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The U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination Reaffirmed Its’
Commitment to the Weapon of War </font></b><br>
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<span><a
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Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist</a></span>
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28 Sep 2022<a
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<p><em>"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.</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><strong>The Black Radical Peace Tradition </strong><a
href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/du-bois-review-social-science-research-on-race/article/in-battle-for-peace-during-scoundrel-time/F81265698C05F13CE8B852BF54014461"
rel="nofollow" target="_blank"
data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/du-bois-review-social-science-research-on-race/article/in-battle-for-peace-during-scoundrel-time/F81265698C05F13CE8B852BF54014461&source=gmail&ust=1664548559353000&usg=AOvVaw09CzRpzh953nNYq7Fg2Dzv"><strong>Provides</strong><span><span>
</span></span></a><strong> a Path Forward for the
Anti-War and Anti-Imperialist Movement in the North</strong></p>
<p><em>“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.” </em>(<a
href="https://blackallianceforpeace.com/principles-of-unity"
rel="nofollow" target="_blank"
data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://blackallianceforpeace.com/principles-of-unity&source=gmail&ust=1664548559353000&usg=AOvVaw221Bst08vRUJrkrFL8i4rK">BAP
Principles of Unity)<span><span> </span></span></a></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>On this year’s theme, Secretary-General António
Guterres <a
href="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"
rel="nofollow" target="_blank"
data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=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&source=gmail&ust=1664548559353000&usg=AOvVaw1GUSULzNaiWabeeUfGRoaK">said:<span><span>
</span></span></a></p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://blackallianceforpeace.com/africomwatchbulletin/edition41"
rel="nofollow" target="_blank"
data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://blackallianceforpeace.com/africomwatchbulletin/edition41&source=gmail&ust=1664548559353000&usg=AOvVaw1ANkQgV4iGsqCdf4XkZ7wO">defines
white supremacy as<span><span> </span></span></a>: </p>
<p><em>“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.
</em></p>
<p><em>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. </em></p>
<p><em>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.</em><em>” </em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>As BAP member and scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly who
has been instrumental in <a
href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/du-bois-review-social-science-research-on-race/article/in-battle-for-peace-during-scoundrel-time/F81265698C05F13CE8B852BF54014461"
rel="nofollow" target="_blank"
data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/du-bois-review-social-science-research-on-race/article/in-battle-for-peace-during-scoundrel-time/F81265698C05F13CE8B852BF54014461&source=gmail&ust=1664548559353000&usg=AOvVaw09CzRpzh953nNYq7Fg2Dzv">explicating<span><span>
</span></span></a> 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.”</p>
<p>Today that tradition is being upheld by BAP.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em><strong>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.</strong></em><br>
</p>
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