John Wight – Public Reading Rooms

The sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey

Public Reading Rooms — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 11:07:00 +0000

Rebecca Long-Bailey is only the latest in a litany of figures on the Labour left to fall foul of the McCarthyite policing of criticism of Israel at the behest of an Israel lobby whose guiding objective is to elide Israel’s brutal apartheid character behind an iron wall of obfuscation, while extending itself in demonising and smearing as antisemitic those who would dare elicit more than the most tepid solidarity with the Palestinians.

On the actualite of Long-Bailey’s sacking by Sir Keir Starmer, the now former education secretary made the mistake of retweeting an interview in The Independent involving the actress and prominent left Labour voice, Maxine Peake, during which the latter claimed that the knee on the neck of George Floyd by racist white cop Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis a few weeks ago is a tactic that was learned from the Israelis. Long-Bailey was sacked despite posting a later Tweet stating that she did not agree with everything that Maxine Peake said in the interview, while Maxine Peake herself later retracted the claim that the murder of George Floyd had anything to do with Israeli policing tactics.

So far so very unusual in this censorious climate when it comes to dancing around the apartheid elephant in the room of Labour internal party politics.

Whether George Floyd perished as a result of Israeli policing tactics or not is really beside the point. Racist policing in the US, along with the lynching of black men whether at the hands of the police or the Klan (and increasingly the distinction between both becomes harder to discern), is not a product of Israel or any other external entity. On the contrary, it’s as American as apple pie – a symptom of the country’s white supremacist past and present which lies at the heart of the country’s dominant cultural values.

With this being said, though, writing in Middle East Eye recently, Sheren Khalel points out that though “The Israeli police force has tried to distance itself from any perceived similarities [between the manner of George Floyd’s death and its own methods], issuing statements denouncing what happened and stating that its officers are not trained to use knee-to-neck techniques…photographs taken as recently as March have shown Israeli forces using the same restraint on unarmed protesters just yards from the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City.”

Coincidence? People can make up their own mind.

Perhaps a more pertinent question to be asked is what exactly are the Israelis teaching various US police departments? And what is it, precisely, that US police departments believe they can learn from their Israeli counterpart that is applicable to the ethos of protecting and serving people in their own communities?

The sheer number of black victims of police violence across the United States is compatible with an ethos of internal repression rather policing. Along with the overweening militarisation of US police departments, it’s as if your average cop believes him and herself to be engaged in pest control when it comes to black America.

Here the parallel with Israeli security forces vis-à-vis the Palestinians is inarguable. And here we arrive at the proverbial heart of the matter. Black Lives Matter can only ever be anti-colonial in character. Blacks in America and to an extent also here in the UK are victims of domestic colonialism, while the Palestinians are victims of settler colonialism. This makes them natural allies in the same struggle against an apparatus of oppression that is underpinned by white supremacy, of which Zionism is but a species. And at this juncture, digressing for a moment in the interests of pointing out that white supremacy is as much an ideological construct as a racial one, the murals of George Floyd that have appeared on the Falls Road in Belfast in recent weeks are wholly in keeping with an Irish republican tradition that has been forged in resistance to the white supremacist reaction of Ulster loyalism in these here parts too.

In the end, the white supremacist knee that lay on the neck of George Floyd in Minneapolis recently is the same white supremacist knee that lies on the neck of the long suffering Palestinian people.

As for the Labour Party, it has under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership proudly nailed its colours to the mast of apartheid.

The retreat from the truth in the face of the wrath of the Board of Deputies is akin to the disinterment of the corpse of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The murder of George Floyd — just another day in Trump’s America

Public Reading Rooms — Fri, 29 May 2020 17:15:23 +0000

Whether is was the robotic-like lack of emotion on the face of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin as he slowly choked the life out of George Floyd on the ground, keeping his knee on his neck for five long minutes despite Floyd screaming that he couldn’t breath, and despite him pleading; or whether it was the fact that Chauvin felt completely at ease in executing his prey in front of witnesses and in broad daylight; the image of him doing so was at that moment more representative of America than the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Statue of Liberty, or any of the baubles deployed in service to the myth of the United States as the land of the free.

Chauvin with his knee on the neck of a supine George Floyd was the acme of evil that is white supremacy. He was the overseer with his knee on the neck of a runaway slave. He was the Confederate Flag raised in triumph, the slaver’s whip, the lynch mob’s noose, the prison guard’s boot. In other words, Chauvin symbolised in those five horrifying minutes the entire legacy and long history of racial oppression in country that was born in genocide and developed and nourished for two centuries on the back of the African slave trade.

Here we are obliged to wrestle with an unvarnished truth — namely that though slavery in its chattel form may have been ended, the consciousness of the slaveowner remains alive and kicking within the diseased minds of racist white police cops all over that God-forsaken land. They are, in fact, less police officers protecting and serving, and more members of increasingly militarised right wing militia groups hunting for prey — black prey.

Those commentators who assert that the struggle for justice for black people has not progressed since the Black Civil Rights Movement in the Sixties are, with all respect, mistaken. They are mistaken because the struggle for justice for black people has actually and manifestly regressed since then. The most obvious symbol of this regression is embodied in the current occupant of the White House, Donald J. Trump.

Trump’s election was a racist pushback against Barack Obama’s two terms in office. You don’t have to approve of Obama’s legacy as president (I certainly don’t) to appreciate the symbolism of a black American with an African name being elected to the highest office in America back in 2008. For racists everywhere it was a moment to mourn, with Trump’s championing of a birther movement designed to prove that Obama was not a ‘real American’, leaving not doubt that he was among them.

You see, it’s very simple. In the hearts and minds of white supremacists, black and brown Americans are not real Americans. They are instead a threat to real Americans, white and proud Americans, and thereby dehumanised, demonised, and ultimately murdered with impunity as such.

With Trump’s election as president in 2016 the KKK and every card carrying white racist and white supremacist in America finally got their most precious wish; they finally got their man in the White House. And since he entered it has been open season on black and brown people.

Shifting focus for a moment, the issue of racial oppression in America is hugely important for people of conscience and consciousness living outside America to understand. For if the most powerful truths are the most simply expressed, then who better than Malcolm X to remind us that ‘You can’t understand what’s going on in Mississippi if you don’t understand what’s going on in the Congo’.

In other words, there exists a circular relationship between racial oppression at home in America and US imperialism abroad. As James Baldwin so eloquently put it: ‘A racist society can’t but fight a racist war. The assumptions acted on at home are the assumptions acted on abroad’.

And staying with Baldwin, when he averred that ‘To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time’, he gave voice to the rage behind the riots that have taken place, and continue at time of this writing to take place, in various cities across the US in the wake of George Floyd’s execution.

Founding member of the Black Panther Party, Huey Newton, was not a man who ever wasted time in beating around the bush.

To wit:

The racist dog oppressors have no rights which oppressed Black people are bound to respect. As long as the racist dogs pollute the earth with the evil of their actions, they do not deserve any respect at all, and the “rules” of their game, written in the people’s blood, are beneath contempt.

The militancy with which he was writing in 1967 was forged by racial oppression. As these words are being written a new generation of Malcom X’s and Huey Newton’s are likewise being forged.

New York protest against the murder of George Floyd.

The people are rising in Minneapolis and across the US. The police station where Floyd’s murderer worked was burnt to the ground and there have been dozens of other protests across the whole country. As many protesters said ‘we’ve had enough’.

Solidarity with those who resist.

COVID-19: marking the death knell of the old world and midwife to the new

Public Reading Rooms — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 16:56:23 +0000

In just two weeks the world has been educated as to the incompatibility of free market neoliberal nostrums and the political and geopolitical order they support with the needs of humanity and the planet. On a national and international level coronavirus is ravaging not only the lives of its victims and those affected by its social and economic consequences, it has taken a bludgeon to a status quo that is now lies broken and blooded on the ground.

To watch Donald Trump and Boris Johnson address their respective nations to update them on the pandemic’s impact and their response is to watch yesterday’s men spouting yesterday’s solutions to the problems of today and tomorrow.

The diseased mind of Trump is now on full display as he heckles the press on a regular basis for daring to ask pertinent questions about his administration’s handling of the pandemic at a time when the body count in the US is rising exponentially. Millions without healthcare, countless thousands who have and who face losing their jobs and reduced to destitution, and Trump continues to debase himself and his office with press conferences at which lying and dissembling, buttressed by the shameless self-promotion of a man for whom the word narcissist could have been written, have been elevated to performance art.

As for Boris Johnson and his government in the UK, the British public have been awoken to the devastation wrought by years of systematic and chronic underfunding of the National Health Service. This in service to the long and cherished desire of the country’s Tory establishment to destroy the NHS as a public service free at the point of need and in its place roll out private health care across the country as a privilege of wealth. The fact that NHS doctors and nurses are now risking their lives just by going to work due to the lack of personal protection equipment is a national scandal, as is the failure to as yet introduce universal basic income as part of the package of measure required to place an economic floor under this crisis.

As I wrote on this platform recently, in dealing with coronavirus Johnson has from the outset been faced with a choice between acting in the interests of his class or in the interests of his country. Thus far he is doing neither, resulting in a lop sided response which is chaotic at best and negligent at worst.

Russian aid flight arriving at JFK in New York

Geopolitically, meanwhile, we find that coronavirus has to all intents midwifed into being a new multipolar reality wherein Washington is no longer the master of all it surveys; the bluster of the usual propagandists to the contrary notwithstanding. While the US delivers sanctions to a pandemic-afflicted world, Russia, China and Cuba have been delivering aid. And in this respect the irony of ironies is that Russia, while itself under US sanctions, has even begun delivering medical aid to same, recently flying in a cargo aircraft of protection equipment to JFK in New York, a city whose suffering mirrors that of Tehran at present.

Just two weeks into a global pandemic and we are left in no doubt that societies and countries cannot and should not be run along the same principles as a business, that there is such a thing as society, and that in the peerless wisdom of Edward R Murrow ‘a nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves’.

Chinese medics and aid arriving in London

The very migrant doctors, nurses and medical professionals who were demonised and despised in the cause of Brexit are now saving lives while risking their own in a land that doesn’t deserve them and which should be on its knees thanking them. Over the Atlantic has come aid from Russia to a country whose missiles are pointing in the opposite direction. International solidarity and co-operation, we are learning by the day, cannot co-exist with global hegemony and domination. It is either one or the other.

Ironically, given the chaos which coronavirus has wrought in America itself — where free market neoliberal mania has left millions of Americans naked and vulnerable as the virus surges through the country at warp speed — the American people themselves can no longer afford this hegemonic beast and its brute values of purifying the poor and weak with pain and rewarding the rich and powerful with more.

As the virus continues to wreak havoc on its victims, it is also wreaking havoc on an old world whose time has passed and which now must give way to the new, else we are confronted by encroaching ecological and planetary ruin.

‘Strength and violence are lonely Gods’, Camus argues, and for too long they have been the gods at whose feet a suffering world has been forced to worship. Let it be resolved that by the time we emerge from this pandemic those same gods are among its already far too many victims.

End.