Our system propaganda machine, the mainstream media, continues to paint a picture that all is well within the system, with a few hiccups here and there. This despite the obvious impending collapse of the financial system that will bring extreme hardship and deprivation across the globe, moving it right across the developed world instead of containing it mostly, as it tries at present, in the poorer countries of the world. On top of that, there are massive uprisings across the globe by the people, against the brutal exploitative system that has for generations, heaped so much misery and deprivation on so many while lavishing untold wealth on the few. It is obvious to the thinking observer that something has to break and that break is not far off.
The Demise of U.S. Hegemony: Analysis of a Revolutionary Heat Wave in
Haiti, West Papua, Mexico and Beyond
Filed under:
Analysis,
The
State
—
Abolition
Media Worldwide
A
look at recent revolts in Haiti, West Papua, and Mexico and how
they are linked to the decline in US imperial power.
A massive
revolutionary heat wave has swept the globe this summer, as militants
have risen up with the intent to overthrow their colonial and
imperialist foes. In the face of gruesome and relentless State
repression, the people are nevertheless holding and gaining ground.
From West Papua to Mexico, from Haiti to Colombia, from Honduras to
Sudan and beyond, those who have long suffered the violence and
indignities of occupation are declaring, unequivocally, that they
have had enough. These and other
uprisings around the world herald the demise of U.S. hegemony.
Recent
Events in West Papua, Mexico, and Haiti
On September 23rd,
2019, West Papuan revolutionaries burned down an Indonesian colonial
government building in Wamena, as the insurrection
in West Papua that began last month gained new momentum. In
August, racist attacks against West Papuans in cities on the island
of Java prompted widespread protests in the provinces, and roughly
2,000 West Papuan students studying in Java headed home early.
Indonesia’s colonial occupation of West Papua and the racist
violence stemming therefrom have propelled these protests into a
full-on insurrection— and the Indonesian State has responded
accordingly.
The State remains
unable to suppress the revolution, despite many feverish attempts. At
least 35,000 West Papuans have been forced from their homes, and an
additional 6,000 Indonesian police and military personnel were
deployed to West Papua earlier this month. Still, when police
murdered sixteen West Papuans after students protested against
racism, the people administered revolutionary justice in the form of
flaming barricades and the torching of several buildings, including a
government building and the airport.
In Mexico, on the
fifth anniversary of the disappearance of 43 Normalista students from
Ayotzinapa, militants
attacked the national palace where President Andrés Manuel López
Obrador currently lives, a Christopher Columbus statue, and other
commercial and government buildings in Mexico City. The Normalista
students disappeared on September 26th and 27th of 2014; last week,
roughly 4,000 people, including students and anarchists, took part in
enacting revolutionary justice against the State on their behalf.
Targeted offices
included those of Secretariat of Welfare, the Superior Court of
Justice of Mexico City, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, among
other government agencies. In all, roughly thirty businesses and
public offices were affected.
On Friday, September
27th, revolutionaries throughout Haiti destroyed
police headquarters, attacked residences of government officials, and
burned a jail and courts to the ground. Insurgents there are
fighting to overthrow the corrupt right-wing regime of Jovenel Moise,
who is backed by the U.S. Four people died in clashes in recent days,
with many reports of injuries. Moise’s government had siphoned off
Venezuelan aid money that came through Venezuela’s PetroCaribe
program, which had allowed Haiti to buy petroleum products at
discount and on credit. The program has now been suspended, owing to
both the U.S.’s interest in overthrowing the current Venezuelan
government in order to install a new far-right puppet regime and its
support of the Haitian State.
Faced with
devastating fuel shortages and prices, the people of Haiti have set
the island ablaze. In the capital city of Port-au-Prince, police were
met with armed resistance; in Jacmel, the central court and prison
were burned to the ground, while prisoners arrested during the last
round of uprisings earlier this summer were liberated. In Thomonde,
revolutionaries disarmed the police, who fled as their vehicles and
substation were set on fire. And in Les Cayes, the office of USAID
NGO Caris Foundation was ransacked and their vehicle was set on fire.
The Death of
U.S. Hegemony
While circumstances
vary from one to another, these struggles are united in myriad ways.
Not only are they all instances of anti-imperialist rebellion, but
also among the sinister empires at the root of the oppression endured
in West Papua, Mexico, and Haiti alike is none other than that of the
United States.
In 1957, eight years
after having recognized Indonesia’s independence, the Dutch empire
began a process that would allegedly allow independence for West
Papua in 1972. What the Dutch did not know at that time was that
twenty-one years earlier, a 1936 expedition had discovered an
ertsberg (ore mountain) on West Papua. While various
territorial claims had been made, the mountain remained uninhabited
for over twenty years.
Enter the twin
demons of capitalism and imperialism.
The United States
mining company Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold negotiated with
Indonesian army general Suharto to allow prospecting on the mountain.
In 1962, after Indonesia declared war on the Netherlands, the U.S.
and U.N. predictably conspired to have “interim” control of West
Papua signed over to Indonesia. The Indonesian State, having just
over a dozen years earlier liberated itself from Dutch colonial rule,
donned the colonizer’s clothes and viciously repressed the people
of West Papua, making acts such as singing the West Papuan anthem and
flying the West Papuan flag illegal.
General Suharto, no
doubt thoroughly a U.S. stooge by this time, became president of
Indonesia in 1968.
Similarly, the U.S.
empire also colonized Haiti through both stooge deployment and theft
of resources. In 2015, the U.S. successfully installed its Haitian
stooge, Moise, by enabling former president Martelly— via his
goons— to frighten and intimidate Haitians into voting for Moise
(who Martelly also backed). In 2010, Canadian and U.S. mining
companies unearthed gold, silver, copper, and other valuable metals—
roughly $20,000,000,000 worth— in Haiti. This was just after the
devastating earthquake that instantly killed up to 300,000 people and
from which Haiti has yet to fully recover.
Roughly 15 percent
of Haiti’s territory was under license to North American mining
firms and partners as of December 2018, including the U.S. company
VCS Mining, the Canadian company Majescor, and their subsidiaries.
Predictably enough, as the people of Haiti struggle harder and harder
to meet their most basic needs, North American colonizers continue to
profit wildly from the island’s resources.
Hillary Clinton’s
brother, Anthony Rodham, was a prominent player in the mining scheme,
according to corporate VCS documents. (It should come as no surprise
that Rodham has no background in mining whatsoever.) Rodham joined
the advisory board of VCS Mining in October 2013, and a 2014 VCS
memorandum touts his influential connections to the Clintons’
“inner circles” and “power bases.”
While President
Obrador (AMLO) was fashioned in the style of a left-leaning crusader
for justice during the most recent Mexican presidential elections, he
has unwaveringly done Trump’s bidding since taking office. AMLO,
who vowed not to do Trump’s “dirty work” with respect to
abusing and oppressing migrants while on the campaign trail, has been
deploying unprecedented levels of troops throughout Mexico, including
his newly-formed and contentious Guardia Nacional (National Guard):
an amalgamation of existing federal, military, and naval police.
In spite of ample
promises made to respect the autonomy of indigenous people, AMLO
created the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples to manage
indigenous affairs— an obvious attempt to undermine organizations
such as the National Indigenous Congress, an anti-capitalist
indigenous resistance movement focused on defending land and
resources and protecting indigenous culture. In April, AMLO announced
a series of megaprojects he claimed would improve regional
development: the Maya Train, a new refinery in Tabasco along the Gulf
of Mexico, the Trans Isthmus corridor, and the Plan Integral Morelos—
all of which involve dispossession of farmers and indigenous
communities. In some cases, construction and management have already
opened to bidding by transnational corporations, including many that
are U.S.-based.
Trump personally
sent a message to AMLO to assure the latter that the U.S. would
invest in the Maya Train in particular. The area it will cover—
approximately 1,500 kilometers, from Palenque to Cancún— is
already overrun by big-box hotels, fine-dining restaurants and
nightclubs which allow tourists from advanced capitalist societies to
enjoy luxury on the cheap. By comparison, local economic benefits
from this arrangement are minimal. Tourists are spared the sight of
the wretchedly under-serviced neighborhoods outside of town that are
home to the army of service, maintenance and construction workers
whose starting salary ranges from $180 to $420 per month for a
six-day week. One can imagine how far that goes in a city dominated
by international tourism.
That this
by-colonizers-for-colonizers railway invokes the name of the first
indigenous people of Mexico pours salt on an ever-widening wound. (It is fitting that
so many harbingers of the end of the U.S. empire’s dominion should
occur as we approach Indigenous People’s Day, October 7th— a day
the State calls Columbus Day and that was meant to celebrate
Columbus’s enslavement and murder of indigenous people, but is now
being reclaimed by U.S.-based anti-imperialists as a day to
commemorate indigenous martyrs and express solidarity with ongoing
indigenous struggles unfolding across the globe.)
One remarkable thing
about the present moment is that the three revolutionary uprisings
explored above do not even amount to half of the total number taking
place worldwide:
On September 20th
and 21st, thousands of people in at least eight Egyptian cities took
to the streets to demand the removal of President Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi, a fascist who won both the 2014 and 2018 “elections”
after running against no serious contenders and amid widespread
voting boycotts.
Two days later, on
September 23rd, students in Colombia rebelled in the capital city of
Bogota and defended themselves in the face of violent repression by
the police. This was the second clash between students and police
there this year, and the third since current President Ivan Duque
took office. (Under his regime, repression of student protests of any
kind has become increasingly merciless.)
Three days later, on
September 26th, roughly two thousand people demonstrated in Khartoum,
Sudan to demand the immediate release of Waleed Abdelrahman Hassan, a
Sudanese student who had been detained by Egyptian authorities and
delivered a coerced confession on television.
Still, this list is
not exhaustive.
Revolutionary
anarchists stand in solidarity with all oppressed people, and
recognize the potential contained in this moment. We mourn those who
have already fallen in these struggles, but are buoyed by the
knowledge that the Age of Empire is coming to a definitive end. The
revolutionary heartbeat is palpable and thunderous, pulsing across
oceans, deserts, mountains, and hills; igniting fortitude and
resilience like wildfire. Neither individual State actors nor their
imperial puppet-masters can put out the fire that burns in the chest
of the People.
We welcome the
imminent demise of U.S. hegemony, and support all of those who
continue to fight for liberation!
Sources:
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201182814172453998.html
https://sfbayview.com/2018/12/merten-mercenaries-marionettes-and-the-media-blackout-on-haiti/
https://truthout.org/articles/amlo-in-office-from-megaprojects-to-militarization/
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