This paper is prepared by Turwanire KT Mandla of the Jenne-Niane Institute for International Studies
Over the past month or so the world has been witness to the real depth of the horror of Zionism. In occupied Palestine, the area known as the Gaza Strip has been set up by the Zionist State of Israel as an open air prison for Palestinians. The Gaza Strip as a prison began as a series of tents on the desert 50+ years ago for those Palestinians forced out of the land given to the Zionist by the British and the Western controlled United Nations. The idea of “open air prisons” can be traced to the early Spanish conquests of Mexico and the Andean Nations, in which the conquered Native American peoples where subjugated to their lands and villages under indigenous and Spanish elite control. Later this mix of indigenous system and Spanish Feudalism was altered by the Anglo-Germanic settlers of North America in to the ‘Reservation System’ for that region’s Native peoples. Again even later, the reservation system was used to ensure the control of enslaved Africans, by confining us to the plantations on which we were subjugated. Segregation and Apartheid were the modern development of these historical systems of foreign population control conceived by the European settlers in their expansion. It is critically important that these events, processes and developments be seen as part of a historical system, systematic developments, rather than as the anomalous developments they are being characterized by the Euro-American commentators and African-Am political class of collaborationists.
The next question that has to be asked is what is this systematic development and how is it being employed strategically? I think it is useful to call this strategy in the modern contemporary context “The Gaza Strategy”. It is and always has been a military containment strategy used to control the movement and engagement of subjugated peoples. Today, it has become a more refined strategy with military planning developed to ensure its effective application in a variety of circumstances where containment is required to ensure the protection of the classes most benefiting from capitalism. In Gaza we see how the Zionist are able to lay siege to an entire population cutting them off from the world in every imaginable way; economically, socially, culturally, politically and severely limiting communications with other populations.
Once this kind of effectively total control is established, the population is at the mercy of the subjugators for every need related to material existence; the life of the subjugated population represents an existential threat to the subjugators. Over the past nine years we have seen how the Zionist exterminators have waged a murderous war of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, as well as those in the so-called more moderate or compliant West Bank. This containment strategy, takes on a policy framework in how land and infrastructure is developed and distributed. In occupied Palestine the so-called moderate leadership, effectively and in essence, agreed to “demilitarize” the area; that is disarm the people’s resistance, while at the same time the interloper state armed itself with all of the modern tools of warfare possible. In fact, in the case of the Zionist State, it is rapidly becoming a major player in the technical development of military machinery for civilian population control and pacification.
Occupied Palestine represents a seemingly ideal theater for testing the military machinery needed for containment around the world. Why? Because all the Western governments led by the United States and the United Kingdom are firmly behind the acts of extermination, and the policy of social genocide being employed against the Palestinian People by the Zionist State of Israel in the name of Jewish freedom. In addition, rabid capitalist states like China and Russia see no self-interest in actively opposing the West or standing for ethical and moral principles. Most African and other Asian states are so economically obliged to the American capitalist for their very state existence, their silence is assured. The military elites, princes, and autocrats of the Arab world are all in open collaboration with the Zionist as they see the Israelis ridding them of potential threats to their continued existence from both the right and the left. Only Spanish speaking America has had the fortitude to stand in clear opposition to the ravages of the Zionist. Bolivia it appears has gone the full way to declare the Zionist state a terrorist-state. The Zionist are acting as test agents for the rest of the capitalist world, seeking to ascertain the extent to which unbridled savage violence can be unleashed against a subjugated or restive people. They want to see the extent of the public backlash to such violence, alongside the effectiveness of various weapons systems. This testing should not be seen as designed solely to contain the valiant people of occupied Palestine. Palestine is only the test area for a strategy that the capitalist global system will employ worldwide to protect its interests and its minority populations that are strategically placed around the globe working for them.
Recently in Brazil, we witnessed the spectacle of the football World Cup. Brazil is a country in which the majority population is African, yet the African presence was almost entirely missing from both the soccer spectacle and the anti-spectacle demonstrations. The African population is of course at the economic bottom of society and represents the major population occupying the slums called Favelas. Soon after Brazil won the 2016 Olympics and the 2014 World Cup, the army was deployed to the favelas to pacify the gangs and the so-called drug trafficking, laying siege to the favelas, containing the African population in conditions similar to those in Gaza. Brazil has been temporarily made safe for these capitalist spectacles by the complete repression, siege and military containment of the African population, the potentially most restive and revolutionary urban population.
In South Africa the traitorous African National Congress (ANC) openly collaborated with the mine owners of the Markani platinum mine to suppress by any means the democratic union activities of the rightful owners of South Africa, the African people. This traitorous collaboration led to the massacre of 38 miners. Clearly, the ANC is in collaboration with international capitalism to ensure that the settlers retain their dominance and control over the economic instruments that make South Africa an up and coming player in the so-called BRICKS capitalist grouping. It is likely that we will soon see the Gaza Strategy employed more rapidly and fully in South Africa.
However, South Africa is not the only place on the continent the Gaza Strategy will find use. In Ghana the Chinese are under assault from the local people in Sekondi-Takoradi as the Ghanaian commission (collaborationist) class has leased the region to the foreigners for their exploitation, without regard to the people’s interests. In Kenya, the struggles developing on the coast are related directly to land ownership as natural gas deposits have been found and the local commission class wishes to make the necessary deals to disenfranchise the local peoples. In all of these instances and many more on the continent, expatriate communities have evolved to exploit the resources and they exist in close physical relations with the commission class who provides them this entre. These capitalist agent populations of commission class locals and expatriate exploiters must, like the Israelis, be protected from the larger hostile populations surrounding them; thus the Gaza Strategy comes in to play.
In China the people of Western China are headed to open revolt against the Han-Chinese who have essentially invaded their lands as settlers not unlike Israel or South Africa. Xinjiang is a so-called autonomous region that apparently has large oil and natural gas reserves, which the Chinese Han majority needs. The Han-Chinese have employed a containment strategy in Xinjiang very reminiscent of the Israeli strategy of containment in occupied Palestine. Indigenous Xinjiang communities are cordoned off under various levels of military occupation. At the same time Han Chinese areas are under direct military protection, as settler communities.
In Russia the Asian non-Russian areas of the country are being opened to commodity exploitation at the expense of the local peoples, causing resentment, forcing workers to relocate to Russia proper for jobs, where Russian racist nationalism is being used against the migrants much like in the United States and European Union (the Atlantic or NATO states). It is probably accurate to say the situation in the Ukraine has no stand-out progressive force with a dog in the fight. However, it is important to note that the European Union and the Americans precipitated the current situation, by drawing the Ukraine away from its natural attachment to Russia and into the Union’s orbit. It is also true that the Ukraine government has writ large significant neo-fascist elements and has an overall right leaning. The Atlantic States alliance seeks to draw away states from the Russian orbit to boost a flaying economy across the European Union, at the expense of Russia who seeks to compete within the established capitalist world-order. It is important to note that many in the population on the ground in so-called break-away Ukrainian regions long for the idealist versions of the “socialism” of the old Soviet Union; longing for a more social existence even if the Soviet Union failed to actually provide such. This latter group may someday be the progressive force that emerges in this conflict and across the Russian territory.
In the United States the reservations of the Native Americans are deplorable beyond so-called Third World in conditions. Complete underdevelopment exists despite the fiction of Native American sovereignty and the development of mafia controlled gambling establishments. In the rest of the United States centuries of racial segregation has meant that land use policies and infrastructure development has led to the concentration of the majority of Africans and Latinos in to ghettos not unlike Gaza and the West Bank, or Soweto. Since at least the 1960’s the Americans have designed various iterations of today’s Gaza strategy to contain and pacify a restive African population. The historical fiction that nothing can be gained by violence, only thorough non-violence is completely untrue, a lie! Any examination of the historical record of the Civil Rights and Black Power stages of the African Movement in the United States will clearly show that at the heart of change was violence, violence either by the State or state sanctioned White terrorist groups against African People and our allies, or the fear resulting from the open rebellions of Africans during the period. Capitalism in particular and power in general, never concedes or makes concessions without the involvement of violence in the calculations. Public accommodation legislation was a direct result of ‘direct action’ action campaigns such as the Freedom Rides, the Sit-ins, the Children’s March, and the boycotts. The Voting Rights act grew firmly out of the violence against demonstrators on the bridge in Selma, Alabama, by the state authorities. The many rebellions of the 1960’s, called riots, led to many urban programs meant to tap down more uprisings. University student take-overs in the latter years of the 60’s and early 70’s, and the violent response of State military forces, forced the development of Affirmative Action Programs across the whole of academia. There is an irreconcilable tension between the capitalist system and its subjugated masses, especially the most disenfranchised minority populations.
Recently we have seen at marked increase in the “policing” of African and even Latino communities; ‘stop and frisk’ and ‘broken window’ are employed in various iterations in every African community in the United States. The Gaza Strategy of siege is employed against African communities in the form of ‘food deserts’, poor public transportation’, relocation of Africans to suburban enclaves with no services as a result of inner-city gentrification; employment places located far from urban areas, and harassment if Africans are spotted by police outside or inside certain areas driving or walking while being African. In short the prior slave population in the globalized automated economy of the 21st century is no longer needed in the Americas to provide cheap labor to the capitalist enterprise; we have, as a whole, become a surplus and un-needed labor reserve in the United States.
Ferguson=Gaza is a slogan statement seeking to show the links between what happened in Gaza and what is happening in Ferguson, USA. The very type of military equipment that was used to cordon off Gaza, put down demonstrations in the West Bank, or roll in to Gaza in a war of extermination was deployed in Ferguson against unarmed, non-violent protestors. The purpose of rolling out this high-level military equipment is essentially to intimidate a small population of Africans who have been gradually relocated from St. Louis City proper to the suburbs, as a part of city gentrification. A population that small town administrators are both afraid of and believe they can effectively intimidate into compliance along the lines of “Netanyahu’s quiet”. The clear execution of Michael Brown, the case of the murder of Garner, Trayvon Martin and the numerous other cases of Africans being shot down in the streets, along with the incarceration of our youth, means the collaborationist African-Am politicians could not avoid appearing to deal aggressively with the situation in Ferguson, Missouri.
Congressmen Immanuel Clever, babbling in his normally mealy mouth manner, cited military equipment moving in to Ferguson like tanks in to Baghdad, but tanks are not moving in to Baghdad, they are moving in to Gaza and the West Bank. These collaborationist leaders are so subservient to the small Zionist population that they are fearful of even mentioning the situation in Palestine as an example of military “over-reach”. The Negro political establishment, along with Barack Obama, has all called for a rollback in the use of such military style over-reaction. They have now begun to frame the narrative about small town police forces having such unnecessary high-level military style equipment. So one must suppose that large cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New York have a real need for such high level equipment to suppress what? Presumably restive African and Latino large city urban communities and with increasing probability disenfranchised White communities!! Current management policy likely suggests that the capitalist want to maintain the fiction of “White Privilege” in the minds of poor Whites, so such force was not employed in the instance of armed right wing insurrectionist in the Nevada Bundy Ranch case.
Make no mistake that what is occurring in Gaza is over there, about those Arabs, not our problem, we got other issues, or most importantly the stupid who allow themselves to be tools of Zionism supporting Israel; these notions are all wrong and squarely against African interests in all the forms these excuses take. What is going down in Gaza was rolled out in Ferguson by out-of-touch backwater police prematurely, exposing a containment system built around the successes of its testing in Gaza and the West Bank. Premature exposure has meant there now needs to appear to be a rollback, but only in its deployment, not in the existence of this military apparatus to be deployed against any who threaten the social quiet of capitalist interests.
A people must know its real enemy. A people must know how a system develops mechanisms (systems) and strategies to employ against them and why. A people must know that they are never dealing with an event or even a process; they are always and without fail dealing with a system, built around how the means of production and distribution of goods and services are organized. Capitalism is a totality; it is an economic system, a political arrangement, a legal system, a social division of society, a way of thought and a way of life, as well as a cruel and all engaging mental pathology.