[News] In Bolivia as in Palestine

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.resumen-english.org/2019/11/in-bolivia-as-in-palestine/resumen-english.org 
<https://www.resumen-english.org/2019/11/in-bolivia-as-in-palestine/>


  In Bolivia as in Palestine

By Carlos Aznarez, on November 20, 2019

Bolivia is resembling Palestine these days. For many reasons it is 
important to make this comparison now as the horror of the installation 
of a brutal dictatorship is unfolding in that South American country.

First and foremost these are two native peoples who not only face an 
implacable enemy but also a religious factor that is among the most 
lethal weapons that could be used against them.  In the name of a 
defamatory and unhealthy version of true Christianity, the Bolivian 
oligarchy in true Nazi style is promoting “racial purity”, by using the 
Bible as its mandate, including brainwashing being applied by the 
Pentecostal churches to co-opt the poorest layers of society and the 
different and numerous original ethnicities that it considers inferior.

If these tricks don’t work, plan B is rolled out to show them hatred by 
mocking and humiliating them in every circumstance and destroying the 
most precious symbols of their identity. Burning of their wiphalas for 
example, despising and degrading Bolivian indigenous women or cursing 
the indigenous people as a whole as Camacho, Mesa and the de facto 
president have done, are concrete elements of punishment to those who 
look different.

This is the same script Zionism wields against the Palestinian people. 
It is the idea of ethnic cleansing, by the way of distorting the reading 
of a history where fundamental data is omitted to disguise that when the 
invaders arrived, they found the indigenous people who had lived there 
for centuries clinging to their territory with the same strength and 
determination that they do in the present. The Zionist entity is, like 
the stateless Bolivian oligarchy, racist and violent to the core, one in 
the name of Jehovah and the other using an invented God to justify its 
crimes.

This Bolivian dictatorship of today, which orders its military and 
police to repress the indigenous-peasant people, workers and students as 
they did in the most sinister days of the Latin American decade of the 
60s and 70s, are shooting from helicopters or tanks, torturing and 
murdering. This also has class hatred in it against those who, thanks to 
a popular and revolutionary government, could feel included for the 
first time, treated as equals, empowered and entwined with the rest of 
the population.

In Palestine, the occupier not only seizes territories, expelling the 
native inhabitants, demolishing their homes and destroying their crops, 
but also manifests a deep hatred towards those who, in spite of 
continuous persecution and massacres, maintain a profile of political 
and above all cultural resistance. The occupants act as an oppressive 
class, being in reality an elite of new riches nourished by the wealth 
that others like them send from the diaspora. The objective of these 
voluntary contributions, sometimes under pressure, is to achieve, among 
other projects of economic opulence, to grease the machinery that 
carries out the continuous looting of Palestine and through a gigantic 
war apparatus, to militarize that territory in order to harass the rest 
of the Arab world from there.

On the other hand, what can we say about the resistance to the oppressor 
in Bolivia when every day we are seeing the next Tupaj Katari, Bartolina 
Sisa and Evo Morales, heroic scenes in which the masses guided by their 
natural organizations using all the methods of struggle, but making the 
main weight fall on the peaceful resistance to which the indigenous 
peoples have been accustomed to using for centuries. An important aspect 
of this strategy is the blockade of the big cities to make the maximum 
weight felt by those who sow, produce, manufacture and distribute food. 
Or at the same time they generate massive mobilizations, occupying the 
streets, the highways and the diverse territories, demanding that those 
who were not elected fall and that the man who socialized the leadership 
with his comrades in so many struggles re-govern again. The response of 
the parasites of the bourgeoisie and the affluent classes to the 
slightest hint of shortage consists of ordering their uniformed dogs to 
go hunting.

As in Bolivia, the Palestinian people have not stopped fighting and 
mobilizing, not a single day since the occupation and the Nakba it 
brought with it more than seven decades ago, and in that sense the 
peaceful “return marches” for more than a year now led by the people of 
Gaza or the continuous actions of protest and resistance in the West 
Bank, become landmarks of territorial vindication where the heroism of 
its protagonists are shown, confronting with stones heavily armed 
snipers in Palestine, or police and military blinded by hatred, 
gasifying men, women and children to the point of asphyxiation, or 
machine-gunning them, in the Bolivian El Alto or Cochabamba. In both 
confrontations, identity symbols such as the multicolored wiphala of the 
indigenous peoples of Abya Yala or the four-colored Palestinian insignia 
are proudly raised by those who know that the two synthesize much more 
than a banner, which must be defended with life if necessary.

Finally, a note on how the world reacts to these ethnic cleansings. The 
governments, almost all of them, with the exception of revolutionary 
Cuba and Venezuela (to which we can add, especially in the case of 
Bolivia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Uruguay, the future Argentine government and 
Third World countries) keep quiet or close ranks supporting the murderers.

In the field of international intellectuals and academics, in the face 
of conflicts of such magnitude as those occurring today in Latin America 
and the Middle East, there are also two distinct perspectives. An 
important minority that is aligned with the Bolivarian and Cuban 
revolutions that is clear on who the main enemy is and do not hesitate 
to show their support for both peoples who are being subjugated. 
Unfortunately, however, there are some dissonant expressions.

They are the ones who are on the lookout to mark and emphasize what is 
wrong with the leadership or the peoples, and throw themselves into 
corrosive criticism. They are the ones who do not use the same power, in 
the midst of a massacre here or there, to denounce and confront with the 
same force the criminals linked to the Empire.

We see it over and over again when it comes to Palestine, when tired of 
turning the other cheek, there were and there are sectors of the 
resistance that decided to combine peaceful methods of struggle with 
revolutionary violence. Immediately the voices of the eternal “good 
thinkers” (many confessed “progressive” or “left”) come out to 
pontificate: “this is not how it is done”, “this plays into the hands of 
the enemy”.

And without further ado, they continued or continue to give lectures on 
this at various universities, while those who fortunately do not listen 
to them, give themselves completely to defend their territories.

Now, in Bolivia, the same thing is happening, this intellectuality that 
calls itself “in solidarity” or even “anti-imperialist”, is very 
concerned about discovering the “magnitude” of the “errors” of Evo 
Morales and they do it, once again from the comfort of the people who 
overthrew Evo not because of their errors but because of their thousands 
of successes and who are now trying to take the Bolivian people back to 
the Middle Ages.

It is a pity that not even in such limited moments, where the Empire, 
capital and patriarchy are on one side and those who challenge it on the 
other, can they close ranks to give a common sense response to such 
enemies. But since these are not times of speeches, advice or omnipotent 
attitudes, but rather times of action and concrete solidarity, we will 
continue in the struggle and those who do not understand that will be 
left on the road.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano 
<http://www.resumenlatinoamericano.org/2019/11/20/en-bolivia-como-en-palestina-por-carlos-aznarez/>, 
translation North American bureau

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