It isn't surprising...

... that 'Status Indians' face threat of extinction, since the Indian Act was implemented specifically for the purpose of eradicating indigenous peoples and culture. Indian Status was designed to reduce the Indian population, a neat solution to the "Indian Problem".

Within a few generations, it was assumed, the Indian population would nearly disappear. This was ensured through the restrictive nature of Indian Status: an indigenous woman who married a white man lost her status, as did her children, plus if you were enfranchised to vote or got a university education you were no longer considered an Indian.

In the past 40 years there have been many changes to the Indian Act, some positive and some negative, but most aboriginals in Canada are unable to access the benefits of the Act, while dealing with many of the negative consequences of their heritage. Canadians often display an incredible degree of racism, particularly towards aboriginal individuals and groups. Don't believe me? Just read the comments on the Star article, if you can stomach it.

Personally, I can't imagine if the government was able to decide for me who I am (legally speaking). Imagine they all of a sudden decreed that only those with two Christian parents could be Christian, or that those women who vote were no longer legally women, or that men who go to university are no longer legally men, or if you have a slice of pizza you are now Italian.

Also see How the Indian Act made Indians act like Indian Act Indians

Why Critical History in a Postcolonial World? Part 3

Continued from Parts 1 and 2

This is exactly why history as critical practice is so crucial. Without a relationship to the past (historicity) we assume things like culture are natural, immutable. Something which is the product of history is naturalized as the eternal human condition and then used to justify oppressive practices, as if it is in the nature of people of colour, women, and non-Western peoples to be dominated. Marx brought this to our attention when he unmasked bourgeois man masquerading as universal man. Historicity, then, is a means of recognizing alterity. As Spivak points out, history involves the "transgression of the logical by the historical-geographical." It introduces the problem of difference into the philosophical master narrative, requiring us to be sceptical of claims to timeless truths. This opens up the possibility of changing our present and imagining a very different future. Likewise, Nietzsche's critical history means the prospect of putting a knife to the roots of an injustice, "a privilege, a caste, a dynasty." Ironically critical history lets us be in the present by loosening the hold of the past, "to shatter and dissolve something to enable [us] to live."

The difficulty is how to act without the script, without slotting our story into its place in the grand master narrative. This is more important than ever in our supposed postcolonial world. Despite decolonization and liberation struggles, the hierarchies between the West and the rest of the world are perpetuated; indeed the disparities grow wider. HIV/AIDS, conflicts and intractable poverty prompt some to say the postcolonial project has failed. Trying to follow the blueprint the West has laid out does not seem to be an option, but neither does looking backwards. Time moves forwards so there is no choice about whether or not to progress, but maybe progress must not be unilinear. Maybe, as Nandy suggests, there are alternative universalities. If the universals of the West had to so distort the difference they encountered in order to include it, are they really universal? Instead of othering difference in order to force it to fit into the universals, can we modify the universals to truly accommodate difference? In other words, can we change the script?

According to Spivak's reading, Marx was already dealing with these concerns in his critique of the intending subject. Even the capitalist, in whom we usually see dominance, power and agency, is just an instrument of capital: "capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will." If both those who dominate and those who are dominated are but playing a part, following a script, where is there any room for responsibility, agency, change? Capital may be the historical agent in Marx's historicism, but it is not alive. Indeed any script is dead without actors to breathe life into the part. It cannot function without people, humans to play the part: "the human is the living element that can be instrumental in animating (or operating) inscriptions." A script is not entirely deterministic. If there is no escape from the script, can we perform it creatively?

In some ways, this is what people are doing all the time in their everydayness, when they, "collectively attempt to make their own history as they act (in the most robust sense of agency) a part they have not chosen, in a script that has as its task to keep them silent and invisible." (Yup, her again) Chakrabarty shows us that despite how hard the British worked to enumerate and measure fixed, impermeable and discrete communities, Indians still inhabit fuzzy communities: "In their everyday lives, in negotiating the spheres of friendship and kinship, say, Indians, like human beings everywhere, are comfortable with the indeterminacies of ethnic identities." This is part of what he means by the term History 2. There are ways of being in the world that cannot be explained by even the most rigorous history of capital. All the everyday practices that cannot be captured by scripts and identities are not necessarily subject to temporizing. Because it is outside its logic, History 2 is not the Other of capital. History 2 is its limits, disrupting its totalizing force. While historicism tries to "subjugate or destroy the multiple possibilities that belong to History 2," it cannot complete the "subordination of History 2s to the logical of capital."

In a sense History 2 is simply an attempt to name the radical alterity of the past. The past is often treated as the other of the present, as if it can be captured, but in truth it escapes our grasp. The infinite fullness and diversity of the vanishing present cannot be held onto, preserved, as the antiquarian would desire. It slips through our fingers. We can never capture the past in its rich livingness; we cannot make it present. Neither can we cram it into a single master narrative, to possess its essence or meaning. Its teeming complexity will overflow even the grandest monumental account.

We can never know everything that happened in the past – Nietzsche's superhistorical perspective notwithstanding – but neither can we be outside of history. Though the past has passed, its traces remain in the present. If I have a broken leg, it is because last week's event – say, falling out of a tree – is in some way present today. There is no standpoint outside of history, outside of human experience. As temporal beings, we are imperfect, finite, embedded in a particular history and culture. This contingency of our existence, rather than discouraging, is actually cause for hope. If contingent, it can be created otherwise. We can destabilize history's all-knowing narratives of power by starting with the limits. This opens new vistas. An imaginative source for re-presentation, history can be transformative. This is history in service of life.

---

BTW, I put the points I consider most important in bold - is it helpful or distracting?

Why Critical History in a Postcolonial World? Part 2

Continued from Part 1...

In order to effect comparisons and determine positions in a hierarchy, differences must be made commensurate, usually by the application of a universal category. If by definition universal (Encarta: "applicable to all situations or purposes") means there is nothing outside the universal, how do universals deal with difference? Partha Chatterjee shows that under colonialism claims of both universality and difference had a tendency to slip into a development narrative, as we saw in Hegel, which was a way of temporizing and therefore assimilating cultural and historical difference. Difference thus produced deferral, based on an expectation of education, improvement and progress. Through this not-yet, primitive India could be brought into the grand master narrative, though not equally with Europe. What Chatterjee calls the "Rule of Colonial Difference" meant a deferral of identity or sameness, possibly an eternal deferral: if Europe is still progressing and India is behind, can it ever catch up?

This is the situation inherited by nationalist movements. Fanon explains that colonialism, "not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future," also "distorts, disfigures, and destroys" the past of the colonized societies. To fortify and legitimize collective identity in the present, nationalism must rehabilitate the past. Fanon sees this as a response to colonialism's totalizing discourse. In the nationalist psyche, to recreate a pure and uncolonized past is to find and recover the national culture. But for Fanon the attempt to recover the glory of a past civilization is doomed. It makes culture, which should be in constant motion and full of vitality, into an artefact, preserved like a museum piece, dead. This kind of nativist history is, in Nietzsche's words, not serving life. It resembles antiquarian history, which "merely understands how to preserve life, not how to generate it." Mummified, decaying, this is the past sucking the vigour from the present. We can see exactly this tension in Nehru. Although he wants to rejuvenate the universals he finds in India's past (to make that past live), he is also searching for mythological origins of the nation's essence.

This search for origins and essential identities often has the purpose of buttressing boundaries, demarcating identities, making precise the inside and outside of "authentic" culture. Tradition is one familiar means for this, and its invention and preservation seem to have been a feature of nearly all decolonization struggles. This reproduction of the (imagined) past often involves enforcing custom and tradition, sometimes in a repressive manner: "the fact that something has become old now gives rise to the demand that it must be immortal." (Nietzsche) Obsession with tradition is yet another form of fetishism of the past, privileging it over the present. In opposition to the domination of the West, difference is privileged. In the name of emancipation, this nativist history reverses the binary, valorizing the past and rejecting the modern. Different problematic same thematic, it remains within the colonial logic, since it presupposes that the colonized are living in the past, while Europe is modern and more advanced on the unilinear historicist scale.

This is the general problem for Others trying to reconstitute their selves as subjects, because, as Fanon says, sealed in Otherness the only way to have a subject position is to accept being the voice of the Other, to fetishize themselves, reproducing the racialized logic of same and other. It also explains the performance of nativism by native intellectuals and elites who feel they must "go native" to "get away from the white culture." As if the only way to participate in politics and society is to take on these identities. However, identity politics is simply another form of mimesis: first determine the Indian way of doing things, and then follow that script. It is puppetry, following the black man script because that appears to be the only way to enact a subject position. But whiteness has constructed blackness, so this is playing someone else's part without authenticity or real agency; taking on the voice of the Other is about sheer instrumentality.

What is tricky, as Chakrabarty reminds us, is to take on a subject position of difference that does not repeat the racialized self-other logic. Fanon recognizes how difficult this is, and says it indeed produces a sort of melancholy because for this there's no script. We want a living culture, a community with national consciousness, but what the hegemonic order means by "culture" is a given political identity. If culture is that which cannot be captured, the living vanishing present, what Balibar calls everyday practices of meaning, "culture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin."

Part 3

Why Critical History in a Postcolonial World? Part 1

This is a follow-up to yesterday's post.

Let nothing be called natural
In an age of bloody confusion,
Ordered disorder, planned caprice,
And dehumanized humanity, lest all things
Be held unalterable!
Bertolt Brecht

The past has passed, meaning it is no more. By definition not present, it no longer exists. So why bother attending to it? Whether we attend to it or not, we cannot escape the past, since it produced our present – what exists is inherited from whatever came before. Perhaps we could just forget the past and be as happy as Nietzsche's cows. With no memory, they would be forgiven for taking themselves to be the general case. They might assume the whole world is an eternal pasture, and that a herd is the only natural way of being. But this is exactly the concern. Without attention to historicity we run the risk of naturalizing a particular kind of subject, society, culture, economic system, or set of power relations, universalizing the particular, making natural a product of history. Not only does this reduce anything (or anyone) different into an Other, an aberration, it leaves little room for change. The colonial order, racial hierarchies, gender inequality all appear natural and timeless.

A diachronic perspective, by contrast, can show us that things have not always been the way they are now, and therefore immunize us from assuming things will be thus forever. How we tell our past-narrative, our history, impacts how we imagine ourselves, our present, and our future. This is precisely the reason postcolonial thinkers have concerned themselves with the past. Of course, as Nietzsche points out, not just any attention to the past will do – history should serve life. Whatever falls outside of the grand universal narrative of historicism, akin to monumental history, is produced as an Other. Nativist history, a response to this othering, makes a fetish of the past (as does antiquarian history), but is unable to break free of the othering discourse. In contrast critical history and attention to historicity are concerned with the present and have the potential to go beyond the othering discourse.

The grand sweep of colonial history could be seen as an attempt to deal with difference met in the colonial encounter. In order to persevere, historicism had to find a way of fitting very different societies into its universal temporal narrative. Often seen as unhistorical, in stasis, outside of time, these colonized societies were only wrenched back into the stream of time by colonial rule. Although back in the narrative, they were then behind, backward. The colonies were seen as Europe's own past, like Europe but at the same time not like Europe. Historicism is then about both sameness and difference. It brings difference into sameness by temporizing. Nietzsche could have been writing about this when he wrote of monumental history: "how much that is different must be overlooked, how ruthlessly must the individuality of the past be forced into a general form …" Monumental history is inspirational. It advises us that greatness is once more possible if we imitate past greatness. Monumental history thus produces a script, forcing out all specificity. It is nothing but lifeless mimesis, producing "nothing but timidly disguised universal men."

Hegel exemplifies historicism. His juggernaut of a master narrative simply rolled right over alternative histories. He could subjugate them, bringing them all into the grand narrative, because of the totalizing progress of spirit (geist) through the ages. To be all-encompassing his system had to find ways to make these varied narratives commensurate, which is why the India we meet in Hegel's narrative is so distorted. Hegel's question of how to deal with discrepancy – India – was solved by the explanation that ancient India was once great but got stuck in stasis, while Europe kept on progressing. For Hegel, self-consciousness is produced dialectically through experience of the other: "those peoples therefore are alone capable of History... who have arrived at that period of development... at which individuals comprehend their own existence as independent, i.e. possess self-consciousness." But the Indians, steeped in spirituality, did not exercise their reason to separate Man from Nature and God. Without differentiating themselves from the universal, the dialectic could not function. The irrationality and lack of individuation of Indians ("In India we have only a division in masses..." explains Hegel) thus retarded the development of reason. And because reason, or Spirit, is the great mover of history, without it the Indians could have no history or progress. They were doomed to be stuck in the past – at least until Europe's convenient intervention; it was "the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires to be subjected to Europeans." In Hegel, India is othered, then the other is conquered by the same. As Chakrabarty explains this is a united world with an internally articulated hierarchy – the world is both one and unequal.

Part 2 here

The Politics of Historicism

Historicism enabled European domination of the world in the nineteenth century... [It] posited historical time as a measure of the cultural distance (at least in institutional development) that was assumed to exist betwen the West and the non-West.
[...]
Historicism - and even the modern, European idea of history - one might say, came to non-European peoples as somebody's way of saying "not yet" to somebody else.

Consider the classical liberal but historicist essays by John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty" and "On Representative Government," both of which proclaimed self-rule as the highest form of government and yet argued against giving Indians or Africans self-rule on grounds that were indeed historicist.

According to Mill, Indians or Africans were not yet civilized enough to rule themselves. Some historical time of development and civilization (colonial rule and education, to be precise) had to elapse before they could be considered prepared for such a task. Mill's historicist argument thus consigned Indians, Africans, and other "rude" nations to an imaginary waiting room of history. In doing so, it converted history itself into a version of this waiting room. We were all headed for the same destination, Mill averred, but some people were to arrive earlier than others.

That was what historicist consciousness was: a recommendation to the colonized to wait. Acquiring a historical consciousness, acquiring the public spirit that Mill thought absolutely necessary for the art of self-government, was also to learn this art of waiting. This waiting was the realization of the "not yet" of historicism.

From Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Paragraph breaks added to facilitate reading)

Papua New Guineans Apologize for their Ancestors' Killing of Four Missionaries

Is it just me or does this make you angry too?

The descendants of cannibals in Papua New Guinea, who killed and ate four Fijian missionaries in 1878, have said sorry for their forefathers' actions.

They held a ceremony of reconciliation, attended by thousands, in the East New Britain province where the four died.

The missionaries were part of a group of Methodist ministers and teachers who arrived in 1875 to spread Christianity.

Their murder three years later, by the Tolai tribespeople on the Gazelle Peninsula, sparked angry reprisals.

The head of the mission, English pastor George Brown, avenged the killings by taking part in an expedition that resulted in the deaths of a number of tribespeople and the torching of several villages.

Ten commandments

Candles were lit in remembrance of the four killed missionaries as thousands attended the ceremony in East New Britain.

Fiji's High Commissioner in PNG, Ratu Isoa Tikoca, accepted the apologies on behalf of the descendants.

"We at this juncture are deeply touched and wish you the greatest joy of forgiveness as we finally end this record disagreement," he said.

PNG's Governor-General Sir Paulias Matane praised the early missionaries for making the country Christian - and called for more people to follow its guiding principles.

"I wish many people could follow the 10 commandments, but they still steal today and commit adultery," he said.

"There is a big increase in HIV/Aids cases in the country because of adultery, despite knowing its wrong."

I wonder if the church ever apologized for what it did to the peoples of Papua New Guinea? For one thing, missionaries were heavily involved in the colonization of the island, helping to open up the island to Europeans. From the US Department of State: "Traditional Christian churches proselytized on the island in the nineteenth century. Colonial governments initially assigned different missions to different geographic areas."

Papua New Guinea has been passed around from colonial ruler to colonial ruler, broken up, stitched together, broken up again. Informal racial segregation was the norm until recently. It still has some of the most intact indigenous cultures left in the world, and one of the lowest rates of urbanization. The vast majority of the population depends on subsistence agriculture; they live off the land.

Unfortunately, the exploitation of the people and the resources of the island continue. Mining and mineral production make up a huge portion of the economy, but this is devastating the land and the indigenous peoples who depend on it. A good old Canadian company, Barrick Gold, is just one of those pursuing destructive gold mining.

Oh, and about HIV/AIDS... From Human Rights Watch:

Public shaming of sex workers as 'AIDS carriers' prevents people from seeking HIV-related services for fear of being stigmatized. Police continue to harass persons possessing condoms, including by forcing individuals to chew and swallow condoms and their plastic wrappers. Such responses deter condom use and undermine desperately needed HIV/AIDS prevention work by NGOs and the government.

And a group of indigenous Papua New Guineans is made to apologize for killing 4 missionaries over a hundred years ago? People, this is a prime example of the internalization of colonialism through humiliation and shame.

Interesting how those with power rarely apologize for horrible past actions and yet those without do.

India: After 60 Years of Independence, Indians Still Resisting Colonialism

Today, India marks 60 years of independence with the usual: song, celebration and speech.

But despite 60 years of formal independence, India remains burdened by global empire as British capital continues to exploit poor communities in its former colony.

Centuries after Britain's East India Company -- the world's first multinational -- faced protests in London, a group of villagers continue the tradition of resistance.

Read more at Lessons of Empire: India, 60 Years After Independence, a Corpwatch special.

Indigenous Peoples Fighting Ongoing Colonization and Genocide: Australia

Indigenous peoples all over the world are fighting valiant battles to protect what's left of their land, peoples, and cultures in the face of ongoing colonialism. While there are some small victories, the vast juggernaut of globalized corporate Capitalism simply steamrolls on. Helping this along is the paternalism of well-meaning liberals.

It is from the "white man's burden" that some of the most lasting harm has come. Apartheid in South Africa grew out of the same reserve system we have in Canada. Self-government for the natives in semi-autonomous communities - sounds almost progressive doesn't it? Well, we all know how that ended up.

Similarly, misguided but mostly benevolant people, who wanted to improve the lot of young native children through education, created Residential Schools - known as The Stolen Generation) in Australia. This was genocide dressed up as education, with devastating consequences. What happens when nearly an entire people is subject to state-sponsored physical, sexual, verbal, spiritual, and other forms of abuse - for generations? Anyone familiar with the effects of child abuse knows that it can persist through generations in complex ways.

Australia has done little to heal the damage, despite evidence of chronic social problems in Indigenous Australians communities. Instead of promoting healing, the Howard government introduced a a policy banning porn and alcohol for Aboriginals, ostensibly to protect children from abuse(even though the abuse is committed by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people). Howard's actions are reactionary, but he speaks the language of care, which unfortunately is often accepted by kind and decent people.

How does eliminating pornography teach a child to love her blood, her cells, her roots?
How does a ban on alcohol erase the desire to no longer be aboriginal?
How does controlling welfare payments teach aboriginal mothers to trust themselves and their love again? <BFP>

Not only are the Howard government's policies cruel and racist, but they are also not likely to be effective because they are targeting the consequences instead of the causes. Alcohol and pornography do not cause abuse. Rather, those with a history of abuse are far more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs and to have difficulty achieving healthy sexuality, among other terrible outcomes. Even I know better than to conflate correlation with causation.

But perhaps the Howard government does not care if it will be effective. Perhaps this has to do with gaining increasing control over Aboriginal communities and lands (possibly for more nuclear waste dumps or mining): "Australia’s national Government was using its powers to seize control of the Northern Territory’s Aboriginal settlements... The proposals mean scrapping the entry-permit system under which Aboriginal people have controlled access to northern Australia’s 660,000 square kilometres of Aboriginal lands - an area about of the size of Afghanistan - in recent decades." <Times Online> The Howard government is using well-intentioned Australians to promote his atrocious policies. But such paternalism, however pure the intentions, is still racist.

Most Australians don't like to be termed as racist.

The word is supposed to be for South Africans two decades ago, or for Americans before the civil rights era, or even for our earlier colonial ancestors, about two hundred years ago.

But what other reason could there be for the fact Aboriginal people have the same mortality rate of sheep?

And what other word could be used to justify the fact that being an Aboriginal Australia is more dangerous in terms of annual excess mortality than that people in US-occupied Iraq? <National Indigenous Times via Shmohawk's Shmorg>

Humanitarian "Feminism" from Above as a Form of Colonial Control

These interventions by the colonial state against social practices that oppressed women have been described as 'colonial feminism', that is where the colonial government intervened on behalf of women, claiming it was doing so on humanitarian grounds.

Sometimes these measures operated simultaneously as forms of colonial control. The colonial authorities were often sympathetic to those interventions that they regarded as a way of transforming the values of societies whose traditions resisted their rule. This was clearest with respect to the French colonial policy of forced unveiling in the Maghreb.

In all cases, it was entirely predictable that such legislative acts would become the focus for nationalist resistance. Yet, paradoxically for women colonial ideology could represent new forms of freedom. As a result, women were much more ambivalently placed in relation both to colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism. This has also meant that while women struggle with the legacies of colonialism in the postcolonial era, they are repeatedly accused of importing western ideas.

Well-meaning interventions by western feminist, human rights groups, and Ford Foundation-funded non-governmental organization can at times end up by making life more complicated for local feminists. Development of all kinds comes best from below rather than being imposed by above.

Interestingly, he also writes about how during anti-colonial struggles, women are often seen as the vessels of culture, "retrieved for the present from the society of the past."

For macho-nationalists, home and the domestic sphere, relatively free from colonial control, was the best guardian of the traditional values, culture, and identity of the new phenomenon they were creating on the Europen model against their European masters, 'the nation'.

Which means women's struggles do not end upon achieving self-determination, but that this is a precondition for a strong and viable feminist movement.

There's nothing new with what we are doing in Afghanistan, nor with the arguments used to justify it. It's been done by colonial powers in the past, and will continue to be done in our name unless we stop it.

Quotations from Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction by Robert Young. Formatting added to make it easier to read.

Inspired by the ongoing conversation here (see comments).

See also Afghan Women: Used by the Taliban, Used by Us.

Fighting Against Occupation Will Not be Tolerated (Unless you're on our Side)

Let's do a little mental experiment.

Let's say the USA was invaded by Cuba for harboring known terrorist Luis Posada Carriles. Many American civilians were killed.

Along with US army, private security contractors, militias, and regular armed citizens join in the popular resistance against the occupiers. Now lets say one of those killed a member of the invading Cuban army. Would that person deserve to be taken to a secretive prison, charged with murder, and potentially receive the death penalty?

What if this American was a teenager: 14 or 15 years old?

15 year old Omar Khadr (actually a Canadian Citizen) was arrested in 2002 because he threw a grenade which caused injury leading to death. He has been in Guantanamo since.

Now, nearly 5 years later he is being formally charged with murder. Originally the process was ruled illegal by the US Supreme Court, and the charges were thrown out, but the law was conveniently changed by Congress.

The message being sent? This is what happens when you resist the great military imperialist juggernaut that is the USA. Resistance is futile. It will not be tolerated.

The truth? The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is the crime. Resisting is not.

Oh yeah, and why do we understand that child soldiers in Africa are victims, who are traumatized and need treatment, while Middle Eastern children are not given the same consideration? Oh silly me. I know why: because of who they kill. If a child soldier kills one us they are evil. If they only kill other Africans we get that it isn't their fault. Read A Child in War: Detaining Omar Khadr Violates Our Moral and Legal Principles

UPDATE MAY 2, 2007
Read this excellent post, and the scary comments that follow

The Right to Bomb

From an interview 21 January 2003 (Before this Iraq War officially began), with Sadiq, a scholar:

Now they are saying we are 'a threat' to them. But hasn't it always been they who have threatened us?
[...]
Yes, we are a threat to them. Every time we break bread, thousands of them are at risk from each munch of our teeth. Every time I chew a grape or a sugared date, suck a mulberry or an apricot, someone in England must shudder in fear. Every time my son climbs a tree to find a fig, the fine imperial gentlemen of England are put at risk. Yet all we have ever wanted to do is to live our own lives without them. The other night on TV I heard an old Iraqi layman saying, 'they have everything, we have nothing. We don't want anything from them - but still they want more from us'. All we ask is for them to stop interfering with us. We have not been bombing them since 1920. It is they who have been bombing us. Do they never think of that? It never bothers them. They seem to think of it as their god-given right. Or is it another of their human rights - the right to bomb?
[...]
And still they claim that it is we who are a threat to them. So much so that they have been killing us over the decades, bomb after bomb after bomb, whenever we displeased them or went against their interests. Our problem though, I suppose, is that ... we didn't just go along with everything they wanted... They will never subdue us, you will see, never 'pacify' us - even if they keep at it for all eternity.
[...]
I often wonder how they would feel if we had been bombing them in England every now and then from one generation to the next, if we changed their governments when it suited us, destroyed their hospitals, made sure they had no clean water, and killed their children and their families. How many children is it that have died now? I can't even bring myself to think how many. They say that their imperial era is over now. It does not feel that way when you hear the staccato crack of their fireballs from the air. Or when the building shakes around you and your children from their bombs as you lie in your bed. It is then that you dream of real freedom - in shaa' allah - freedom from the RAF

Quoted from Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction by Robert Young. Emphasis mine.

Colonization and the Killing of History

Read this slowly. Let it sink in.
Roland Chrisjohn:

What if the Holocaust had never stopped?

What if no liberating armies invaded the territory stormed over by the draconian State? No compassionate throng broke down the doors to dungeons to free those imprisoned within? No collective outcry of humanity arose as stories of the State’s abuses were recounted? And no Court of World Opinion seized the State’s leaders and held them in judgment as their misdeeds were chronicled? What if none of this happened?

What if, instead, with the passage of time the World came to accept the State’s actions as the rightful and lawful policies of a sovereign nation having to deal with creatures that were less than fully human?

What if the Holocaust had never stopped, so that, for the State’s victims, there was no vindication, no validation, no justice, but instead the dawning realization that this was how things were going to be? What if those who resisted were crushed, so that others, tired of resisting, simply prayed that the ‘next’ adjustment to what remained of their ways of life would be the one that, somehow, they would be able to learn to live with? What if some learned to hate who they were, or to deny it out of fear, while others embraced the State’s image of them, emulating as far as possible the State’s principles and accepting its judgment about their own families, friends, and neighbors? And what if others could find no option other than to accept the slow, lingering death the State had mapped out for them, or even to speed themselves along to their State-desired end?

What if?

Then, you would have Canada’s treatment of the North American Aboriginal population in general, and the Indian Residential School Experience in particular.

Canada's aboriginals are survivors of genocide. They are still a colonized population. It isn't history. It isn't in the past. They are still living the effects today.



From Praxis Media's Hoping Against Hope: The Struggle Against Colonialism in Canada Listen to the first episode, read transcript here, read a review or purchase the series.

Radical Aboriginal Canadians are Terrorists?

Let me get this straight. Let's say I walk into your house, kill most of your family, take your children away, destroy your means of livelihood, and force you to go live on the sidewalk. When I then take a stand and ask for, say, my garage back, I'm the problem? Not just a problem... a terrorist?

Let's see if this definition resonates. "Terrorists", noun, plural: people on the underside of the social, economic, and political power structure who stand up for themselves. Those who, marginalized on the land they peopled first, take a stand and demand their rights instead of continuing to allow themselves to be further beaten down. Also known as "Insurgents" or "Military Opponents".

At least that's how the term is to be understood in the Canadian army's counterinsurgency manual, which states:

The rise of radical Native American organizations, such as the Mohawk Warrior Society, can be viewed as insurgencies with specific and limited aims... Although they do not seek complete control of the federal government, they do seek particular political concessions in their relationship with national governments and control (either overt or covert) of political affairs at a local/reserve ('First Nation') level, through the threat of, or use of, violence. (G& M)

Read the excellent response by Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil Fontaine. Excerpt:

Any reference to First Nations people as possible insurgents or terrorists is a direct attack on us - it demonizes us, it threatens our safety and security and attempts to criminalize our legitimate right to live our lives like all other Canadians do. Just being referenced in such a document compromises our freedom to travel across borders, have unimpeded telephone and internet communications, raise money, and protest against injustices to our people.

I mean, we all know it is which side of the power structure you are on which determines whether your fight is "terrorism" or "defense" or "freedom fighters" or "insurgents". But usually they try to hide that fact.

The Problem with Bill Gates' Philanthropy in Africa...

...Is that it appears to help, but in the end does more damage.

Bill Gates, the world's richest man, on Friday delivered a snub to the ethical investment movement by saying his foundation should concentrate on grant giving, rather than judging the social impact of businesses in which it invests. (FT)

Now Gates is investing in a project called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which seeks to fix the problem of hunger by promoting high tech farming.
But promoting technological solutions that have done so much damage (like GM Crops) is simply irresponsible. Besides, there is a an abundance of food in the world, it is just distributed unfairly. Things like unfair trade policies and subsidies are a huge part of the problem. Monocultures and environmental degradation in vulnerable regions is another.
From Stuffed and Starved via zmag

The Gates solution ends up exacerbating the problems facing the poor, shoring up institutions and companies that scalp poor farmers. And then they offer a band-aid, one that helps the wound go septic.

Philanthropy isn't meant to be like sausage-manufacturing - yet every step of the way in the Gates plan for Africa, from endowment investment to the agricultural spend, induces nausea. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. Microsoft's chief software architect has spent a career developing technological patches, and then patches for those patches, and so on. If one were uncharitable, we might see the Foundation itself as a patch for his falling personal stock in the 1990s. It does rather seem that Gates' generosity is charity in its worst form, a mode of self-aggrandizement. Such is the narrow vista, and greatest tragedy, of the world's richest man. (The Rest)

There is a major flaw in the Gates vision; the solution to major third world problems like hunger is not charity - it is justice. Imagine the benefits if Gates put his considerable money and influence behind programs for justice instead of these controlling, damaging acts of "charity".

Afghanistan: The Case for Withdrawal

"It is much better for regime-change to come from below even if this means a long wait as in South Africa, Indonesia or Chile. Occupations disrupt the possibilities of organic change and create a much bigger mess than existed before. Afghanistan is but one example."

The Khyber Impasse: The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan

February 27, 2007
By TARIQ ALI

It is Year 6 of the UN-backed NATO occupation of Afghanistan, a joint US/EU mission. On 26 February there was an attempted assassination of Dick Cheney by Taliban suicide bombers while he was visiting the ‘secure’ US air base at Bagram (once an equally secure Soviet air base during an earlier conflict). Two US soldiers and a mercenary (‘contractor’) died in the attack, as did twenty other people working at the base. This episode alone should have concentrated the US Vice-President’s mind on the scale of the Afghan debacle. In 2006 the casualty rates rose substantially and NATO troops lost forty-six soldiers in clashes with the Islamic resistance or shot-down helicopters.

The insurgents now control at least twenty districts in the Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan provinces where NATO troops have replaced US soldiers. And it is hardly a secret that many officials in these zones are closet supporters of the guerrilla fighters. The situation is out of control. At the beginning of this war Mrs Bush and Mrs Blair appeared on numerous TV and radio shows claiming that the aim of the war was to liberate Afghan women. Try repeating that today and the women will spit in your face.

Who is responsible for this disaster? Why is the country still subjugated? What are Washington’s strategic goals in the region? What is the function of NATO? And how long can any country remain occupied against the will of a majority of its people?

Few tears were shed in Afghanistan and elsewhere when the Taliban fell, the hopes aroused by Western demagogy did not last too long. It soon became clear that the new transplanted elite would cream off a bulk of the foreign aid and create its own criminal networks of graft and patronage. The people suffered. A mud cottage with a thatched roof to house a family of homeless refugees costs fewer than five thousand dollars. How many have been built? Hardly any. There are reports each year of hundreds of shelter-less Afghans freezing to death each winter.

Instead a quick-fix election was organised at high cost by Western PR firms and essentially for the benefit of Western public opinion. The results failed to bolster support for NATO inside the country. Hamid Karzai the puppet President, symbolised his own isolation and instinct for self-preservation by refusing to be guarded by a security detail from his own ethnic Pashtun base. He wanted tough, Terminator look-alike US marines and was granted them.

Might Afghanistan been made more secure by a limited Marshall-Plan style intervention? It is, of course, possible that the construction of free schools and hospitals, subsidised homes for the poor and the rebuilding of the social infrastructure that was destroyed after the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989 could have stabilised the country. It would also have needed state help to agriculture and cottage industries to reduce the dependence on poppy farming. 90 percent of the world’s opium production is based in Afghanistan. UN estimates suggest that heroin accounts for 52 percent of the impoverished country’s gross domestic product and the opium sector of agriculture continues to grow apace. All this would have required a strong state and a different world order. Only a slightly crazed utopian could have expected NATO countries, busy privatising and deregulating their own countries, to embark on enlightened social experiments abroad.

And so elite corruption grew like an untreated tumour. Western funds designed to aid some reconstruction were siphoned off to build fancy homes for their native enforcers.. In Year 2 of the Occupation there was a gigantic housing scandal. Cabinet ministers awarded themselves and favoured cronies prime real estate in Kabul where land prices reached a high point after the Occupation since the occupiers and their camp followers had to live in the style to which they had become accustomed. Karzai’s colleagues built their large villas, protected by NATO troops and in full view of the poor.

Add to this that Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, has become one of the largest drug barons in the country. At a recent meeting with Pakistan’s President, when Karzai was bleating on about Pakistan’s inability to stop cross-border smuggling, General Musharraf suggested that perhaps Karzai should set an example by bringing his sibling under control.

While economic conditions failed to improve, NATO military strikes often targeted innocent civilians leading to violent anti-American protests in the Afghan capital last year. What was initially viewed by some locals as a necessary police action against al-Qaeda following the 9/11 attacks is now perceived by a growing majority in the entire region as a fully-fledged imperial occupation. The Taliban is growing and creating new alliances not because its sectarian religious practices have become popular, but because it is the only available umbrella for national liberation. As the British and Russians discovered to their cost in the preceding two centuries, Afghans never liked being occupied.

There is no way NATO can win this war now. Sending more troops will lead to more deaths. And full-scale battles will destabilise neighbouring Pakistan. Musharraf has already taken the rap for an air raid on a Muslim school in Pakistan. Dozens of children were killed and the Islamists in Pakistan organised mass street protests. Insiders suggest that the ‘pre-emptive’ raid was, in fact, carried out by US war planes who were supposedly targeting a terrorist base, but the Pakistan government thought it better they took the responsibility to avoid an explosion of anti-American anger.

NATO’s failure cannot be blamed on the Pakistani government. If anything, the war in Afghanistan has created a critical situation in two Pakistani provinces. The Pashtun majority in Afghanistan has always had close links to its fellow Pashtuns in Pakistan. The border was an imposition by the British Empire and it has always been porous. Attired in Pashtun clothes I crossed it myself in 1973 without any restrictions. It is virtually impossible to build a Texan fence or an Israeli wall across the mountainous and largely unmarked 2500 kilometre border that separates the two countries. The solution is political, not military.

Washington’s strategic aims in Afghanistan appear to be non-existent unless they need the conflict to discipline European allies who betrayed them on Iraq. True, the al-Qaeda leaders are still at large, but their capture will be the result of effective police work, not war and occupation. What will be the result of a NATO withdrawal? Here Iran, Pakistan and the Central Asian states will be vital in guaranteeing a confederal constitution that respects ethnic and religious diversity. The NATO occupation has not made this task easy. Its failure has revived the Taliban and increasingly the Pashtuns are uniting behind it.

The lesson here, as in Iraq, is a basic one. It is much better for regime-change to come from below even if this means a long wait as in South Africa, Indonesia or Chile. Occupations disrupt the possibilities of organic change and create a much bigger mess than existed before. Afghanistan is but one example.

Tariq Ali’s new book, Pirates of the Caribbean, is published by Verso. He can be reached at: tariq.ali3@btinternet.com

This article originally appeared in Counterpunch.

Via New Socialist
More excellent analysis at James Laxer's Blog

Humanitarian War in Afghanistan?

Readers of this blog know I do not buy the official justification for the invasion of Afghanistan. I don't believe for a second the Harper Government (or the Bush Administration) has altruistic motives.

However, many kind and caring Canadians, even some progressives, support the war in Afghanistan. They are motivated by the pathos of seeing burka-clad women, starving children, and terrified old men in desert-like landscapes. Their line of reasoning goes something like this: if our army can supply security and help the Afghans rebuild, why shouldn't we support it?

Leaving the ethics of invading and occupying another country (even to supposedly help that country), let's address this pragmatically. If we assume our motives are "pure" why are so many Afghan people against our continued occupation?

I think the simplest answer is that we have failed in convincing them we are on their side. (Again I'll reiterate: our government's motives are anything but pure, but many regular people support the war for altruistic reasons.)

To growing numbers of Afghans, the NATO-led forces are an enemy similar to the Russians who tore this country apart in the 1980s. People even blame suicide attacks directly or indirectly on the soldiers. (RAWA)

The Soviets used the same sort of rhetoric as does NATO, trying to gain popular support among the Afghan people. They said their invasion was defensive. They said they were providing aid and security, and a better political and economic system (Soviet Communism). We say we are responding to Al-Qaeda's 9/11 attack (i.e. our invasion was defensive). We say we are providing aid and security, and a better political and economic system (Democracy and Capitalism).

What the Afghan people saw was the Soviets' illegitimate intervention in their own internal affairs, lack of respect for their culture and customs, and "brutal and clumsy attempts to introduce radical changes in control over agricultural land holding and credit, rural social relations, marriage and family arrangements, and education" which "led to scattered protests and uprisings among all major communities in the Afghan countryside." (Wikipedia)

The parallels are actually quite striking. How can we expect war-weary Afghans to trust us, when we are committing so many of the same mistakes? This is why we cannot "win" this war by military means.

The occupation needs to end, so people have the opportunity to heal their country, but this can't even begin until there is some goal of peace on Afghan terms. We'll need to find a way to provide security and aid - under the direction of the Afghan people themselves, in a format they themselves are comfortable with. We need to really understand what the Afghan people want, and stop pretending we are doing what's best for them.

Listen to an interview with a former Soviet army soldier who fought in Afghanistan, as he compares and contrast Canada's involvement in Afghanistan with that of the Soviet Union.

The Myth of the "Clash of Civilizations"

No matter how hard many world leaders are trying, the people aren't buying - the myth of the "Clash of Civilizations" that is.

A BBC World Service poll of over 28,000 respondents across 27 countries found that a majority of people worldwide believe the tensions between Islam and the West are due to conflicts over political power and interests - not from differences of religion and culture.

“Most people around the world clearly reject the idea that Islam and the West are caught in an inevitable clash of civilizations,” said Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.

A majority also agree that violent conflict between Islam and the West is not inevitable. Only 28% think that violent conflict is inevitable, while twice as many (56%) believe that "common ground can be found."
- Source
You can also read the BBC Story

What do Canadians think?

More than seven in ten Canadians believe common ground can be found between Muslim and Western cultures. Seventy-three percent say that common ground can be found, while just 16 percent believe that violent conflict is inevitable. A significant majority (56%) of Canadians sees “conflicts about political power and interests” as the source of tensions between Islam and the West, while fewer than three in ten (29%) believe they arise from religious and cultural differences. Three in four Canadians (74%) also see intolerant minorities as a primary reason for tensions between Islam and the West compared to just 19 percent who blame cultural differences. Fifty-five percent of Canadians fault intolerant minorities on both sides, far more than those who specifically cite a Muslim (12%) or Western (7%) minority. (SOURCE

At least two illustrious leaders, however, like to make the case that there is a deeper cultural or religious conflict. George Bush, right after 9/11:

Americans are asking, why do they [terrorists] hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber -- a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

Which is of course, ridiculous. They don't hate the West's "freedoms". If anything, they hate our Imperialism.

Stephen Harper, in a speech speech to B'nai Brith

But the fact is this: those who attacked Israel – and those who sponsor such attacks – don’t seek merely to gain some leverage, to alter some boundary, or to right some wrong.

They seek what they and those like them have always sought – the destruction of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish people.

Why? A thousand complicated rationalizations but only one simple reason – because the Jews are different. Because the Jews are not like them.

Again, ridiculous. As if it were possible to find "one simple reason" for Israel-Palestine, but if you had to, probably it would be the extreme imbalance of power and resources - oppression due to occupation - not because they are "different". Does he also think Iraq's insurgents do it because Americans are "different"?

The right-wing media is even more blunt. Bill O'Reilly says "if Islam didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be a war on terror." Heidi Harris continually refers to "Islamic fascists" on Hardball (a term Amy Goodman thankfully calls her on, labeling it "racist" and "disgusting").

Much of the MSM's discussion of war and terrorism is done within this "cowboys and Indians" frame, in which we are the good guys and they are the evildoers. At best, it's lazy and at worst it's sickening bigotry.

For an example, see my analysis of the portrayal of the recent conflict in Somalia.

Canadian Elections Coordinator on the 2006 Haitian Presidential Elections

"On a very personal level, Haiti exposed me to the realities of development as an imperialistic enterprise."

The significance of the Haitian presidential elections of February 2006, has been ignored by the corporate press. That isn't surprising given that the results exposed the most damaging distortion the international press reported about the ouster of President Jean Bertrand Aristide - that it was the result of a "popular uprising" against him.

Voters delivered a decisive rebuke to the most prominent people involved in the coup of February 29, 2004. Guy Philippe, the rebel whom the press told us was greeted by huge, cheering crowds after Aristide's ouster, received less than 2% of the vote. Charles Baker, a sweatshop owner widely and uncritically quoted by the press before and after the coup, received 6%.

Rene Preval, who was endorsed by the Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste, a prominent Aristide ally and former political prisoner, eventually prevailed after massive non-violent protest foiled the de facto government's last gasp attempt at fraud.

The Canadian government was responsible for organizing the presidential elections of 2006.

Read the full interview with a Canadian elections coordinator who worked in Haiti, with an insider's perspective on the elections.

For background on Haiti and the ouster of Aristide, watch Aristide and the Endless Revolution or check out Democracy Now's ongoing coverage.

More about Canada's Involvement, here mapped out to help you visualize it.

Somalia - Another Resource War Dressed up as a "Clash of Civilizations"

Throughout history, "wars of religion" have served to obscure the economic and strategic interests behind the conquest and invasion of foreign lands. "Wars of religion" were invariably fought with a view to securing control over trading routes and natural resources.

The current war on Islam, commonly referred to as the "war on terror", is a resource war; the most important resource is of course oil. The justification for this war requires heavy-handed demonization of Muslims.

The oil lies in Muslim lands. Vilification of the enemy is part and parcel of Eurasia energy geopolitics. It is a direct function of the geographic distribution of the World's oil and gas reserves. If the oil were in countries occupied predominantly by Buddhists or Hindus, one would expect that US foreign policy would be directed against Buddhists and Hindus, who would also be the object of vilification. (The rest)

We see this playing out in Somalia right now. Somalia is part of an ongoing resource conflict in the Horn of Africa but it is discussed in the MSM solely inside the frame of the supposed "clash of civilizations". The Bush spokespeople have characterized the conflict in Somalia as a religious war between the "Christian Ethiopians" and the Somali "Islamists" - and this explanation has had little challenge. According to International Christian Concern (ICC), Somalia is one of the top 10 persecutors of Christians. Good thing the US is propping up gangsters - at least they aren't Muslim.

But it is more about territory than terror: Time To Rescue Somalia's Resources From The Somalis.

... nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. (more)

Grab Bag - From Iran to the "Dark" Continent

Interesting articles in the Toronto Star this week.

Iran's unseen art:

"Tabibzadeh pointedly satirizes the hypocrisy of an outwardly Islamic society wracked by sexual promiscuity and heroin or opium addiction. In one painting, a completely nude figure is covered by a headscarf — mandatory for women in Iran in all public spaces." Here's more art by Golnar Tabibzadeh and other Iranian artists.

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Despite AIDS, Africa endures by James Travers:

The great kaleidoscope of lands, languages and peoples sweeping north and east from Cape Town to Cairo is now synonymous with Stephen Lewis's pandemic, the corruption of kleptocrats and the mad, jumped-up generals who fight their wars with stolen children.

It's true that much of that is true. Most of the 49 years since Kwame Nkrumah led Ghana and sub-Saharan Africa to independence were lost to suffering, Big-Man greed and boundless hostility over limited resources.

That's Africa's history, not its present or future. And it's certainly not the continent's character.

Beneath all the horrors roils a remarkable spirit. Despite the death and palpable despair, Africa is bursting with energy, the determination to turn nothing into something and, yes, hope.

Outsiders usually miss it. Overwhelmed, they see slums, not rudimentary industry, huge failures, not small successes, and victims, not the resilient.

"The fact that they survive on a $1 a day makes them the greatest entrepreneurs in the world," says Farouk Jiwa.

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The `development of underdevelopment': Excerpt, How Western progress created African misery:

How do we talk about how to develop a meaningful political process in societies that have been fractured by colonialism and violence? What, indeed, does progress mean in societies that were systematically dismantled by the West in the pursuit of progress?

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