[News] On the International Day of Peace, The U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination Reaffirmed Its’ Commitment to the Weapon of War

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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*On the International Day of Peace September 21st, The U.S./EU/NATO Axis 
of Domination Reaffirmed Its’ Commitment to the Weapon of War *
<https://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php/international-day-peace-september-21st-useunato-axis-domination-reaffirmed-its-commitment-weapon> 


<https://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php/international-day-peace-september-21st-useunato-axis-domination-reaffirmed-its-commitment-weapon> 

Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist 
<https://www.blackagendareport.com/author/%20Ajamu%20Baraka,%20BAR%20editor%20and%20columnist> 

28 Sep 
2022<https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php/index.php/international-day-peace-september-21st-useunato-axis-domination-reaffirmed-its-commitment-weapon>
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On the International Day of Peace September 21st, The U.S./EU/NATO Axis 
of Domination Reaffirmed Its’ Commitment to the Weapon of War 
<https://www.blackagendareport.com/sites/default/files/2022-09/Peace-Day-2022_0.jpg> 


/"End Racism: Build Peace" was the theme of the 2022 International Day 
of Peace. That noble sentiment can't be realized when powerful white 
supremacist structures are committed to practicing hegemony./

It is not a cruel irony but imperial consistency that on September 21, 
2022 the United Nations International Day of Peace, Xiomara Castro 
Sarmiento, the new president of Honduras addressed the 77th Session of 
the United Nations in New York while on that same day in a display of 
shameless imperial hubris and utter contempt for the idea of 
international peace, Volodymr Zelensky, the Ukrainian actor/president 
was scheduled to address a gathering of defense contractors in Houston, 
Texas to make the case for more war.

The contrast of President Xiomara Castro’s appearance in New York, 
representing a nation that in 2009 was plunged into 13 years of brutal 
dictatorship by the newly elected Obama administration, and Zelensky’s 
scheduled appearance in Houston could not be starker. President Xiomara 
Castro and most of the representatives from the Global South used their 
presentations at the United Nations to call for peace, for global 
cooperation and security for their people and the people of the world. 
The messages from the West were quite different. While decorated with 
allusions to liberal values that the West never really believed in, and 
certainly never applied to their colonial subjects, self-serving 
moralism and calls for more confrontation peppered the remarks from most 
Western leaders. None of them made a serious commitment to peace.

Zelensky’s U.S. handlers had to know that September 21 was the United 
Nations International Day of Peace, but providing another opportunity 
for one of Zelensky’s grand performances, this time before the CEOs of 
defense corporations with a personal stake in war and death, outweighed 
any considerations for being caught in a political and moral 
contradiction on that day.

For the Biden administration, a commitment to peace is a poor substitute 
for the benefits of securing another $13 billion in aid for Ukraine 
contained in legislation meant to fund the U.S. government. Moving money 
from the public coffers to the pockets of the defense companies that pay 
the bills for both parties is always seen as good bipartisan policy.

Zelensky did not appear before the defense industry CEOs because it 
appears that at the very last minute someone in the Biden administration 
understood that the optics of Zelensky begging defense contractors for 
more weapons to wage war on a day the U.N. had committed to peace would 
not look good. A lame excuse was given for why he could not do what he 
was put in place to do: play the role of a president and push Western 
interests. So, one of his underlings filled in for him.

However, that small bit of perception management did not, and cannot, 
reverse what is irreversible, namely, the precipitous decline of the 
moral standing of the U.S. and the West. The heavy-handed attempts to 
coerce nations in the Global South to align themselves with the U.S. and 
Europe on the Ukrainian conflict has had a disastrous result for the 
West. The vast majority of the peoples of the world — a world still 
experiencing the degradation and humiliation of ongoing parasitic U.S. 
and Western colonial/capitalist exploitation — decidedly turned against 
the “collective West.”

*The Black Radical Peace Tradition 
**Provides*<https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/du-bois-review-social-science-research-on-race/article/in-battle-for-peace-during-scoundrel-time/F81265698C05F13CE8B852BF54014461>*a 
Path Forward for the Anti-War and Anti-Imperialist Movement in the North*

/“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by 
popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from the 
interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament and 
proliferation, unjust war, and subversion through the defeat of global 
systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, 
and white supremacy.” /(BAP Principles of 
Unity)<https://blackallianceforpeace.com/principles-of-unity>

The fact that the theme of the International Day of Peace this year was: 
“End Racism: Build Peace,” and was ignored by the collective West, was 
no surprise to non-Westerners.

On this year’s theme, Secretary-General António Guterres 
said:<https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2022-03-18/secretary-generals-remarks-general-assembly-event-the-international-day-for-the-elimination-of-racial-discrimination-bilingual-delivered-follows-scroll-further-down-for>

“Racism continues to poison institutions, social structures, and 
everyday life in every society. It continues to be a driver of 
persistent inequality. And it continues to deny people their fundamental 
human rights. It destabilizes societies, undermines democracies, erodes 
the legitimacy of governments, and… the linkages between racism and 
gender inequality are unmistakable.”

But Guterres’s commentary demonstrates the limitations of his 
understanding of race and racialism, and their connections to war and 
imperialism. Black peace activists, who were also anti-colonial 
activists, made the correct connection between white supremacy, war, and 
the colonial/capitalist global system more than seventy years ago in the 
immediate post-world-war period. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating 
Committee that trained the first wave of white anti-war activists, and 
eventually Dr. King, also made those connections. But for liberals like 
Guterres and even radicals, racism, as a non-material phenomenon that 
exists in the consciousness of individuals, is the focus. You change 
minds, and like magic, fundamental human rights like housing, education, 
healthcare are then realizable.

But this conception is anachronistic and even reactionary. For the Black 
Alliance for Peace, the concept of white supremacy provides a broader 
and more theoretically sound framework than the focus on “racism” for 
understanding the structures and social relations that emerged with the 
invasion of the “Americas” , the establishment of the global 
colonial/capitalist system. BAP defines white supremacy 
as<https://blackallianceforpeace.com/africomwatchbulletin/edition41>:

/“The combined ideological and structural expression of “white power.” 
In its ideological expression, it posits that the descendants of people 
of the territory/idea referred to as Europe represent the highest 
examples of human development. /

/That their culture, social institutions, religions, and way of life are 
inherently and naturally superior. This position is combined with what 
BAP calls the global structures and institutions of white supremacy, the 
material means to maintain and advance global white power: the 
International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organization, 
Global Banking system, NATO, and dollar hegemony. /

/For BAP, white supremacy, therefore, cannot be reduced to 
individualized attitudes and values just among people identified as 
white. Instead, it should be seen as a structure of domination that is 
also ideologically embedded into every aspect of U.S. and European 
society to the extent that it has become normalized and invisibilized as 
general common sense.//” /

Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky as the coordinators of the “white lives 
matter more movement” understand the connections between war, white 
supremacy, and imperialism. They are white supremacists, committed to 
European (white) global hegemony. They both understand very well that 
the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is dependent on its capacity to 
effectively project collective imperialist state violence. They also 
understand that this agenda requires some degree of public support, or 
at least public acquiesce. That is precisely why the idea of peace is 
seen as a threat and the repressive mechanisms of the state are deployed 
to foster confusion and division among the anti-war movement in the U.S.

For the peoples and nations in the global South, the Ukraine war 
stripped away all pretenses to any idea of Europe being committed to any 
idea of collective humanity. The self-interested agenda of “collective 
West” and the imperialist interests driving that agenda became obvious 
to all. Yet, among the liberal/left in the Northern nations, concerns 
for “authoritarianism” trumps the imperial and racialist class and 
national agenda of the U.S. and European bourgeoisie. Northern anti-war 
and anti-imperialist organizations often find themselves providing 
ideological cover for imperialism by projecting moral and personal 
explanations for war and conflict over the colonial/capitalist material 
determinants that are really driving imperial policy.

Anti-war and anti-imperialist solidarity requires that those movements 
embrace the Black radical approach to the peace issue. Connecting 
anti-capitalist analysis and an anti-colonial stance is essential for an 
Anti-war politics that will have some value for nations and peoples who 
find themselves in the crosshairs of Western colonial violence.

The people of Honduras understood in 2009, as people in the U.S. lionize 
Obama as a supposed departure from the criminality of past presidents, 
that this kind of confusion exacts a terrible price for the colonized 
that can, as in the case of Honduras, result in 13 years of right-wing 
dictatorship. And with the manufactured NATO proxy war with Russia, it 
can also lead to the possibility of global nuclear annihilation for the 
world today.

As BAP member and scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly who has been 
instrumental in 
explicating<https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/du-bois-review-social-science-research-on-race/article/in-battle-for-peace-during-scoundrel-time/F81265698C05F13CE8B852BF54014461> 
the Black Radical Peace tradition has written, “throughout the 1960s and 
1970s, the legacy of Radical Black Peace Activists like W. E. B. Du 
Bois, Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, and the Sojourners for Truth and 
Justice lived on through organizations like the Black Panther Party, the 
National Black Anti-War Anti-Draft Union, and the Third World Women’s 
Alliance.”

Today that tradition is being upheld by BAP.

There is no solution but peace, but to have peace we have to fight for 
it. That is the commitment that must be made on the international day of 
peace and all other days. That means seizing power from the Euro- 
“American” capitalist oligarchy — the defenders of death, the 
plunderers, and profiteers — and building a new world where all can 
prosper and live in dignity and peace.

/*Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace 
and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. 
Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and 
leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition 
(UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.*/

Freedom Archives 1615 Hopkins Street Berkeley, CA 94707
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