The clandestine campaign to destabilize the Soviet Union by making it “bleed for as much and as long as is possible” was carried out, like the arming of the contra forces in Nicaragua, largely off the books. It did not, as far as official Washington was concerned, exist, a way to avoid the unwelcome scrutiny of covert operations carried out by the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s that made public the three decades of CIA-backed coups, assassinations, blackmail, intimidation, dark propaganda, and torture. The Saudi government agreed to match the U.S. funding for the Afghan insurgents. The Saudi involvement gave rise to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, which fought with the mujahedeen. The rogue operation, led by Brzezinski, organized secret units of assassination teams and paramilitary squads that carried out lethal attacks on perceived enemies around the globe. It trained Afghan mujahedeen in Pakistan and China’s Xinjiang province. It shifted the heroin trade, used to fund the insurgency, from southeast Asia to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This pattern of behavior, which destabilized Afghanistan and the region, is reflexive in the military and the intelligence community. It will, without doubt, be repeated now in Afghanistan, with the same catastrophic results. The chaos these intelligence agencies create becomes the chaos that justifies their existence and the chaos that sees them demand more resources and ever greater levels of violence.

All empires die. The end is usually unpleasant. The American empire, humiliated in Afghanistan, as it was in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, as it was at the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam, is blind to its own declining strength, ineptitude, and savagery. Its entire economy, a “military Keynesianism,” revolves around the war industry. Military spending and war are the engine behind the nation’s economic survival and identity. It does not matter that with each new debacle the United States turns larger and larger parts of the globe against it and all it claims to represent. It has no mechanism to stop itself, despite its numerous defeats, fiascos, blunders and diminishing power, from striking out irrationally like a wounded animal. The mandarins who oversee our collective suicide, despite repeated failure, doggedly insist we can reshape the world in our own image. This myopia creates the very conditions that accelerate the empire’s demise.

The Soviet Union collapsed, like all empires, because of its ossified, out-of-touch rulers, its imperial overreach, and its inability to critique and reform itself. We are not immune from these fatal diseases. We silence our most prescient critics of empire, such as Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Andrew Bacevich, Alfred McCoy, and Ralph Nader, and persecute those who expose the truths about empire, including Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Daniel Hale, and John Kiriakou. At the same time a bankrupt media, whether on MSNBC, CNN or FOX, lionizes and amplifies the voices of the inept and corrupt political, military and intelligence class including John Bolton, Leon Panetta, Karl Rove, H.R. McMaster and David Petraeus, which blindly drives the nation into the morass.

Chalmers Johnson in his trilogy on the fall of the American empire – “Blowback,” “The Sorrows of Empire” and “Nemesis” – reminds readers that the Greek goddess Nemesis is “the spirit of retribution, a corrective to the greed and stupidity that sometimes governs relations among people.” She stands for “righteous anger,” a deity who “punishes human transgression of the natural, right order of things and the arrogance that causes it.” He warns that if we continue to cling to our empire, as the Roman Republic did, “we will certainly lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates.”

“I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and, in the end, produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent,” Johnson writes. “The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government – a republic – that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.”

If the empire was capable of introspection and forgiveness, it could free itself from its death spiral. If the empire disbanded, much as the British empire did, and retreated to focus on the ills that beset the United States it could free itself from its death spiral. But those who manipulate the levers of empire are unaccountable. They are hidden from public view and beyond public scrutiny. They are determined to keep playing the great game, rolling the dice with lives and national treasure. They will, I expect, preside gleefully over the deaths of even more Afghans, assuring themselves it is worth it, without realizing that the gallows they erect are for themselves.

Between Strangers: A Meditation

A meditation on the parallel lives of fellow commuters and the particular solitude to be found among strangers on a train.

The Great Game of Smashing Nations by John Pilger

Source: L'HORA

As a tsunami of crocodile tears engulfs Western politicians, history is suppressed. More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their “allies” destroyed.

In 1978, a liberation movement led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew the dictatorship of Mohammad Dawd, the cousin of King Zahir Shah. It was an immensely popular revolution that took the British and Americans by surprise.

Foreign journalists in Kabul, reported The New York Times, were surprised to find that “nearly every Afghan they interviewed said [they were] delighted with the coup.” The Wall Street Journal reported that “150,000 persons … marched to honor the new flag … the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.”

The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned.” Secular, modernist and, to a considerable degree, socialist, the government declared a program of visionary reforms that included equal rights for women and minorities. Political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

Under the monarchy, life expectancy was 35; 1-in-3 children died in infancy. Ninety percent of the population was illiterate. The new government introduced free medical care. A mass literacy campaign was launched.

For women, the gains had no precedent; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 percent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 percent of its teachers and 30 percent of its civil servants. 

Women at university in Afghanistan in the 1970s. (Amnesty International U.K.)

Backed by the West

So radical were the changes that they remain vivid in the memories of those who benefited. Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who fled Afghanistan in 2001, recalled:

“Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked … We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday … it all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning … these were the people the West supported.”

For the United States, the problem with the PDPA government was that it was supported by the Soviet Union. Yet it was never the “puppet” derided in the West, neither was the coup against the monarchy “Soviet backed,” as the American and British press claimed at the time.

President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, later wrote in his memoirs: “We had no evidence of any Soviet complicity in the coup.”

In the same administration was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, a Polish émigré and fanatical anti-communist and moral extremist whose enduring influence on American presidents expired only with his death in 2017.

On July 3, 1979, unknown to the American people and Congress, Carter authorized a $500 million “covert action” program to overthrow Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government.  This was code-named by the CIA Operation Cyclone.

The $500 million bought, bribed and armed a group of tribal and religious zealots known as the mujahedin. In his semi-official history, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote that the CIA spent $70 million on bribes alone. He describes a meeting between a CIA agent known as “Gary” and a warlord called Amniat-Melli:

“Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in one-foot stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say we’re here, we’re serious, here’s money, we know you need it … Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash.”

Recruited from all over the Muslim world, America’s secret army was trained in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Others were recruited at an Islamic College in Brooklyn, New York – within sight of the doomed Twin Towers. One of the recruits was a Saudi engineer called Osama bin Laden.

The aim was to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and destabilize and eventually destroy the Soviet Union. 

‘Larger Interests’

In August 1979, the U.S. embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

Read again the words above I have italicized. It is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as clearly.  The U.S. was saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan government and the rights of Afghan women could go to hell.

Six months later, the Soviets made their fatal move into Afghanistan in response to the American-created jihadist threat on their doorstep. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles and celebrated as “freedom fighters” by Margaret Thatcher, the mujahedin eventually drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan.

The mujahedin were dominated by war lords who controlled the heroin trade and terrorized rural women. Later, in the early 1990s the Taliban would emerge, an ultra-puritanical faction, whose mullahs wore black and punished banditry, rape and murder but banished women from public life.

In the 1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their burqas to film evidence of atrocities, and did the same to expose the brutality of the Western-backed mujahedin. “Marina” of RAWA told me, “We took the videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know ….”

In 1992, the enlightened PDPA government was overrun. The president, Mohammad Najibullah, had gone to the United Nations to appeal to for help. On his return, he was hanged from a street light.

The Game

“I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard,” said Lord Curzon in 1898, “upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.”

The viceroy of India was referring in particular to Afghanistan. A century later, Prime Minister Tony Blair used slightly different words.

“This is a moment to seize,” he said following 9/11. “The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.”

On Afghanistan, he added this: “We will not walk away [but ensure] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence.”

Blair echoed his mentor, President George W. Bush, who spoke to the victims of his bombs from the Oval Office: “The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering … “

Almost every word was false. Their declarations of concern were cruel illusions for an imperial savagery “we” in the West rarely recognize as such.

Orifa

In 2001, Afghanistan was stricken and depended on emergency relief convoys from Pakistan. As the journalist Jonathan Steele reported, the invasion indirectly caused the deaths of some 20,000 people as supplies to drought victims stopped and people fled their homes.

Eighteen months later, I found unexploded American cluster bombs in the rubble of Kabul which were often mistaken for yellow relief packages dropped from the air. They blew the limbs off foraging, hungry children.

In the village of Bibi Maru, I watched a woman called Orifa kneel at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, and seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed next door.

An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a clear blue sky and dropped an Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she gathered the body parts.

Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and gave her an envelope with 15 notes: a total of $15. “Two dollars for each of my family killed,” she said.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to distant themselves from Osama bin Laden. They were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a U.S. oil company consortium.

In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited to the U.S. and entertained by the CEO of the Unocal company in his Texas mansion and by the CIA at its headquarters in Virginia. One of the deal-makers was Dick Cheney, later George W. Bush’s vice president.

In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked.

“Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?”

When we watch the current scenes of panic at Kabul airport, and listen to journalists and generals in distant TV studios bewailing the withdrawal of “our protection,” isn’t it time to heed the truth of the past so that all this suffering never happens again?

The End of Illusions by Caitlin Johnstone

 

Source: Going Rogue with Caitlin Johnstone

Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone · The End Of Illusions

Poet's Nook: "why fear this moment…" by Gill Washington

 

why fear this moment
 when no thoughts come
 at last I lie naked
 in the arms of experience

why fear this moment
when no words come
at last I find rest
in the lap of silence

 why fear this moment
 when love finds itself alone
 at last I am embraced
 by infinity itself

why fear this moment
when judgment falls away
at last my defenses
fail to keep intimacy at bay

 why fear this moment
 when hope is lost
 at last my foolish dreams
 are surrendered to perfection

How an Entire Population Becomes Mentally Ill

 

This video explores the most dangerous of all psychic epidemics, the mass psychosis. A mass psychosis is an epidemic of madness and it occurs when a large portion of a society loses touch with reality and descends into delusions. Such a phenomenon is not a thing of fiction. Examples of mass psychoses are the American and European witch hunts 16th and 17th centuries, the notion of white superiority, American exceptionalism and the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century. This video aims to answer questions surrounding mass psychosis: What is it? How does is start? Has it happened before? Are we experiencing one right now? And if so, how can the stages of a mass psychosis be reversed?

Musings

 

Decolonizing Our Dreams by Samir Doshi

Dreams aren’t practical, they are a vision of what is possible

 

Source: Yes!

We live in a country of colonized cultures. The project that is the United States is a melting pot of bodies that have been marginalized from its inception. Still today, those who have been othered by supremacy culture continue to strive to cultivate a sense of belonging and freedom despite the perpetual attempts to oppress us.

I believe that many of our recent efforts to abolish harmful systems of oppression are being done with consideration of the white gaze, through a lens of scarcity and lack. Our responses to oppression have been colonized. If we are to be successful at dismantling the systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and anthropocentrism that enforce domination and oppression over people and ecosystems, we have to start seeing our abundance. It’s imperative for us to move forward and live in right relationship with each other and the planet.

The late Grace Lee Boggs said, “The time has come for a new dream, that’s what being a revolutionary is. I don’t know what the next American revolution is going to be like, but you might be able to imagine it, if your imagination were rich enough.” How do we liberate ourselves from all supremacy culture to dream the new dream that Boggs speaks of? Dreams are an essential part of our human cognition, identity, and being. They allow us to bring our whole selves and our communities into imagining new worlds and realities. They conjure the unseen and unknown, while redesigning our notions of what is possible.

I often reflect on the dreams of my parents, who immigrated to the U.S. from India in 1973. Like many other immigrants from the Global Majority, they arrived here with very few possessions—and a dream. One of economic and physical security for their newly arrived family, their family back home in India, and also their future generations. Their dream of familial economic and physical security is not exclusive; it’s a dream that all people have, but the oppressive structures that exist in this country and around the world actively prevent queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color from realizing our dreams. 

When we remind ourselves that we are enough, we can decolonize our dreams to decolonize our responses to oppressive structures so that we can move through the portal toward liberation.

My parents raised me in the South Asian faith of Jainism, where the core tenets of Ahimsa and nonviolence hold that all life is sacred and interconnected as kin. I also grew up in a part of rural Indiana that was a Ku Klux Klan stronghold and where the KKK still held rallies during the time I was in school. Although the nearby farming families, most if not all of them White, held a close and intimate connection to the land, this intimacy wasn’t extended to me and my family. I faced the paradoxical reality that my identity and behaviors were all wrong and threatening outside of my home, while I was fully loved and accepted inside my home. Holding both of these realities confused and limited me. Why was I not enough?

To this day, I often experience moments of insecurity  and question the authenticity of my behavior—if my intelligence is enough, if my hustle is enough—even around my friends of color. 

It’s then I’m reminded of adrienne maree brown’s words in her book, Pleasure Activism: “Do you understand that you, as you are, who you are, is enough?”

Affirmations like this one, along with the foundation of security my parents laid help me to have my own dreams—of total liberation where the sacrality of all life-forms is honored. This is why I work for a Just Transition that builds economic and political power to move us from an extractive economy to a regenerative one. But I also believe that a Just Transition gets us to the first step and beginning of the work toward liberation and a society that is fully able to live up to the potential of what it is to be human. And it is also why I see the current dreams and imaginings of abolishing systems of persecution as reactive and conditioned to our current reality. Our dreams have been colonized. The focus on abolition, while necessary for the survival of our people, also limits us by centering the world that supremacy culture built. How can we do the vital work of abolition while also dreaming beyond the world they built to one that is for us and by us?

I acknowledge my own privilege in this sentiment and that I have had time, space, and support for healing for my own trauma. I acknowledge that I have the privilege of being asked what my dreams are and have been supported in pursuing those dreams. What about those who are in everyday trauma, who don’t get access or space for healing? Who gets to heal and to dream? How do we support others on their pathway of healing and knowing that they are enough? When we remind ourselves that we are enough, we can decolonize our dreams to decolonize our responses to oppressive structures so that we can move through the portal toward liberation.

We can liberate our dreams from reacting to our current reality into dreaming of entire new realities and ways of being that tap into the mosaic of our ancestral cultures and stories. Dreams of a new economics where the currency and capital are banked on interdependence and liberation; widespread ecological and community designs that are braided by Indigenous designers from across the continents; bioregional forms of governance that see the watershed as the geopolitical entity where we all come together, rural and urban, to be in true right relationship and belonging with each other and ecosystems; Black reparations and Native rematriation meld together to form new models of justice and stewardship, recognizing that land doesn’t have to be owned by humans to support habitats for our and other species. These are my dreams for my people and my kin—the vulnerable who are part of the seed bank of my soul, waiting for sunlight, nourishment, and hydration so that they can spring up and root down.       

Perhaps my parents would think that these dreams are not for us or that they are too much. Perhaps because of the collective trauma of people who have been marginalized by supremacy culture over the past decades and centuries, it is too difficult for many of us to dream beyond abolition or even our current day to day survival. Others who work for a Just Transition might say that these dreams might not be practical. But dreams aren’t practical, they are a vision of what is possible. 

We have to shed these oppressive structures that contain us so that we can dream of new realities where we can freely be who we already are—enough.  

Deep Medicine & How Capitalism Primes Us for Sickness

 

Society is sick of capitalism and any cure must involve the eradication of the latter. To fight disease it is not enough to dissimulate the symptoms. This has been the shortcoming of environmentalism. The problem can only be resolved by the construction of communities, that is, social groups without commercial relations. These communities must be self-sufficient, that is, they must function outside of the market, allowing for a certain degree of direct satisfaction of real needs and resisting the manipulation of desires. But this is not enough, it is only the starting point......

~~Miguel Amorós

 

Dr. Rupa Marya and Dr. Raj Patel,examine the social and environmental roots of poor health. “Inflammation is the body’s appropriate response to damage, or the threat of damage,” says Marya, a physician and co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition. “We’re learning that the social structures around us, the environmental, political structures around us, are tuning the immune system to sound out the full range of inflammation.” Patel adds that “capitalism primes bodies … for sickness.”

‘The Past is So Present’: How White Mobs Once Killed American Democracy by Lois Beckett

Hours after Georgia elected its first-ever Black and Jewish senators in early 2021, a mob of white Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. They set up a gallows on the west side of the building and hunted for lawmakers through the halls of Congress.

People around the world watched in shock: was this the United States?

As he monitored the attack from his home in South Carolina, the local historian Wayne O’Bryant was not surprised. He recognized the 6 January attack as a return to the political playbook of white mob violence that has been actively used in this country for more than a century. Mobs of white Americans unwilling to accept multi-racial democracy have successfully overturned or stolen elections before: in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873 and New Orleans in 1874, and, in Hamburg, South Carolina, in 1876.

O’Bryant, who lives just five miles from the ruins of Hamburg, once a center of Black political power in South Carolina, has become an expert on the 1876 massacre. He has relatives on both sides of the attack: one of his ancestors, Needham O’Bryant, was a Black Hamburg resident who survived the violence, while another, Thomas McKie Meriwether, was a young white man killed while participating in the mob.

O’Bryant has spent years researching how the Hamburg massacre unfolded, and how, despite national media coverage and a congressional investigation, the white killers were never held accountable. Now, he is watching history repeat itself. The attack on the Capitol, he said, was “almost identical” to the way white extremists staged a riot in Hamburg during the high-stakes presidential election of 1876.

The Hamburg attack and other battles successfully ended multi-racial democracy in the south for nearly a century. Black Americans, who had filled the south’s state legislatures and served in Congress after the civil war, were forced out of power, then barred from voting almost altogether, as white politicians reinstituted a full system of white political and economic rule. The south became a one-party state for decades.

It would take Black Americans until the 1960s to win back their citizenship.

Now, as Republicans have shut down any attempt to hold Trump and other politicians accountable for inciting the attack, historians like O’Bryant are warning of the known dangers of letting white mob violence go unchecked, and about the fragility of democracy itself.

The effects of the white terrorism of the 1870s lasted into O’Bryant’s own childhood: he vividly remembers the day his great-grandmother, grandparents and mother voted for the first time. It was in Charleston in 1968, and he was eight years old.

The reason American history is marked by repeated incidents of white mob violence is because the violence works, O’Bryant, 60, said.

“When you adopt a political strategy and you’re successful at it, you might as well continue.”

By the summer of 1876, a presidential election year, some white citizens in South Carolina had reached a crossroads: they realized they would never again hold power in a state with fair elections.

Benjamin Tillman, one of the leaders of South Carolina’s white mob attacks, identified the “arithmetic” problem for white supremacists: “In my State there were 135,000 negro voters or negroes of voting age, and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters,” he said later. “With a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000? How are you going to do it?”

Since they did not have the votes, white supremacists decided to take control of the South Carolina government through terrorism. There were white terror attacks across the southern US that year, all aimed at preventing Black citizens from casting their votes in national and state elections.

The first major attack in South Carolina came in July, in Hamburg, a growing center of Black political power. In Hamburg, the mayor was Black. The sheriff was Black. Most of the city officials were Black. Several prominent Black lawmakers elected to the state legislature also lived in Hamburg.

“These same slaveowners that once told you what to do – they might ride through Hamburg, and you might be the sheriff, and you might tell them to pick up their trash off the street,” O’Bryant said.

The rise of Black politicians such as Prince Rivers – a man who had liberated himself from slavery, served as a sergeant in the Union army and gone on to be a mayor, state representative and judge in Hamburg – undermined white supremacists’ arguments that Black Americans were unready for political power.

On the Fourth of July in 1876, two white men staged a confrontation with Black soldiers outside of Hamburg. The white men then went to court and tried to get a judge to take away the Black soldiers’ guns.

When the Black soldiers refused to disarm, they were attacked by a crowd of hundreds of white men, who even wheeled in a cannon to fire at the Black soldiers as they took refuge in a government building. Some Black residents were killed in the initial attack, and others were captured later and then executed in cold blood.

Hamburg’s Black sheriff was also killed and mutilated, according to some accounts: the white men cut out his tongue. In all, one white man and seven Black men died during the massacre.

As with the 6 January attack at the Capitol, the rioting in Hamburg in 1876 appeared spontaneous, but had been carefully planned in advance by white extremist groups, O’Bryant said. The South Carolina groups called themselves “Red Shirts” or members of local “rifle clubs”. O’Bryant said he saw them as the equivalents of the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers militia today.

The violence sparked national outrage, O’Bryant said. There were official investigations of the massacre and in-depth coverage from the New York Times. Ninety-four white men, including a former Confederate general and other veterans and prominent citizens, were indicted for murder for their roles.

Worried that jailing the white defendants might spark another attack, court officials let all of the men out on bail, O’Bryant said, and the decision was made to postpone the trial until after the 1876 election, because of the “climate of violence”.

As the November election approached, white violence in South Carolina escalated: two months after the Hamburg massacre, another series of white terror attacks in Ellenton, South Carolina, killed dozens of Black citizens, by some estimates as many as a hundred.

One of O’Bryant’s own ancestors, Needham O’Bryant of Hamburg, later testified before the Senate about the constant attacks and threats, describing a white man firing shots at his house, and having to flee and hide when posses of armed white men rode by.

In the 1876 election, one marked by murder and outright fraud – the county where Hamburg was located ended up logging 2,000 more votes than it had registered voters, O’Bryant said – white Democrats took control of the South Carolina government.

The continuing violence also “wore down northern commitment to enforcing the law in the south,” the historian Eric Foner said. “In the beginning, President Grant sent troops into South Carolina in order to crush the Ku Klux Klan. But over time, the willingness to intervene to protect the rights of Black people waned.”

After political negotiations over the contested presidential election of 1876, the federal government ended Reconstruction and withdrew federal troops from the south.

With white supremacists once again in control of the state government, Rivers, like other Black politicians, was accused of corruption and quickly forced out of public office. He ended up working once again as a carriage driver at a white hotel, the same work he had done when he was enslaved.

O’Bryant has records of one of his ancestors on the South Carolina voter rolls in 1868, and a record of another relative serving as an elections manager in 1876. After that, there is no record of them voting for 92 years. His family members, a long line of educators and academics, worked hard and were deeply involved in their communities. They faced the risk of being fired, he said, if they even tried to participate in an election.

Meanwhile, one of the men indicted in the Hamburg murders, Benjamin Tillman, rose to a position of national power, continuing to brag about having “shot negroes and stuffed ballot boxes” on his way to becoming South Carolina’s governor, and then serving for nearly a quarter-century as a US senator.

None of the perpetrators of the Hamburg massacre was ever prosecuted or convicted.

“We took the government away from them in 1876. We did take it,” Tillman said in a speech in the Senate in 1900. “If no other senator has come here previous to this time who would acknowledge it, more is the pity.”

What Tillman and others had won through terrorism they later codified into law, writing a new South Carolina constitution explicitly designed to keep Black citizens from voting.

“We are not sorry for it,” Tillman said. “We of the south have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men.” 

‘This is America’

Anti-democratic beliefs, white nationalism, and the glorification of violence have always been a “powerful strand” in American history, Foner, one of the most influential historians of America’s post-civil war period, said.

It is time to push back against the shocked statements of television pundits on 6 January “saying, ‘This is not America,’” Foner said. “It is America, actually. Not the whole picture of America, but it is part of the American tradition. And we need to face that fact.”

In the footage from the 6 January invasion – a giant Confederate flag being paraded through the halls of Congress, a gallows and noose being set up outside, furious white crowds chanting about hanging politicians – the echoes of post-civil war violence are unavoidable.

“Whether or not these men and women [who broke into the Capitol] are aware of how their actions replicated what has already happened in history, it’s so present – the past is so present,” Kellie Carter Jackson, an American historian who studies 19th-century political violence, said.

That does not mean that the violence is at the same level as it was directly after the civil war, Carter Jackson said. In 1895, Robert Smalls, a Black army veteran who became a South Carolina congressman, estimated that 53,000 Black Americans had been killed by white terrorists since the end of the civil war.

“That’s 1,766 murders annually, or five per day,” Carter Jackson said. “I don’t think we are at those levels of such open racial violence and hostility.”

In the the wake of the Capitol invasion, the problem facing the United States is often framed as one of “disinformation”: how were so many Americans convinced to attack the government based on claims that simply were not true?

Much of the media and political reaction has taken the invaders’ claims at face value: they believed the lies of Trump and Republican politicians that the election had been stolen. They sincerely thought Democrats were undermining democracy. Some had been radicalized by the lurid claims of the QAnon conspiracy theory about a cabal of powerful pedophiles torturing children.

But some experts argue the insurrection should be labeled a white supremacist attack, even if many of the attackers themselves did not talk explicitly about race. Trump’s evolving web of claims about election fraud, which were rejected by judges in lawsuit after lawsuit his supporters brought, revolved around the idea that the vote counts for Joe Biden in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, which all have large Black populations, were somehow fraudulent.

The former president’s repeated claims that he got the majority of “legitimate” votes suggested that the African Americans who cast decisive votes for Biden were inherently illegitimate.

Trump’s big lie about the stolen election was built from the same lies propagated by the white supremacists in the south: that majority-Black cities were corrupt, that Black politicians could not be trusted.

South Carolina’s white supremacists not only put up giant statues of the murderers who had stolen the state government, they also wrote history books for school children that described the state’s brief era of Black political participation as “the darkest days in the state’s history”, an era of rampant corruption and mismanagement, O’Bryant said. Those were the books he grew up studying.

After the victories of the civil rights movement, many Americans were taught a more triumphant version of their own history, with the arc of American democracy redrawn as a slow but inevitable march towards racial equality.

O’Bryant is proud of the legacy of the civil rights movement: he met Martin Luther King as a small child, attended marches in diapers, sat in the background at movement meetings in his home and at church. But he has also spent years spreading public awareness about the flourishing multiracial democracy that was ended through violence in the 1870s.

“If they had prosecuted and punished the perpetrators of the Hamburg massacre, they would have set a precedent that we won’t stand for these types of crimes,” O’Bryant said. “There would have been no need for me to have marched if they had done the right thing in Hamburg.”

The ruins of Hamburg

Today, the site of the Hamburg massacre is part ruin, part golf course. There is no marker there to the seven Black men who were murdered in 1876, just neatly maintained turf, fences and a few disintegrating buildings in the woods.

America’s civil war battlefields are the sites of intense, even obsessive, memorialization: hundreds of thousands of people visit the site of the battle of Gettysburg every year, and the government and private donors annually spend millions of dollars to maintain the town’s thriving complex of statues and museums. Gettysburg is remembered as the bloody turning point, the moment where the north, at great cost, began to win the war.

But the battlefields where America’s multi-racial democracy was lost just a decade later have not been preserved in the same way. Most of the memorials that exist were erected by white supremacists to mark their victory.

There is massive statue of Ben Tillman at the South Carolina statehouse, and an obelisk dedicated to Meriwether, the one white man killed during the Hamburg massacre, at the heart of North Augusta, the town closest to Hamburg.

Hamburg itself had been built next to the Savannah River, in an area prone to flooding, and while the army corps of engineers built a levee to protect Augusta, the white town on the other side of the river, the government left the Black town unprotected, O’Bryant said. After a particularly devastating flood in 1929, the town was abandoned. Today, all that is left on the site are a few ruins deep in the woods.

But Hamburg has survived in other ways. Forced out by flooding, the town’s Black residents moved to higher ground and built a new town, Carrsville.

“They didn’t have the money to buy lumber,” O’Bryant says, citing interviews with elderly residents who could recall the move. “They took their houses apart, brought the wood uphill, and reconstructed them.”

In 2016, after advocacy by O’Bryant and other local residents, North Augusta finally dedicated a historical marker and memorial to all eight people killed at Hamburg, including the seven Black victims. The place they chose for it was not the empty ground in Hamburg, but in Carrsville.

O’Bryant does not see it as an accident that Black primary voters in South Carolina, led by Jim Clyburn, a veteran of the civil rights movement, picked Joe Biden as the safest choice for the Democratic presidential nominee, or that Black voters in Georgia and other swing states turned out to help secure Biden’s victory.

Black voters fully understood the dangers of a second Trump term, O’Bryant said.

“It felt to us like it was life or death, not just for African Americans. It felt like it was life or death for the country.”