settler-colonialism

January 21, 2024

No Justice in Imperialist Courts

The ICJ, like the International Criminal Court (ICC), was born as a response to the Nazi Holocaust in an attempt to stop it from ever happening again. This doesn’t mean international law is going to come to anyone’s rescue, but Netanyahu’s genocidal hypocrisy becomes especially apparent when one compares him to the late Ben Ferencz.

Ferencz, who was also Jewish, had been the last living Nuremberg Trial prosecutor until his death in April 2023 at the age of 103. Ferencz was among those who led the charge for the ICJ and was responsible for the creation of the ICC too, believing it to be necessary in the fight for global justice. Unfortunately, even in the scores of obituaries after his death, only one mentioned his opposition to the crimes against humanity committed by the USA.

In a 2019 documentary called “Prosecuting Evil,” Ferencz pointed out that he and Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara co-authored an article in the New York Times mid-December 2000 urging that then President Bill Clinton have the United States join the ICC. McNamara knew full well that in the US becoming a signatory, he could be tried for crimes against humanity because of his role in the US anti-communist war in Vietnam. Clinton signed on, but then George W. Bush quickly withdrew in 2001.

October 14, 2023

by Amy Lerner

On the Question of Revolutionary Violence

“The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters.” – Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

May 8, 2023

by Justin Akers Chacón

The American Way of Fascism

We are living through a period of reemergence, rise, and surge of far right and fascist forces internationally. This includes reconstructed fascist political parties and movements from the past, alongside novel and neo-fascist formations taking shape inside capitalist states and electoral systems in the present.
The miasma of fascist regeneration emanates from within the cascading crises of the capitalist system, increasing in both depth and frequency over the last two decades. This crises include recurring episodes of recession and stagnation; imperialist and inter-imperial conflict and war; distress, weakening, and collapse of traditional bourgeois political parties; and the rising frequency and intensity of class struggle, authoritarianism, culminating in both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements.

May 30, 2022

by Atlee McFellin

The Revolutionary Passion of Those Who Suffer Most

Most people know who Karl Marx was, at least to one extent or another. Remarkably and, yet also unsurprisingly, it’s Jenny Westphalen (aka Jenny Marx) whose understanding of the world we desperately need right now. The sensuous materialism she briefly expressed in her letters to husband Karl illuminates a path of hopeful imminent communal revolution.

Roughly a year after they married and less than a month after the birth of their first child, Karl unfortunately left Jenny for Paris to cosplay as revolutionary less than three years after completing his doctoral dissertation in philosophy. Awaiting him was a meagerly paying job as an agitational socialist journalist. In June of 1844, less than a month after he left, she wrote to him that her “heart is yearning” and for even just “a few words to tell me that you are well and are longing for me a little.”

March 22, 2022

by Atlee McFellin

Left Conformity to the Settler Cult

In his book, Fascism: Theory and History, lawyer and historian David Renton outlined what he called “the anti-fascist wager.” It was a gamble the German left made against Hitler, the extent to which the social democratic (SPD) and communist (KPD) parties accurately perceived the uniquely dangerous threat the Nazi’s posed. This is like the gamble we make within settler Amerikkka against resurgent fascism today. Lives hang in the balance, which is why we start with the above quote from an April 2020 interview Noam Chomsky did with Medhi Hasan, who was then still at The Intercept.

July 6, 2021

by Héctor Rivera

The Path to Socialism Requires Border Abolition

Although the Biden administration has attempted to differentiate its immigration policies from those of Donald Trump, the end result has been the same: deportations, abuse and negligence of children jailed in detention centers and refugees turned away at the border. What’s more, Biden’s refusal to allow in the refugees at the border has contributed to horrific human rights abuses. As Reuters reported, nearly 3,300 migrants stranded in Mexico have been kidnapped, raped, trafficked or assaulted since Joe Biden took office on January 20.

September 30, 2020

by Héctor Reyes

Assimilate This! Is it possible or desirable to assimilate into a white supremacist, colonial settler, and imperialist nation?

Assimilation is this political plasticine that is frequently at the core of newspaper editorials, scapegoating by politicians, and ideological constructs of what it is to be a citizen of the United States of America (U.S.). As such, it refers to a myth-soaked narrative of the history of the U.S. as a nation; who is assumed to belong to it, or who can be allowed to earn a spot in that ark of glorified passengers known as “Americans.”
The term “American” sits at the center of this chauvinistic and exaggerated conception of who is a “red-blooded” inhabitant, and therefore a bona fide “citizen” of the U.S. It is a misguided and vainglorious term that robs the rest of the inhabitants of the Americas of such self-designation. For everyone born or naturalized in Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean

September 6, 2019

by Héctor Reyes

U.S. imperialism in the Americas: the function of colonialism and racism, and how they are different

If you live in the U.S. and are not indigenous to it, you live on stolen land.

Frequently, racism and colonialism are used as substitutes for each other. The technical term for this type of conflation is metonym, as Chickasaw Nation scholar Jodi A. Byrd asserts. I want to argue that the currently popular use of the terms racism and colonialism as interchangeable qualities among social justice activists, and even academics, is not only inappropriate, but that their frequent conflation is the result of more than simple expediency.

The failure to recognize that colonialism is structurally different than and not just another manifestation of racism does irreparable damage to the victims of colonialism. In the specific context of colonialism, failure to recognize colonialism as a continuing crime of erasure and dispossession, the liberal prescriptions of inclusion and civil rights exacerbate the harms of colonialism.