Category Archives: Government Oppression

The new American law to bolster support to Tibet comes at a time when China has stepped up its oppression campaign in Tibet.

From people being forced into re-education camps to forced labour, China's Xinjiang playbook is implemented in Tibet.

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This report will tell you the crimes of the dragon in this region.

China has built multiple slave camps across Tibet which are run by People's Armed Police, a paramilitary organisation.

Also read | Donald Trump signs laws to further US's support to Taiwan, Tibet; drawing China's criticism

Rural Tibetans moved into these camps must dress in uniforms and perform military drills.

Reports say their teaching program includes curriculum on skills, legal, and gratitude education and all the subjects have one driving theme, loyalty to the Communist Party of China.

News agency Reuters earlier this year conducted an investigation into these camps and they found local-level officials have been given quotas.

These officials must send a fixed number of Tibetan workers to factories where they are employed in low-paying jobs. Officials who meet their quotas are rewarded. Those who fall short of quotas are punished. Bigger districts have bigger quotas.

In the first seven months of 2020, more than half a million people were trained in these camps, which is 15 per cent of Tibet's population.

Out of these, 50 thousand people were transferred to jobs within Tibet, while thousands more were shipped across China.

Many of them ended up in low-paying jobs in textile, manufacturing, construction and agriculture, among others.

The exodus is part of a campaign of cultural cleansing for forced assimilation of Tibet into China.

China's Tibet mission has several objectives.

First, it wants to homogenise the population and to do that Tibet is being flooded with the majority Han Chinese.

Six years ago, China began promoting mixed marriages between Han Chinese and Tibetans.

From 2008 to 2013, mixed marriages saw double-digit growth in Tibet.

The government also offered incentives for such marriages, including social security, vacations, reproductive rights, among others.

In fact, children that were a product of mixed marriages were promised special treatment, including funding for education, assured employment and even membership of the Communist Party.

Beijing followed this up with an assault on the Tibetan culture and faith and recently local officials ordered the destruction of Tibetan flags.

A U.S. State Department report lists more crimes of the Communist Party.

There are reports of former detainees being beaten up until they lost consciousness. Monks and nuns being forced to wear military clothing and undergo political indoctrination in detention centres.

The US has accused the Chinese government of restricting the size of Buddhist monasteries with evictions of monks and nuns who are being banned from practising Buddhism.

All this tells one story that Tibet has become a police state with the iron hand controlling the life of every Tibetan and execute forced assimilation of Tibet into China.

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US comes to the rescue when China ramped up oppressions campaign in Tibet - WION

The Fourth Estate in India must attack feudal forces like casteism, communalism, religious bigotry and attempts to polarise society

Today a large part of the Indian media has lost its voice and the trust of the people, too. It has become a godi media. Instead of being the Fourth Estate and serving the Indian people, it has largely become part of the First Estate, as stated by eminent journalist and Magsaysay Award winner Ravish Kumar. This brings us to the key question: What is the role of the media?

This was explained by Justice Hugo Black of the US Supreme Court in The New York Times vs. US, 1971 (the Pentagon Papers case) in these stirring words: In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free Press the protection it must have to fulfil its essential role in our democracy. The Press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Governments power to censor the Press was abolished so that the Press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The Press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the Government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained Press can effectively expose deception in Government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free Press is the duty to prevent any part of the Government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of the Government that led to the Vietnam war, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.

Historically, the media arose in England and France in the 17th and 18th centuries as an organ of the people against feudal oppression. At that time all the organs of power were in the hands of the feudal authorities (kings, aristocrats and so on). Hence, the people had to create new organs which would represent their interests and the media (apart from the Parliament), was one of these new organs. In Europe and America, it represented the voice of the future, in contrast to the old, feudal organs which wanted to preserve the status quo.

Great writers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Thomas Paine and so on used the media (which was then only print media and that, too, not in the form of regular newspapers but pamphlets and leaflets) to combat feudalism, religious bigotry and superstitions.

Thus, the media was of great help in transforming European society from the feudal to the modern age. Indias national aim is to transform itself from an underdeveloped to a highly developed and highly industrialised country. If we dont do so, we will remain condemned to massive poverty, record unemployment, appalling level of child malnourishment, almost total lack of proper healthcare and good education for the masses, among other things.

Our media must play an important role in this historical transformation, as the European media did. But for that it must stop behaving like a mouthpiece and serve the governed, not the governors (as Justice Black said in his judgment). The Indian media must attack feudal forces like casteism and communalism, condemn religious bigotry and attempts to polarise our society. It must promote scientific ideas, social harmony and the unity of our people. It should stop diverting attention from real issues and focusing on relative non-issues like the lives of film stars and cricketers (e.g. the suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput, allegations made by Kangana Ranaut, Kareena Kapoors second pregnancy and Virat Kohlis decision to take paternity leave and so on), petty politics, astrology, among others, and instead focus on the real issues, which are mainly socio-economic. This includes the problems of unemployment, malnourishment, lack of healthcare, price rise, the agrarian crisis and so on.

For years, the Indian media turned a Nelsons eye to the large number of farmers suicides in our country, until a brave journalist, P Sainath, revealed the sad truth through his persistent reporting. It was only then that the rest of the media began reporting the agrarian distress in the country.

Some years ago, a fashion show was held in Mumbai during the Lakm Fashion Week in which the models wore cotton outfits. This event was covered by over 500 fashion/lifestyle journalists while the farmers who produced that cotton were committing suicide just an hours flight away, in Vidarbha. No one covered those suicides except for a few local journalists.

Many TV anchors forget their journalistic ethics and just indulge in propaganda. To give an example, some time ago an organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat was lambasted by the media as spreaders of the Coronavirus. They were even given despicable names like Corona jihadis and Corona bombs. I made a personal investigation into this and found that the allegations against the Tablighi Jamaat were false. The Tablighi Jamaat is a religious organisation which meets at its Markaz in Delhi once or twice a year, where Muslims come from several countries. This year, too, many people came from Indonesia, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, the United Arab Emirates and so on. Some of them were apparently infected with the virus, without being aware of it. But to say that they knowingly brought the disease with them to spread it in India, as propagated by certain sections of the media, was patently false (as indeed the court has now found).

Another example of the partisan behaviour of the godi media is the way they have characterised the ongoing farmers agitation as a movement of Khalistanis, Pakistanis, Maoists and anti-nationals. Countless examples of this kind of biased reporting can be given.

One can only hope that the Indian media will some day get over its sorry plight and emerge as a champion of the people instead of being, to use US President Donald Trumps words, an enemy of the people. Only then will it earn the peoples respect.

(The writer is a former judge of the Supreme Court of India. The views expressed are personal.)

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The media must become the voice of the people again - Daily Pioneer

Dear Prime Minister,During your time of leading our country you have done a commendable job. In foreign policy you have excelled. You have opened up many parts of the world to Israel; in Africa, in South America and elsewhere. As a result, the economy has flourished. Your excellent relationship and cooperation with President Trump created an atmosphere that culminated in the Abraham Accords, an excellent achievement that has placed Israel even higher among the ranks of respected powers of the Middle East and beyond. Direct air routes to several Arab countries are already in operation and it is expected that more will open. Most importantly Prime Minister, your diplomatic skills have awakened the world to the intent and ambitions of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and you have repeatedly stated your determination to prevent their regime from developing nuclear weapons. At the same time you have assured the Iranian population that Israels intentions are not directed against them, but to prevent their evil leadership from plunging them into a disastrous war from which it would take years to recover. I know, Prime Minister, that in the meantime you are engaged in trying to shorten the fundamentalist oppression and curtailment of freedom of the Iranian people.Under your premiership we have maintained an uninterrupted trading partnership with the countries of the European Union, and you are maintaining friendly contact with their leaders, even though they are not in total accord with your Iran policy.This is the first time an Israeli prime minister has had to face the phenomenon of cyberwarfare, and you are doing your utmost to counter the attempts by Russia and China, both highly skilled in infiltrating our computer systems.Our relations with China are particularly strained, because through our security apparatus you are trying to prevent the implantation of control devices into infrastructure projects in Israel in which China is commercially involved.

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Open letter to Netanyahu: Retire, save your legacy, or lose in disgrace - The Jerusalem Post

A publicly funded charter schoolin Nevada created a hostile environment for studentsby instructing them to associateaspects of their identity with oppression, a new lawsuitalleges.

The suit was filed Tuesdayby a highschool senior at Democracy Prep at the Agassi campus in Las Vegas, who claims he was forced to take the course -- titled "Sociology of Change" -- in order to graduate.

William Clark, whose mother is Black and deceased father was White, claims he felt discriminated against and harassed by various aspects of the course -- including an alleged assertion that by not identifying with an oppressive group, students wereexercising their privilege or underscoring their status as an oppressor.

Democracy Prep class slide telling students they should unlearn and challenge beliefs that stem from oppression.

Democracy Prep class slide encouraging students to identify parts of their identity attached to privilege or oppression.

Clark and his mother, Gabrielle, areseeking damages for severe mental and emotional distress, as well as allegedly "permanent" damages to his academic career.

Rather than allowing William Clark to avoid the class or replace it with other alternatives, the school insisted he complete it, according to the complaint.

VIRGINIA COUNTY SPENDS NEARLY $500G ON RACE PROGRAMS FOR SCHOOLS

One of the instructional slides included in the complaint shows lists dominant groups in American culture as "white," "male," "middle/upper class," "heterosexual," and "protestant/Christian," while "everyone else" is classified as "submissive."

Kathryn Bass, Clark's teacher who is named as a defendant in the suit, similarly associates elements of her own identity -- like "White, Irish, American citizen" -- with "privilege." Others like "female" and "working class" are associated with an "oppressive" label. Meanwhile, she says she's "both privilege and oppressive" in her identifying as "bisexual" and having a mental health disability.

Democracy Prep class slide identifying a teacher, Kathryn Bass, as oppressive and privileged according to aspects of her identity.

She also allegedly addressed students as "social justice warriors,"taught students that "[B]lack prejudice does not affect the rights of white people," and useda meme to argue "reverse racism doesn't exist."

Meme featured in Democracy Prep class instructional material

Democracy Prep class instructional material claiming, among other things, that reverse racism doesn't exist.

The meme, which features cartoon character Spongebob Squarepants and a rainbow, is typically used onlineto convey ideas in a condescending manner.

Clark and others in his class allegedly objected when they were taught those ideas, according to the complaint. The complaint, which was filed in a Nevada district court, claims that Bass "terminated class discussion" amid in response to Clark's claim that "everyone can be racist" and "that prejudice anywhere from anyone can harm others."

Democracy Prep class slide purporting to show examples of institutional oppression.

PRESIDENT TRUMP INSTALLS COMMISSION TO PROMOTE 'PATRIOTIC EDUCATON,' COUNTER 'RADICAL' VIEWS OF US HISTORY

"For this protected speech and others like it, Defendant Kathryn Bass terminated class discussion immediately with the intent to chill and discourage future objections to Defendants sponsored politicized ideology," the complaint reads. It also points out that although the school has encouraged other forms of dissent, like "occupying a cafeteria," the same privilege seemed to not extend to Clark.

Besides Bass, the lawsuit names other higher-level officials, whom they claim were involved in pushing the curriculum onto students.

Clark's mother, Gabrielle, told Fox News that the instruction her son received created psychological distress for both of them. "I was really worried about his physical safety," she said.

Her son is "generally regarded as [W]hiteby his peers," according to the complaint, and has "green eyes and blondish hair."

"Defendants, who include a state funded and sponsored charter school, teachers and senior administrators, have deliberately created a hostile educational environment for Plaintiff William Clark, who, unlike his classmates appears to be and is regarded by his peers as white," the complaint reads."Defendants thus discriminated on the basis of race and color, in addition to sex, gender and religion, in violation of Title VI and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972."

HIGHER EDUCATION GROUPS ASK BIDEN TO REVERSE TRUMP ORDERS ON TITLE IX REFORM, CRITICAL RACE THEORY

Part of the suit entails Gabrielle Clark's claim that the instruction violated her rights as a parent and contradicted ideas she conveyed to her son about Christianity and family.

A slide titled "Institutions + Oppression," lists certain institutions with apparent instruction about how they oppress others. Under "Family," the slide reads "reinforce racist/homophobic prejudices." The description for "religion" similarly reads "homophobic prejudices" and "right versus wrong judgement."

Gabrielle Clark told Fox News: "I tried to instill in all of my children that you need to respect everyone and treat everyone the same ... and do what Martin Luther King said. You don't judge people on the color of their skin. You judge them on the content of their character."

A spokesperson for Democracy Prep said the school hadn't been served with the lawsuit.

JOSH HAWLEY CALLS ON CONGRESS TO INVESTIGATE 'CRITICAL RACE THEORY' TRAINING SCANDAL AFTER TRUMP'S EXECUTIVE ORDER

Tuesday'swas just the latest in a series of complaints raised throughout the country in which schools or government institutions came under fire for promoting ideas generally associated with "critical race theory." The Clarks', however, appear to have brought the first and well-publicized suit of its nature.

Leaked, racializedmaterialpreviouslystreamed out of federal agencies, prompting the Trump administration to issue an executive order and ban trainings involving certain ideas about race and identity. Just before the election, Trump installed a commission he said was designed to promote "patriotic education."

M.E. Hart, an attorney who has conducted diversity training sessions for businesses and the federal government, toldThe Washington Postthat it can improve morale, cooperation and efficiency.

"If we are going to live up to this nations promise -- We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal --we have to see each other as human beings, and we have to do whatever it takes, including taking whatever classes make that possible," Hart told the Post. "These classes have been very powerful in allowing people to do that, and we need them more than ever. Theres danger here."

But some, like the president, have argued that ideas like these are actually divisive by conflating individuals with the institutions or groups to which they belong.

The Clarks' lawsuit includes a claim that the school infringed on his privacy by requiring him to fill out a form identifying himself with certain identity categories.

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Bass' course appeared to extend beyond lessons about individual identity and encouraged students to read facts through an ideological lens. One of the slides, labeled "Institutional Examples," makes statements like "when a woman makes 2/3 of what a man makes at the same job... that's institutionalized sexism."

Another reads: "When psychiatric institutions and associations 'diagnose' transgender people as having a mental disorder... That's institutionalized gender opprssion and transphobia."

A copy of the lawsuit was posted to Schoolhouserights.org.

Fox News' Adam Shaw contributed to this report.

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Nevada charter school's students were instructed to link aspects of their identity with oppression: lawsuit - Fox News

On November 28, the Uttar Pradesh government cleared an ordinance to prevent love jihad, a right-wing conspiracy theory which claims that Muslim men are seducing and marrying Hindu women in order to convert them to Islam. The new law, while penalising forced religious conversions, also makes it mandatory for an individual to seek the state governments permission if they wish to convert to another religion in order to get married.

Uttar Pradesh has already arrested about 35 people under this law, but is not the only state cracking down on love jihad. Last week, the Madhya Pradesh cabinet cleared a similar bill while three other Bharatiya Janata Party-led states Karnataka, Haryana and Assam have announced plans to pass such laws.

Hindutva organisations have been raising the bogey of love jihad for nearly a decade, targeting inter-faith couples and Muslim men even though no evidence of such forced religious conversions through marriage have been found so far. The demand for laws hindering inter-faith marriages, however, is incongruent with the right wings other favourite demand: a uniform civil code.

By definition, a uniform civil code involves having a common set of laws governing marriage, divorce, succession and adoption for all Indians, instead of allowing different personal laws for people of different faiths. The aim of such uniformity is meant to be ensuring equality and justice for women in particular, who are often denied their rights in marriage, divorce and inheritance under patriarchal personal laws.

Hindutva groups have raked up the demand for a uniform civil code for decades, and implementing it was one of the three big promises in the BJPs manifesto when it came to power in 2014. Now that the BJP has fulfilled the other two promises abolishing Article 370 in Kashmir and laying the foundation for on a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya its supporters expect the uniform civil code to be next, and have raised the demand once again in conversations about love jihad laws.

Opposition to a uniform civil code has been fierce and predictable from minority religious groups who want to preserve their personal laws. But the idea of a uniform code has also been firmly opposed by womens groups and secular organisations, for reasons that are nuanced and less obvious.

In 1956, the endeavour to secure a common civil code across the country was added as a directive principle in the Constitution. However, the subject has always been contentious and politically charged, so the code was neither drafted nor implemented.

Up to the 1990s, womens rights groups saw merit in the idea of a uniform civil code, which could provide women with rights not granted under the Hindu Code Bills, the Muslim Personal Law or other personal laws. In 1995, for instance, non-profit group Forum Against Oppression of Women drafted its own blueprint for a common civil code in a document titled Vision for Gender-just Realities.

Although it was never formally submitted to any government agency, this vision document focused on ensuring womens rights in matters of marriage, divorce and inheritance. Like the existing Muslim Personal Law, it viewed marriage as a contract rather than a sacrament. It also recognised non-heterosexual relationships and civil partnerships, equal ownership of marital property and equal rights of both men and women over inheritance.

Over the past 20 years, however, most womens groups have changed their position on the matter and now reject a common civil code.

The demand for a uniform civil code has been appropriated by the Hindutva right wing, which is anti-Muslim, extremist and heavily patriarchal, said Hasina Khan, a founder of Bebaak Collective, a feminist non-profit organisation working for minority and human rights. It is sad, because we are opposed to many of the provisions in the Muslim Personal Law. But we cannot have a uniform civil code coming from a Hindutva government.

This, for many, is the crux of the matter. Even though the uniform civil code has its roots in ideas of gender justice, Hindutva groups have turned it into a stick to beat Muslims with.

The demand for the code is raised whenever controversial aspects of Muslim personal law like triple talaq or polygamy are in the headlines, Khan said. In 2017, after the Supreme Court already deemed triple talaq to be invalid and unconstitutional, the BJP government doubled down and passed a law to criminalise that form of instant divorce, which Muslim groups see as a red flag for the uniform civil code.

This is the intention of the right-wing to criminalise everything in order to target Muslims, said Khan. Muslim men dont want issues of womens rights to come to the fore because it provides fodder to Hindutva groups. Women end up bearing the double burden of this.

Another red flag for womens groups is the fact the proponents of a uniform civil code have never, so far, released a draft or even a rough blueprint of what such a code would look like. Would it involve taking the best gender-just practices from different personal laws and making them applicable for all? Or would it involve scrapping the personal laws of minority communities in favour of a majoritarian Hindu approach?

People in the right wing are not spelling out what kind of laws they have in mind, said historian Tanika Sarkar. They are focusing on Muslim men and women, but would they allow change in Hindu personal laws? In general, the Hindu community has been very opposed to reforms.

According to feminist activist Chayanika Shah from the Forum Against Oppression of Women, Hindus would have to be willing to let go of their own personal laws in order to achieve a uniform civil code.

They would have to get rid of the Hindu Undivided Family [under the existing Hindu civil laws], which offers a lot of protection to Hindu family property, said Shah, who points out that Hindu inheritance laws have been retained for Hindus even in the Special Marriage Act, the only law that comes closest to a uniform civil law by allowing men and women from any faith to enter into a civil marriage.

I think the right wing has no idea what it means to have a uniform civil code, she said. Even currently, within various Hindu communities, rules about who you can marry and what is considered a marriage ceremony are all protected by customary laws.

Shahs reference is to the legal protections that Indian law provides to the customs of various indigenous communities. In addition to these, Goa is the only state with its own civil code applicable to all Goans across faiths, even though it is not uniformly implemented.

Keeping in mind these pluralities, many womens groups believe that India needs to reform individual personal laws to make them more gender-just, instead of getting stuck on the idea of single, universally applicable uniform code.

The right wing keeps repeating the same demand over and over again, said Flavia Agnes, a feminist lawyer from Mumbai. But there is no need for a uniform civil code at all.

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Demands for a uniform civil code are back and womens groups continue to oppose it. Heres why - Scroll.in

Illustration by Joe Sacco. (Courtesy of Metropolitan Books)

Theres a memorable scene near the end of Joe Saccos latest book, Paying the Land, that encapsulates his ethos as a comics journalist. For the project, he made two trips to Canadas remote Northwest Territories to interview members of the Dene Nation about their relationship to the land and resource extraction. At the time of his visits, the gas and oil industries had been established in the region for years, but a global petroleum glut had paused operations. Sacco and his guide, Shauna, visited several towns and heard a range of Indigenous perspectives on drilling and fracking, which provide jobs and economic opportunity but also endanger the habitats and cohesion of communities. What he found was that the complications surrounding resource extraction were inextricable from larger issues the Dene have been facing for generations. Sacco couldnt parse the conflicts over oil and gas without understanding the Canadian governments ruthless program of colonization, enacted via unjust treaties and the residential school system. He also couldnt understand it without following the Denes resistance to the government and their fight to regain control of their land and maintain their independence and identity.1Books in Review

In what has come to be his usual style, Sacco intersperses the voices of his subjects in Paying the Land with the history of the region and some of his own thoughts on whats at stake. Compared with his previous work, however, he remains relatively in the background. He listens, narrates, and recurs as a familiar presence wearing a cable-knit sweater and his trademark round glasses, which stand in for his eyes (Sacco has drawn himself with blank frames since his first book). But he doesnt speak or comment often, which makes the scene near the end especially notable.2

In Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, Sacco and Shauna travel to the defunct Giant Mine, a site of gold extraction for more than 50 years. When ore processing stopped there in 1999, it left behind 237,000 tons of a lethal byproductarsenic trioxide dust. Where to put it? Sacco wonders, before answering, Well, down the mine of course! He explains that a remediation project rigged frozen storage chambers deep underground; cascading, angled panels show the pair descending and touring one of them. On the next page, Sacco walks alongside the massive machinery and muses about his journey to meet the Dene. I will leave here with many unanswered questions about my indigenous hosts, he writes, but right nowmy biggest query is about my race, about us. He asks in a series of text boxes laid across drawings of the dark mine, What is the worldview of a people who mumble no thanks or prayers, who take what they want from the land, and pay it back with arsenic?3

Its a remarkable moment, a swift and scathing indictment of the people Sacco representswhite, settler, Western. This type of self-critique is rare in mainstream Anglo-American journalism, which adheres to the myth of the reporters neutrality or else revels in indulgent subjectivity. But rigorous inward-facing critique is common in Saccos work. For him, journalism is about asking questions, relaying information, and uncovering truths, not only about ones subjects but also about oneself. Throughout his books he exposes the mechanics of his process in such a way that the reader can never forget that their narrator is a biased, privileged outsider. He sees it as a matter of ethics. The important thing for me isnt so much objectivity, itsI want the journalists to admit their contexts, their prejudices somehow, he has said. Objectivity to me is a different word than honesty.4

That honesty is a crucial part of Saccos decades-long project. Whether covering the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories, Bosniaks and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, or the Dene, he seeks out difficult and painful stories and tells tales of war and oppression that many people may not want to hear. Saccos oeuvre is built on using words, images, and a potent combination of the two to make visceral the realities of historical trauma. As Hillary Chute wrote in her 2016 book, Disaster Drawn, his work is about an ethics of attention, not about producing the news. And as a white Western man, hes keenly aware of the power his attention holds.5

Comics have flourished as a genre for memoir and nonfiction stories since the 1970s, but the use of the form for journalism has been much slower to catch on. It has gained traction over the past decade or so with the release of books like Josh Neufelds A.D., about Hurricane Katrina, in 2009, and Sarah Gliddens Rolling Blackouts, about the effects of the Iraq War in the Middle East, in 2016, as well as with digital publications like Symbolia (now defunct) and The Nib. In recent years, The New York Times has also begun to run drawn reported pieces in its opinion section, bestowing mainstream visibility on the field. But when Sacco started out, this kind of work barely existed. According to Chute, in fact, he coined the term comics journalism himself.6

Born in Malta in 1960 and raised in Australia before his family moved to the United States in 1972, Sacco began drawing comics as a child. His interest in journalism took hold during high school in Portland, Ore., where he worked on the student newspaper, and he went on to study the subject at the University of Oregon.7

After college, Sacco returned to visual storytelling while leading a peripatetic life. He moved to Malta in 1983 and published a series of romance comics, then back to Portland, where he cofounded a monthly comics newspaper called the Portland Permanent Press, which folded, after a year, in 1988. Next he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for the comics publisher Fantagraphics and founded a satirical magazine called Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy. In 1988, he left the United States for a four-year stint that included touring Europe with a rock band and living in Berlin.8

Saccos work during these years was often satirical and autobiographical, drawn in whats known as bigfoot style, which features expressive characters with exaggerated bodies inspired by Robert Crumb and other underground comix pioneers. Still, politics and military conflicts werent far from his mind. In one piece from the period, he captures his mothers memories of the violence of World War II in Malta; another focuses on his obsessive following of the Persian Gulf war of 1991 while going through a breakup. These early comics, which are collected in the 2003 book Notes From a Defeatist, indicate the direction that Saccos work was moving in, but it was one trip in particular that set the course of his career.9

Between 1991 and 1992, Sacco spent two months in Palestine and Israel. It was the waning days of the first intifada, when Palestinians rose up against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and were met by a military response. Over a thousand people died, the majority of them Palestinians, while images of Palestinian boys and men throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers abounded. Sacco was, he later explained, furious at the American news media, which he thought mischaracterized and misrepresented the reality of the situation and the power imbalances between the two countries. There are two ways in which Palestinians are portrayedas terrorist and as victim, he told an interviewer for Al Jazeera. There may be truth in certain situations for both descriptions, but Palestinians are also people going to school, who have families, have lives, invite you into their home, and think about their food. He wanted to see what was happening for himself and hear from Palestinians in the occupied territories directly.10

On his trip, Sacco spent time in Palestinians homes, where he shared meals and interviewed them about their lives. He turned his notes into a series of comic books published between 1993 and 1995. They werent commercially successful, but they were a rarity in the American media: Unflinchingly honest about the Palestinian plight, they depicted an open, hospitable people describing the horrific yet quotidian nature of their suffering. The following year, Fantagraphics released Palestine in two volumes, and Sacco won an American Book Award. (It has since been collected in one book.) There is nothing else quite like this in alternative comics, wrote a reviewer for Publishers Weeklywhich, as if to drive the point home, miscategorized the work as fiction.11

Illustration by Joe Sacco. (Courtesy of Metropolitan Books) (Courtesy of Metropolitan Books)

Given the milieu in which Sacco had been working, Palestine is firmly grounded in the traditions of underground comix and New Journalism. Its style is cartoonishin fact, he heard complaints that his depictions of people in the first issue were stereotypical and offensive, and he tried to adjust accordinglyand the tone is often sarcastic and outlandish. Sacco plays a starring role as the self-conscious protagonist in search of some kind of truth. Its not his most sophisticated work, but it is a crucial document for tracking the inception of long-form comics journalism.12

The basics of Saccos methodology are already evident in Palestine. From the start, he doesnt shy away from depicting violence, but he also uses art to bring the setting to life: the muddy refugee camps, bare-bones dwellings, and bustling cities. To me landscape is a character somehow, Sacco has said of his work, and indeed, its part of how the reader comes to understand Gaza and the West Bank in this book. It helps Sacco do something thats harder to pull off in prose and reportage alone: He creates a sense of the everyday life that forms the backdrop for, and is disrupted by, acts of brutality.13

In terms of its storytelling, Palestine foregrounds ordinary peoples voices and places them in contextoften in contrastwith official narratives. In the first chapter, Sacco devotes a spread to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain announced its support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. We do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, Sacco quotes the United Kingdoms foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, saying as he sits in an armchair in a book-lined study and delicately holds aloft a cup of tea. Two pages later, a Palestinian man sits on the floor in a dwelling in the Jabalia refugee camp and explains that he lost his home in 1948 during the Nakba. When he took his family back to the site many years later, his entire village was gone. There is no sign that we ever lived there, he says. His words float atop a drawing of the family looking out on a stretch of bare land with a lone truck driving through it.14

Juxtapositionthe whiplash produced by placing contrasting perspectives and timelines alongside each otheris central to Saccos project. It serves as a reminder that dates, documents, and declarations dont account for the reality of lived experiences. It also helps him put into practice a credo laid out in the preface to Journalism, a 2012 collection of his short-form work: The powerful should be quoted, yes, but to measure their pronouncements against the truth, not to obscure it. If, as the expression goes, history is written by the victors, then Sacco has given himself the job of revising it on behalf of the victims.15

Nowhere in his body of work is this truer than Footnotes in Gaza, a hefty and meticulous book that uncovers the circumstances of two Israeli massacres of Palestinians during the 1956 Suez crisis. As part of the operation, Israeli forces invaded the Gaza Strip on their way to Sinai, in an effort to root out Palestinian armed militants who were supported by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nassers government. In the process, they rounded up and killed hundreds of civilians. Israeli leaders downplayed and tried to justify the massacre, claiming that the Palestinians had been noncompliant and unruly, that some had been armed and rioted, and that there had been Egyptian instigators among them.16

Sacco finds otherwise. He first learned about the episodes not quite from a footnote, but in passing in a Noam Chomsky book, which cites a United Nations report stating that 275 Palestinians had been killed in the town of Khan Younis and its adjacent refugee camp and 111 others in the Rafah camp. While reporting from Gaza, Sacco became curious about the two massacres, eventually returning to focus on them and to speak to survivors. He went to the UN archives and read the original report, as well as others he could find, and enlisted the help of Israeli researchers. But little had been written about either incident.17

Footnotes in Gaza is a remarkable work of comics journalism and history that arranges dozens of voices and past and present events into a horrifying yet deeply empathetic assemblage. As in Palestine and Safe Area Gorade, his 2000 book about the siege of the titular town during the Bosnian War, Saccos primary method for narrating the massacres is to pair the texts of peoples recollections with drawn reenactments. He often re-creates the interview process by showing his subjects looking straight ahead as they speak, so the reader assumes Saccos listening position. And whereas the characters and scenes in Palestine are highly stylized, sometimes to the point of looking grotesque, by 2009, when Footnotes was published, he had shifted more toward realism. Most of the speakers in the book are old men, and he draws their creased and weary faces in careful detail.18

Sacco knows that eyewitness accounts can be unreliable, and he acknowledges it by sometimes placing disparate versions of events side by side and highlighting the discrepancies. This is particularly true of his treatment of the Rafah episode, in which, after being violently rounded up, Palestinian men were put through a long screening process. Sacco is forthright about the fallibility of memory and the psychic toll of trauma here. While anyone would remember a two-second flurry of clubs rising and falling onto skulls and fleshand the continuous gunfire as the schoolyard filled up, he writes, what about the next eight- or ten-hour stretch when the gear shifted down to the slow, bitter, but relatively systematic sifting of men?19

Even with the inconsistencies and conflicts, the collection of remembrances in Footnotes doesnt throw the whole story into doubt; instead, it builds up a bulwark that reinforces the common truth: The mass killings did happen, despite the Israeli governments attempts to minimize them. The art bolsters that conclusion, as with the growing number of images of the dead. Their multiplicity, the space they take up on the page, seems to challenge their erasure from official records. In the account of the Rafah incident, especially, images of fearful men holding their hands above their heads and being beaten and shot recur like an oppressive and inescapable refrain.20

Illustration by Joe Sacco. (Courtesy of Metropolitan Books)

That cumulative effect is arguably one of the most important qualities of Saccos work. Traditional long-form journalism is character-driven: Writers tell the story of a place and time through one or two representative protagonists. Saccos approach is more populist, like oral history. Using the form of comics, hes able to build a picture of an event or issue through a diversity of voices, images, and experiences, always working from the bottom up. In doing so, he pushes against a colonial mindset that sees world events through the lens of heroes and leaders.21

A key element of Saccos work is the fluidity with which he moves between registers of time: He always keeps one foot anchored in the present while delving into the past. This is central to Paying the Land. What Sacco finds when he visits the Northwest Territories is not a general Dene consensus about how to handle oil and gas, or even two opposing camps, but a fractured environment in which everyone seems to have their own opinion. Some say resource extraction comes at too high a cost; others argue that the tribes should control it so that they can regulate it and make money.22

This disagreement reflects how different communities have taken their own approaches to settling land claims with the Canadian government. People even have varying thoughts on living in the bush, which was traditionally a defining aspect of Dene existence: Some remember it proudly as a time of self-reliance, while others remember nearly starving in subzero temperatures. Sacco has never shirked complexity, but its an impressive feat that he manages to hold space for all these issues and voices to comfortably coexist.23

There is, however, one unifying factor, a trauma at the heart of the Denes estrangement from the land theyve long revered and respected: the residential school system, which Canadas Truth and Reconciliation Commission labeled cultural genocide in a 2015 report. For nearly 150 years, the government took First Nations children away from their parents and communities and placed them in religious schools, where they were forced to speak English, subjected to strict rules, and often abused.24

Sacco tells the tale of the residential school system largely through the first-person stories of those who attended it. Renderings of them as adults, speaking to Sacco, appear amid drawings of their younger selves experiencing what theyre describing. The work becomes an actualization of their memories, in the process visualizing the haunting grip of historical trauma. In one passage, interviewee Paul Andrew recounts the physical brutality: In residential school you got hit and you never know why you got hit, he says, as images of his 8- or 9-year-old self being slapped ricochet across the middle of the page. Below, Sacco places portraits of the boy, as hes being yelled at by a nun and a priest, side by side with the adult Andrew, their faces set in a similarly pained expression. Boxes of words hover in the space between them, as Andrew recalls how the abuse was also emotional and spiritual: Youre not good enough. Thats why we got to remake you. Because youre not good enough.25

Unlike the structure of Saccos previous books, in which the core conflict is woven throughout the story, the narrative of the residential schools is concentrated in one section in Paying the Land, and it doesnt appear until halfway through the text. That decision reflects a crucial difference in this new work: Although, like other Sacco titles, it involves him visiting and reporting on an oppressed community as an outsider, the subject isnt war or an uprising. There are fewer specific events to chronicle and more sentiments and arguments to convey, which at times makes for a less cohesive story. But the shift allows him to move away from mostly depicting misery to rendering a more complex, affirmative world. This comes through in the richly detailed art and the formal experiments that open up new depths in his work.26

The clearest example of this is the books opening, a 19-page recollection of growing up on the land, narrated by Andrew. You learn about relationships and connections with the land and the animals, he says. You learn how important they are to you, how important the world is, essentially. As Andrew describes his peoples traditionsbuilding a boat every year, for instance, and traveling long distances by dog sleighSacco fills the pages with a proliferation of images. Scenes of bush life flow into one another without panels or borders, creating the feeling of a dreamscape informed by the aesthetic of a scrapbook. The effect is immersive, and the only interruption is Andrews face, which appears in a black rectangle, like a narrator from another time.27

At one point, Andrew explains the Denes holistic approach to life. When you arrive at a camp, you generally arent given specific instructions. Instead, you look at what needs to be done and you do it, he says. So you find yourself in the circle. You work yourself in[to] the circle of that community. Amid these words, the young Andrew stands alone in the center of the page with buckets of water in both hands. Hes surrounded by a ring of white space, beyond which others in the camp form a larger circle as they attend to their tasks.28

This imageof the individual within the grouprecurs at the end of the book, when a young man named Eugene Boulanger tells a story of going out to hunt caribou. The trip was part of a reality TV show about younger Dene connecting with their heritage, but for Boulanger it became a spiritual experience. He explains that while he was alone in the mountains, I had the omniscient moment where I saw myself in the continuum of my ancestry, the ancestors a long time ago doing exactly what I was doing exactly where I was doing it. Sacco draws him near the center of the page, standing over the body of the caribou with a knife in his hand. Around him there is that same ring of white space, and then several images of his Dene forebears carrying out the same task. I felt that this 22-year circle had been closed, Boulanger says.29

Using these two moments as bookends, Sacco turns the theme of the circle into a visual motif as well as a formal structuring device. It works beautifully, not just because of the power of his artistry, but also because it affirms what hes been saying all along in his work: that people and events are interconnected, and time doesnt only move in one direction. Sacco went to the Northwest Territories in search of stories about whats buried underground. He returned with something deeper.30

Read the rest here:

The Groundbreaking Honesty of Joe Saccos Comics Journalism - The Nation

ISTANBUL - In Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast, a news network staffed entirely by women is taking the lead in reporting on women's rights. But in doing so, JIN News finds itself targeted by the government's war on terrorism.

Founded in 2017 under the mantra "On the path to truth, with a woman's pen," JIN News says its goal is to expose exploitation and violence faced by women.

"We are wherever women are," Gulsen Kocuk, editor of JIN News Turkish service, told VOA. "We report, in a way, on every aspect of their life, with the aim of making women visible, making women's work visible, and providing a platform to express their views."

Based in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast, JIN News reports both in Turkish and Kurdish, with a staff of about 20. The agency has offices across the region serving its web page, which is funded by personal subscriptions.

The region in which JIN is based is the center of a decades-long battle between the Kurdish separatist group the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) and the Turkish state, a conflict the government says has claimed more than 40,000 lives.

The PKK is designated by the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization.

Much of JINs reporting focuses on alleged human rights abuses by security forces. In October, two of its journalists broke a story that accused Turkish soldiers of throwing from a helicopter two shepherds, killing one and severely injuring the other.The story became front-page news across Turkeys main independent media. The interior ministry later confirmed the incident but maintains the injuries were sustained while the two shepherds were trying to escape capture.

However, one of the JIN News reportersSehriban Abi, from the city of Vanwas arrested on charges of inciting enmity against the state and membership of a terrorist organization, and remains in detention.

The Turkish government and prosecutors regularly accuse JIN News of terrorist propaganda. With the laws' catch-all phrases, rights groups claim it opens the door to prosecution to normal journalist activities, including attending political rallies and funerals of killed militants.

At least 37 journalists were in jail in Turkey on December 1, nearly all accused of such charges, according to annual data released by the Committee to Protect Journalist. The New York-based rights group ranks Turkey second only to China in detaining the media."There was big oppression against women's journalists during our time as JIN agency," said Kocuk. "We faced many situations like arrests, detentions, office raids and confiscation of our technical equipment. Probably the majority of JIN reporters have been taken into custody. Almost 20 of our colleagues had been in and out of prison."

Turkeys Communications Ministry did not respond to VOAs request for comment.The government defends its measures, saying the country is facing powerful and dangerous conspiracies, which have developed networks throughout Turkeys society, including within the media.

Critics, as well as journalists, say the broadness and ambiguousness of the antiterror legislation, though, make it difficult to know what is legal and illegal. This makes reporting on contentious subjects like the war against the PKK and government malpractice risky.

JIN News also has reported allegations of abuse of women at the hands of security forces, including claims of rape. Such stories often result in the reports being banned by court or interior ministry gagging orders, according to Kocuk of JIN News.

Cat-and-mouse game

Turkey, which has a number of laws and regulations to control web pages and social media, also has blocked access to the JIN News web page at least ten times.

In a familiar game of cat-and-mouse that alternative media organizations play with authorities, JIN sidesteps these bans by reissuing the site under a slightly modified name.

But it's not only JIN's reporting on contentious subjects that makes it a target of prosecutors.

"They are not treated as journalists. They are treated as terrorists, and this is the problem," said Emma Sinclair-Webb, a senior Turkish researcher of the New York-based Human Rights Watch.

"The government doesn't understand there is a right to do objective journalism," Sinclair-Webb said. "The other reason, in the last year, we've seen particular intolerance by government officials of women's rights activism around the Istanbul Convention and combating violence against women."

The Istanbul Convention is an international treaty guaranteeing women's rights, from which some government ministers are calling for Turkey to withdraw.

Women's rights movements across Turkey have become a vocal opponent to the government, which they say has failed to enforce laws to protect women against domestic violence and threatens to reverse hard-won gender rights, including access to abortion.

Sinclair-Webb says the targeting of women's activists by the authorities is particularly severe in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish region, where fighting for gender rights is a major policy for Kurdish political parties.

The Peoples Democratic Party (HDP), Turkey's main legal pro-Kurdish party, has a policy of all elected positions being jointly held by a man and woman. The HDP has been accused by Ankara of having links to the PKKa link it denies. A key policy demand of the Kurdish rebel group the PKK is the equality of women.

"It's a region of gross gender inequality, very low levels of women in employment, high levels of domestic violence in the region," said Sinclair-Webb.

"You have a Kurdish political movement very focused on gender equality," she added. "So the idea of a having a women's news agency did come out of a kind of political impulse in the region to tackle the problem."

"So it allows the government to say if the Kurdish political movement is very focused on gender equality, so any news agency focused on gender equality must be involved in politics and terrorism, not journalism," said Sinclair-Webb.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is vowing no let-up on the war on terrorism and what he calls "terrorist supporters." Its a thinly veiled reference, analysts say, to the county's legal Kurdish political movement and broader civil society.

Despite the risks they face, the journalists at JIN News have no plans to stop.

"Fear doesn't even enter our mind," said Kocuk of JIN News. "Of course, we wish to be able to write in a safer environment. But if you are advocating for a free press, there shouldn't be a place for fear because fear makes you stand back. We are not afraid, and we keep writing."

View post:

In Turkey, JIN News Fights for Women's and Journalists' Rights - Voice of America

The inescapable duty of a socialist revolutionary is to perceive the changes taking place in society which sharpen the class struggle and act on those changes without hesitation. Any socialist or socialist organization which fails to do so cannot be considered a defender of the proletariat (the working class), much less a revolutionary. A failure to perceive the sharpening of class contradictions, especially when that sharpening leads to the creation of a revolutionary situation, consigns the proletariat first to disorganized, spontaneous struggle and then to violent repression and defeat at the hands of the state. Socialist revolutionaries cannot, under any circumstances, believe they have the right to stand idly by while the masses are ground to nothing beneath the tank treads of capitalist oppression. Revolutionaries must instead take decisive action, educating and organizing the proletariat in order to lead them to the ultimate overthrow of bourgeois rule.

Hunger crisis manifested by COVID-19 pandemic.

This critical perception is granted by the application of historical materialism. In 1915, Lenin described the conditions which indicate the rise of a revolutionary situation a situation wherein the bourgeoisie can be overthrown and replaced with a dictatorship of the proletariat. The three conditions he described can be summarized as (1) when the ruling class is unable to maintain the status quo of their rule, (2) when there is a marked increase in suffering among the oppressed, and (3) when there is increasing resistance from the oppressed against their oppression. If we analyze the current conditions of the class struggle in the U.S., there can be no doubt that the U.S. has entered into a revolutionary situation.

Death of the old way

To better understand this, we must look at exactly what Lenin said in The Collapse of the Second International and examine the conditions of the ruling class and proletariat in the U.S. Describing the first point, Lenin said:

What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms: (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the upper classes, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for the lower classes not to want to live in the old way; it is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable to live in the old way.

Lenin tells us that during a revolutionary situation, it is impossible for the ruling class to maintain their rule without any change. In other words, the traditional methods of governing the proletariat either have failed, or will fail in the near future, and therefore the ruling class is forced to change policy in contradiction with their established preference. A failure to make this change would otherwise result in systemic collapse.

Lenin goes on to clarify that this inability to maintain the status quo constitutes a crisis for the ruling class. Specifically, it is a crisis of policy. The established methods of government are no longer producing desirable results and the ensuing problems create a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth.

Is there today a crisis in the policy of the ruling class in the U.S.? No, there are several. Both the bourgeois state and its political administrators are currently experiencing multiple crises in policy. It is common that capitalist exploitation makes it so that the lower classes [do not] want to live in the old way. If that were the only obstacle, the bourgeoisie, with its superior force, could compel the proletariat to obey. But the nature of the current crisis makes it so that the upper classes [are] unable to live in the old way; both the coercive (military) and persuasive (political) power of the ruling class is waning.

Paper tigers

Consider the situation faced by the state. Engels defined the state as the armed defenders of the bourgeoisie; the police, military, courts, and jails. These armed forces which defend bourgeois rule have been engulfed in a gradually unfolding crisis for the last 20 years.

The attempt by U.S. imperialists to occupy, terrorize, and exploit the resources of Southwest Asia and North Africa has been a disaster for the U.S. military. The U.S. hubristically believed that they could easily occupy this region, but local resistance to imperialism broke the body of the U.S. military on the mountains of Afghanistan and strangled it in the alleys of Fallujah.

These failed invasions have had a tremendous impact on U.S. soldiers. Army officers complain that they are no longer able to reach their recruitment goals (tinyurl.com/yapzx4p6), members of U.S. death squads (referred to as special forces) are worn out from repeated deployment and seeking early retirement (tinyurl.com/ya2e3s3s) and drone operators are experiencing high levels of PTSD in spite of their distance from the victims of their bombing missions. (tinyurl.com/y832qj7n) This is a military that has been ground down to the nub.

And what of the domestic soldiers of capital? Should the proletariat rise up, local law enforcement will be the first line of defense for the bourgeoisie. But their situation is equally dire. For example, police officials in New York City are complaining that morale is plummeting and retirement applications are rising. (tinyurl.com/y7rg3y6s) These agents of repression are wilting beneath the glare of public scrutiny. The police are finally realizing that they are despised by all those who loathe oppression and that the world recognizes them as a violent white supremacist militia. They cannot tolerate the justified condemnation that comes with their actions.

The Border Patrol, whose long history of atrocities only came to national attention as their crimes crescendoed during the Trump administration, are suffering a similar dilemma. Fewer people are willing to join their despised agency and their ranks are depressed by the flood of condemnation that theyve received. (tinyurl.com/y3neksb2) How long can U.S. law enforcement endure declining recruitment, surging retirement, and deteriorating morale?

The weakening of the state creates a need for the political elite to assuage the anger of the masses through soft words and false promises. But there is currently a failure by the bourgeoisie to control the conversation. Their traditional domination of the media, along with byzantine restrictions on ballot access and public debate qualifications, had previously prevented even the most tepid left critiques from being aired on a national stage. But the increase in exploitation, the explosion of popular movements, and the expansion of social media have led to a leftward shift in public discourse.

The most well-known representatives of this shift Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, et al. are right-opportunists who seek not the destruction of capitalism, but its maintenance, and must therefore be named as such if we seek to educate the masses rather than deceive them. However, the popular source of this political shift comes from a revolutionary impulse on the part of the masses. It is only the lack of political organization, the absence of a vanguard party, that has allowed for the corruption of revolutionary slogans and demands for the adulteration and declawing of these popular ambitions. The clearest example of this was the transformation of the Black radical slogan Abolish the Police into the reformist Defund the Police, the latter of which has been seized by the Democratic Party and used as a police baton to smash in the teeth of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Make no mistake, the creatures who lurk in Washington do not want to talk about abolishing or defunding the police. They do not want to kneel before adolescent protesters to take part in a moment of silence (politicians love nothing more than the sound of their own voice). And they have no interest in draping themselves in Kente cloths or in African culture generally. They do these things not because they want to, but because they have been forced to. They have been forced by the righteous rebellion of the multi-nationational proletariat which has shaken a country and set a police precinct ablaze.

Prior to the George Floyd uprising, the bourgeoisie had concentrated its energy to fend off a second Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. While the undermining of his movement may seem like a victory for liberal capitalism, the mere existence of such a political run shows the failure of a previously closed political system that had functioned flawlessly for decades.

Twenty years ago, a candidate like Bernie Sanders would not have made it onto the debate stage, much less the final lap of the Democratic presidential primary. The Democratic Party, leal and loyal servants of insurance companies and banks, have no intention whatsoever of providing universal healthcare, a living wage, or a reprieve from crushing student loans. Candidates proposing such policies had previously been dismissed by obedient pundits as cranks and laughed off stage.

But both the press and politicians have lost the power to silence candidates like Bernie Sanders. This is because Sanders policies are backed by a popular proletarian movement which is angrily demanding all of what he has promised and more. The bipartisan attack on Sanders only exposed the fact that the political establishment are the enemy of the proletariat and the servants of big business. This exposure has forced the Democratic Party to be circumspect in their dismissals of Bernie Sanders and the socialist movement at large.

All of these changes in behavior are very unusual for the bourgeoisie, and revolutionaries should not fail to notice this change along with the discomfort it has caused among the ruling class. They are unable to live in the old way.

Sharpening contradictions

Describing the second symptom of a revolutionary situation, Lenin says it is:

(2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual.

History has shown that the oppressed classes can endure tremendous suffering for very long periods without protest. A peculiar aspect of human nature is that a sudden increase in cruelty, even if brief, often provokes a stronger reaction than a prolonged yet unchanging policy of inhumane treatment. And so, Lenin explains that the sharpening of contradictions, the increase in exploitation, a rise in suffering portends danger for the bourgeoisie.

Over the past several decades, wages for workers have remained almost completely flat, in spite of increasing productivity. With each passing year, the capitalists steal an increasingly large share of surplus value (profits) from workers, causing their wealth to skyrocket. This increase in exploitation first hit a crisis point with the 2008 recession, but the failure to make substantive changes has only seen problems worsen. Now, with the COVID pandemic, the contradictions of capitalism have become razor sharp. As WW recently reported, [t]he statistics are damning: One in six households face hunger; one in five workers are out of work; some 30 million renters and homeowners face homelessness in the coming winter months. The COVID death toll will hit 300,000 any day now. The virus is now the leading cause of death in the U.S., passing heart disease and cancer. Hospitals are unable to cope with the surge in COVID cases. (tinyurl.com/y62s2du7)

In addition to the rising pain of economic exploitation, there is also a perceived rise in the states use of violence. Because the state, in callous disregard for the value of Black lives, does not even bother to track police killings, we will never know for sure if there has been an uptick in recent years. What we do know is that the proliferation of camera phones has lead to an increase in exposure of those police crimes. Many in the Black and Brown communities have spoken about police abuse for decades. But it is only with the new phenomenon of officers being regularly recorded that no one in the U.S. even the most reactionary can turn away from the damning truth.

Even for those in the oppressed community, while they may have been aware of police abuse in their neighborhood, they previously could not have been certain that police in another town, city, or state practiced the same terrorism. Now, Black and Brown people in Ferguson, Missouri, know that their struggle is the same as those in Staten Island, New York. A digital stream connects the hearts of millions of oppressed people across the country, linking a collective pain and a collective cry for dignity. People of color have awoken in a United States where the vile racist terrorism of the police is on display and undeniable, and that spike in outrage and consciousness is the spark which has lit a movement.

The suffering of the oppressed has grown more acute than usual, and the oppressed have grown more acutely aware of that suffering.

Historical action

Lenin describes the third symptom of a revolutionary situation thusly:

(3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in peace time, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the upper classes themselves into independent historical action.

It has been firmly established that the crisis of bourgeois rule has resulted in turbulent times. But have these crises led to an increase in activity on the part of the masses? In 2011, after being plunged into an economic recession, the Occupy movement challenged the rule of Wall Street and quickly spread across the country. The proletariat began to understand the division between workers and capitalists, declaring the power of the 99%. Encampments were established in defiance of local authorities and clashes between police and demonstrators broke out. The rash of occupations was deemed so threatening to the bourgeoisie that a country-wide crackdown was launched, smashing the Occupy movement with brutal violence.

In 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was murdered by a white supremacist vigilante. In response, several queer Black women created the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Following the police lynchings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, the hashtag exploded into a movement and a battle against police occupation began. Highways, bridges, and entire cities were shut down by the surging masses.

In 2016, the fight of Indigenous water protectors against the Dakota Access Pipeline drew country-wide attention. The struggle at Standing Rock re-exposed the ongoing colonization and exploitation of Indigenous land. An outpouring of solidarity followed, with activists traveling across the country to join the fight against resource extraction in spite of the horrifically violent suppression tactics used by police and private security.

It would be impractical to produce a year-by-year analysis of mass action from 2011 to the present. Suffice it to say that we have just now witnessed the second surge of the Black Lives Matter movement, which may be the largest political demonstration in U.S. history. (tinyurl.com/y8qt9ftc)

This latest campaign against police terrorism was so fierce that police in Minneapolis (near the site of George Floyds murder) were forced into full retreat, abandoning their own police precinct to be incinerated by the crowd. Similar battles took place in other cities. It should not be understated what a tremendous blow this was to the morale of the police as discussed earlier and a boon to the confidence of the oppressed, obliterating forever the myth of the states invulnerability.

It should be further noted that this action is, as Lenin stated, independent of the ruling class. The masses have taken matters into their own hands, attempting to directly alter the relationship between capital and workers, the police and the oppressed, planet destroyers and water protectors. This is precisely the independent action, which has and will continue to impact on the course of history, which Lenin describes as the third symptom of a revolutionary situation.

Having established that the masses have been drawn into independent historical action, it is important to distinguish between this action and the creation of revolutionary class consciousness. The fact that the masses are in motion does not necessarily mean that they have correctly identified the causes of their oppression, much less developed an effective plan for defeating it. This level of understanding can only be arrived at with the intervention of a revolutionary socialist party that actively agitates, educates, and organizes the masses leading them in class struggle.

The foregoing analysis has established that all three criteria set out by Lenin for the identification of a revolutionary situation are currently satisfied in the U.S. today. But the duty of a revolutionary does not end with the identification of a phenomenon; a true revolutionary must act on their analysis. Socialist parties are not debating clubs, but organizations of the fighting proletariat.

What is to be done?

A critical point must now be addressed; namely that a revolutionary situation is not a revolution. A government in crisis can recover. In The Collapse of the Second International, Lenin explained that there have been many revolutionary situations that did not carry over into revolution, and that the determining factor was the subjective change of revolutionary mass action:

The totality of all these objective changes is called a revolutionary situation. Such a situation existed in 1905 in Russia, and in all revolutionary periods in the West; it also existed in Germany in the sixties of the last century, and in Russia in 1859-61 and 1879-80, although no revolution occurred in these instances. Why was that? It was because it is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution; revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, falls, if it is not toppled over.

This point is vital for two reasons. The first is that a revolutionary situation is a temporary, transient state. It is an opportunity for revolutionary change that can easily be squandered and lost by a dilatory, indecisive vanguard with disastrous consequences for the proletariat. Such a disaster must be averted at all costs.

The second factor is that we must develop an understanding of the subjective change referred to. What is revolutionary mass action and how can it develop the strength to topple the bourgeoisie?

Herein lies the role of the socialist vanguard party. The masses can only build their strength if they are being organized. The communist method of organizing (or deep organizing) was developed and used by communists in every successful socialist revolution in history. It is a process that can be summed up as agitation, education, inoculation, and organization.

Cadre must engage in agitation among the masses whenever possible, stirring the masses to indignation and helping them to understand who their class enemies are. Education is vital so that the masses understand the nature of that class enemy and the correct tactics for defeating them. In order to prepare the masses for the rigors of the struggle, they must be inoculated informed of the enemys tactics so they are not demoralized when the ruling class and the state respond. When all this is done, the masses can be drawn into organizations which concentrate worker power against the bourgeoisie. Returning to Lenin:

What we are discussing is the indisputable and fundamental duty of all socialists that of revealing to the masses the existence of a revolutionary situation, explaining its scope and depth, arousing the proletariats revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary determination, helping it to go over to revolutionary action, and forming, for that purpose, organizations suited to the revolutionary situation.

We see here that Lenin describes the process of agitation (arousing the proletariats consciousness), education (explaining its scope and depth), inoculation (revolutionary determination), and building organizations (suited to the revolutionary situation) as an indisputable and fundamental duty. The process of deep organizing is not optional and requires serious study by any dedicated revolutionary.

So too does the forming of revolutionary organizations. During the Russian Revolution, these organizations were called Soviets (Russian for council) and allowed the peasantry and proletariat to develop a parliament of the oppressed which challenged bourgeois-landlord order. The establishment of a competing worker/peasant government created a situation of dual power wherein only one power could survive. This is the only path to socialist revolution, the only means of harnessing the potential of a revolutionary situation.

We stand now at the juncture of revolution or ruin, socialism or barbarism, exalted victory or ruinous defeat. The stakes could not be higher. The path before us is both clear and yet overcast with the shadow of danger. We understand our concrete conditions and we know our task. The question facing communists is not, are we in a revolutionary situation but, What are you going to do about it?

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Is the U.S. facing a revolutionary situation? - Workers World

On May 10, 2020, former Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode made a formal apology, in the form of an op-ed in The Guardian, for an atrocity that happened on his watch. It had been almost 35 years to the day since Philadelphia police flew a helicopter over the headquarters of MOVE, a revolutionary civil liberties organization, and dropped a bomb on the roof of the building. The bomb sparked a fire that would kill 11 people inside, including five children who were under the age of 15. These people were my family.

I was six years old when the bomb was dropped. From more than four miles away at my Grandmother's house, I could see the thick black cloud in the air. I remember playing outside when a neighborhood kid told me, "They dropped a bomb on MOVE." When I said, "No they didn't," he pointed to the sky to show me billowing smoke. I ran back in the house to find my grandmother, my aunt and other adults watching a raging fire on the television, with a woman screaming uncontrollably. When I said that looked like our home and our family, my aunt said, "It is."

Fear and wonder bounced around my mind like ping pong balls. Who was in the house? Was it the children I knew? Would they survive the blaze? The trauma left me numb and, for decades, fearful of the sound or sight of helicopters.

The MOVE Organization surfaced in the early 1970s, lead by an uneducated, poor, yet wise and strategic-minded Black man named John Africa. John Africa created the organization to fight against the systemic oppression of people. The group was much like many other radical Black groups opposed to societal ills, but unlike those other groups, MOVE believed that people will never achieve true freedom for oppressed people if the slave mentality was allowed to exist. The same system that enslaved African people is the very same system that enslaves animals in zoos and circuses. The same is true for the environment. Bartering the water for money, sacrificing the health of people for environmentally pollutant industries. For our stance against the entire re-formed world system we became targets of the establishments most notorious gang, the police department much like the Black Panthers, Earth First and The Animal Liberation Front.

To this day, no city officialnot the mayor, not the police commissioner, not any one of the officers involvedhas been charged or punished for dropping a bomb on their own citizens. Not even the fire commissioner or the police commissioner who, together, deliberately let the fire burn. Instead, the lone adult survivor of the bombing, Ramona Africa, was the only person to be punished for the incident. She served seven years in prison for "riot."

But Goode, the mayor who let this happen in his city, apologized in his Guardian op-ed. That's supposed to be a good thing, right? He apologized and urged other officials and even the city itself to apologize as well, saying, "it would be helpful for the healing of all involved." But I know for a fact that these apologies are not for my healing, or for my family's healing.

Apologies are not for the victims.They are to ease the minds of the offenders. Goode has apologized for the bombing of MOVE no less than four times, but even his most recent apology served mostly to deflect the very blame he was claiming to accept. He wrote: "I am ultimately responsible for those I appointedI apologize for their reckless actions that brought about this horrific outcome, even though I knew nothing about their specific plan of action."

This is why apologies without action are meaninglessthey are not catalysts of change, but rather a means of placating the public so that those in power can continue carrying on as they always have. Far from ever facing punishment for the bombing of my family, Goode actually had a Philadelphia street named after him in 2018. Public apologies allow officials like Goode to give the appearance of taking responsibility without facing any real punishment or repercussions. It is all part of a carefully constructed machine, the same machine that allows a police chief to apologize away the shooting of a young unarmed Black man without making any changes to his department, or for the officer who shot that young man to go on "administrative leave" rather than being fired or arrested.

I know how this machine works from first-hand experience. I was born in a prison cell after my mother and father were wrongfully convicted as a result of an earlier attack on MOVE, committed by Goode's predecessor, Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo.

Rizzo is most known for his brutal treatment of blacks in the city. As police commissioner, Rizzo was accused of ordering motorcycle cops to intentionally run over Black protestors and telling his officers to "get their black asses." It was Rizzo's cops who mercilessly beat MOVE member Rhonda Africa, who at the time was 8 months pregnant and days later bore her stillborn baby, only to discover his tiny body covered in black and blue bruises. As mayor, Rizzo faced multiple lawsuits for discriminatory practices in hiring for the police and fire departments. He openly employed and supported anyone that had the same type of hate for Black people as he did, and infamously told supporters to "vote white." From cops to firemen, judges to politicians, district attorneys to public defenders, Rizzo had an assembly line of injustice in place to send as many Black people to prison as he could. The brutality of Rizzo and his police is best documented in a Pulitzer-Prize award winning Philadelphia Inquirer series by William K. Marimow and Jon Neuman, if you want to read that full story.

Rizzo's most famous attack, the event that would unjustly put my parents behind bars for more than 40 years, came against The MOVE Organization in 1978. In the wee hours of the morning on August 8, 1978, hundreds of heavily armed Philadelphia police and firemen came out to MOVE's home and headquarters. Police cleared the streets of cars and residents in order to assume a combat formation in the residential neighborhood of Powelton Village. Then Police commissioner Joseph O'Neill ordered MOVE members to surrender over a loudspeaker: "Attention MOVE, this is America."

When MOVE refused to come out of the house, or "barricaded themselves inside" according to some reports, a violent siege began. A bulldozer was used to knock down MOVE's fence, a hydraulic cherry picker knocked out the home's windows. Firefighters and police entered the residence and found all MOVE members in the basement. Firefighters cut a hole in the floor to gain optimal positioning for their water cannons that were used to blast MOVE members who were trapped in the cellar. Tear gas, smoke bombs and hundreds of rounds of ammunition from police rained down on MOVE members as they shielded their babies and each other. My parents were in that basementmy mom was eight months pregnant with me and holding my 2-year-old sister.

The suffocating effects of the tear gas and smoke forced MOVE to flee the home. Police awaiting their exit violently snatched babies from the women's arms and dangled them above the ground like rag dolls. With an already battered body and multiple bullet wounds, my uncle Chuck Africa got out of the building, only to be beaten to the ground by waiting police officers. On the other side of the house, separated from the other MOVE members,Delbert Africa was ordered at gunpoint by police to exit the building from a secluded side window. Although he had already been shot and was exiting the basement bare chested with his hands up, officers still smashed Delbert over the head with a steal helmet and broke his jaw with a rifle butt before arresting him.

Rizzo's justification for attacking our home? Serving an eviction notice for the property having "housing code violations." Since when has it been okay to answer a housing code violation with a military siege?

During the gunfire and confusion of the siege, a police officer was shot (by a single, fatal bullet) and nine members of MOVE, including my parents, my uncle Chuck, and Delbert, were charged with the murder. How ninepeople can shoot one officer with one bullet, I cannot tell you. The trial judge even admitted during the trial that he didn't know who actually killed the officer, but that did not keep then District Attorney Ed Rendell from pushing for the maximum sentence. My parents and the rest of the MOVE 9 were sentenced to 100 years each in prison.

Despite all the subsequent public apologies for the obvious mishandling of this case, including apologies from Ed Rendell himself, it would still take 40 years before I was able to get my parents released from prison. It was not until February of this year that my uncle Chuck, the last of the MOVE 9 to still be incarcerated, was finally released. By that time, two of the MOVE 9 had already died in prison.

Back in the 1980s, by the time election season rolled around, the Black community was desperate for a change. So when there was a chance to finally vote out Rizzo, and a Black candidate by the name of Wilson Goode was running, Black voters flocked to give Goode their support. Goode promised that, if elected, he would look into the case of the imprisoned MOVE members and even went so far as to say that he believed they wereinnocent. This was almost 40 years ago.

Between the MOVE 9, Mumia Abu-Jamal (a young journalist who was also arrested on blatantly false charges)and a number of other high-profile injustices at the time, protests and demands for justice were reaching a fever pitch. The pressure from MOVE and the community was so intense that city officials dubbed it "rioting," an arrestable offense, in order to put an end to it. This was the decision that would lead to the 1985 bombing.

When heavily militarized police came to the row house on Osage Avenue on May 13, 1985, under the guise of serving arrest warrants on charges of "terroristic threats," "riot," and "disorderly conduct," a series of fatal decisions would show, with terrifying clarity, just how deeply embedded racism and hate were in the Philadelphia fire department, police department, and the court system.

When MOVE members found themselves once again confronted with fabricated charges and a militarized police siege at their door, they refused to leave the house, and police, seeing "no other way" to get in or force them out, then flew a helicopter over the house and dropped a bundle of C4 on the roof of the building. When the bomb sparked a roaring inferno, police commissioner Gregore Sambor told the firemen on the scene to stand down, reportedly telling them to"let the fire burn." When the 13 people in the house tried to escape the inferno, they were met with police gunfire, forcing them back into the blaze. When the fire consumed 61 homes in the largely Black neighborhood before it was finally extinguished, it would take years for the city to make what were ultimately pretty shoddy repairs. The District Attorney who ensured that the bombing's lone adult survivor, Ramona Africa, was sentenced to 7 years for "riot," was, again, none other than Ed Rendell.

But now, 35 years after the bombing of an American residential homeand 42 years after the wrongful conviction of nine innocent people resulting in 100-year prison sentences each, Goode and Rendell are making apologies. Their apologies have been published in local Philadelphia newspapers and in The Guardian. Goode apologized for his role in the bombing, saying that he would now support MOVE in their mission for the rest of his life, just like he said during his election campaign, years before the bombing. Yes, Goode eventually wrote letters of support for releasing the MOVE 9, but that was not until 2018, after my mother had already been released and we were receiving media attention. Rendell was quoted recently saying he regretted pushing for so much time to be served in prison for the MOVE 9, but he still has not pushed for commuting my parents' parole, which they are still serving.

What can apologies do for the two members of MOVE who died in prison after serving 20 years and 37 years each? What can apologies do for the children who died in the bombing, or for their parents who were in prison on false charges while their children burned? While an apology may seem noble to some, it's hard to accept an apology when you're watching your parents grow old in prison. When my parents went to prison, my oldest sister was five years old. By the time my parents came home, my sister was a grandparent. All of these apologies make it sound like this was some kind of mistake, but it was deliberate. Every step of the way, actions were taken to shore up a system designed not just to oppress Black people, but to kill us. How can I accept an apology from the people who deliberately killed my family? How can an apology, empty words, be all there is?

With the recent uprisings around the world calling for justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and too many others to name on one page, we have seen some cops joining the protesters, kneeling in solidarity, making statements against police brutality. And this is a positive step, but we have to move past this symbolism and into action, reform. What will this symbolism do to stop the brutality if the system itself has been built, in too many layers to count, to subjugate the people and protect the enforcers?

In Buffalo, NY, for example, the world saw 75-year-old white protester Martin Gugino shoved to the ground by police. Those same police, just 24 hours earlier, had been kneeling with protesters. The shove knocked Gugino to the ground causing him to hit his head and crack his skull. The impact of the fall was so severe that the hit caused blood to leak from his ears. Witnessing the fall, other cops tried to aid Gugino and they too were shoved away from providing aid by their fellow officers. The Buffalo Police Department later issued an apology for the offense, which no one complained about, but when the two officers involved in the shove were actually arrested for the assault, 57 other police officers resigned from the unit "in disgust because of the treatment of two of their members, who were simply executing orders."

This system, a system in which officers feel more empowered to take action for the violent offenders within their ranks than they do for an elderly man who is bleeding out in front of them on the concrete, this is the system we must fight to change. Apologies and shows of symbolic solidarity are not enough to fix this system on their own.They are only the pleasantries at the beginning of what needs to be a very tough and action-oriented national conversation.

On June 3, 2020, the city of Philadelphia finally removed Frank Rizzo's statue from where it stood across from City Hall, but the echoes of his brutal policy decisions are still shaping our police force and our government. There is still a street named after Wilson Goode.

Is it possible for people to actually feel sorry for their roles in an atrocity, and at the same time do nothing for the peoplewho are affected by it? Can you feel sorry about a heinous crime while also defending the people who committed it? If Philadelphia officials can recognize that Rizzo was a racist and remove his statue, why force the victims of his racism to stay in prison? If Ed Rendell is so sorry for my parents spending so many years in prison, why is he not pushing to commute their 60 years of parole? To visit a dying brother one town over, they need approval by a parole officer, to visit a daughter who just came out of surgery is denied due to area restrictions.

Apologies, statue removals, repainting the streets these are forced responses due to pressure from the public, for fear of the people's uprising. But removing a statue of one brutal, white fascist does not change the racist treatment of Black people in America. Renaming a street to Black Lives Matter will not stop police from kneeling on our necks in other streets. A few police officers symbolically kneeling with protesters will not fix a nation-wide system that allows for the brutal attacking of Black people without fear of repercussions. It is a system that must be dismantled with as much intention and effort as it took to build it. It is a system built around decades of racism and hatred, with a determination to institutionalize that hatred, and if you are not willing to do the hard work of actual reform, you will not be able to fix that with any number of apologies.

Written with Salon's Editor at Large D. Watkins, New York Times bestselling author of "The Cook Up," "The Beast Side" and "We Speak for Ourselves."

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Best of 2020: Philadelphia's deadly MOVE bombing and me - Salon

Last week, a report emerged that hackers, probably fromChina, had beenfilching security camera footagefrom inside the African Union headquarters building in Ethiopia. Several years ago, AU technicians discovered that the buildingsHuawei-provided servers were daily exporting their data to Shanghai, and that the walls of the Chinese-built headquarters were peppered with listening devices.

It is a strange way for Beijing to treat a continent whose rulers have emerged as key backers of its international agenda. Yet the Chinese governments spying, which almost certainly extends far beyond the African Union headquarters, may in fact be one of the reasons why African rulers are willing to defend Beijings increasingly indefensible actions.

Beijings opportunities for eavesdropping in Africa are vast. Chinese companiesmany of which are state-owned, all of which are legally obliged to cooperate with theChinese Communist Partyon intelligence mattershave built at least186 government buildingsin Africa, including presidential residences, ministries of foreign affairs, and parliament buildings. Huawei has built more than 70 percent of the continents 4G networks and at least fourteen intra-governmental ICT networks, including data centers in Kenya and Zambia that house the entirety of those governments records.

The reportnow confirmed by two other media outletsthat broke the original story of the Chinese governments AU spying demonstrates what Beijing can do with a structure one of its company builds. The AUs compromised ICT system was also provided by Huawei, whose equipment is often swiss chees-edwithsecurityvulnerabilitiesthat make them easilyexploitable. GivenHuaweislinkstoChinas Ministry of State Security, it beggars belief that Beijing lacks anything less than an excellent idea of how to access those backdoors.

Beijing has many reasons to take advantage of the spying opportunities its companies activities in Africa provides. It can eavesdrop on the sensitive conversations they have with their non-African counterparts, and theChinese governmentmight be able to gather useful economic information it can pass to its many companies operating on the continent.

Yet as the Chinese government becomes more aggressive internationally, it likely increasingly values the information it gathers in Africa for its use in maintaining and expanding African decisionmakers support for Beijings global agenda. African states are consistent apologists for the Chinese regimes oppression of its ethnic and religious minorities, vote frequently with Beijing at the United Nations (often in opposition to the United States), and usually back Chinese candidates vying for leadership of important international agencies.

Recent bombshell revelations demonstrate Beijings commitment to influencing foreign leaders. A Chinese spy named Christine Fang spent years developingpersonal tieswith local politicians primarily from California. Fang arranged donations for, and even managed to place at least one intern with, U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, who is now a current member of the sensitive House Intelligence Committee (Swalwell cut ties with Fang after receiving an FBI briefing about her spying).

In early December, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe wrote of a Chinese influence campaign aimed at several dozen"Congressmen and Congressional aides. China, in fact, targets Congress six times more frequently than does Russia, according to Ratcliffe. Meanwhile, abranchof the Chinese Communist Party known as the International Department, which is responsible for cultivating sympathy for the CCP with foreign politicians, claims to have ties with over 600 political groups in more than 160 countries.

African leaders, of course, do not need to be persuaded to accommodate China on certain issues. Many of their countries face a massive infrastructure gap, and Beijing is often happy to open its wallet for infrastructure projects. Affordable Chinese products, especially tech such as smartphones, are popular on the continent as well.

Yet the Chinese government spends a lot of time and energy trying to influence African leaders to support Beijings agenda at a level beyond what simple concern for their countries national interests would prompt. These charm campaigns include everything frombriberyto throwing up flashy infrastructure projects during election times to lavishing no-strings-attached aid on rulers tofeedtheir patronage networks.

The information that Beijing appears to be hoovering up daily is of obvious use for those kinds of influence operations. It could offer insights into an officials habits, personality, and proclivities that would help Beijing effectively cajole or coerce him or her. A key element of Christina Fangs approach was to get as close as possible to her targets; electronic surveillance access to a targets most sensitive haunts would offer the sort of extensive surveillance a human spy could only dream of.

China has built access to African leaders that will be impossible to roll back in the immediate term. Washington, however, can begin building a response that is as patient and far-seeing as Chinas strategy has been. One element of that must becomplicatingwhat is currently Beijings almost unfettered surveillance access to Africa.

This piece originally appeared in the National Interest https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-china-has-been-using-huawei-made-cameras-spy-african-union-headquarters-174992

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How China Has Been Using Huawei-Made Cameras to Spy on the African Union Headquarters - Heritage.org