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    The Brockton High 1996 Basketball and Football Team, 20 Years Later

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    I left Brockton, Massachusetts in 1996 to study and play basketball in New York City. I lost touch with most of my old teammates. Last night we caught up at Owen O’Leary’s over some beers and burgers. It is amazing how things have shifted in 20 years! I jotted down some of my impressions, changing everyone’s name to protect their privacy.

    Hakeem was All-American. He was the type of athlete who could drink and smoke all night and then set national records the next morning. When he played against New Bedford, no one thought he was even going to show up for the game. The coach sent a car looking for him. The assistant found him just in time. Without even stretching, he ran for 409 yards and 6 touchdowns. With one foot in the streets and the other on the gridiron, he was always one step from the precipice. He was infamous for shutting down movie theaters. He would come in with his crew then make sure no one else got in unless they paid him for “a second ticket.” He was recruited to be Indiana University’s next great running back. He blew out his knee. A decade later he weighs 350 lbs. After years in the street, he became a foreclosure prevention expert.

    Big Glom was Portuguese American. He was one of few English speakers on the soccer team. Even the coach preferred to speak his native Kreolu Kabuverdianu. Glom translated when the referees had to give instructions to Coach Lopez. He did a famous bicycle kick against Durfee. As he did a back flip, he swung his powerful leg around and scored the winning goal. The Brockton faithful exploded into applause and mobbed the field, hoisting Big Glom up on their shoulders like he was Tom Brady. Excelling at soccer, Coach Colombo recruited Glom to be the football kicker. He served in the Peace Corps for four years in Peru. He is now an ESL teacher. The other day after an unfortunate shooting, he wrote on Facebook: “Deeply saddened. 14 years teaching, 6 students murdered.”

    Matt was the basketball center behind me. He became a guidance counselor at South Junior High. 6’9” and committed to his students’ progress, Matt is an impressive role model for the students.

    Joshua Johnson gravitated between the legal and illegal realm. He was the victim of a drive-by shooting on Route 24. Some local bandits shot up his car and his intestines to send a message. He has lived his life as a half-vegetable since.

    Bobby G was a 230 lb. fullback. Today he is a 460 lb. double fullback. He is still sturdy but not as strong. He became an actor and hustled on the side. They called him Goose because of his fondness for Grey Goose and other types of vodka.

    Pat and Mark never had good attitudes but they were definitely both great athletes. Ironically, they are coaches today of the teams we once played on. Dealing with 15 and 16-year-old angst, they probably have a different perspective on what they were like at that age.

    Wheeze was never an athlete per se; Wheeze was an enforcer. The coaches kept him around for pure intimidation. If there was a scuffle, he tackled the opposing players before a punch could even be thrown. He was kicked out of so many games, there was a debate if he could come back for the playoffs. To get pumped up before games he listened to Rage Against the Machine and went into a trance, bobbing his head up-and-down to his own rhythm. He was too crazy to feel fear. Today he is an artist. He paints and draws expressive canvases. Sometimes he disappears for a week on his bicycle, coming back when he feels he is ready to deal with people again. He lives by Pedro Pietri’s motto: “Sometimes you have to lose yourself for a while in order to find yourself.”

    Tyrone was another world-class athlete. He won dunk contests blindfolded. He was a quarterback at Syracuse. He was struggling for a while with unemployment. He entered the Investment Banking world before settling as a representative of a sports community. He said he has not moved to even shoot a hoop or go for a run in six years.

    Eastside Willie Nice is washed up. He has 12 kids that he recognizes and a few others that he says are “out and about.” Wearing a gold chain over a burnt-out frame, he is a shadow of his former self. He was famous for taking three point shots three or four steps behind the three-point line. Coach Victor Ortiz hated him but never hated the 30 points he poured in on any given night. Today he collects social security for a “back injury.” He uses social media to harass and gawk at women. Like his father, he became a pimp. He is proud two of his daughters became strippers. He pimps out one of his kids’ mothers to Central American laborers for $50. His twitter feed offers instructions about how to treat “hoes.” He was banned from Facebook. It made me wonder about the social and family forces that create misogynists.

    His older brother’s name was Z for Zaaron. He was the only other white kid that played basketball with us growing up. But with a name like Zaaron and his street demeanor, no one believed Z was white. If someone called him Larry Bird or the Hick from French Lick, it was an automatic fist fight. Calling him Bob Cousy was even worse. Zaaron had it rough. His mother was a bad addict who tried to kill him over and over. He must have had more lives than Fidel Castro. He set up booby traps in his house for would-be invaders. We weren’t sure if suffered from paranoia or Brocktonnoia. He flirted with drug-dealing lifestyle but taking into consideration how it destroyed his family, he backed off. He disappeared from public view and resurfaced in Alabama. He went to night classes and got his GED. He won a engineering scholarship to Michigan State, graduating with honors. He runs a computer company based out of Argentina and Guatemala.

    Moose was a Cape Verdean force to be reckoned with. He had the most massive biceps and natural afro anyone had ever seen. He had a unique hustle. He would take old bikes on their last leg and ride them to the suburbs. He then made his way back to Brockton on brand new ten speeds and mountain bikes. He flipped them before repeating the endeavor. Moose became a professional football player in Canada. Like most football careers, it only lasted a few years. He became a bouncer.

    Manny owns a barbershop. He was a point guard who was fleet of foot and a good conversationalist. He hailed from a long line of pretty boy point guards and players. They say his old man was in his 60’s and still cheated and had women on the side. Manny was on that very path.

    Paul came to Brockton as a hustler and left Brockton as a hustler. I’ll never forget when our coach Victor Ortiz sat him on the bench and slapped him in the middle of a game because he didn’t run the right play. That shocked and hurt all of us. We all said if that was us we would have done this and that but the truth was none of us did anything. Paul caught a murder one rap on Main St. He did federal time until he was deported to back to his neighborhood Atchadinha in Praia, Cape Verde.

    Conner fought if you looked at him wrong. Conner fought if he though you said something about him. Conner fought & fought & fought. Everyone just discarded him as crazy. But no coach complained about how tough he was on the football field. That was his only relief. Many of us judged him but did any of us know his story. When he was a toddler, his mother intentionally burnt him with a iron to punish him. When Conner was three, she made him eat out of a litter box. When she was in a bad mood, she wouldn’t let him leave his room to go the bathroom. She “played games,” making him drink his own urine and eat his own feces. Most of us can’t understand such unconscionable acts. But when you go deeper into her story, you realize this is what she went through a generation before when she was robbed of her childhood. It is so easy to point a finger at the beasts but what about the social bestiality that called them into existence? For 47 long years, Collin hated his mother. It was only last week that he took a step back and realized why he was always fighting. He started to go to different anonymous survivor groups so that he wouldn’t pass the savagery onto his three daughters.

    Edgar De Barros was the craziest and calmest of us all. I remember long conversations in the red caefteria about life and where we would be one day. I also remember pulling his legs back as he lunged into an office at the local YMCA trying to stab Sean Pearson over a disagreement on the basketball court. We had hid Sean in there to try to save his life. Edgar was not deterred. He punched and stabbed out a hole to climb through the window. We continued to pull him back in order to prevent a stabbing. This was 1995. But Edgar matured and started a family just as he had imagined he would in the red cafeteria. Just when things were settling into place, he died in a mountain-climbing accident with his father in their homeland of Cape Verde.

    Gary is a family man who works for an insurance company in Boston. He is an assistant coach of the Basketball team. I tried to make conversation but we couldn’t find much to talk about besides the Patriots and Celtics.

    Kevin had the potential to play pro. But his sophomore year as a shooting guard at Texas A&M he blew out his knee. Overnight, Kevin went from being a dreamer to a schemer. He transferred colleges after some academic problems and getting caught selling. 20 years later, stuck in Brockton, he was still bitter about his fortunes.

    Jeff ended up at Florida State and is a corporate banker with a home in Brookline, a suburb of Boston. Never much of his own man, his wife makes his decisions for him.

    Kendrick wanders through the Westgate projects getting high and talking to himself. He was supposed to take antipsychotic meds but preferred to self-medicate with weed.

    G-man was a natural born hustler who came up and blew it all. He was a cocaine supplier who got out of the game in time to cross over to mail-carrying. Today he is a family man who everyday resists the impulse to hit the streets again.

    Daquan — the goofiest of all of us — became a Brockton cop. After all the trash he talked about being in the streets and hating the police, it was tough to believe the career path he chose.

    Deshaun pledged to get as far away from Brockton as he could. He didn’t want his kids to see what he saw growing up in a cesspool of heroin and violence against women. He drives for UPS. He is still a great athlete. He moved to a town in New Hampshire that is .06% Black. Before he moved there with his family, it was 0% Black.

    These were the stories I could recover. Other former teammates disappeared from public view.

    It was great to see old faces and see how people have grown and evolved. I meditated on former friends who got stuck in their surroundings and never managed to move beyond them. There were some gung-ho, dog-eat-dog, hate-the-Iraqi, blame-and-hang-the-victim type comments floating around that I couldn’t really respond to at the reunion. Beyond that, it was good time.

    I wanted to go deeper at some points with the old crew about growing up and the challenges. Whose old man was around and whose had run away? Whose mother was strung out and whose was at home? Whose family had succumbed to addiction & violence and whose had escaped?

    So many questions. So few answers. I will pose at our next reunion in twenty years.

    And that was our night grabbing beers at Owen O’Leary’s.

    A Giant Social Paradox: China in 2017

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    To see China through western eyes is to misunderstand China. These are some of my impressions after visiting Beijing and Shanghai this past summer and studying China’s modern revolutionary history over the course of the past two decades as a member and leader of the U.S. socialist movement. I have provided links to critical background materials for those who wish to understand China in more depth.

    1. The 1949 Chinese Revolution was a monumental event not just for the masses of poor peasants and workers in China but throughout the world. One of the great event of the 20th century, the Chinese revolution raised hundreds of millions of people out of destitution. The last became first and the Western-backed old ruling class was sent scampering to Taiwan where they planned for the overthrow of the revolution. In the 1950’s, ruling circles in the West obsessed over “Who lost China?” Students of political science and revolution the world over have a responsibility to study the lessons and challenges of the Chinese Revolution.
    2. William Hinton’s Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village is a snapshot of how class relations shifted. Fanshen (the word means to turn over and start anew) documents how peasant democracy and a planned economy under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) played out in one village. The American farmer and writer captured the self-sacrificing spirit behind the CCP cadre who mobilized the sleeping giant, the Chinese peasantry: “I often thought what hardship it must be for such a woman to live the life of a spartan revolutionary cadre in the bleak North China countryside… Yet she seemed to pay no attention whatsoever to cold, fatigue, lice, fleas, coarse food, or the wooden planks that served as her bed. For her this was all a part of ‘going to the people’ who alone, once they were mobilized, could build the new China of which she dreamed.”
    3. Post-1949 Red China was a beacon of hope for all oppressed people. China’s foreign policy was one of principled internationalism supporting colonial people’s struggles for self-determination across the globe. Robin Kelly’s article Black like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution explores what China meant to oppressed people here in the belly of the beast.
    4. The 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution was “a revolution within the revolution.” 50 years later, the Cultural Revolution still strikes fear into the capitalist class. Mao’s orders to the everyday workers, peasants and students “to storm the headquarters” meant the temporary crushing of capitalist and bureaucratic forces that threatened to creep back into the driver’s seat of the Chinese state. The Cultural Revolution is a stern reminder that our class, the working-class, is not the only social class that can be repressed. Elite circles in the US have seized every opportunity, 50 years after the fact, to heap slander on this momentous chapter in world revolutionary history. Our responsibility is to rescue the legacy of the Cultural Revolution and set the record straight.
    5. From the perspective of the struggle against bureaucracy and class inequality, the Cultural Revolution was the high point of the Chinese Revolution. It was also exhausting and divisive. Struggle sessions, constant denunciations and mobilizations staved off internal enemies but the excesses and extremes resulted in the political pendulum swinging back to the right. The mysterious death of Lin Biao, the death of Chou En Lai, Mao Zedong’s development of Parkinson’s disease and the swift repression of his successors (the left-wing of the CCP, known by their detractors as the “Gang of Four”) represented the end of principled communist leadership and the consolidation of the capitalist roaders, personified in the leadership of Deng Xiaoping.
    6. The secret 1972 visit of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon—the genocidaires of Indochina, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, the Congo etc.—represented a sharp right turn in Chinese foreign policy and a knock-out blow to the vision of Soviet-Vietnamese-Chinese-Third world unity. The CCP leadership lost sight of the true enemy and succumbed to historic rivalries and chauvinism. These tensions became so pronounced that Vietnam invaded Cambodia in self-defense in 1979. China then unjustifiably invaded Vietnam. Instead of focusing on a common unity, China turned on a sister socialist state. The brunt of the blame must also fall upon the Soviets who chose accommodation with imperialism before international solidarity. China then beat the Soviets to the punch by shifting towards the US government. The Sino-Soviet split represented the complete collapse of the Marxist principle of internationalism. This is the largest blemish on Mao’s principled pedigree as a leading historical and global revolutionary spokesperson. Sam Marcy’s China: the struggle within and China: the suppression of the left, published by Worker’s World in the 1970’s and 1980’s, offers a profound evaluation of the struggles within the summits of Chinese leadership and their turn to the right.
    7. China’s reactionary foreign policy based on narrow nationalist interests played out in disastrous ways. As a result of seeing the Soviet Union as a “social imperialist” (an incorrect, non-Marxist formulation) and humanity’s number one enemy, China supported Pinochet in Chile, UNITA in Angola and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. China’s misleadership threw a purported 600 Maoist parties, who had been a tail to the CCP’s kite, into disarray around the world. With their center of gravity removed, the Maoist movement in the West crumbled and never recovered. Today in the Philipines, Nepal, India and beyond there is a powerful Maoist movement that controls large swaths of these countries.
    8. Like Mikhail Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping was a darling of the West. Still, despite opening up China to foreign capital, he did not move at the pace that imperialism insisted upon. The West worked with Deng Xiaoping but the moment there was an anti-CCP movement within China that US intelligence calculated could undermine and overthrow the revolution, the US latched on. The 1989 seven-week long Tiananmen Square protest represented this opportunity for the US; they saw a potential rallying point for the overthrow of a system of centralized planning. The west cried crocodile tears for what they presented as defenseless students massacred by CCP tanks. The reality on the ground was quite different; there was repression but there were also pitched battles resulting in the death of Red Army soldiers. The Tiananmen Square students held up Gorbachev and the Statue of Liberty as beacons of “democracy” and the “free market,” revealing their vision for China’s future.
    9. Understanding the US’s approach to regime change in Libya and Syria offers clarity on its strategy towards China. The US government engaged with Gaddafi and Assad even though the two leaders maintained a sense of economic nationalism combined with neoliberalism. As soon as Western intelligence detected a small protest movement within (including elements of al-Qaeda and ISIS) that they could back, they switched from a strategy of working with Pan-Arabists to one of regime change. This is how we should understand US foreign policy towards China today, one of toleration until the moment is ripe for regime change.
    10. Chinese foreign policy today is based on what is good for the Chinese state, not proletarian internationalism. China’s expansion, from Ecuador to Angola, represents an important counterweight to US capital. This interactive New York Times map offers a sense of the emergence of China as a global rival to the U.S. China still seeks surplus and profits but on preferential terms for exploited countries compared to its capitalist rivals. This is preferable for exploited countries seeking to emerge from under the yoke of a unipolar world. The bourgeois media constantly attacks China’s foreign investment because “China invests in countries with poor human rights records.” What a joke! Perched atop a pulpit of bones, the imperialists pretend to be guided by a moral compass as they squeeze profits from every corner of the earth.
    11. Ecuador is one example of left-leaning, anti-imperialist Bolivarian state weaning itself off of Western debt and dependency. China’s massive investments in Ecuador, Venezuela and pre-Macri Argentina ensured that Western banks could not completely isolate and suffocate the Bolivarian nations’ growth. Washington’s meddling in the region aims to thwart the Bolivarian alliance. Zimbabwe—Africa’s Venezuela so to speak—receives 82% of its foreign investment from China.
    12. It would also be naïve to overlook the predatory nature of China’s capital abroad. There are two centers of power within China—the CCP and independent Chinese businesses. When left uncontrolled abroad, Chinese capital has proven itself capable of functioning like imperialist capital. The short documentary China’s African Takeover examines Chinese mineral extraction in Zambia and the Congo, providing evidence of the reality that there is a bi-polar Chinese system.
    13. Red China no longer exists. China today is a mixed bag, a half-way house between capitalism and socialism. The state-steered market develops a domestic and foreign capital in a planned and proportionate way. Socialism with Chinese characteristics means that the government supervises the market and resource allocation. This remains unforgivable from the point of view of China’s detractors and would-be neo-colonizers.
    14. Trump’s demonization of China is dangerous and faulty. It is true that much of the West’s manufacturing has set up shop in China where they can pay a fraction of the wages they paid in Chicago, LA or Cleveland. What Trump fails to mention however in his jingoistic crusade is that the US multinationals are primarily to blame for the deindustrialization and unemployment that afflict the U.S. Chinese and US capital is entangled; large sections of the US capitalist class benefit from trade with and exploitation of the Chinese labor force. Trump’s promises to restore jobs to the Rust Belt cities will prove empty because for-profit corporations will not return to the US because of some loyalty to American workers. As more workers (especially white workers infected by centuries of racism who voted for Trump) wake up to this reality, there will be large opportunities to shift consciousness to the left across the US.
    15. To the extent that the U.S. fears China, they fear both a capitalist global competitor, specifically in Asia, and an economy that is still state planned. The extent to which the New York Times, the Washington Post and other US foreign policy establishment mouthpieces critique China and warn of the Chinese menace in the South China Sea reflects their active fear of China’s emergence as a rival economic pole. Because China retains a great degree of self-determination, the Chinese state incurs the wrath of the “free world’s” press which labels it “totalitarian” and “tyrannical.” Seen through a class lens, what these meaningless labels actually mean is that China still retains some sovereignty. As anti-imperialists, we in the Party for Socialism and Liberation, defend a Workers’ state’s right to defend itself from all forms of hostile foreign encroachment.
    16. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) true crime is that is it no push over. The CCP still retains an imprecise monopoly over foreign trade. They partially manage foreign capital and redirect it towards the good of China. When the US labels China a dictatorship or a one party system, what they really mean is the CCP is an arbiter of foreign capital. For example, the Chinese firewall, the blocking of Facebook, google etc., functions as a partial break on imperialist penetration. While the West haughtily accuses of China of being backward and isolated, its internet technology is often superior to that of its Western rivals. The Economist notes that many of the apps we take for granted today in the US, such as Uber or WhatsApp, were in fact inspired by Chinese innovation.
    17. Because Chinese leadership represents a new potential Pan-Asian unity and a new captain in the Pacific, the US seeks to surround China with hostile neighbors. Obama’s visit to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to sell them weapons for the first time since the US’s “loss” of Saigon and their attempt to use the Philippines as a proxy power (which is no longer realistic with the nationalist Roberto Duterte’s presidency) reflects this encirclement strategy. Front page news story of China’s aggression in the South China Sea over some islets is an attempt to justify what was to be Obama’s highly touted “pivot” towards Asia. However the empire is bogged down in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, and because there are such deep rifts in US governing circles (ie the intelligence “community” vs Trump), the US has been so far unable to fulfill its plan to isolate China.
    18. In all of the Pentagon’s reports, China figures as the US’s number one long term concern. John Pilger’s documentary The Coming War on China is helpful to understand who the true aggressor is in the Pacific. China is surrounded by some 600 US military bases. Just in Okinawa, Japan, the US has 50,000 troops, only 400 miles off of China’s coast. China desires peaceful coexistence so it can focus on economic development. Its military spending is defensive versus the US which maintains a vast network over 1,000 foreign bases across the globe. In response to Trump’s pledge to increase the US military budget by $54 billion, China vowed to decrease its military budget.
    19. China remains focused on economic development and open trade as Trump vacillates between isolationism and aggression. Xi Jinping is poised to play the role of the anti-Trump and guide China as the undisputed economic powerhouse of the Pacific. In an ironic historical twist, the CCP is presenting itself as the global defender of free trade. In response to Trump’s anti-globalist posture, Xi Jinping promised another $75 billion of Chinese investment in the pacific.
    20. Goldman Sachs estimates that the Chinese economy will catch up to the US by 2025 and by 2050 it will be twice its size. As the capitalist camp has experienced recessions and crisis, industrial production is booming in China. China’s industrial production is 150% higher than the U.S. As industrial production sank in the US and Japan in 2009, it rose 7.3% in China. With decades of centralized planning, under its belt China is poised to outrace its capitalist competitors whose economies are based on the anarchy of the market. For these and many other reasons, imperialism fears that “the 21st century is the Chinese century.”
    21. The economic basis exists for a transition back to a more egalitarian socialism in China. However, there does not appear to be a strong or vocal tendency within the 90 million-strong Chinese Communist Party that defends a dictatorship of the workers at the present moment. China has more industrial workers than all of the capitalist countries combined. There are big trade union struggles in China. Here within lies the kernel of a potential united workers’ fightback movement against a bureaucracy committed to “market socialism.”
    22. The rise of China’s mega metropolises has come at the expense of the peasantry. China has rural-urban inequality that mirrors the divide between what the mainstream media calls the “first world” and “third world.” In this sense, China’s interior is a massive exploited country with a line of New York Cities dotting its east coast. The reality is one of uneven development. Remittances, accounting for more than what the provinces themselves produce, keep many families in the countryside afloat.
    23. There is no unified peasantry like there was under the CCP during the epic-making Long March, the 1949 revolution and the 1966 Cultural Revolution. The peasantry has been engaged in sporadic local uprisings against the Chinese state but has no unified national approach to organizing. Many in the villages see themselves as exploited and neglected. Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of China’s Peasants is a thorough exploration of the class inequality that persists in today’s China. The book was only available outside of China or photocopied and sold in the street. Its authors Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao document bureaucratic abuses of the peasantry of Anhui province and the impunity enjoyed by low-level party opportunists. According to Guidi and Chuntao, many local CCP “cadre” are not guided by revolutionary principles but by careerism. The peasantry is overtaxed and there are ongoing mobilizations against local petty tyranny. The CCP claims to have investigated these allegations and partially addressed peasant concerns.
    24. The general superstructure of China today is devoid of revolutionary enthusiasm. In Cuba, the ruling class makes an active effort to create billboards, school curriculum, television programs and general propaganda to promote the cause of international solidarity and world revolution. In the Eastern Chinese sea board, there is nothing of the sort. Every corporation—from Versace to Starbucks to Kentucky Fried Chicken—enjoys free reign across China. To the extent that Cuba had to institute economic reforms in order to survive in a hostile capitalist world, the Cuban leadership correctly identified them as necessary retreats to survive in a hostile world. The Chinese leadership has adopted faux Marxist rhetoric to justify its capitalist moves. When Cuba found it necessary to introduce foxes into a chickens’ coop, it correctly labeled the foxes and chickens. The CCP confuses foxes and chickens, friends and enemies.
    25. China is a mammoth social paradox. There was a Hooters a few blocks away from the Communist Youth League office. A museum of propaganda is housed in the basement of tenements buildings where the curators and historians struggle to attract visitors. The state shifted away from the promotion of socialist consciousness in the 1970’s and maintains these museums as artifacts of a bygone era. A Brookings Institute study showed the mixed reactions the Chinese have to Donald Trump. While many Chinese predictably decried his saber-rattling against their country, there were large segments of the population who admired his “business acumen.” How telling in terms of general state of Chinese consciousness today! Various professors I met were flabbergasted at the indifference of many Chinese students, even in comparison to the average U.S. college students! One professor used the term “politically neutered” to describe them, explaining that “with a few exceptions if you ask them for their views on politics, they seem almost aggressively apathetic in their views.” This made the old guard apprehensive about the future of Chinese leadership.
    26. If Time Square is a monument to capitalism, the shopping centers of Beijing and Shanghai surpass this and are monuments to the future of capitalism. The latest Hurun Wealth Report shows that in 2015 the number of billionaires in China (596) surpassed that of America (537). The richest 1 percent of Chinese families control one-third of all Chinese household assets. This is a level of inequality similar to the U.S. Chan Koonchung’s novel The Fat Years is an underground parody of the lavish lifestyles and corruption that characterizes life at the top in China. Completely turning on Marxist principles, the CCP allows capitalists, billionaires and exploiters (all three terms are interchangeable here) to be members and leaders of the communist party. The CCP has also periodically hands out prison sentences, or even death sentences, to corrupt bureaucrats and capitalists for abusing their power, something unimaginable in the US. Recognizing the drastic effects of pollution and global warming, the CCP has also cut down on carbon emissions. These policies stand in stark contrast to the unrestrained capitalism that Trump is now overseeing.
    27. The US media has never hesitated to attack General Secretary Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping is the son of two long march veterans. His father was a vice-premier of the CCP in the Mao era. Two of the lynchpins of Xi’s leadership are a relentless campaign against the corruption that crept back into daily life with the introduction of foreign capital and a return to some of the PRC’s and the CCP’s founding ideals. This makes Xi a target of Western propaganda. The New York Review of Books’ article on Xi is one sample of a lengthy, biased attack on CCP leadership.
    28. Are there a sense of social harmony and a unity of purpose in China today? From my perspective as an outside observer, China stands in stark contrast to the US which is rife with social implosions i.e. the election of the divisive, semi-fascist Trump, school shootings, terrorist threats, racist police terror, state declared emergencies because of drug addiction, etc. In comparison to the divided US ruling class, the CCP plays the role of the one captain directing China in a unified direction. For example, 90% of China’s 1.3 billion plus people identify “racially” as Han. There is a long, complex history to Chinese identity formation but many Chinese does not identify their country as multiracial. Of course, China has its social ills and national divisions (Tibet, the Uighurs, internal migration and exploitation, environmental crises) but some might consider them mild compared to what the US is experiencing.
    29. The US is long accustomed to seeing itself as the center of the world. China’s development at break-neck speed shows the superiority of a centrally planned system over the free market. In this speech, Guardian columnist Martin Jacques urges a Western audience to humble themselves before the shifting global relations and points towards a Chinese future.
    30. Our party’s (the Party for Socialism and Liberation) book China: Revolution and Counterrevolution is a deeper consideration of how to understand China, and all of its vicissitudes and contradictions, as anti-imperialists and revolutionaries in the 21st century. Our position, as I have laid out in this document, critiques China’s accommodation with imperialism after 1972 but still defends China vis-à-vis imperialist aggression.

     

    The Hungarian Past and Present: Contested Ground

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    Over the course of the past few years, I have visited Prague’s “Museum of Communism,” Budapest’s “House of Terror” and Tirana’s “National History Museum” and “Bunk’Art 2.” But these were no museums; they were ideological forcing-houses.

    Here tourists and the next generation of Czechs, Hungarians and Albanians become more self-assured of their touristified, pro-capitalist, “end of history” view of the world in all of its infinite complexity.

    Whose ‘House of Terror?’

    I visited an ahistorical (as in anything but historically accurate) museum in Budapest’s bustling, vintage city center today. The “House of Terror” — as it is called — claims to recount Hungary’s history under Nazi and Soviet occupation.

    There was a two hour long tour — complete with haunted house music and imagery — through the “horrors of communism.” The fascist invasion is conflated with the Soviet arrival and defeat of the Nazis as though the two chapters formed one continuous tragic episode in Hungary’s history. How can the genocidal invaders be compared to Hungary’s liberators who acted out of self-defense to defeat the Nazis? turkey-greece-598

    Thousands of tourists lined up to cement their triumphalist view of Western exceptionalism and victory over the evil force of communism. There was a sensationalist presentation of a macabre interrogation room, replete with a collage of thousands of photos said to be “the victims of Soviet purges.” Interviews with survivors of gulags were played over and over.

    There is no question every social transformation has its excesses. The changes wrought on Hungarian society by the arrival of the Red Army were radical, as they dug up and overturned feudal and anti-Semitic roots. But only through the prism of the rich — fearing a second emboldening of the sidelined producing classes — would everything be presented as completely negative.

    There is much to consider. Not since the 1919 Hungarian Soviet, had the propertied classes’ monopoly over land and production been challenged. Before 1945, 40 families controlled the land while 3,000,000 peasants lived as landless serfs. It is the heirs of this class rule who today lament the earth-shattering changes spun in motion by WWII and the arrival of Soviet workers’ bayonets.

    Unresolved Questions 

    Hungary’s four-decades long existence as a workers’ state begs many critical inquiries. What were the balance of class forces on the ground in Budapest after the Red Army trounced the Nazis and their Hungarian counterparts and underlings? Did the Soviet Union act too severely in its intervention against the Hungarian counterrevolution in 1956? If the U.S. lost 1/6th of its entire population to a Nazi onslaught, would it not also seek to secure its borders against a rearmed fascist threat? Was it wrong to punish and in some cases execute Nazi leaders and collaborators who had helped to execute 400,000 Hungarian Jews? Were there bureaucratic deformities in Hungary and how did they manifest? What toll does bureaucratic degeneration take on society when weighed in comparison to the complete monopolization of a society’s wealth by a small coterie of expropriators?

    These are legitimate questions for critical-minded thinkers to take up. The science of historical materialism seeks to soberly weigh and evaluate every unique, dynamic situation. Sensationalism — the “museum’s” trademark — predictably shied away from these uncomfortable questions.

    The revolution was not completely home-grown. Nor was the Hungarian holocaust completely foreign inspired. The analyst must weigh the dialectical interaction between inner-Hungarian class forces and the Global Class War that was at the heart of post WWII international relations.

    ‘The End of History’

    When the tour was complete, tourist guides handed out brochures urging foreigners “to continue the fun” and join a pub crawl. The homeless panhandlers looked on passively, pondering what stage of history will take them into consideration. turkey-greece-611

    Under the Hungarian Workers’ State, private property was nationalized. Everyday people benefited from socio-economic rights, such as the right to a home, a job and medical care. A well-balanced view of post WWII Hungary must weigh both the challenges and the gains of the expropriation of the expropriators. Failure to understand this context leads to a lazy perpetuation of the anti-communist myth of “the evil Soviet empire.”

    Today, Hungary is again grappling with the return of fascism —both in crypto form under its leader Viktor Orban, and with the growth of outright fascist groups such as Jobbik (Movement for a Better Hungary). The nation’s living standards are atrocious and the ruling sectors have taken advantage of this to blame refugees and promote xenophobia.

    There is a direct link between the past and present. The class that controls the present controls the past in hopes of perpetuating their control long into the future.

    This “museum” deletes facts and ignores context because its designers arrogantly profess “the end of history.” The reign of AT&T, British Petroleum and Kentucky Fried Chicken is presented as the culmination of every Eastern European fantasy and is not to be questioned. They fear the possibility of Hungarian children learning to dream beyond free markets, free trade and free-dumb.

    History has only begun to breathe and the reign of the silenced is forthcoming. Every dog has his day. Then, and only then, will such propaganda, masquerading as history, take its rightful place in the scrap heap of history. Until then, Hungary’ rulers should be honest and call this museum what it is, Budapest’s House of Anti-Dialectics.

    Stirrings in Vienna

    0

    Five centuries ago, Austrian laborers built the 1,411 room Schönbrunn palace to house “the royal family,” the Hapsburgs. Today, in our world, there are still emperors and plebeians; they have just been assigned new names.

    Today’s global order of refugees and right-wingers, the refused and the ravagers, the confined and the benighted is but a continuation of the epoch of empire. OXFAM (Oxford Committee for Famine Relief) released a study this year revealing that 62 individual billionaires now own as much wealth as 3.6 billion people, or half of humanity.

    The social implosions and explosions are pending. Revolutionaries prepare for the eventuality of a class showdown, redirecting both destructive and constructive energies into the channels that will bring peace to future generations. What we are living today is not peace; it is its diametrical opposite; greed.

    Mark our words: the day will soon come when the Schönbrunn palace is reopened to house the refugees of imperialist-fueled wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and beyond. The uprooted families will find a home here until they can return peacefully to their homelands and reparations can be restored to tune of billions of dollars. Reparations are merely the returning of what was stolen over the course of centuries from Africa, the Arab world and the rest of the “third world” to fund empires of a bygone past and build decrepit, soulless artifacts — such as the Schönbrunn palace.

    In Search of White Gold (Part III.)

    7

    “Shuh No one Knows”

    Every morning we took our places on an assembly line to harvest “white gold.”  We all played our role on the conveyor belt — sifting, cleaning, and mixing the golden crop — though it was never clear when cryptic healing formula would be ready.

    The nutritional sorcerer claimed we were harvesting hundreds of thousands of dollars of monotonic gold that he discovered in the Rocky Mountains.  According to Jubb’s research, this compilation of small atom clusters consisted of ruthenium, copper, iridium and other elements that penetrated and rejuvenated the cell in a revolutionary way.  White gold was said to repair the DNA like no other mineral concoction.  There was a whispering campaign around the night fires to reassure the infidels that this treasure chest would soon bring us all great wealth.  It seemed strategic for my co-conspirators to seek part-time work in the meantime, before we cashed in on our pots of white gold.

    One Kitchen, One Ego

    The owners of the home were the well-to-do, old money Arizona families, the Schners and the Shnedleys.  They established strict rules about the rental, unsuspecting that a mad scientist was opening their property up to a commune of rutabaga fermenters and urine drinkers.  Jubb’s wandering family lived under the threat of being discovered and kicked out by the police at any moment. img_0674

    Though he had set up shop on rented property, with someone else’s backing, Jubb called all the shots.  To venture outside of his routine brought consequences.  When the patriarch was not in the kitchen, Sitting Moose made cherry electrolyte lemonade with the Vitamix.  The Life Foods chief stormed into the kitchen and yanked the blender out of his hand, insisting “Sitting Moose: electrolyte lemonade is not sustainable for the entire collective.”

    Nothing was transparent at our fort.  We tasted raw strawberry cheese cakes, quinoa lasagnas, quinergy pizzas, probiotic beverages, white gold and evacuees (a grounded power of root crops and vegetables) but we never learned what went into these elaborate concoctions.  He was careful to protect his exact measurements and concoctions, remaining forever paranoid that someone else might master his potions.  I picked up the tidbits that I could but so much of what we ate remained shrouded in secrecy.  After the fact, we learned that our cheeses were cultured with the most lively Life Food of them all, breast milk.  But we never learned how to culture and integrate the healthy enzymes into the almond and pumpkin seed-based cheeses.  We feasted on plates that cost $50 at one of Manhattan’s two or three raw food restaurants. But no recipe was ever written.  Why was Dr. Jubb maintaining a monopoly over the healing secrets?

    There was only one meal, dinner.  It was served any time between 9 pm and midnight. Jubb then served an extravagant desert, such as coconut-based ice cream, peach cobbler or blackberry strudel.  Sitting Moose and Raining Dance infamously woke up early to raid the refrigerator and stock up on the previous night’s left overs.  This was the only hour they could sneak into the kitchen unchaperoned.

    We lived off of 100% Life Foods at the campsite.  No other food was tolerated.

    ‘Maybe we are a Cult’

    We rarely adventured off of the land unless the local healing community or University of Arizona organized public events for the good doctor to speak at.  We were his private army of Life Food elves.  With our name tags and varying commands of the Life Foods gospel, we were at his beck and call.  We passed out samples of Brazil nut milk, life dogs, and fermented drinks.  As we signed people up for consultations, cleanses and orders, I realized there would never be any follow up.  There was no centralism nor professionalism.  There was only the promise of now.

    Jubb was a charismatic, humorous speaker with a unique dominion of the English language.  His invention of words and new grammatical rules was limitless, eloquently incorporating them into sentences that had a life of their own.  Here before us in the flesh was a born entertainer.  He was on this earth to take the stage.

    Upon cleaning up after dinner we sat around a table under the stars posing questions about quantum physics and consciousness, cosmic numerology, social anthropology, & the proper mechanics of exercise.  We listened to his whirlwind responses that navigated every topic under the sun.  Is there a book he has not read?  Is there a question he has not pondered?

    His response took us to Atlantis, Sri Lanka, Sweden and beyond.  Fifteen minutes later, he took a puff on his peace pipe, having sown more confusion and curiosity than clarity.  When he took his habitual puff, Sea of Sands chimed in with two sentences to address the question the twenty year-old had originally posed about what it means to derive energy, survive and thrive off of the Amazonian basin, precluding the need to consume food.   Happy Face claimed he had survived off of the land for two years without eating.  A camera crew and news network tracked his journey.  Sun gazing afforded him the energy he needed to perform exercises that built up his muscles.  Such elaborate tales kept the jaws of the clan members agape, hungry for more.

    Lost in the Desert

    Each personage has their own spiritual outlook, their own eccentricities and their own imbalance.  Some people were open to reason.  Others were closed and accepted every teaching as unchallengeable.  There were those who realized that they were contradictory individuals and sought to come to terms with that.  Others had no interest in plunging deeper into their  shortcomings.  The latter were a dangerous breed.  They spewed out lesson after lesson but when it came time to travel deeper into their own story, how quickly their defense mechanisms surfaced!  It was a waste of breath to engage souls who were not open to growth.  These were not breatharians.  These were exhalarians, blocked off from inhaling growth and healing.

    There were Jubb prodigies who regurgitated his words and mimicked his style.  This parroting of Jubb’s teachings and mimicking of his eccentricities presented an awkward picture to outsiders.  Others learned not to lose sight of the teachings because of the all too human flaws of the teacher.

    Even when Jubb was in the big house, Fire Glacier remained loyal to the holy Life Foods gospel.  He had not reached out to his family in eight months.  An older companion challenged Fire Glacier: “Young Blood: your messiah sleeps in the big house.  You don’t have to talk like that to us out here in the forests.  Think for yourself.  Take it all in but remember who you are too.”  The elder nutritionist encouraged him to reach out to his family back east in Pennsylvania, who he had become estranged from for the past year.  How worried they must have been, knowing only that their son had hitchhiked west to join a raw foods commune.

    The all-knowing Jubb claimed that the organic tobacco and weed were good for the lungs.  Yet those who followed his ways remained short of breath in the canyons.  The youth-enhancing lifestyle that was said to produce real life Benjamin Buttons involved no physical activity.  Jubb set the pace and if something was out of whack, he just explained it away as part of eco-sterilization and other incomprehensible theories.  He put fourth convoluted concepts that no one dared challenge so as not to confront the imbalance of it all.  The great orators, spokespeople and proselytizers did not believe that listening was also a great skill.

    Disharmony

    Spectral Gaze and Humble Elk made a beautiful couple but they were constantly at each other’s throats. Because Spectral Gaze was Filipina from Hawai’i and Elk was Puerto Rican, they made matching t-shirts for their children that said “Hawai’a-Philirican and Proud.”

    The past four years were a series of ebbs and flows for the Hawai’a-Philirican family.  They emitted a complete sense of resentment and tension.  Anyone in their presence could feel the disconnect.  They had a four year old girl, Purple Tree, a three year old boy, Fury Vision and a newborn boy, Selfless.

    Spectral Gaze was aloof and detached.  Her trauma and mental illness hid behind her escapes; she only responded to life when she successfully “bummed” marijuana off someone.  Even then, the couple argued over the joint and how much should be allocated to who.  Her silence — pregnant with self-hatred — threatened to explode and hurt someone.  Would she hurt one of her children but make it look involuntary?  Spectral Gaze reminded us that hurt people take their pain out on those who are closest to them and most vulnerable.

    For over a year, the couple bounced from home to home. They took advantage of unsuspecting families who took them in with their three beautiful children for a weekend that quickly turned into a month.  The couple launched into arguments blaming one another for their plight.  When questioned by their hosts about when they were leaving and why they do not pursue work opportunities, they lamely repeated: “This is what the universe has given us.”

    Toxic Yoga

    Sprawling, open fields were nestled in between awesome, fire-orange canyons of jagged geometrical proportions.  This was the land of the grazer, the adventurer and the hunter of destiny.

    Humble Elk and I descended into the lush verdant valley for shaman training.  Barefoot and bare-chested, only Humble Elk’s arrogance separated him from the earth.  He swore he had everything figured out.  We began two separate yoga practices.  We exchanged light banter as we breathed through different poses.img_0627

    In reverse warrior position, I inquired about his plan for his family.  Launching into a diatribe that blamed everyone else for their plight, his voice pierced the mountains.  Instead of reflecting on a logical plan, his penned-up fury against his partner, Spectral Gaze, bellowed out across the valley: “How can she reason?  She doesn’t even poop!  Compact fecal matter!  Compact fecal matter!  That is the problem!  Until she poops, we’ll never understand one another!”

    The root causes of a relationship, in dire straits, was reduced to a lack of bowel movements.

    Gobsacked, I nearly fell out of the downward dog I had cartwheeled into. This would have been hysterical were our dear healer not completely sincere in his denunciations of his non-pooping companion.  Convinced I could never make headway before his one-dimensional stubbornness, I retreated back into my breath as he continued his ranting.  I left him alone with the breathtaking mountain landscape, capable of absorbing his swarming anger better than I was.

    Banking Reform

    Dr. Jubb resented when people focused solely on the nutritional aspects of his teachings.  Recently, he put forth the theory that all social ills were rooted in the banking system.  In a hushed, conspiratorial tone the shaman emerged from the darkness, passionately pledging war on the banksters: “Mate: We will not rest until the people reclaim the money supply!”  As his tone intensified, the audience tuned in to the latest pronouncements on the pending appropriation of the banking industry.  Estranged from reality, the communards fervently swore to topple the Rothschilds and their banker cliques.  Here assembled before my eyes was a revolutionary army like no other I had ever seen.

    At any moment, the chief spiraled off onto sweeping tangents, pledging to lead a moratorium against the bankers that would be the basis for a social revolution.  “All we have to do is check the box for a moratorium.  It is a box, mate. Check check.”  I looked around at the burnt-out crew, sipping their eighth tea of the day and puffing on their ninth joint.  I was worried about humanity’s fate if it was in their hands.  Still, Jubb’s inflections and eyes bedazzled the audience.  Even if you knew it to be pure hullabaloo, his emotions drew you in as they rose and contracted.

    The teacher had a volatile side as well.  I committed a blunder one night.  Through another one of Jubb’s students, I learned that a couple in Idaho sold 60 pound tubs of raw honey for $189.  Because two pounds of unheated honey sold for $30 dollars, buying in bulk made sense.  Salmon Valley honey had been my supplier for the past few years.  I shared this brilliant deal and passed the information along to others.   I received an ear full from Jubb for divulging the secret of the treasure chest of unrefined honey.  Jubb insisted that they were his exclusive contacts, not to be shared with anybody.  He denounced Whirlwind and I for daring to pass along “his contacts.”  “Mate you must tell Whirlwind to never give out those contacts. That is nooooot correct mate. I do not expect this to happen again.”  Incandescent from the anger, he lectured all of us on respecting his command over the Life Foods mothership.

    The Human Connection

    Paranoia and inner-compound arguments were common.  The Life Foods movement never grew beyond a few dozen followers spread out across the globe because there was only room for one messiah.  Other self-anointed saviors emerged to set up their own kingdoms.  The unwritten rule was one massive ego per encampment.

    I stayed clear of any disagreement or confrontation, focusing on the human connections that united us all.  I recognized that this was not a temporary, entertaining escapade for everyone.  I listened to everyone, drew out their story and offered insights on how to go deeper into forgiveness, healing and self-love, with the ultimate aim of rising up on the system that was responsible for our suffering.  I questioned the worth of individual cleansing if it was disconnected from the healing of the unhealthy, absurd society we lived in.  The point was not to withdraw permanently, like vegan hermits into the mountains, but to remain within the insidiousness, sharing Life Foods healing so that others could take power back over their health.  Until the nutritional world was connected to the broader mission of overthrowing oppression and seizing power, who did it serve?

    I trusted that material reality would prove to be a superior hypnotist and guide Jubb’s troops away from dead-end conspiracy tales towards the only denouement that can ever liberate us all from our common foe — struggle, class struggle.

    He Never Stopped Teaching

    As soon as Dr. Jubb reached for his pipe, I had my questions ready: “How do we understand schizophrenia and heal it?”  “Tell us about autism”  “Is there any cancer we cannot heal?”  The wilder the question I posed, the more unpredictable the response it elicited.  Dr. Jubb’s pedigree and knowledge were inspiring.  It was bedeviling to gather at his side for hours and only understand a fraction of the words I was enmeshed in.

    The roving, playful medicine man had no interest in stability.  Nature was his element. He was in Nebraska one week, and then suddenly hitching a ride off to the Rocky Mountains.  He made a brief appearance in Tasmania until he made an impromptu trip to set up shop in Mexico or Malaysia.  He lived on the run.  He hid out and reappeared.  Some of the forward-thinking campers urged him to open a bank account.  He refused.  He advised his followers not to pay taxes or work.  He lectured on common law and how to outsmart the courts.  He designed documents to win land grants from the government. But he, who would lead us all over the horizon towards a new human epoch, did not have his own house in order.  He, who charged exorbitant prices for all of his products, did not have a dime to his name.

    Was this Spiritual Materialism?  What working-class person could spend hundreds of dollars on cleansing products?  He was uncompromising about his prices but only sold an occasional jar of almond milk or probiotic rutabaga.  Giving away his delicious recipes in the course of the extravagant collective dinners and lectures he hosted, the control freak was at the same time a sentient, giving being.

    We were all part of Something Special

    It was unpredictable who might make an appearance at the Eagle campsite.  We hosted a full spectrum of visitors — leading scientists, a local medicine man, actors among them Woody Harrelson, the model Donna Karan, music producers, a contestant for Mr. Universe and patients recovering from cancer or Lyme disease.  Hip hop performers from Wu Tang Clan and other rap groups dropped in for a visit, looking for their own healing and answers.  That was the fun of it all.  You never knew who would wander in over the canyons next.

    I asked Jubb to reveal the names of some of his past clients.  He retorted: “Mate do you think this is about me mentioning the prime ministers, Olympic athletes and kings that I have worked with?  You want me to drop names? That is not who I am mate.”

    Despite his inner-contradictions, from which none of us are free, David Jubb was a warm, kind, generous, sweet man.  I felt his love for all of us in his gentle words and actions.  He took care to integrate everyone into his Life Food operations.  One minute he read us a poem before shifting to pick up his drum and flute or retrieving a bottle of Black Gold and teaching us how to massage one another’s’ injuries.  There was never a dull moment.

    Jubb paid attention to everyone and met them where they were at.  The partially literate Sitting Moose became his video man.  He beamed with pride after putting together a video clip about sun-dried sea salt and it’s functioning within the cell.  I asked Sitting Moose where he was a few months ago and how he felt now.  His response was: “A year ago I was fresh out of prison and addicted to Crystal Meth.  Now? Well, fuck I’m bored and freaked out by all the hippies but I know that I am onto to something worth checking out.  Since I was homeless and hungry, I said what the fuck!”

    A unifier, Jubb had a way of bringing us all together.  Reading people’s energy and bodies like a book, he popped up out of his chair mid-sentence and attended to someone’s aching injury.  A story teller of the first sort, did he separate fact from fiction?  One dawn, as the dew spread across the front lawn, the omniscient chief described how Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky were Brooklyn school boys the Rothschilds had whisked into St. Petersburg in order to keep Russia in the hands of the bankers.  As a student of Russian history, I wondered if I should laugh or if he sincerely believed his own wild tales?  He was dead serious. Had the years of hallucinogenic experimentation altered his mind?

    We huddled around the camp fire one last night.  Jubb’s drum transported us back to the ancestral Lakota homeland.  It felt like I was back at my aunt and uncle’s house where my family congregates to celebrate Christmas.  There was a deep sense of community and an overpowering feeling of love and solidarity.  I had to leave and return to my son, my classroom, my home and my reality; it was tough to pull away from this parallel universe.

    One month after my departure, the Schners and the Shnedleys, the old German scions of wealth who owned the property, contacted the state police, reporting that a druggie commune had squatted on one of their properties. The police descended on The Return to the Eagles’ Nest and the eviction began shortly after. Once again the road called. Jubb and his faithful followers departed into the night. Where would the shaman set up his next encampment?

    In Search of White Gold (Part II.)

    10

    The Mystique

    Exactly who was I was searching for a few hours north of 114 degree Phoenix?

    Some looked upon Dr. David Jubb as visionary; others wondered if he was a madman.

    Jubb was a shaman in the Toltec tradition.  He came of age along the untouched, pristine shores of Tasmania. He earned a PhD as a neuro-behavioral physiologist at NYU. He was a pioneering thinker on agrarianism, colloidal biology, ancient civilizations, futuristic dwellings, non-surgical removal of neo-plasm (cancer) and other diverse topics.  His books Secrets of an Alkaline Body and The Lifefoods Recipe Book, among others, are brilliant reads. Internationally recognized as a pioneering microscopist, hematologist, cytologist, naturalist and linguist, Jubb has two post-doctoral degrees, deepening what is known about the digestion of different foods at the cellular level.img_0620

    Hushed whispers circulated the fireside, embellishing the legend. Dr. Jubb, or Happy Face as he was known in the healing world, worked out in in 177 degree saunas. He had a 26 inch waste. He trained princes and prime ministers. Mr. Universe came to study in his kitchen. He practiced breatherianism for a year in Brazil, consuming nothing but water and lemons. Buried deep in the Amazonian basin, deriving energy purely from sun-gazing and his own breath, the immortal Pacific Islander put on ten pounds over the course of months. He trained Brad Pitt for Fight Club. After completing his gall-bladder and liver cleanses, participants discarded their eye-glasses; their vision was corrected. When he discovered he had cancer, he trekked across Eastern Africa, surviving off only his own liquids. His “breakfast of champions” consisted only of urine therapy and the contents of his pipe. He led ayahuaska retreats in northern Mexico. The real-life, most-interesting-man-in-the-world, was an enigma.

    Cloud Two Children — of the Cree and Lakota people—adopted Dr. Jubb and spiritually mentored him.  The Cree split away from the Seminole nation because they refused to stay on the reservations assigned to them by the U.S. government and continued to break away west in search of freedom to practice their ancient ways.  Dr. Jubb’s spiritual journey brought him to live among the maroon nation.  It was a point of contention among the native elders that a person from outside the lineage of Crazy Horse and Two Feathers — two of the ancestral leaders of the nation — deemed him a spiritual son of the Cree. Cloud Two Children re-baptized him, “Happy Face.”

    ‘We are not a Cult!’

    A wide spectrum of personalities flocked to Jubb in search of themselves.

    Each character in the compound — Dancing Swan, Medicine Brook, Raining Dance, Firefly, Dream Walker, Healing Stream — had their own story.  No one addressed anyone else by their legal name.  According to Jubb, in the Toltec tradition, the healer bestowed names upon everyone in the community that captured a certain irony about their characters.  It was a bluff of sorts or what Dr. Jubb called “the secret of the trance.”  I wondered if this was a harmless practice or cultural appropriation.img_0676

    Here at the Eagle camp, no one knew my real name.  After two weeks of my presence, Jubb grabbed my hands and squeezed his eyes shut.  He pressed his temple to my heart. In the thirty-sixth year of my life, he re-baptized me; my name was Lame Wolf.

    Dancing Swan

    At twenty, she was the oldest of eight sisters who grew up in Columbus, Ohio. Her mother became a neglectful pain pill addict and drowned one of her sisters.  Landing in foster care, Dancing Swan was filled with resentment. Abandoning Ohio, she headed west, eventually finding room and board with an alcoholic friend.  Searching for a permanent escape, Dancing Swan had grown morbidly obese and began chain smoking. She had never known a home but had never ceased to search for one. The non-judgmental affection and acceptance she received at the Eagle’s Nest ensured her loyalty to the outcast community.

    Fire Glacier

    At a suburban New Hampshire high school, Fire Glacier dabbled with marijuana, coke, mollies and pain pills.  Spiraling out of control, by nineteen, he was a full-fledged heroin addict.  After three of his childhood friends overdosed, Glacier landed in rehabilitation.  Seeing the writing on the wall, he kicked the drugs cold turkey and then hit the road in a hippie Volkswagen van with four companions he met online. They vowed to only drink freshly made juice on the open road.  After a year of liquefied cleansing and traversing the American wilderness, Glacier met some like-minded youth in Nebraska who were students of Jubb.  The unlikely clan hopped in the graffiti-decorated van until they tracked down Jubb.  Fire Glacier never looked back.  He has been following the Life Foods lifestyle for six months.

    Sitting Moose

    Standing an intimidating 6’3”, 230 lbs. of steel and anger, Sitting Moose’s social background turned him into a tough, ruthless man-child.  Deprived of a childhood in Portland, Oregon, he learned what it meant to be a man when he was eight years old.  Bastardized when the state locked up his parents, his two older brothers—lieutenants in a white supremacist motorcycle gang, Hitler’s Helpers—raised him.  The Trump-admirers tried to hire Sitting Moose as one of their enforcers but he turned them down because, in his words, “I hate everybody equally.”  The 20-year-old wanderer was not invested in the Eagle’s Nest but rather saw the camp site as a place to lay low until the smoke cleared from the crimes he had committed.img_0641

    At twenty years old, Sitting Moose had lived and suffered more than most adults three times his age.  He was an underground cage fighter on the reservations of Oklahoma.  He followed his beloved older brother, Rocko’s footsteps until the Mexican Mafia disappeared him.  He went on the run.  Imprisoned for over three years in Oregon for attempted murder, his young age saved him from a lifetime prison sentence. Some days he disappeared for hours without alerting anyone, hitchhiking fourteen miles into Sedona to gobble down McDonalds.

    I laid down on the ground alongside Sitting Moose in the darkness of the forest, trying to drift off to sleep to the rumblings of javelinas. Just as I closed my eyes the first night, he said “Oh yo Wolf, you hear that noise?  Those are wild pigs looking for food. All right good night dude.” I didn’t sleep a wink that night.

    Sea of Sandsimg_0674

    Sea of Sands was Chowdury Bikram’s assistant for ten years.  Uneasy because of the megalomania of the founder of Bikram Yoga, she teamed up with Jubb in Eastern Africa.  She was the only communard who did not smoke marijuana and tobacco. As the chief organizer of The Return to the Eagle’s Nest, she set the tempo for the rest of the camp.    She was in charge of Dr. Jubb’s writings, videos and speaking engagements.  Without her, nothing moved and the camp descended into hippie hedonism.  She brought class to an otherwise chaotic, dysfunctional scene.  When several Lifefoodarians lost their minds, she supported them.  A mother figure, Sea of Sands had one foot in Jubb’s world, the other in reality.  She shadowed the larger-than-life alchemist in the kitchen, documenting his alkaline and colloid secrets in hopes of helping him organize the next Life Foods recipe book.  Seeing Sea of Sands as a successful and stable figure, some observers wondered why she offered her talents to the “burnt-out” scene.

    Healing Stream

    An enemy of bathing, his name did not fit his persona.  Healing Stream’s oversized shorts fell beneath his beltline.  He cut his hair like “his messiah,” Jubb, shaving his hair on the side but leaving a patch of hair on the top that he put in a ponytail.  A young wanna-be wizard, Healing Stream broke out of his mother’s basement and found his new home in Sedona.  I dubbed him Polluted Stream and Stinky Bear for obvious reasons.  If anyone wanted to make the case that we were being brainwashed and cultish, Healing Stream seemed to confirm this argument.  His robotic like behavior and regurgitation of Jubb’s lessons gave birth to many rumors.

    Healing Stream’s strength was that he was a junior mad scientist.  Brilliant, he was the only Life Foods disciple who grasped the intricate teachings and made them intelligible to the rest of us.  This was very helpful.  Although he came across as a know-it-all and regarded himself as Jubb’s personal assistant, when he spoke to others alone, he let his guard down.  He was just another young man searching for himself.  When his arrogance was in retreat, his humanity emerged.

    Rainey Toad

    This 62-year-old woman was a raw foodist who left Arkansas to hit the hippie trail.   In the 1960’s, she trained under Ann Wigmore, the mother of living foods.  In order to heal from Lyme disease, she invested $5,000 to contract Jubb’s services and establish the Eagle’s Nest.  At times Rainey Toad was the sweetest, little grandma.  In other moments, when she ran out of her magic pipe, she turned into Grumpy Toad. Holding the keys to the big house, she decided who could take a shower inside the home and who could not.  Even in our parallel universe, money regulated human relationships.

    Doc Precise

    Forced to commute two hours uptown to school because of the danger in his neighborhood, Doc Precise wasn’t supposed to leave his block in South Jamaica, Queens, never mind the state of New York.  Coming of age a few blocks away from 50 Cent, the young Trinidadian, Doc Precise, shattered some teeth and had his share of teeth shattered.  Jubb’s one-time weed supplier, emerged as a Life Foods apprentice.  The antithesis of a hippie, he proletarianized Life Foods like no one else.  With the flare of a hip hop artist and a performance poet, he explicated the chemistry of fruitarianism and popularized the lifestyle.  Eloquent and dynamic, like Sea of Streams, he lent credibility to a clandestine lifestyle, guiding others through the reversal of heart disease, not through pseudoscience but through hard work.  While others lost their minds and flew the coup, Doc Precise remained calm and consistent.  As tempests of gossip and intrigue consumed others, Doc P didn’t flinch.  His catch phrase, whenever someone left the compound and goodbyes were exchanged, was “Peace Brethren, Catch you in the whirlwind.”

    Raining Dance

    Raining Dance was from 129th street in Harlem.  Many of his contemporaries and siblings fell victim to the concrete jungle.  He was raised to be nutritionally conscious by a single father.  By his mid-20’s he became a loyal follower of Dr. Jubb. One Saturday, Raining Dance was walking down 116th with a massive backpack that contained his Vitamix and glass jars of Life Water, fizzy shots and home-fermented kombucha.[1] The police stopped him, frisked him and handcuffed him for no reason.  Because of his training in Jeet Kune Do — the martial art form made famous by Bruce Lee — they could not wrestle him to the ground.  The police officer’s brutality was caught on camera and uploaded to social media for the world to witness.  For a breathless two minutes, seven police jostled and beat a man whose hands were handcuffed behind his massive backpack. Ten officers then manhandled him as he laid face down in the concrete.  This was the same man who taught my nine-year-old son to offer a cucumber up to any police officer who ever mistreated him.  He fled New York to avoid the dreadful bureaucracy of a police summons, court and a warrant.  He never looked back.  He took his life foods expertise on the road.  With razor-like exactitude, he talked people through every detail of cellular rejuvenation and liver flushes.  He was to Jubb what Malcolm was to Elijah Mohammed.

    A drifter, he had no plan for his four young children, his partner and his mother.  They lived on the road for the past three years, camping out across the Midwest and Southwest, escaping reality and ACS (the Agency of Child Services).

    At the End of the Rainbow

    This is a partial portrait of our community.  Others came and went.  Empty Nest, Rainbow Hawk, Proud Turtle, Light Frog and others appeared out of the night, searching amidst the bewildering galaxies. The Eagles’ Nest attracted young women and men with dreams who found themselves stuck, chasing illusions. There were common threads of family trauma and drug abuse that ran through the stories.  Staying up to smoke organic tobacco and marijuana, until the sun rose, they woke up in the early afternoon. Perplexed by their own material reality, Jubb’s followers saw the millennial leader as their escape. Jubb was their messiah and he promised everyone that the Eagles’ Nest was sitting atop half a million dollars of a mysterious mineral known as white gold.

    [1] Life Water is 8 ounces of structured water mixed with baking soda, Epson salt, castor oil, MSM, and apple cider vinegar. The breakfast of champions!

    In Search of White Gold (Part I.)

    14

    In the summer of 2014, the nomadic Tasmanian shaman, Dr. David Jubb set up a mobile healing camp at the foot of Arizona’s picturesque canyons, which he named “The Return to the Eagles’ Nest.”  Jubb is the designer of a nutritional lifestyle — Life Foods — that had transformed my life and extended my youth by years.  I drifted across the United States to join the clan of herbivorous desert nomads.  In the upcoming weeks, I will be publishing installments of what I lived that magical Arizona summer, alongside the founder of Life Foods healing.  In my account, I changed the names and certain details about the encampment to protect the privacy of the individuals I camped out with in Sedona.

    Chasing the Enigma

    I had been following Jubb for years, watching and studying his zany, comical ramblings on infinite topics revolving around natural living.  A perplexing figure — reminiscent of the Toltec shaman Don Juan — I partially owed my reinvention to Dr. David Jubb.[1]  His teachings helped set my nutritional freedom in motion.  In 2009, one of Jubb’s mentees, Thomas the Cleanser, coached me through my own destarchification.  I learned to prepare and consume natural foods based on organic fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds.  Within days, I felt lighter and sharper than I had in years.

    Lured by this mysterious aura, Life Foods students traversed oceans and continents to camp out with Jubb in the mountains of Sweden, the plains of South Africa, the reservations of Oklahoma, the cornfields of Nebraska and the hot springs of Colorado.          

    I was hot on Jubb’s heels in Morocco over a year ago but missed him by days. The stories that emanated from Chefchaouen, Marakesh and Casablanca only contributed to Jubb’s allure and heightened my curiosity.  When I learned that I was only a few hundred miles away from this sought-after healer, who was cultivating white gold—an arcane healing formula —in the canyons, I boarded a bus in Los Angeles bound for Phoenix.

    A Lost Art Form

    Sedona was twenty five miles outside of Flagstaff.  No public transportation serviced Sedona. Upon receiving advice from the local owners of an organic coffee shop, I made a Sedona Please cardboard sign, in hopes of making it closer to my destination.  I remembered my mother’s stories about hitchhiking across the Americas and Europe but, as I learned, it was not 1969; it was 2014.  Hitchhiking was a lost art form.

    After waiting an hour under the unforgiving sun and watching my duffle bag collect dust, I hitched my first ride.  The very couple who had advised me earlier, drove up next to me and told me to hop in.  I suspected they were not “headed south” but rather offered me a ride out of pity.  It felt like cheating but, nonetheless, I was thankful to be three miles closer to Sedona.

    The second ride was from the town sheriff. A pale, lumbering, gruff-looking man, he approached me aggressively, with the intent of ticketing me.  He harassed me, asking me if I knew it was illegal to hitchhike. I remained seated, unemotional, on a rock as the sheriff returned to his police cruiser to run my ID.  I answered all of his questions and converted his anxiety into curiosity. The sheriff, Gus wanted to know about my accent and if New York City was everything it was said to be.IMG_0623

    When my ID came up clean, he made more small talk.  Within minutes, he began to relate to me as if we were two old friends.  He complained to me about “drunk Indians and dead beat hippies who hitched around the reservations.”  It was as if he was citing this “mischief” in order to justify his initial hostility.  I took in his clichés and mediocrity, observing this clog-in-the-machine simpleton. I thought about code-switching and the many advantages of being white in America. With a little bit of whiteness and money — you can just be, without worrying about how you will be perceived.

    After more small talk, Gus offered to drive me eight more miles down the solitary road to where his jurisdiction ended. Again, this was not hitch-hiking as I expected but I was drawing closer to my destination.

    The final lift was the most sincere. Two young women — who lived on an organic farm and spearheaded a campaign against baby male circumcision — told me to hop in the back of their black Ford pickup truck. They said I could live on their farm for as long as I needed. We conversed through the small window of their pickup truck, shouting raw foods recipes back and forth. I had known them for a total of 20 minutes and they were ready to adopt me on to their land and baptize me into their campaign against “male genital mutilation.”  Only in Sedona, was the slogan I had heard before. I gently declined their invite, focusing on the approaching moment, when I would at last come face to face with the fabled medicine man.

    As the sun set over the canyons, sublime oranges and reds ricocheted off the gorges. Awe-struck by the towering landscape, I grabbed my bag, dismounted the back of the pick-up and window-shopped at a health food store where I had coordinated to meet up with Dr. Jubb’s travelling band of Life Foodarians. A rented aqua blue Honda Sedan rolled slowly up to me. The driver slowed to a halt, rolled down the window and said “There he is! How about ‘cha mate?”

    It was Dr. David Jubb.  He invited me into the car.

    When I jumped into the car, the passengers and driver introduced themselves as Sea of Sands, Sitting Moose, Rainy Toad, Fire Glacier and Happy Face. The adventure had begun.  I had found the man behind the legend.

    A Kaleidoscope of Life

    Followers and mentees of Dr. Jubb pooled together money to rent a home in Arizona with turquoise and purple orchards and land to cultivate. This was typical for the impromptu teams Jubb assembled. An incessant transient, Jubb resisted the idea of stability and permanence. In the summer he set up camp in the hot springs of Colorado, only to disappear in the winter into the blue mountains of northern Morocco. Just when a potential student thought she had caught up with him in the glaciers of Norway, she received word that Jubb had reappeared among the Hindu temples off the coast of Sri Lanka. Jubb specialized in evasiveness. The shaman didn’t believe in the past or the future.  He was fond of saying “we only have now.”  Elucidating the concept of timelessness, Jubb refused to say his own age.  When asked how old he was, he simply stated “I am entering my second lifetime presently.”Jubb

    On the arid outskirts of Sedona, the elder Lifefoodarians slept inside the home. The younger communards slept outside, in a make-shift fort, hidden eighty yards into the forest.

    We drifted off to sleep in the stiff heat, gazing up at a prodigious flock of stars that pranced through the night.  We slept aside one another in the pitch darkness of the forest, illuminated only by the perennial motion of the celestial bodies above. The rumblings of javelinas, a type of wild boar, was the only sound bold enough to break the silence of the night.

    There were extraordinary colors dancing in everything that we did — picking ripe fruits, preparing Life Foods cuisine and living in nature. The rainbow of life took the weary under its wing, offering a fresh perspective on both the mundane and the extraordinary.

    We woke up to the poignant greens of the trees.  Florescent and alive, they discouraged us from sleeping in. The blooming blues of the sky invited yoga, barefoot running, and harvesting white gold. Lava red canyons sprouted up from the barren earth.  A treasure-chest of nature opened up around us.

    My thoughts shifted east, back home to the Bronx: How criminal that most of our families were confined to a survival routine, without the ability to wander out and roam this vast, open land!  I remembered Bob Marley’s prophetic lyrics:

    Oh why can’t we roam?
There’s open country. 
Tell me
Why can’t we be what we want to be?
We want to be free.

    [1] Reference to Carlos Castaneda’s 1968 book, The Teachings of Don Juan.

    Meddling in International Waters

    4

    Confronted with the July humidity and tired of running over incandescent swaths of the mega-tropolis’ concrete, I visited Shanghai’s public pool for a workout swim.

    When the clock struck midday, a class of adolescent swimmers exited the pool and the “free swimmers” proceeded in for their hour of glory. I charged in anxious to work up a sweat.

    The Olympic size pool had lap lanes but I quickly learned it was a free-for-all; swimmers, revelers, and families alike shared the same pool.

    I was at peace with the elders offering their grandchildren elementary swim lessons but there was another faction that vied for hegemony over the pool. As we sought to swim vertically, there was a retrograde group who insisted on swimming east to west, partitioning the rectangle and cutting off my free path.

    Despite the human traffic, the serious swimmers with their goggles and swim caps smoothly coasted from one end to the other uninterrupted. How did they do it?

    I was envious because just when I achieved some momentum, human bodies acted as barriers, breaking my rhythm.

    Mid-stroke, I stopped to appeal to the authorities. Inspired by the veterans’ example, I too was determined to complete some laps.

    I looked up at the life guards on both sides of the pool but as soon as we made eye contact, they shifted their glances away from me, ignoring my pleas for order. Cross-swimmers were in clear violation of international swimming protocol but no one was taking a stand.

    I plunged my body back into the water and in the middle of my third stroke, a cross-swimmer charged into my sternum. Livid, I burst out of the water like the great leviathan himself, flailing my arms to exaggerate the infraction.

    My descent complete, I again appealed to the higher order, subtly motioning my head at the guilty party, an elderly woman who was swimming with her entourage of friends.

    A fusillade of whistles blared out. I thought, at last, the heavens have heard my plea.

    The chief life guard took his index finger and middle finger, pointed them at his own eyes, then at me, as if to say he had witnessed the entire international episode and knew who the aggressor was.

    I looked around to measure the temperature of the pool. The momentum had shifted against me.

    The elderly woman had a home field advantage. All I had was raw emotion. I took my two hands to my chest incredulously, as if to confirm the verdict and ask “me?”

    I searched for international solidarity but the entire pool community was in motion. There was a group of little girls flapping their feet on the edge who stopped to observe the unfolding situation. I thought I would drown in their disappointed glances.

    The die was cast.

    The chairman of the lifeguards raised his two hands and began to count down from ten, one finger at a time. I wondered what fate awaited me after ten seconds.

    I made my way from the middle of the deep end to the ladder. It was the longest walk of my life.

    The cute little children in their floaties stopped mid-lesson, cheering my exit. I looked back one final time; the vertical and horizontal swimmers continued unimpeded, crisscrossing the pool as if nothing happened. It was one harmonious society.

    “Human Rights” as a Weapon of Imperialism: Teaching “International Law” in Nicaragua

    0

    In 2005, La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua (UNAN) hired me to teach International Law through the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University, where I was finishing my graduate degree.  After several weeks instructing and advising a group of 60 law students in Leon, Nicaragua, my work was closed down by forces within the university.  I write to detail this experience, and to clarify the course of events.

    The U.S. embassy intervened within the autonomous life of the university. This intervention ultimately contributed to my dismissal.  My experience amounted to censorship and speaks to the power relations that persist in Nicaragua, keeping this Central American nation in the U.S.’s sphere of influence.

    Before I document my experience in Managua and Leon, it is important that the reader have a basic foundation of Nicaraguan history in order to understand, first and foremost, how this country arrived at such an astonishing level of poverty.  This is an article I wrote for the American reader, on the 36th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution.  Without some familiarity with Nicaragua’s tortuous yet triumphant history, the build up of tensions and the denouement of the plot in which I played a small part will make little sense.  This was the country I was entering into, a country I had read about, and admired for its resistance, my entire life.

    I. War and Occupation: Through whose Eyes?

    In the introductory {1} seminar, I highlighted my experience researching and organizing in oppressed countries on three continents, offered observations on key human rights covenants and treaties, and the conceptual foundations behind them and the lack of enforcement mechanisms within the current global socio-economic model.   The seminars that followed focused on {2} Sexual Violence and Strategies of Resistance – A Case Study of the Dominican Republic, {3} the screening of an anti-trafficking documentary and a critique of the structural inequalities that give birth to the reality of sex work and {4} The Landless People’s Movement in Brazil: The Right to Organize.nic

    In the fifth {5} seminar, I analyzed human rights questions closer to home, my home.  I spoke on “The U.S. Occupation of Iraq: Violations of Iraqi Human Rights and Sovereignty.”  I showed a poignant documentary called “The Hidden Wars of Desert Storm” which offered a view of the war through Iraqi eyes.  I also invited two International Relations professors and five student leaders from FEUCA (Federacion de Estudiantes Centro Americanos) to share with them the reality of two decades plus of U.S. devastation of Iraqi infrastructure and life.  This was consistent with my open-door teaching style, whereby any members of the community were invited to participate in the classes. The seventy participants were moved by the course’s content.  Students wanted to know: “With what authority does the U.S. government preach human rights, when it is the biggest violator of these rights in other countries?” “Of what use is International Law, if it is not respected?” “How can we oppose this war?”

    These pivotal questions echoed the very questions I posed as a graduate student at SIPA, questions to which I never received satisfactory answers from my professors.

    When I arrived in Nicaragua and up until this point, I was treated like royalty.  The Human Rights department was proud to host an American “expert.”  I had a small entourage of students and department assistants who traveled with me everywhere in Leon & Managua.  If I had parroted mainstream human rights discourse, I would have continued to enjoy this status as “a visiting scholar and expert.”  I did not, and the contradictions rapidly intensified within the department.

    II. Imperial Double Standards

    At the heart of the fifth seminar was the question of terminology.  Why does the human rights field apply the term genocide to the death of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994 and the massacre of 200,000 East Timorese over the course of 15 years of Indonesian occupation but ignore massive Iraqi, Afghani & Palestinian deaths?  What term do we use for the 27,000,000 people of Iraq who have lost family members since 1991?  Why is the liberation of language important?

    The first six weeks of U.S. bombing in 1991 killed 150,000 people.[1]  After the latest invasion of Iraq, the most reliable sources placed the number of Iraqi casualties at over a million.  Officials within the United Nations such as Denis Halliday, former United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, estimated the number of Iraqi casualties between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 spanning the 15 years of invasion, occupation and sanctions.[2]  Wide-spread sources documented the U.S. military’s illegal use of depleted uranium, the destruction of the desert ecosystem, the use of napalm against trenches, and radiation poisoning.[3]  The full spectrum of Iraqi resistance today—from ISIS to secular expressions of nationalism—flows from the West’s ignoring of the barbarous effects of the U.S. war on the civilian population.  We ignore Iraqi suffering at our peril.

    “Holocaust,” “sanctions,” “humanitarian intervention,” “dictatorship,” “failed state”…all of these terms have been politicized.    They are strewn about or withheld depending on imperialism’s relationship with a particular country.  Saudi Arabia – with its 20,000 princes – is not defined as a dictatorship because it functions as an attack dog for U.S. interests in the region.  Israel—with its apartheid system in effect against the natives of this land—is the number one recipient of US aid in the world.  In contrast, the international media vilified Syria and Libya—which had much sounder social, economic and political rights for its citizens—solely because they stood as the last vestiges, despite whatever contradictions, of a self-determining Middle East.  The American public—hypnotized by the  anti-Assad, media war drums—became overnight “experts” in the histories of nations they had scarcely heard of. Regardless of Assad’s human rights record, the U.S. government has a sordid history of manipulating the truth and is no position to decide who the human rights violators are.

    III. Opening up Dialogue across Central America

    The universities in Nicaraguan had a one week break for national holidays.  Student organizations and Political Science departments invited me to present conferences on “An Alternative View of Human Rights” to other public universities in Central America.  It was a wonderful opportunity to travel the region via the “Tica” bus and build up more contacts who were of like mind and heart.[4]  I facilitated seminars in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panamá over the course of the semester.  I was honored to trek through the lands of Farabundo Marti, Rigoberta Menchu, Omar Torrijos and so many other epic fighters.  It was a spiritual sojourn through countries I first learned about through Noam Chomsky and Eduardo Galeano’s writing which documented the horrific civil wars the U.S. oversaw in the 1980’s to keep these countries “in their place.”[5]IMG_7508

    On July 28th, I showed “The Hidden Wars” to large seminars of political science students in Guatemala City.  At 9 pm, after the second seminar I went out for dinner with the elected student leadership body and two indigenous Guatemalan professors.  Through these conversations, I felt the tangible shock and anger on the part of the students, learning about the reality of U.S. invasion beyond the mainstream headlines.  A handful of Nicaraguans and other Central Americans felt so impacted by the relentless assault on the Iraqi and Afghani homeland that they asked me in private how they could cross international borders in order to support the Iraqi resistance.  As veterans and survivors of decades of resisting U.S. proxy forces in their homeland, they understood all too well the pain and devastation visited upon these occupied lands.  The veterans of U.S. intervention understood that Syria was today’s Nicaragua and Libya was today’s El Salvador or Mozambique.  Their sincere inquiries were symbolic of the solidarity they felt and the universal feeling—in the words of Friedrich Engels—that “no human pain is foreign to us.”  If only our organizations were sophisticated enough to facilitate this level of internationalism, reminiscent of the Spanish Civil War.

    As we exited a restaurant adjacent to San Carlos University at 10:30 pm, a group of ski-masked individuals robbed us with guns and machetes.  They sped off on motorcycles with my collection of documentaries from Cuba, Haiti, Palestine and beyond.  I felt crushed.  The use of these visual resources across Central America, backed by a historical contextualization of western interference in the Middle East, had motivated many students and professors to take a more active stance against U.S. imperialism.  The masked men also took my passport.  I was not leaving Guatemala anytime soon.  My plans to do outreach in Honduras and Belize were cancelled.  Guatemala City was in the midst of massive protests against the latest U.S. “free-trade” agreement CAFTA-DR.  I could not make an appointment at the embassy to apply for a passport with hundreds of thousands of protesters surrounding the embassy.  After a week of waiting for a replacement passport, I returned to Nicaragua.

    IV. Silencing Intellectual Dissent

    For the sixth {6} seminar back in Nicaragua, I planned to examine what forms global resistance took in a unipolar world.  I did not want to feed any more sand to the desert without highlighting the many times oppressed people have stood up, fought and won against the neo-colonial barbarism that I had previously highlighted.  Up against such overwhelming devastation, it was important to find hope and a reason to believe and organize.

    As was typical with my syllabi, after identifying the problem, I then focused on the massive entrance into history of the toiling people of Cuba, Grenada, Venezuela & elsewhere.  I left Nicaraguan politics and history alone; the students came from different class backgrounds, and revisiting the horrific U.S.’s proxy Contra war would have been traumatizing and divisive for the students.[6]

    On August 3rd, I met with Professor Francisco Porra and two student leaders to preview the documentaries Zapatista and The Revolution will not be Televised, a film about a U.S. sponsored coup in 2002 against the democratically elected government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.  This was to be the last occasion during which I was formally allowed to meet with any member of the course.

    On August 5th, in front of the human rights course the director of the institute, Dr. Paguaguá, stood up and announced that all activities under my coordination were to be suspended until further notice.  She had not previously contacted me about this decision.  I was caught off guard.

    After Dr. Paguaguá, my attention shifted to an event scheduled for the next day.  In consultation with a group of students, I had planned a series of gatherings and workshops in the oppressed and peripheral neighborhoods of Leon.  I stood up and told the group of 70 students that Saturday’s event would go forward regardless of her instructions because this was bigger than politics and bureaucracy.  I refused to sacrifice the students’ credibility in a neighborhood where we had invested time and resources to build up trust so that the university could contribute something positive to historically neglected areas.  I explained that if we could not do it in the name of the HR institute we would organize it under the banner of an international anti-war coalition.   The students were visibly confused by the conflicting instructions.  Dr. Paguaguá was flustered. She interrupted me again and said I was not authorized to speak.

    V. “Western Rights”

    Dr. Paguaguá preemptively dismissed the students and told me to go to her office.  She stated that there was a major problem with the way I was teaching.  She accused me of not being “objective” and of having a “political agenda.”  I understood all too well what she meant by “objectivity.”  When one’s ideas expose inequality and its origins one is accused of “taking sides” and “having an ideological agenda.”  When one is largely silent and remains “neutral” before the big questions, one is regarded as objective.

    The accusations were that I was anti-American and had a leftist agenda.  Her exact accusation was “proselitismo político,” or “political proselytizing.”  She instructed me to stay within the traditional parameters of Human Rights.  I responded, articulating the following thoughts:

    “Human Rights, in order to be truly “human,” must be taught through diverse historical lenses, otherwise they are Western Rights.  All educators have an agenda; I was forthcoming with mine.  The concerns, views and experience of the vast majority of the world’s people, who live in abject poverty, form the only true basis of “objectivity.”  The war “on” terror is a war of terror and the intentional polarization of humanity into two warring factions – Muslim and Christian – is a necessary illusion to secure the US-dominated $950 billion dollar arms industry.[7]  If the Human Rights discipline had real intellectual integrity, the practitioners would question their Eurocentric prioritization of non-European/American (white) HR violations & highlight the state crimes of “the greatest purveyor of violence” that humanity has ever known, the U.S. government.”[8]

    Dr. Paguaguá refused to budge from her position.  She told me she respected my convictions, confirmed that they were intellectually valid, but stated that this was not the correct forum for them.  I told her I could never sacrifice everything I believed in and deliver token seminars that do not even scrape the surface of everything that is wrong in this world.  As long as I only highlighted the symptoms of an unequal social order—sex tourism, violence and gangs, street crime, South-to-North migration patterns, the trafficking of children—I was allowed free rein.  It was when I began to question the structural roots that give birth to these phenomena that suddenly I was accused of “not doing my job.”

    I asked her, “Am I being censored?”  The director—her posture visibly shaken—said that she had “a job to do and was not about to alienate the program because of a visiting scholar’s political agenda.”  I was not officially fired because I continued to be the coordinator of the law students’ Internship/Community Service requirement.  However, the director instructed me to limit myself to a narrow understanding of individual rights and to steer away from an overarching analysis of international politics, specifically in the Middle East and Venezuela.  Until I agreed to this point, I was not allowed to have further contact with the students.

    VI. Dependency

    The Human Rights institute received the bulk of its funding from the U.S. embassy.  I visited the embassy on one occasion on July 15th, 2005.  I had a meeting with the cultural attaché, the functionaries in charge of releasing grant funds, and several other State Department employees.  I submitted a proposal for human rights education within Nicaragua’s most impoverished neighborhoods and the insertion of 70 human rights law students into the infrastructure of this project.  This was the only contact I ever intended to have with the embassy.

    The Human Rights Institute within UNAN is a microcosm of the brutal dependence that characterizes life in Latin America.  Funding is almost exclusively from NGO’s and embassies in the North and is inevitably conditioned on carrying out the powerful government’s priorities.  James Petras’ writing demonstrates how NGO funding is used to push US interests abroad and to win over young talent that could be used to build up the liberation movement.  The Revolution will not be Funded is an apt title for a book that excavates this very subject.

    VII. The Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledge

    I reflected on the impact these critical seminars could have on the law students.   The majority of the students were in their 5th or 6th year at one of Nicaragua’s most prestigious universities.  I had struck a critical nerve in Nicaraguan politics.

    How would the students interpret the situation?  A core group of ten students emerged who had an accurate understanding that there were bigger forces at play.  They commended me for having the courage to illustrate the moral double standards at play.  They told me they would rebel and protest the course until I was reinstated.  I advised them that this might not be the proper tactic, depending on the position of the other students, and as it turned out, the majority, while curious about what was happening, were not willing to take a stand against the director.

    I went ahead with one brigade, the Carlos Fonseca Brigade.[9]  We organized the first community event in one of Leon’s most impoverished barrios.  The event was well-organized and well-attended.  Out of a brigade of 18 students, 15 participated.  The three who were absent did not want to participate in an event that was not sanctioned by the director.  Some fifty members of the community participated in the event, an event which proved rich in dialogue about human rights, crime, policing, unemployment, and gangs. There were also cultural performances and traditional pinol, a corn porridge drink, typical in Nicaragua.IMG_7506

    My next task was to try to meet with various groups of students to measure their commitment to protesting against the censorship.  When I called meetings with them, only a few from each brigade responded.  A week passed.  It was time to reconsider my next step.  I was on the outside looking in.

    I approached the director and agreed that it would be impossible under these circumstances for me to continue teaching.  I explained however, that my priority was to set up the students’ interventions in marginalized areas of Leon. I would limit myself to that role and set up gatherings on my own time for anyone in the community to participate in. She welcomed the reconciliation and invited me to speak to them at the next lecture about the upcoming phases of the project.

    VIII. ‘Incandescent with anger’

    On the morning of August 12th, I sat before the class waiting for my turn to speak.  I was curious about how Dr. Paguaguá would explain away the scuttlebutt that was circulating.  The tension was ever-present. I felt emasculated sitting there without the opportunity to clarify what had occurred. As she spoke about unrelated subjects, I couldn’t tell if she was merely buying time and ignoring me.

    Finally and to my surprise, she launched into her interpretation of what had transpired.  She began by saying that she commended me for my talents and my experience organizing in different countries.  She indicated that I was a solid fit for this position but that she considered it entirely inappropriate that I would use this venue to promote a left-wing ideology.   There was a collective gasp among the students.  The vast majority were witnesses to the fact that while I had indeed been critical of U.S. foreign policy I had never mentioned the forbidden words the US government fears—socialism, Marxism, class struggle or Cuba.

    She granted me the opportunity to reply.  I called on the group of fifteen students who had participated in the first community event to stand before the class. The students had organized a critical reflection and each student reflected on the successes and weaknesses of the event.  They related their field work back to themes of community-organizing, selflessness, and a long-term vision of de-politicizing human rights. One student spoke for the group:

    “Daniel taught us that human rights are not just something written in fancy books.  He took us there.  We were afraid to go into our own neighborhoods.  We said those kids are gangbangers.  They have knives.  They will stick us little spoiled brats up.  And they probably would have.  But Daniel went right to them.  He extended his hand to them.  He said, ‘no that’s not the enemy.  That’s the future of Nicaragua.’”  IMG_7507

    The students were polarized.  The exchange that ensued was a microcosm of the ideological and intellectual divisions that have riddled university and political life in Nicaragua.  The misnamed “Cold War”— which was in essence a Global Class Struggle—had yet to write its final chapter.  In the words of one student, Mariam;

    “The director and the few students who backed her position were incandescent, glowing bright red like the lava of the volcano Masaya.  I thought they were going to explode when we came to your defense.”

    This forgotten land—battered and brutalized by a government that claimed to act in my name, under a flag that I am supposed to be proud of— had stood up again.  I thought of Ben Linder.  I thought of S. Brian Wilson.  Arlen Siu.  Leonel Rugama.  Sandino.  There were so many heroes and not enough memory.[10]  Meanwhile, two students following the director’s lead, kept referring back to my alleged connection with the Venezuelan government.  It was like a page out of McCarthyism.  I thought of the hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans who have been pitted against one another like the Crips and the Bloods and African Americans and poor whites.  There was nothing left for me to say.  The bond with this group of students was the true victory.  They didn’t need the university to do the work that needed to be done.[11]

    IX. Cold War Politics: 2005

    I also sought out allies within the University.  I contacted Mauricio Carrión, the Dean of Academic Affairs.  I explained to him the dynamics of the situation.  He was a veteran Sandinista and had fought the U.S.-led Contra invasion for six years.  He heard out my perspective.  Reading his body language, it was clear there was no love lost between the dean and the director of the HR department.

    He intervened immediately. He called Dr. Paguaguá into a meeting.  He reprimanded her for bringing politics into the university, the very charge leveled at me.  Professor Carrión opened up other channels within the law school through which I could freely express these sentiments.

    Representatives from the US embassy asked to meet me.  They left messages at my residency at La Casa del Protocolo (professors’ housing).   On August 16th I received a call from Marcia Bosshart, The Director of U.S. Public Affairs.  She asked me why I had ignored the embassy’s phone calls, then requested that I visit the embassy the next day to speak about my performance within the institute.

    Mrs. Bosshard then spoke about “the fragility of politics in Nicaragua, left-wing tendencies that would manipulate me with ulterior intentions and the importance of a non-politicized take on human-rights.”  She invited me to take part in some basketball clinics the embassy was hosting with professional players from the U.S.  What a grand contribution to a country U.S. foreign policy plunged into civil war and decimated with unexampled brutality!  Token, feel-good, donate-to-poor-Nicaraguan children’s’ programs!  This brick-in-the-wall functionary thinks that the U.S. can wipe its hands clean of the past and gloat over its giving spirit before the media’s cameras!  And she wants me to be a part of this P.R. charade?

    I nodded passively and cordially, seeming to be in agreement with her take on things.  I had nothing to say.  Careerists were not going to be swayed by my worldview.  I told her that if they wanted to meet with me in person they should come visit me at my housing or wait until I was back home in the Bronx but that I did not see any need to go to the embassy.  The embassy’s cultural attaché, Rafael Foley, then contacted Columbia University, the institution that sponsored and funded my stay in Nicaragua and registered a complaint that I was not “fulfilling my teaching duties.”

    I asked the director why it was necessary for the U.S. embassy to get involved.  She claimed that they had sent functionaries to investigate my performance and that they had witnessed “my slanted discourse.”

    I refused to respond to their inquiries.  They called one of my colleagues, Professor Franscico Porra to a meeting in Managua to comment on my performance.  What follows is this professor’s testimony:

    “When I entered the embassy and cleared security I was called into a room where five agents were gathered around a long rectangular table.  I sat down and they immediately asked me about Mr. Shaw’s teaching performance.  I asked more specifically what they were referring to.  They indicated that they wanted to know if Mr. Shaw had continued teaching and coordinating criticism of U.S. politics or if he had altered his opinionated style.” 

    “I felt trapped between two flames.  My mind raced 20,000 kilometers per hour.  I thought about my job and my future wife.  I thought he will leave for the U.S. but I will stay.  My gut spoke for me.  Mr. Shaw understands his right within the university to “libertad de catedra,” or freedom of speech.  They persisted with their questions. I told them that your posture had not changed.

    The Director of Public Affairs spoke English.  They asked me questions along the same line.  She gave some instructions to several agents.  I don’t speak English but it was clear their intention to remove you permanently from your position.”

    When I returned to the casa de protocol, there were messages from the embassy expressing their wish to meet with me.  I packed my bags.  Two employees of the embassy went to the university and requested my immediate dismissal.  Apparently the director considered my dismissal to be too harsh of a measure, perhaps because of the eyes that were on her within the University.

    Upon my return to New York I received the following message from another embassy employee. who worked within the grant funding department: “During my evaluation at the Embassy my boss commented on what had happened with you.  According to her, you were a headache.  They put something in your record that would prohibit you from getting federal funding or federal employment in the future.”

    In closing, I will again cite the primary human rights documents that the U.S. professes to uphold.  Article 13 of the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural rights states: “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity, and shall strengthen the respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.”  Article 19 of the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article declares: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression: this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”  The State Department acted to arrest the process of conscious-raising, with utter disregard for these covenants.nica ii

    Through it all, the quest for the truth remains firm. The gift I most cherish from my experience was the bond I forged with those students in Nicaragua whose priority was not just to obtain the highest grades but to engage in a genuine quest for a critical education.  The struggle continues until the vision of Augusto Sandino, Carlos Fonseca and Dora Astorga are a reality for all Nicaraguans and for all of humanity!

    Danny Shaw

    Managua, Nicaragua

    September 2005

    [1] Clark, Ramsey. The Fire This Time US War Crimes in the Gulf. New York: Thunder Mouth’s Press, 1994.

    [2] Arnove, Anthony. Iraq Under Siege. Cambridge: South End Press, 2002.

    [3] International Action Center. Challenge to Genocide. (New York: IAC, 1998).

    Caldicott, Helen. Metal of Dishonor. How Depleted Uranium Penetrates Steel, Radiates People and Contaminates the Environment.

    UN Food and Agricultural Organization. The Children are Dying. The Use of Sanctions as a Weapon of War. New York: World View Forum, 1996.

    [4] Tica/o is a national nickname for Costa Ricans.

    [5] Chomsky, Noam. What Uncle Sam Really Wants.

    Chomsky, Noam. Deterring Democracy.

    Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America.

    [6] The example of Nicaragua reconfirms yet again what the US government has done in the name of “democracy.” Paul Dix and Pamela Fitzpatrick’s book Nicaragua: Surviving the US Legacy of Foreign Policy documents the lives of the survivors of the Contra War.  In the words of survivor Coni Pérez: “It is terrible to think that in a country like the United States, the young people who live there don’t know anything about what their own country does in other countries.” Another victim of the Contras is quoted as saying: “I know who killed my mother.  I don’t hate them. I blame the gringos who were the ones that made Nicaragua divide itself. . . . The gringos were behind all of this.  The Contras were also victims of the gringos.”  It is important to elevate these voices to inform the working people of the U.S. that the humble people of Nicaragua, Syria, Iraq, Palestine and beyond are not our enemy.

    [7] See Huntington, Samuel.  Foreign Affairs. “Clash of Civilizations.” 1993

    And the brilliant rebuke by Said, Edward The Nation. “The Clash of Ignorance.” October 22, 2001.

    [8] Genocide by Sanctions and What I’ve Learned about US Foreign Policy: The War Against the Third World are two informative documentaries which broach these questions.

    [9] I assigned each team of students a name based on national heroes.  Carlos Fonseca was the founder and ideological-motor of El Frente Sandinista who was assassinated in 1975.

    [10] See Shaw, Daniel. 365 Days of Resistance. New York: Create Space. 2014.

    [11] There was also a group of Spanish professors from the University of Alcalá in Madrid who invested their time in understanding the dynamics of this repression.  On August 16th they took the initiative and participated in a talk I gave concerning Venezuela, the nationalization of oil reserves, and the exit of Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell from the Venezuelan national scene.

    Yugoslavia: A Blueprint for Imperialist Partition and Recolonization

    21

    This past summer, I left Croatia to the north and mounted a bus that winded through the misty, majestic mountains of Bosnia into Sarajevo. As the sun rose over the historic valley, I saw pock-marked homes that still lay demolished, seventeen years after the war ended. Here I was, at the interface between great religions and empires, where a young Bosnian nationalist’s assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, the maximum representative of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, supposedly sparked WWI. Respiring centuries of history, I began to question and dig in order to understand what brought imperialist aggression to this beautiful, sacred land, beginning long before 1991 and continuing through NATO and the U.S.’s bombing of Belgrade in 1999.

    NATO’s War

    Sixteen years ago, the forces of NATO, led by the United States and Germany, waged war on the people of Serbia. Over the course of 78 days in 1999 — from March 24th to June 10th — NATO dropped 79,000 tons of bombs and 10,000 cruise missiles on Serbia, causing enormous casualties to the civilian population and extensive damage to the economic infrastructure. The corporate media spoon-fed the world a false, facile explanation to justify its all-out assault on the nation’s sovereignty. They focused solely on what they portrayed as the sudden resurgence of ancient bloodletting feuds among the nations of Yugoslavia and the need for the West to come to the rescue. The mainstream media repeated this perspective ad nauseam because it reinforced a grim, generalized view that the nations within Yugoslavia were motivated by selfish, narrow interests and “needed” Western intervention. This article revisits what really lay behind the Western military powers’ flagrant violation of international law and what lessons anti-imperialists can draw today from the dismemberment of Yugoslavia.

    Torn Apart at the Seams

    The Yugoslavian fortress
    The Yugoslavian fortress

    The victors of WWII hoped to sink their fangs into the Balkans since 1946 when the Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, led by Marshal Josep “Tito” Broz, defeated the Nazis and established the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

    The son of a Croat father and Slovenian mother, Tito grew up in deep poverty. He became a metal worker and worked for the German Benz car factory. He rose to the leadership of labor movement, the Partisan army, the revolutionary party and the workers’ state. What made him a special leader was his ability to unite the different nationalities of Yugoslavia behind the idea of a strong, peaceful multinational state.

    tito che 1959
    Tito and Che Guevara, 1959

    The profiteers of the West knew that it was only the Yugoslavian fortress  —the idea of a strong, united people personified in the principled leadership of Marshal Tito — that protected the individual nations —Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania — from complete re-penetration by foreign capital. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 and the socialist camp left the door wide open for Western maneuvers to rip apart one of the few self-determining and socialist countries left on the global map.

    Yugoslavia’s demise was hastened by outside interference which dictated that this centrifugal force had to be smashed. Behind the scenes, foreign meddling stoked the flames of ethnic hatred by encouraging the independence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo. In 1991, President George Bush and Congress passed the Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill which cut off loans, credit and trade for any part of Yugoslavia that did not declare its independence. Italy promised Montenegro $40 billion in “aid” if it went independent. Germany coddled the Croatian bourgeoisie, enticing them with investment promises. Albania was built up as “the capital of the Pentagon in the Balkans” and US, Turkish and Albanian joint forces trained and supported the Kosovo independence movement.[1] Meanwhile, Serbia —the most stubbornly independent republic with the deepest ties to non-Western countries, namely Russia— was subjected to sanctions. As a result, the per capita Serbian income was reduced from $3,000 in 1990 to $700 by 1993.

    Yugoslavia & a Correct Evaluation of the National Question

    The Yugoslavian economy was not classically socialist but it retained features of a planned economy unacceptable to international high-finance.

    Slobodan Milosovic, the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and his leadership became imperialism’s principle obstacle. The other nationalities had brokered deals with their imperialist sponsors, retreated into their own fiefdoms and were open for business. Milosovic had to go. Consequently, he became the latest anti-Christ needed to validate the unleashing of a full scale NATO war. Milosovic’s intransigence before NATO was his true crime, far worse in the eyes of the West than the rapes, murders and massacres that occurred under his command and the command of every warring party in the 1991-92 conflict that saw over 200,000 killed and four million displaced.

    Only under socialism was it possible to unite all of the nationalities on the basis of equality and common ownership of property. Serious efforts were made through Affirmative Action like programs to invest in the development of the historically more underdeveloped southern regions of Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia in each republic forbid their leadership and rank-and-file from having a nationalist orientation. The ideals of internationalism and working-class unity were the bedrocks of the entire social system. For a more-in-depth evaluation of Yugoslavia’s history and economy, see Richard Becker’s article.

    Socialists respect the right of every oppressed nation to self-determination. But we oppose those forces who claim to speak in the name of a nation but are really acting in conjunction with U.S. imperialism.

    Hillary Clinton visits the mamouth, 12 foot statue of her husband in Kosovo.
    Hillary Clinton visits the mamouth, 12 foot statue of her husband in Kosovo.

    The separatist claims of the NATO-supported, fascist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) were in reality against the interests of the working class of all nations. As Kosovo —a region rich with mineral wealth—was pried away from Serbia, Serbia was subjected to a 78 day bombing spree. Gregory Elich —author of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period— detailed NATO’s intentional targeting of auto factories, civilian infrastructure, and the Chinese embassy.   Kosovo became the host of Camp Bondsteel the US and NATO’s largest base in the Balkans where 28,000 foreign troops continue, to this day, to oversee the colonial project.

    Not surprisingly, Kellogg, Brown and Root, KBR Inc. —a military subsidiary of Halliburton— received the massive contract to build and supply the base. In the words of capitalist ideologue Thomas Friedman; “The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist —McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15.”[2] Kosovo —like Tibet, South Sudan, & the Kurds of Iraq (but not Turkey) offer an example of imperialism’s sinister manipulation of the question of national liberation.

    Srebrenica: Sorting through the propaganda

    Nazi propagandist Joseph Gobbles infamously said “A lie repeated 1,000 times becomes the truth.”  One-sided reporting simultaneously freed the US proxy forces of blame while vilifying any impediments to their underlying designs. The most glaring example in the case of Yugoslavia was what the West called “the Srebrenica genocide.”

    There is no question that the siege of the majority Muslim, Bosnian town of Srebrenica was horrific. But was it any more or less grisly than the Croatian ethnic cleansing of Serbian families in the Krajina region or the massacring of Serbs by Muslim warlord Naser Oric in the days leading up to the Srebrenica massacre? All sides committed mass murder, rape and other war crimes. Imperialism needed Srebrenica and pure victimhood of Bosnia’s Muslims to justify their wanton destruction of the infrastructure and economy of Serbia. Scholars Michael Parenti and Diana Johnstone, among others, painstakingly documented the one-sided coverage to guilt trip the Western public into supporting the NATO war. As we have seen in Iraq, Libya and Syria, the pro-imperialist media is very adept at feigning concern for human rights. The U.S.’s wars of the 21st century are justified under the guise of “humanitarianism.”

    Lessons Learned

    Studying and understanding the dynamics of the dismemberment of Yugoslavia teaches us valuable lessons that we can apply to the empire’s ongoing wars of conquest across the world today. As the godfather of all war criminals Henry Kissinger reminds us, the U.S. “has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.”

    Although the ruling class has whipped up islamophobia to justify its imperial adventures in Afghanistan, Palestine and beyond and to rationalize the repression of dissent here at home, imperialism is not anti-Muslim across the board. They are far too cunning for this. In the case of Yugoslavia, one of their main proxies was the Muslim president of Bosnia, Alija Izetbegovic.

    Izetbegovic served three years in jail for his support of the Nazi occupation of Croatia during WWII and later became an extremist advocate of Sharia law. Today it is common knowledge that the U.S. conspired with extremist, jihadist forces from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Albania and beyond to wage their proxy war in Bosnia. Professor Peter Dale Scott documents the West’s use of al-Qaida in Bosnia. He argues that the training of some KLA units in terrorist camps run by Osama bin Laden followed a long pattern also used by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in Afghanistan in 1979 to defeat the secular government of President Najibullah and the Progressive Democratic Party of Afghanistan.   Not a word was uttered against the honor of the Muslim Bosnians because they were the “good guys” in this conflict. They needed a pure victim and a totally evil aggressor (Serbia) led by Satan himself (Milosovic).

    Through think tanks, academic conferences, professional analysts and paid experts, the warmongers constantly monitor dynamic situations. They shift alliances according to their interests. Imperialism has proven that it will renege on old partnerships and create new ones according to the moment.

    Donald Rumsfeld meeting with ally Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran war.
    Donald Rumsfeld meeting with ally Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran war.

    It is enough to remember that “bad guys” such as Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were all once stooges of the U.S., when the forces they oversaw did the U.S.’s bidding. When it no longer served their interests to support them, the empire turned on them and converted them into the latest boogeyman (i.e. ISIS). Their crimes and human rights records then became convenient excuses to bomb, invade and occupy Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan which were all steps in the recolonization of these regions.

    When the non-aligned Yugoslavia functioned as a buffer zone between the Soviet Union and the US in the Global Class War, the IMF and the European banks were content to lend it money, drive another wedge through the idea of Soviet-Yugoslavian unity and keep it —even if only partially— in their sphere of influence.[3] With the rise of the unipolar world, this calculation changed. The US and EU countries did not stop their war drive until the country was completely under its boot again.

    Yugo-Nostalgia

    According to studies by historians and sociologists, a high percentage of people today —spanning across the different nationalities— yearn for the unity and social stability guaranteed in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.[4]

    Tito meeting with the young Coronel Gadaffi
    Tito meeting with a young Coronel Gadaffi

    In Zagreb and Sarajevo I found responses consistent with this sense of Yugo-nostalgia. Many citizens of the former Yugoslavia bemoaned the stripping away of people’s right to health care, a home, a university education, a job and social peace —and the concomitant privatization of these services. In their opinion, these maneuvers represented the thirdworldization of the Balkans, a return to a position of servitude they had valiantly overcome. According to an article in The Economist entitled “Balkan’s Economies, Mostly Miserable,” 23% of Serbian workers are unemployed today and this number climbs to the 50% mark for younger workers. These statistics are representative of the struggles of the different nationalities of the region to make ends meet and resist the globalization forced upon them by NATO bombs.

    A Template for Imperialist Wars Today and Tomorrow

    interior ministry in Belgrade, bombed by Nato
    The Interior Ministry in Belgrade, bombed by NATO

    Karl Marx said that “History repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce.” The dynamics of the Yugoslavian situation repeat themselves again today and the American public is being duped again.

    The mainstream media —as the spokesperson of the State Department—does not get it wrong. A key part of our training as anti-imperialists —dating back to the Zimmerwald Conference when socialists maintained that WWI was not fought in the interests of working people— is to read beyond the headlines and stay principled when imperialism goes into war drive. When our class enemies beat the war drums and pretend to appeal to Americans’ human compassion —as in the case of every US invasion— it is necessary to decipher what the empire’s true interests are. No matter how relentless, sensationalist and patriotic the barrage of propaganda, it is unacceptable to line up shoulder to shoulder as our oppressors at home relentlessly demonize inconvenient nationalist forces abroad. It is important to return to Malcolm X’s formulation: ““If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Our defense of a nation’s right to defend themselves vis-à-vis foreign domination is not a blanket endorsement of their social systems. Surely every social system has its flaw and challenges, but this is no justification to dismantle the central state as we have seen in the countries aforementioned in this article.

    As the billionaires run out of new markets to conquer, they are seeking to expand. China, Russian and the other BRICS nations are demonized because they have resisted deeper penetration. The wars of the 21st century will be ignited along these lines and will come packaged in human rights rhetoric. Any nation who resists capitalist re-enslavement —Zimbabwe, the Bolivarian camp in Latin America, eastern Ukraine, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Cuba and the DPRK— will be in the cross heirs. The hundreds of thousands of refugees who seek to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe are the very victims of these recolonization efforts. They have been defuturized by US/EU proxy wars. While the corporate media outlets lament the plight of the refugees, they do not utter an honest word about the source of this human conflagration. Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan are today’s Yugoslavia. The greatest solidarity we can render to imperialism’s millions of victims is by challenging its power right here in the belly of the beast! Until then, in the words of the prophet of peace, Bob Marley, “Everywhere is war.”

    [1] Dakovic, Mirko. The Center for Peace in the Balkans. March 22, 2001. “Destabilizing the Balkans: US & Albanian Defense Cooperation in the 1990s.”

    [2] Cited in the New York Times, March 28th 1999.

    [3] The Soviet leadership was to blame for failing to unite with Yugoslavia on an anti-imperialist basis. This was due to the fact that post WWII, the Soviet Union agreed with the US and Britain to divide up Southern Europe between the three powers, with Greece and Yugoslavia falling into the US/British sphere of influence and Bulgaria and Hungary falling into the Soviet orbit. Stalin then unjustifiably expelled Yugoslavia from the Socialist Camp at 1948 Cominform meeting accusing the Yugoslavs, among other charges, of “Nationalism; and, ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyism.” This was a huge gift to imperialism. With his back against the wall, Tito soon after moved into a military alliance with NATO. He was central figure along with Nasser, Sukarno, Nehru and Nkrumah in the non-aligned Bandung Conference of 1955, clearly an attempt to draw the newly decolonizing countries away from the Soviet-led socialist camp.

    [4] Several studies are cited in Titostalgia: A Study in Nostalgia for Josep Broz by MitjaVelikonja.

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