‘Black Lives Matter has a plantation mentality’ --Elaine Brown

There was a time, just a few decades ago, when "organizing" meant actual self-generated community self-defence and reparation programs, headed by an independent political party, and the language was not in any way polluted by "critical race theory" mush.

I say do it or don't do it but stop asking the occupying government to do it, and stop "organizing" the asking of the master to be more kind.

--Black Panther Elaine Brown on the degradation of black liberation

(Note: Nonetheless, even the BPP was infiltrated at the highest level by the CIA. See Assata Shakur's autobiography.)

Rockets from Gaza are morally justified and are not contrary to international law

By Dr. Denis G. Rancourt

"It is the obligation of every person who claims to oppose oppression to resist the oppressor by every means at his or her disposal. Not to engage in physical resistance, armed resistance to oppression, is to serve the interests of the oppressor; no more, no less. There are no exceptions to the rule, no easy out..."
--Assata Shakur, 1984 [1]

Many well-meaning observers who indiscriminately oppose violence and who support Palestine against its ruthless oppressor Israel have condemned the Hamas rockets launched towards Israel.

To condemn the rockets is misguided at best.

To condemn the rockets supports Israel in its war crimes against Gaza.

To condemn the rockets is also pompous, paternalistic, and racist.

Who are we -- as outside observers not sitting in Gaza -- to dictate to the victims of the brutal, systematic, long-term, and on-going suppression perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians how best to defend themselves?

Who are we to dictate which tactic might best increase survival?

Who are we to judge that Israeli civilians have such a high degree of innocence regarding the actions of their army as to prevent Gaza from attempting to defend itself with homemade rockets pointed in desperation at the only available targets?

In addition, one can easily make the moral argument that Israeli civilians share significant responsibility for the Gaza massacres. This responsibility follows from the structural circumstances:

• Israelis are well informed about the war crimes
• Israelis have political influence within a democratic system
• Israelis have the means and institutions to speak out
• Israelis can chose to abstain from military service

And it follows from the facts on the ground. Instead of opposition to the Israeli state's war crimes, social statistics show overwhelming support for the organized murder and genocidal suppression of Palestinians.

• Only 5% of Israeli academics have expressed opposition to the land invasion, in a recent petition. Where academics have total freedom of inquiry and of expression. 
• Israelis shamelessly gather to cheer-on the show of bombs dropped on Gaza, and threaten journalists with bodily harm who might report negatively about this particular display of cruelty.
• The Israeli media is overwhelmingly brutal and racist in its expression against Palestinians. Politicians make political points the more violent and waring they are -- there's an indicator. 
• The state is an apartheid state in both law and fact, yet there is virtually no opposition from Israeli civil society against the apartheid.
• And so on.

There is no doubt that the Hamas rockets constitute self-defence. The statement that the rockets are "indiscriminate" is no more than a statement that the rockets are not high-tech weapons, and this fact on-its-own is irrelevant to whether or not the rockets constitute self-defence.

There is no doubt that the rockets constitute self-defence because the rockets are a response to a brutal occupation, deprivation, and slaughter. No sane analyst can claim that Israel's long-term policy and actions of genocidal cleansing and land and resource annexation by force is caused by rockets or by suicide bombs or anything that the resisting Palestinians have or may do. (The inverse logic itself should be declared criminal.)

In my estimation, the use that Gaza makes of rockets is amply morally justified. And it is up to Gaza to decide how best to defend itself for its own survival.

Israel is showing little sign that it cares about World criticism of its actions in Gaza. It does not appear that anything except some moderately effective military resistance could slow Israel down in subjugating and torturing Gaza. For this reason, for the sake of Gaza, we can only hope that it will secure more and better weapons for its defence in the future, as this would probably minimize the loss of life and accelerate a just political resolution.

Furthermore, for readers who require the approbation of jurists, recently Dr. Norman Finkelstein has competently argued that the Hamas rockets, in the context of Israel's aggression, are not contrary to international law (LINK):

Human Rights Watch has argued that, even if its civilians are being relentlessly targeted, a people does not have a legal right to carry out “belligerent reprisals”—that is, to deliberately target the civilians of the opposing state until it desists. “Regardless of who started this latest round, attacks targeting civilians violate basic humanitarian norms,” HRW’s Deputy Middle East and North Africa director stated in the first press release.  “All attacks, including reprisal attacks, that target or indiscriminately harm civilians are prohibited under the laws of war, period.” Not so. International law does not—at any rate, not yet—prohibit belligerent reprisals.[4] The United States and Britain, among others, have staunchly defended the right of a state to use nuclear weapons by way of belligerent reprisal.[5] By this standard, the people of Gaza surely have the right to use makeshift projectiles to end an illegal, merciless seven-year-long Israeli blockade or to end Israel’s criminal bombardment of Gaza’s civilian population. Indeed, in its landmark 1996 advisory opinion on the legality of nuclear weapons, the ICJ ruled that international law is not settled on the right of a state to use nuclear weapons when its “survival” is at stake. But, if a state might have the right to use nuclear weapons when its survival is at stake, then surely a people struggling for self-determination has the right to use makeshift projectiles when it has been subjected to slow death by a protracted blockade and recurrent massacres by a state determined to maintain its occupation. 

One might legitimately question the political prudence of Hamas’s strategy. But the law is not unambiguously against it, while the scales of morality weigh in its favor. Israel has imposed a brutal blockade on Gaza. Fully 95 percent of the water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption. By all accounts, the Palestinian people now stand behind those engaging in belligerent reprisals against Israel. In the Gaza Strip, they prefer to die resisting than to continue living under an inhuman blockade. Their resistance is mostly notional, as makeshift projectiles cause little damage. So, the ultimate question is, Do Palestinians have the right to symbolically resist slow death punctuated by periodic massacres, or must they lie down and die?

***

Endnotes:

[1] This is the opening quote in Ward Churchill's essay "Pacifism as Pathology: Notes on an American pseudopraxis". Churchill's works are dedicated to the genocides against the native peoples of the Americas, including Canada. Assata Shakur has been feature on this blog in these posts.

Dr. Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and Full Professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is known for his applications of physics education research (TVO Interview). He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals, and has written several social commentary essays. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism. While he was at the University of Ottawa, he supported student activism and opposed the influence of the Israel lobby on that institution, which fired him for a false pretext in 2009: LINK.

Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur

This is the most beautiful and rewarding book I have read in a long time [1].

As an old white First World male, there are not a lot of books that emotionally stir me to tears. This is a rare gem for me in that regard.

The book reaches into growing up black, self-discovery through bold exploration, and dignity-preserving rebellion that should not be driven from any soul.

The experiences are real and positioned in history with a candid view of the outside turmoil and its impact on self, family, and the black nation.

Assata was in many places in the 1960s and 1970s and directly involved: segregated USA, grunge-job exploitation, aspiring middle-class climbers, campus mobilization, community education, black liberation, American Indian Movement resistance, Black Panther outreach, underground, COINTELPRO repression, mammoth legal system battles, giving life as struggle, and her own near-death survival and escape from maximum security prison to Cuba.

The critics that bash the book as Shakur's political ranting are out to lunch. The book is mostly a personal and historic voyage recounted with extreme sensitivity and flair. It is not a political essay or party propaganda by any stretch!

I had a few criticisms regarding Shakur's recommendations for the struggle.

Shakur's pedagogy with young children is inspired but her view of the importance of formal education in black struggle, in my opinion, is misguided. She was not aware of the work of Paulo Freire which was first published in English in 1970. Although she knew about theology of liberation, Shakur did not have theoretical knowledge about the central role of the praxis of liberation in learning [2]. This despite the fact that her own learning was predominantly achieved by praxis.

As a result, Shakur would have designed formal college-style education for Black Panther cadres. This suggests that her development was partially polluted by institutional college education.

Similarly, Shakur appears to not have been aware of the anarchist critiques of socialism and communism. Her suggestion to moderate the rebellion of independent Black Panther operatives driven underground in view of its perception by the mainstream struggle is a carbon copy of present activist discussions around "violence" and, in my opinion, is counterproductive [3].

This is a minor point in the book but whereas Shakur correctly taps into her own rebellion and life force throughout this period in her life she fails to realize that tapping into such individual rebellion is the life-source of emancipatory revolution [3]; rather than depending only on organizational discipline coupled with ideological education.

References
[1] "Assata: An Autobiography" by Assata Shakur
[2] "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Paulo Freire
[3] "Symbiosis of anarchy and hierarchy" by Denis G. Rancourt

On the prison of delayed fertility*

The right to choose death vs. life imposing choices

By Denis G. Rancourt

In this note I suggest that the mainstream political thrust of “right to choose” proponents is harmful, as viewed in a meta-picture of society.

In the First World, the system separates us from ourselves and from each other. It’s more than atomization. It includes ionization, loss of self.

School is a major instrument. We are made obedient but also made sterile for use in non-life tasks. We are conditioned to delay entry into adulthood, into responsibility, into participation and into meaning.

We are barred from creation of life as discovery of self and conditioned to view procreation as a disaster in our reproductive prime and as an optional distraction and luxury in our reproductive decline.

The system needs dedicated managers and workers who only reproduce to replicate economic extraction. There is no time or space for self-discovery and self-organization.

We are conditioned into a death culture where our imposed primary purpose is to serve the exploitation machine.

Where life gave life which sustained life, now death is manufactured in order to serve death.

The First World is the land of the walking dead. No community, no nature, no self.

Walk off the plane in the developing world and step into life creation, bonds, vibrancy, family and community. Only military onslaught and sustained merciless economic predation can destroy a life-based people.

By comparison, the death-based people that we are fall prey to depression, futility, emptiness, pharma-cure, consuma-cure, entertaina-cure, and the rest. We don’t have a chance because we have been designed to be dead – in order to be manageable and malleable.

And the design must be strictly enforced. Rebellious teenage parents must pay the price and suffer the system’s wrath: Economic punishment, child removal, societal exclusion, stigmatization, isolation …

There may as well be prison walls keeping us from our own fertility; and in addition there is technology – the pill, the abortion, surgical intervention, and the food we eat.

And on the privileged left there is a mental environment industry to justify the prison: “A woman’s right to choose.” A woman’s right to be fairly exploited and oppressed equally to men.

The right to life movement is in part an earnest revolutionary impulse against the culture of death, the culture of the market; the expanding and globalizing market that destroys traditional family types centered on procreation.

The life vs. choice debate confronts more traditional modes against corporate-oriented organization. It is a fundamental battle touching the heart of the single most important defining characteristic of any culture: The culture’s reproductive paradigm.

The “right to choose” in the mainstream is a misguided political venture and a harmful slogan that preserves class inequality. Does woman choose to be in a culture of delayed fertility or is this an unquestioned given defined by market forces?

As radical choosers know, the right to choose must be the right to choose economic and class justice; before it makes any sense beyond accommodating middle class death management for dedicated house slaves to the system.

There is no choice without personal safety and healthy conditions. And there is no choice in a prison.

I agree that a foetus that cannot survive outside the womb can be subjected to choice and that women have not had choice and that an individual should be allowed to choose his/her own death but the best way to gain all these choices is to take down the prison, starting with the prison of delayed fertility.

*This essay was inspired by the autobiography of Assata Shakur.

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