Some have asserted the U.S. empire has reached its historic endpoint because of its defeat in Afghanistan. However, that call is as premature as political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation that history had "ended" in 1989 when Western liberalism won because the former Soviet Union was coming apart.
Afghanistan might have been the so-called “graveyard of empires” and of certain states at other points in history. But the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan had occurred years earlier, a fact verified by revelations found in the “Afghanistan Papers.” That defeat had no appreciative impact on U.S. foreign-policy makers, who continued their destructive path in places like Yemen, Libya and Syria. Only a handful of the U.S. population was still interested in continuing a war in Afghanistan up until the last week or so. But the rulers did not inform the U.S. public, so the masses did not know the war had been lost.
Nothing quite demonstrates the arrogance and white supremacy of the U.S. empire like its relationship to Africans and other colonized people.
On Thursday, the Biden administration slapped new sanctions on Cuban government officials. We ask those who have raised racism in Cuba as a nuance worthy of interrogation: Why not question the white supremacy inherent in U.S. policies that disproportionately impact African/Black peoples throughout the region?
The Cuban people have spoken and they have said, yes, they have internal contradictions, like any country born within the context of colonial conquest and genocide. But they also have said what would make the most difference to Cubans in Cuba is an end to the cruel medieval-style blockade that has prevented vital food, medicine and other items needed to help the Cuban people.
We say when a people are at war with an oppressor, it is our obligation inside the United States to stand with them against the empire without engaging in the ego-inflating exercise of raising their internal contradictions at those critical moments. Either you support national liberation and self-determination or you don’t.
U.S. President Joe Biden and the Democrats have been playing the "Black Lives Matter" tune on their fiddle. Biden even raised the issue of Black Lives Matter during his presidential campaign. But, just days after Biden was sworn into office, his administration lent support for the Haitian dictator, Jovenel Moïse, who stayed in office past his term to the dismay of the Haitian people, who flooded the streets in protest.
Now, Moïse is dead and the United Nations has decided who will be the new president of Haiti. We see the racist irony. The people of Haiti have not been allowed to weigh in. The white rulers have made their decision, as the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) stated in its July 9 press release.
And while the director of Colombia's National Intelligence Agency and the director of its national police's Intelligence Division are in Haiti to investigate the role of Colombia in the assassination, those agencies have not launched investigations into police forces and paramilitary elements involved in the recent killings of peaceful protesters in Colombia, a client state of the United States.
"The managers of the colonial/capitalist world understand the terms of struggle, and so should we. It must be clear to us that for the survival of collective humanity and the planet we cannot allow uncontested power to remain in the hands of the global 1%. The painful truth for some is that if global humanity is to live, the Pan-European white supremacist colonial/capitalist project must die." -Ajamu Baraka, Black Alliance for Peace National Organizer
Like Indigenous people throughout the world, the Palestinian people demand a life of dignity, sovereignty and self-determination.
What prevents Palestinian national self-expression is the constructed state of Israel. The United Kingdom helped settle the first Zionists in Palestine in 1922 after the Balfour Declaration. Later, a brutal Nakba took place when the U.K. aided the newly created state of Israel's settler-colonization. Meanwhile, the United States has armed and funded Israel for years. But lately, that support has come at a cost of $3.8 billion per year, plus an additional $8 billion in loan guarantees.
It is the white rulers who spent millions building prisons in Haiti and funding and training the Haitian police and military. It is the white rulers who have turned a blind eye to the atrocities of the Moïse administration. It is the white rulers who have condoned the lack of parliamentary elections, the ruling of the country by decree, and the rewriting of the Haitian constitution. Most importantly, it is the white rulers who have affirmed Moïse’s illegal extension of his ruling mandate. —Jemima Pierre, “Haiti: Black Despots and White Rulers”
After the “anti-democratic” Trump forces were defeated, the Biden-Harris administration assured it would re-commit to neoliberal orthodoxy in both domestic and foreign policy with its slogan, “Build Back Better.” That promised a return to the “traditional” U.S. values of decency, democracy and human rights.
Yet, the Biden-Harris administration, as well as most U.S. policymakers and political representatives, employ a double standard: While expressing concern for oppressed people and rhetorically supporting “democratic” processes and human rights in their domestic and foreign policies, they inflict harm on millions of people around the world through their wars, subversions and sanctions.
