The genocide in Gaza, the threat to Venezuela, and the targeting of Iran are not isolated crises. They are coordinated fronts in a single war effort attempting to enforce imperial dominance.
“Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature which in fact owe their originality to that sort of substantiation which results from and is nourished by the situation in the colonies. Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together – that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler- was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler is right when he speaks of knowing “them” well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and perpetuates his existence.“ Frantz Fanon – Concerning Violence
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion…but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, but non-Westerners never do.” - Samuel P. Huntington, author of the Clash of Civilizations.
“When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten all that oil.” -U.S. President Donald J. Trump.
Over the last two weeks, images of starving Palestinians in a dystopian backdrop of bombed out buildings reflect the horrific reality of a terrain that has experienced the equivalent of six Hiroshima atomic bombs. It is a reminder that the genocide in Gaza continues even as the pathetic zealous characters surrounding the U.S. President spoke of a ceasefire, an end to the assault on Gaza, and Trump as the peace president.
That cynical game was finally brought to an end with the unsurprising announcement by Benjamin Netanyahu, the indicted war criminal and Prime Minister of the ethno-supremacist apartheid state of Israel, that Israel will resume the bombing of the occupied Palestinian people. Netanyahu’s excuse is that, allegedly, “Hamas” fired on Israeli occupation forces and also has not returned all of the bodies of dead Israeli captors.
The resumption of war crimes and genocide in Gaza is occurring simultaneously with the build up U.S. military forces off the coast of Venezuela in anticipation of a predatory attack on that country in order to finally realize President Trump’s desire to literally steal its oil.
And in Iran, the people and government fully expect that Israel and the U.S. will launch another attack on their nation before the end of the year.
The Charter of the United Nations committed all of its members to adhere to the core principles and purposes of the United Nations that include maintaining international peace, fostering cooperation, and respecting fundamental human rights and international law. By operating outside of the bounds of international law and flagrantly violating all of the core principles of the Charter, especially with the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Israel and U.S. impunity has almost rendered the Charter a hollowed-out banality.
States and people have a right to live in peace, to realize fundamental individual and collective human rights (including the most precious right which is the right to life), to be able to determine for themselves their mode of living, their governance structures and sovereignty without interference from any other state.
But for the Palestinians who will still die and the thousands who might die in Iran and Venezuela there is no peace and will be no peace because the United States and Israel, the two greatest outlaw states on the planet, are unrestrained in the level of criminal violence that they have unleashed on the world over the last few years.
At the center of U.S. and Western hegemony was the notion that the West upheld the liberal values of the enlightenment. An idea that, those at the receiving end of colonial/capitalist modernity, knew was a damnable lie. But that lie had life, especially among the Western elite and their colonized elite counterparts charged with managing the “natives,” and the more privileged sectors of the white working classes in Europe and the U.S. that derived some material benefits from Western capitalist plunder.
Gaza finally stripped away the veil of civilization that masked the moral contradictions and rationalized barbarism that always occupied the center of European civilizational relations with the non-European world.
History revealed that human rights, the consent of the governed, rule of law, and rationalism were all ideological mystifications meant to disguise and obscure the class project of the bourgeoisie of Europe that had been erected on the pedestal of slavery and colonial accumulation on a global scale. Nowhere was that lurid mendacity more apparent than in the territories named the United States of America where a vicious, white supremacist ruling class murdered, raped, burnt, and mutilated in wars of annihilation protected by their white supremacist God who blessed them through “manifest destiny” with the right to murder and conquer from sea to shining sea, from the East coast of indigenous lands to the West coast and beyond.
The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) is clear. It declared that it “Stands Firmly with Venezuela and the Bolivarian Revolution.”
As BAP National Co-Coordinator Erica Caines describes,
“BAP has been clear that the accelerated militarization and occupation that we have seen in Haiti over the last four years has violated the concept of a Zone of Peace and should have served as a warning for the rest of the region. The labeling of “gangs” as terrorist organizations in Haiti has allowed the U.S. to do the same in Venezuela, where the Department of War now compares Caribbean people in boats to Al-Qaeda, in order to justify their imperialist bloodlust. Despite these challenges the steadfast people of Venezuela have joined civilian militias in the millions to defend their homeland, to enforce peace. We applaud the Bolivarian Revolution and support the Venezuelan people’s defense of their sovereignty.”
In the fight for Palestinian liberation and self-determination, BAP unapologetically supports the Palestinian right to armed self-defense and right to struggle against colonial occupation. This is a “people(s)-Centered human right that has standing in law and in the history of popular resistance against colonialism.
“Two years into an unspeakably vicious genocide unfolding before the eyes of the world, the Palestinian people continue to embody an unconquerable will to be free, an enduring expression of popular struggle to defeat the interlocking systems of white supremacy and colonial domination threatening all oppressed and colonized people across the world. Their example demonstrates the collective ability of humanity to expose and defeat the militarized arms of western imperialism which extend over all corners of the planet.”
And what does the U.S. Peace Council say about the link between Venezuela, Iran and the U.S.?
“In Our Americas and West Asia, the U.S. invokes “counterterrorism,” “anti-drug operations,” and “nuclear deterrence” to justify overt and covert forms of intervention, sanctions, and regime change in order to secure trade routes and geostrategic assets and maintain access to vital natural resources as China deepens its economic and political relations in the region. Venezuela is targeted for reclaiming its oil and building South-South unity; Iran for defying imperialist domination, supporting the Palestinian national liberation struggle, and advancing multipolar cooperation. Both nations are punished not for aggression, but for asserting sovereignty and helping shape a new world order no longer under the U.S. unilateral domination.”
“Imperialism’s internal and external wars are inseparable. Just as during earlier colonial eras, militarization of policing and the expansion of the surveillance state mirror the tactics of imperialist occupation. Programs like the “snapback” sanctions against Iran and the deployment of U.S. warships in the Caribbean to threaten Venezuela are symptoms of the same imperialist panic that drives Blackhawk raids in Chicago.”
Born out of violence and the negation of human life, the barbaric lawlessness of the U.S. and Israel can be and will be defeated. Both settler-colonial states are ensnared in irreconcilable contradictions that inevitably lead to the negation of their anti-human colonial projects. And when that happens, the world will be a safer and more peaceful place.
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