Ethiopian monk said to be 114 years old survives coronavirus
June 27, 2020

Centenarian Tilahun Woldemichael crys as he prays to God after spending weeks in hospital recovering from the coronavirus, at his house in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Saturday, June 27, 2020. The Ethiopian monk believed to be 114 years old has survived the coronavirus and was discharged from a hospital on Thursday, having received oxygen and dexamethasone, a cheap and widely available steroid that researchers in England have said reduced deaths by up to one third in severely ill hospitalized patients. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) — An Ethiopian Orthodox monk whose family says he is 114 years old has survived the coronavirus.

Tilahun Woldemichael was discharged from a hospital on Thursday after almost three weeks. He received oxygen and dexamethasone, a cheap and widely available steroid that researchers in England have said reduced deaths by up to one third in severely ill hospitalized patients.

Ethiopia’s health minister has said the ministry recommends the emergency use of the drug for COVID-19 patients who require ventilation or oxygen.

Tilahun’s grandson Biniam Leulseged said he has no birth certificate to prove the monk’s age, but he showed a photo of him celebrating his 100th birthday.

“He was looking young back then, too,” Biniam told The Associated Press on Saturday.

He said he was emotional when his grandfather was taken to the hospital but “I am very happy because we are together again.”

Ethiopia has more than 5,200 confirmed cases of the virus.

Critics question `less lethal’ force used during protests

IN A DEMOCRACY YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO PROTEST

UNTIL THE COPS DECIDE YOU DON'T

By ACACIA CORONADO

This this photo provided by Howell family shows Justin Howel. When a participant at a rally in Austin to protest police brutality threw a rock at a line of officers in the Texas capital, officers responded by firing beanbag rounds ammunition that law enforcement deems “less lethal” than bullets. A beanbag cracked Howell's skull and, according to his family, damaged his brain. Adding to the pain, police admit the Texas State University student wasn't the intended target. (David Frost via AP)

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — When a participant at a rally in Austin to protest police brutality threw a rock at a line of officers in the Texas capital, officers responded by firing beanbag rounds — ammunition that law enforcement deems “less lethal” than bullets.

A beanbag cracked 20-year-old Justin Howell’s skull and, according to his family, damaged his brain. Adding to the pain, police admit the Texas State University student wasn’t the intended target.

Protesters took to the streets in Austin and across the nation following the May 25 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In some instances, police reacted with force so extreme that while their intent may not be to kill, the effects were devastating.

Pressure has mounted for a change in police tactics since Howell was injured. He was not accused of any crime. He was hospitalized in critical condition on May 31 and was discharged Wednesday to a long-term rehabilitation facility for intensive neurological, physical and occupational therapy. His brother has questioned why no one is talking about police use of less lethal but still dangerous munitions.


BEAN BAGS FIRED UNDER PRESSURE CAN BE LETHAL 

This still image taken from video provided by David Frost shows protesters running after police fire beanbag rounds in front of the Austin Police Department Headquarters on May 31, 2020 during a demonstration against police brutality in Austin, Texas. In some instances, police reacted with force so extreme that while their intent may not be to kill, the effects were devastating. (David Frost via AP)

“If we only talk about policing in terms of policies and processes or the weapons that police use when someone dies or when they are ‘properly lethal’ and not less lethal, we’re missing a big portion of the conversation,” said Josh Howell, a computer science graduate student at Texas A&M University.

The Austin Police Department said in a news release that, before June 1, its officers used Def-Tec 12-gauge beanbag munitions on protesters. According to the manufacturer’s website, they have a velocity of 184 mph (296 kph)

The growing use of less lethal weapons is “cause for grave concern” and may sometimes violate international law, said Agnes Callamard, director of Global Freedom of Expression at Columbia University and a U.N. adviser.

HOW IS THIS NON LETHAL 

From 1990 to 2014, projectiles caused 53 deaths and 300 permanent disabilities among 1,984 serious injuries recorded by medical workers in over a dozen countries, according to Rohini Haar, an emergency room doctor in Oakland, California, and primary author of the 2016 Physicians for Human Rights report

This still image taken from video provided by David Frost shows protesters carrying Justin Howel, injured during a protest against police brutality in front of the Austin Police Department Headquarters on May 31, 2020 in Austin, Texas. A beanbag cracked Howell's skull and, according to his family, damaged his brain. In some instances, police reacted with force so extreme that while their intent may not be to kill, the effects were devastating. (David Frost via AP)

Ishia Lynette, a spokeswoman for the Austin Justice Coalition, said her group had been organizing a rally with an expected 10,000 attendees, but that was canceled after Howell was shot. With anger flaring on both sides, the organization that advocates for racial justice feared confrontations could arise.

“I feel safe in some sense, but it is always in the back of my head, the what if? Other people can incite violence, whether that be other protesters or the police,” Lynette said.

The Austin City Council has since begun an overhaul of the Police Department, banning the use of less lethal munitions and tear gas in crowds participating in free speech, and prohibiting the use of chokeholds. The attack on Howell is one of more than 100 under investigation.

Lynette hailed the city’s efforts to change, but said more needs to be done. Her organization also has been calling for Austin Police Chief Brian Manley to resign.

“They recently banned chokeholds, rubber bullets, beanbags,” she said. “These are small things, but we need them to take more actions to not hurt any more protesters. Since then, I have seen videos of them operating in the same way. If they would uphold what they said, it is not enough, but it is a start.”

David Frost, who captured on video the moments after Howell was shot, said he saw protesters throwing fist-sized rocks and water bottles at the line of police on an overpass. Then he saw Howell fall. He was bleeding heavily and went into a seizure, Frost said.

As medical volunteers with red crosses on their arms helped Frost to move Howell to a safe place, officers again opened fire. Frost’s video shows the police firing towards them.

Manley said at a news conference that Howell was not the intended target, insisting that the officer was aiming for the person who he said attacked the police line near the Austin Police Department headquarters.

“One of the officers fired their less lethal munition at that individual, apparently, but it struck this victim instead,” Manley said. “Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and we hope his condition will improve quickly.”

Howell was not the first person at the Austin rallies to be injured by police. A day earlier, 16-year-old Brad Levi Ayala, who was watching a protest from a distance, was also shot in the head with a beanbag.

“We can’t really take comfort in the phrase ‘less lethal,’” Josh Howell said. “Because if what we mean is less lethal than a bullet, that’s not a high bar to clear.”

He declined to comment on the changes the city and police chief said they are making because he doesn’t live in Austin.

___

This story was first published on June 27. It was updated on June 29 to correct the name of a man who captured on video the severe injuring of a protester during a demonstration in Austin, Texas. His name is David Frost, not David Foster.

___

Acacia Coronado is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

MAP OF COUNTRIES ACTIVE IN THE ARCTIC AS IT WARMS

FROM LE MONDE 

Inequitable healthcare, insufficient resources
Russian hospitals may not cope

Russia inherited enough hospital beds from the old Soviet health system to cope with Covid-19 patients, though not the medical personnel or critical supplies now needed. With the private sector growing, is state healthcare being dangerously hollowed out?

by Estelle Levresse

Pandemic: Russia’s health system has been neglected
v

Moscow’s tree-lined Rozhdestvensky Boulevard was almost deserted. Behind a barrier, a litter-picker was at work while another rested on a bench. These municipal employees in Day-Glo orange overalls were among the few Muscovites who could enjoy the tulip display. Russia’s capital normally returns to life in spring, but this year has stayed dormant: shops, restaurants and cafés closed, public spaces padlocked. People go out to buy food or walk their dogs, but this mega-city of 12 million, on lockdown since 30 March, is quiet. There are no children or old people in the streets, as they are forbidden to leave home except to go to the family dacha (1).

Russia managed to delay the coronavirus outbreak by a few weeks through early preventative action: it closed its land border with China on 30 January, banned Chinese nationals from entering the country soon after, quarantined citizens returning from high-risk countries, and began disinfecting public transport and taking the temperature of Moscow school pupils daily.

But the virus began to spread throughout the country. In May new infections rose steeply, with almost 31,000 registered during the long 1 May holiday weekend. Just before it, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin was hospitalised with the virus, as were two other ministers and the president’s spokesperson.

By 19 May there had been 300,000 infections but only 2,837 deaths, which caused western media to speculate that the Russian statistics understated the true death rate by as much as 70% (New York Times and Financial Times, both 11 May). The Russian authorities acknowledged that a patient who tested positive for Covid-19 but died of another cause would not be included in their figures, but denied any manipulation. Even if revised upwards, Russia’s Covid-19 deaths remain below those of Italy, Spain and the US. But if the infection rate grows, will Russia’s medical infrastructure be able to cope?

Russia’s experience of fighting infectious diseases may help explain the authorities’ swift initial response. It dates from 1918 when the Narkomzdrav, the People’s Commissariat of Public Health, was created. The Narkomzdrav, led by medic Nikolai Semashko, developed the world’s first unitary national health system, known as the Semashko system: free, universal and founded on a multi-level organisation of care according to the severity of the condition (2).

Free district clinics

District polyclinics were the first link, offering outpatient treatment for common ailments and ensuring coordination within the system. In these free clinics, patients could see general practitioners and specialists such as ENT doctors, urologists and dentists. Semashko wrote, ‘The organisation of the health system on the district principle gives healthcare providers a chance to know their patients’ working and living conditions better, so the district doctor becomes the “local” doctor, a friend of the family’ (3). The family practice was the forerunner of similar systems later adopted in other countries.

Organisation on a district principle gives healthcare providers a chance to know patients' working and living conditions better, so district doctors becomes the ‘local' doctor, a friend of the familyNicolai Semashko

Particular attention was paid to infectious disease prevention. In 1922 Sanepid, the State Sanitary and Epidemiological Service, was created, with intervention teams that could be deployed nationwide, from factories to villages (4). Their vigilance, together with mass vaccination, allowed the USSR to eliminate tuberculosis and malaria. Average life expectancy in Russia, just 31 at the end of the 19th century, rose to 69 by the 1960s; the Soviets had closed the gap with western nations.

Today’s successor to Sanepid, Rospotrebnadzor (Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing) is in daily contact with the health ministry but reports directly to President Vladimir Putin, who is in charge of Russia’s overall anti-Covid-19 strategy. According to Ivan Konovalov, a researcher in the department of childhood infectious diseases at Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University, this organisation has helped alleviate the burden on hospitals, using large-scale CCTV surveillance and policies that discriminate by age. On 23 March a mayoral decree in Moscow forbade anyone over 65 who suffers from a chronic illness to leave home. As a result, 85% of Russia’s Covid-19 patients are under 65 so on average experience less acute symptoms. Russia boasts of one of the lowest Covid-19 death rates in the world (0.9%, 25 April data), but this might be due to its comparatively low national life expectancy, which averages 72 years overall, 67.6 for men.

Russia’s mass testing strategy is another contributory factor. Rospotrebnadzor said it had carried out 2.5 million tests by 24 April, the second-highest figure in the world, which allowed early isolation and treatment, and brought down the percentage mortality rate by identifying people with asymptomatic forms.

Soviet-era hospital capacity

Russia retains significant hospital capacity from the Soviet era. This anomaly in a country that devotes just 3.5% of GDP to public health, compared to an OECD average of 6.5%, has been ascribed to organisational shortcomings from the 1960s. At that time, the health system began prioritising hospitals over primary care. A sharp increase in cardiovascular disease and cancers, poorly treated by the Soviet system because of a lack of investment in expensive technology, explains the fall in life expectancy by three years between 1965 and 1974. Judyth Twigg, a US expert on Russia’s health system, said, ‘To fulfil the objectives of the plan, there was a tendency to open as many beds as possible and hospitalise people for as long as possible. There was little regard for quality and innovation. Only quantity counted.’ Prevention, the strength of the Semashko system, was relegated to second place.

Despite a drastic reduction in numbers of healthcare institutions — the number of hospitals halved between 2000 and 2015 and the number of beds per 10,000 inhabitants was reduced by a quarter — Russia still has one of the highest beds-per-capita rates in the world, with 8.1 for every 1,000 inhabitants compared to six in France and 2.8 in the US, according to OECD figures. This capacity will be an asset during the pandemic, especially as Russia is also well equipped with ventilators and respiratory equipment — around 40,000 according to the authorities — but behind these figures the reality of healthcare provision is highly variable.

The system never really recovered from the collapse of the 1990s, when the brutal decline in economic and social conditions led to the re-emergence of tuberculosis and other previously eradicated infectious diseases. The introduction in 1993 of an Obligatory Medical Insurance scheme, which currently takes 5.1% of a worker’s net salary, as part of every employment contract has made it possible to improve the system over time, at the cost of widening inequalities in access. Consultations with a GP and hospital stays remain free, but prescriptions have to be paid for.

Regional inequalities have grown too. The restructuring that began to optimise expenditure in the 2000s led to rural hospital closures and the construction of hi-tech facilities in big cities. Many Russian healthcare workers complain on social media about a lack of equipment and medicines, outdated technology and low pay. In 2019 there were strikes and collective resignations in several cities, often with support from the Doctors’ Alliance. Last August, at a hospital in Pyatigorsk, near the Georgian border, A&E doctors resigned en masse.

Does Russia have the resources?

This anger is not confined to outlying regions. In Tarusa, a town of 10,000 inhabitants 150km south of the capital, healthcare workers say they lack such basics as disposable gowns and disinfectant. Twigg points out, ‘Putting someone on a ventilator requires not just a qualified doctor but also anaesthesiologists, lab technicians and, in particular, intensive care nurses. It’s not certain that Russia has such resources.’

Even if the system holds up against Covid-19, structural problems remain. Provision of primary care is being neglected. The number of district doctors nationally fell from 73,200 in 2005 to 60,900 in 2016. In 2017 just 13% of Russia’s doctors were GPs, compared to an average of 33% across the OECD (5). Russians are rejecting public polyclinics when seeking treatment. According to a study in August 2019, 57% of Russians self-medicate rather than go to the doctor.

The better-off are turning to a booming private sector. Since MD Medical Group opened its first private maternity hospital in Moscow in 2006, the big health companies have accelerated their growth, targeting the upper-middle class in big cities. In 2016 private healthcare providers’ share of the Obligatory Medical Insurance sector was 29%, compared to 16% just three years before. Medsi, owned by the Sistema holding company, already does eight million consultations a year in Russia and this year planned to open a 34,000 sq m multi-speciality medical centre in Moscow.

Igor Sheiman, a researcher at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, has long advocated a return to basics of the Semashko system, based on affordable care and the central role of polyclinics. ‘Unfortunately, that’s not where efforts have gone,’ he concedes. He believes the 550bn roubles ($7.55bn) earmarked for the national health programme (one of 13 national priority projects for 2019-24) is not enough to modernise primary care. And these funds are at risk of cuts. The Russian government, obsessed with the stability of the rouble, is reluctant to increase its budget deficit and is only unwillingly dipping into its sovereign fund to finance emergency measures. The modernisation of the healthcare system may have to wait.

Estelle Levresse is a journalist based in Moscow

(1) See Christophe Trontin, ‘Russia’s vanishing summerfolk’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, August 2019.

(2) See Vladimir A Reshetnikov, Natalia V Ekkert, Lorenzo Capasso et al, ‘The history of public healthcare in Russia’, Medicina Historica, vol 3, no 1, 2019.

(3) Ibid.

(4) See Roger I Glass, ‘The Sanepid service in the USSR’, Public Health Reports, vol 91, no 2, 1976.

5) Health at a Glance 2019, OECD Indicators.

African Americans revive alliance with Palestinians
‘When I see them, I see us’


A short video from 2015 linked African Americans and Palestinians from the occupied territories, reviving an empathy dormant for decades, which began when Palestine became part of the struggle against colonial dominance and land rights.

by Sylvie Laurent
FEBRUARY 2019


Before the fall: President Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalynn Carter congratulate Andrew Young on becoming UN Ambassador in 1977. Credit Bettmann · Getty Images

‘When I see them, I see us’ is a short video that shows in quick succession faces of people united by the messages they hold up to the camera: ‘We are not collateral damage, we have names and faces’. There is footage from Ferguson, Missouri, and shots of Palestinians in the occupied territories with placards reading ‘Black Lives Matter’ while African Americans protest against the racist oppression of Palestinians. There is a single target, the US firm Combined Systems Inc, which supplies products such as tear gas both to the Ferguson police and to the Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank.

The three-minute video, produced in 2015, was immediately picked up by social networks. Besides unknown protestors, black activist Angela Davis, who recently published a collection of essays (1), philosopher Cornel West, actor Danny Glover (who once played Nelson Mandela), singer Lauryn Hill and writer Alice Walker all appear. Noura Erakat, the human rights lawyer who came up with the idea, was well aware of their impact. The film is a declaration of solidarity between African American activists and Palestinians (2), who were both suffering from state violence at the time although their relationship goes much further back.

The year 1967, with the Six Day war and Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, was also crucial for the American civil rights movement, marking the turning point from the non-violent stance of its Christian base to radical demands for justice. The Black Power movement reverted to the third world internationalism and anticolonialism of earlier black activists, whether communist, like Paul Robeson, or nationalist, like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, who visited Jerusalem in 1957 and Gaza in 1964, ahead of a transnational and cosmopolitan liberation struggle. In his 1964 essay Zionist Logic, he denounced the ‘camouflage’ of Israeli ‘colonialism’, disguising violence as benevolence with the strategic support of the US. He called it ‘dollarism’.
Right to land and freedom

The most important radical groups, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers, also condemned Israel and the US. Young Black Liberation activists moved away from African American sympathy for Israel as the Holy Land and a refuge for a people once enslaved and persecuted. African Americans had cherished the biblical metaphors of Exodus since the 17th century, and the establishment of a Jewish state had seemed providential. James Baldwin wrote in 1948: ‘The more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage to a hard taskmaster and waiting for Moses to lead him out of Egypt’ (3). No one could better understand the Jews’ search for a land of freedom than an African American. Equally, when in exile he visited Palestine in 1961, Baldwin expressed empathy for any people seeking a homeland, and understood the meaning of dispossession and forced displacement.

We are not anti-Jewish and we are not antisemites. Only we do not believe the leaders of Israel have a right to this land H Rap Brown

Israel’s 1967 occupation of more Palestinian land ended Zionist feelings among activist African Americans. Having once identified themselves with the Jews in their servitude, they now felt closer to the Arabs. While Martin Luther King had spontaneously hailed the founding of Israel, his mentors, Mahatma Gandhi and Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s revolutionary leader, had publicly condemned Zionism in the name of their anticolonial struggles. In 1977 SNCC activists, King’s rebellious heirs, published a call for solidarity with the Palestinians.

The anti-imperialism of the new black activists expressed solidarity with non-whites in the third world. This generation saw themselves as prisoners in a domestic colony, and the more nationalistic demanded a bi-national solution within the US. This produced what the historian Alex Lubin called ‘an Afro-Arab political imaginary’. The Black Panthers contacted the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which saw the link between Palestine and the anticolonial, antiracist and anticapitalist struggle, as legitimate.

Both the Black Panthers and the SNCC were immediately accused of antisemitism. Spokespeople for both organisations, aware of some antisemitic trends among activists, clarified their position; SNCC chairman H Rap Brown declared in 1967, ‘We are not anti-Jewish and we are not antisemites. Only we do not believe that the leaders of Israel have a right to this land’ (4). In 1970 the Black Panther leader Huey Newton also denounced extremist remarks by activists and defended revolutionary internationalism, hostile to white supremacy, but not to Jews. He reasserted the right to self-determination of all peoples oppressed by militarism and Israeli-American ‘reactionary nationalism’ (5).
‘Thinking our emancipation for us’

The coalition between African Americans and Jews, which had played a determining role during the civil rights period (1954-68), was endangered. This was an important turning point. From the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching alongside Martin Luther King, the progressive Jewish elite had played a major role in the Black Liberation struggle. The majority of students who took part in the Freedom Summer of 1964, a voter registration drive in Mississippi to encourage African Americans to sign up to vote, were Jewish.

That relationship had been strained, notably by accusations of paternalism by educated Jews. But the Palestinian issue marked the break in relations. In 1967 the African American writer Harold Cruse challenged the premise of an alliance between the equally oppressed. In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), Cruse argued that Jews held power and used it, including for ‘thinking our emancipation for us’. Where was that empathy when it came to denouncing the Israeli occupation of Palestine? What was the Jewish position on Zionism in the rightwing review Commentary? Cruse said African Americans in search of justice should think about the wisdom of their partnership with American Jews.

The mention of Commentary highlights the gradual shift in views of leftwing American Jewish intellectuals, including Norman Podhoretz, from the end of the 1960s. They ended all national support for African Americans, and unconditionally supported Israel internationally. Trying to reconcile this, they claimed that the US social, liberal and universalist model, which had enabled Jews to become Americanised, was threatened by those who wanted to destroy racism and domination in both countries.

This made UN General Assembly resolution 3379, adopted in 1975 and condemning Zionism as ‘racism and racial discrimination’, controversial in the US. The US ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was outraged, although he was aware of the mechanisms of state discrimination. In 1965, as an academic close to Lyndon Johnson, he had produced the Moynihan Report calling for ambitious social policies favouring African Americans excluded from social structures. He eventually became a neoconservative and an ardent defender of Israel.

To understand why the Palestinian question resonates with African Americans, we need to look at the balance of power within the US after the civil rights movement, when the protagonists reviewed issues rooted in history: foremost were the imperial nature of the American republic and the exclusion of minorities of colour from citizenship. Declaring support for Palestine proclaimed the right to dissent from US power, which, after confiscating land and rights from African Americans, Mexicans and Native Americans, replicated that domination in the Middle East. From 1968 American Jews and Arabs, aware of that similarity with US history, committed to their own movements for political assertion inspired by the American civil rights movement. Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defence League in 1968 and future leader of Israel’s far right, raised the idea of ‘Jewish power’.
‘Israeli apartheid’

The apartheid regime in South Africa led to mobilisation on US campuses and in black working-class neighbourhoods. South Africa, already a symbol of colonial domination, bought weapons from the US and Israel, pushing Israel further towards the oppressors. There was talk of ‘Israeli apartheid’ (6), and Palestinians became members of a diaspora of the dispossessed. As in South Africa, Palestinian activists demanded boycotts, condemnation and an end to investment by all US institutions, from local universities to the State Department.

In 1979 President Jimmy Carter forced civil rights activist Andrew Young to stand down as US ambassador to the UN for having met PLO leaders. Irritated by Young’s hostility to his pro-Israel policies, Carter made African American leaders angry. James Baldwin wrote in The Nation on 29 September 1979: ‘The state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of Western interests ... The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of divide and rule and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.’ Since this was more a domestic matter than geopolitical, many African Americans — including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, another civil rights veteran and a rising figure in the Democratic Party — brought up the role of American Jews in Young’s forced resignation. Accusations of antisemitism resurfaced, and Jackson’s comments about New York’s Jews (as Israel-fixated and dominant in ‘Hymietown’) did nothing to help. Jackson, a strong advocate of a broad pan-minority coalition, struggled to heal this divide, and failed. When Louis Farrakhan, the black leader of the Nation of Islam, whose antisemitism had been well known since the 1970s, lent his support, African Americans’ anti-Zionist stance was fatally discredited.

In the 1990s the radical African American movement lost power, and its relationship with the Palestinians ran out of steam. The leaders’ focus on democratic self-restraint, the breakup of the remaining Black Panthers, and hopes for peace in the Middle East after the 1993 Oslo accords ended the criticisms of imperialism that had marked the US liberation movement.

Solidarity with Palestinians only resurfaced after the 2015-16 Ferguson riots, when there was anger over police crimes against unarmed young black men. The Black Lives Matter movement took up the SNCC’s torch and linked racial issues with the logic of world domination. Social media helped revive solidarity: one Facebook group is called Blacks for Palestine (B4P). In 2017 the anti-racism group Dream Defenders organised a trip for black artists to the occupied territories. There have been conferences on US university campuses, where calls to boycott Israel have triggered controversy (7).

Such actions involve only a few, but a new generation links both groups’ struggles. Vic Mensa, a rapper from Chicago, travelled to the occupied territories in 2017 and wrote about it in Time (8). He described the mirror effect of seeing a young Palestinian frisked by an Israeli soldier; his relief at not being the suspect was followed by the realisation that ‘for once in my life I didn’t feel like the nigger.’


Sylvie Laurent
Sylvie Laurent is a research associate at Harvard and Stanford, a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris and the author of King and the Other America: The Poor People’s Campaign and the Quest for Economic Equality, University of California Press, Oakland, 2019.
Translated by Krystyna Horko


Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2016.


(2) ‘When I see them, I see us’, Black Palestinian Solidarity.


(3) James Baldwin, ‘The Harlem Ghetto’, V Commentary 165, 169 (1948).


(4) Quoted in Douglas Robinson, ‘New Carmichael Trip’, The New York Times, 19 August 1967.


(5) Huey P Newton, ‘On the Middle East’, in To Die for the People, Random House, New York, 1972.


(6) See Alain Gresh, ‘Palestine: the view from South Africa’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, August 2009.


(7) See Alain Gresh, ‘The truths that won’t be heard’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, September 2018.


(8) Vic Mensa, ‘What Palestine taught me about American racism’, Time, New York, 12 January 2018

A superpower undermined by social decay
The cultural sources of black radicalism


by Achille Mbembe

June 1992, online exclusive


‘Malcolm X’ by Spike Lee.
cc.VDO Vault

America is acting surprised at the violence of the recent riots in Los Angeles and at the immense anger that has been expressed, not only by African Americans but by other minorities (Latinos, Asians), too. Unable to look beyond the mostly reassuring image provided by Martin Luther King (a man whom it once had no qualms murdering), over the past twenty years America has chosen not to interest itself in the cultural work unfolding in the ghettos, whose political impact now flows well beyond the confines of black spaces. Indeed, here is one of the nation’s paradoxes: a minority of the population, practically stripped of its rights, can be credited with crucial innovations in the fields of culture, sports and the arts. It thus manages to exercise an influence that is disproportionate to its economic and material means, and to its objective political weight.

Here is one of the nation’s paradoxes: a minority of the population, practically stripped of its rights, can be credited with crucial innovations in the fields of culture, sports and the arts

To understand the deep roots of the new cultural radicalism in people’s minds, it is important to note what distinguishes it from other cultural currents within black communities and the way in which it defines itself with regard to great contemporary societal and political struggles. It especially sets itself apart from the ‘buppie’ (black upwardly mobile professional) wave — that ambitious group which, over the course of the years after desegregation (1965), proved itself determined to reap the fruits of integration by any means necessary. Big names of the black media elite (Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Prince, Oprah Winfrey, Eddie Murphy) fit within this trend, as well as those of sports (Michael Jordan, ‘Magic’ Johnson, Carl Lewis). Such artists and cultural figures have been co-opted into the dominant system and wield almost complete financial control over their product, even if the channels of its distribution still evade them.

The logic of co-option has spread to other domains. On a political level, thanks to multiracial coalitions, black mayors have been elected to head up several important cities (David Dinkins in New York, Coleman Young in Detroit, Andrew Young then Maynard Jackson in Atlanta, Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, Wilson Goode in Philadelphia). The same holds true in academic and intellectual fields: a black university elite has increasingly taken its place within institutions once exclusively controlled by whites, notably in law and social theory in general, as in the case of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Orlando Patterson at Harvard, Stephen Carter at Yale and the African American intellectuals gathered around the journal Reconstruction (1).

Although it is itself subject to subtle forms of racism and discrimination, this co-opted elite ultimately conceives of its future as being within the system and tries to escape traditional definitions of blackness, while insisting on the multicultural foundations of the American nation. Politically, its debates are closely related to the issue of civil rights and the advantages and pitfalls of affirmative action (2). It is also in these settings that most black neocons can be found, of which Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court justice, is the prototype.

The principal troops of the new black radicalism are recruited elsewhere, of course, in a trend known as b-boy. Its two primary supports are music and film, the visual language of images and oral language. A pure product of the ghetto, this trend marvellously combines the most explosive elements of urban poverty, street knowledge and the immense potential for anger, which, up until now, has neither been annexed nor politically exploited by any traditional institutional force. Its best-known musical form is rap (to rap literally means to cut, to strike, to bump, to put back in one’s place). It was around 1979 that the mainstream media discovered this art form, made of rapid street dialogue that is chanted and strongly rhythmical. This was back in an era when graffiti covered the walls of major cities and breakdance still took pride of place on the sidewalks. It was not until 1982, and the release of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s single ‘The Message’, that explicitly political rappers appeared.

From then on, the nebula of rap never stopped gathering power. It was able to take advantage of parallel events in the political sphere and shifts that occurred in ghetto culture. For example, Jesse Jackson’s two runs for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1989 spurred on the political awakening of a rap generation. The 1983 election campaign, with its overtones of the crusades, was the same, and saw the arrival of Harold Washington in Chicago’s mayor’s office; then, in 1984, there were the great campaigns for Boycott and Sanctions of South African goods.

Many incidents tinged with racism – and the system’s inability to sanction it – contributed to the radicalisation of this generation and to the emergence of new leaders (usually at neighbourhood level) who had more or less broken with the traditional black political establishment, which was accused of colluding with a system in which the right to vote does not appear to guarantee change, and whose racist structures have not fundamentally altered despite formal desegregation. That was the case in New York when, in 1986, a young black man was killed following a full-on manhunt by a gang of white thugs at Howard Beach, or later when, during the summer of 1989, Yusef Hawkins was shot down in the Italian neighbourhood of Bensonhurst. The names of Al Sharpton, C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox belong to this period.

The link to the legacy of the 1960s was no longer mediated by the figure of Martin Luther King, but by the heroes of insubordination banished from the United States’ collective memory (Malcolm X, the Black Panthers)

The power of rap’s appeal can also be explained by the fact that over the last ten years, influential intellectual currents have developed. They were, for the most part, facilitated by new cultural intermediaries, keen not so much to articulate the anxiety rising from the ghettos as to participate in academic debates from non-Western perspectives. This current, called ‘Afrocentrism’ (3), reigned supreme in Black Studies departments and aims to reclaim the question of African identity and the contribution of black people to universal history separate from Eurocentric views that have long obfuscated it. Such critical revisiting rests on the theory of the African origins of Egyptian civilisation, among others, and on the fact that Greek civilisation also borrowed the majority of the elements that made it great from Egypt (4). It is hard to comprehend the political impact of these debates without taking into account the fact they have a direct influence on the very definition of the American nation and of the respective places of its cultural components.

At the beginning of the ’80s, the nebula of rap also benefited from renewed creativity in the production of urban symbols and symbols of identity. In this respect, we note, for example, the proliferation of jeeps and other cars driving at high speed, music blaring out of boom boxes from 1987 on. T-shirts splattered with slogans such as ‘Black by popular demand’, or ‘It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand’ spread out of black universities. The famous slogan ‘No justice, no peace’ that was ‘discovered’ by the mainstream media after the LA riots also dates back to this period.

In parallel, we witnessed the growing rediscovery of Malcolm X. As early as 1986, you could see kids reading his autobiography in the New York subway and in public places. The writings of Elijah Muhammad, notably his Message to the Blackman, also enjoyed increased favour, while Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan was more and more often invited to speak on campuses by black student groups. The link to the legacy of the 1960s was now no longer mediated by the figure of Martin Luther King, but by the heroes of insubordination banished from the United States’ collective memory (Malcolm X, the Black Panthers). Most of their ideas concerning self-defense, economic emancipation and the rediscovery of the self and of one’s cultural identity echo the feeling that the black race has been subjected to a genocide and that it should, in the words of Malcolm X, defend itself, ‘by all means necessary.’

These themes were taken up and popularised in music, with most records selling millions of copies. So, when the band Public Enemy released ‘Bring the Noise’ in 1986, the song opened with Malcolm X’s voice declaring, ‘Too black, too strong’. The same band later stood out with two more hits: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and ‘Welcome to the Terror Dome’. KRS-One directly attacked the criminal justice system in 1987’s By All Means Necessary. As for the band Niggaz With Attitude (NWA), it denounced the deterioration of towns and police violence in ‘Fuck tha Police’. Family structures didn’t escape criticism either. Most black young people in the ghetto had simply never experienced the family as represented in reassuring Bill Cosby series. This is the point the band MAAD drove home in ‘Fuck My Daddy’, in which life in prison is an important subject, as is daily life on the streets, in the underground worlds of drugs and cocaine. The band Mad Mutherfuckin’ Congatas also describes with candour and brutal honesty how ‘living hard and dying hard’ is the fate of young people in the ghetto. As for Niggaz4Life, he affirms, ‘Niggas know how to die/Niggas don’t know nothin’ else, but dyin’/Niggas dream ’bout dyin’’ (5).
It is no exaggeration to say that a parallel language has developed alongside conventional US English since the era of slavery

Conventional and puritanical language is done away with around issues of sex and drugs. Creative freedom is expressed through the use of graphics, excessive profanity, tales of blood, violence, and crime. This is the case for example with Puff the Buddah or NWA hits such as ‘I’d Rather Fuck You’ or ‘Findum, Fuckum and Flee’, ‘She Swallowed It’, ‘Just Don’t Bite It’, or ‘One Less Bitch’. Why this return to the word ‘nigga’? ‘Because police always wanna harass me/ Every time that I’m rollin’/ They swear up and down that the car was stolen/Make me get face down in the street/And throw the shit out my car on the concrete/In front of a residence/A million white motherfuckers on my back like I shot the President,’ replies one of the members of NWA.

This same reality feeds the cinematic work of artists like Spike Lee, Van Peebles, John Singleton and Matty Rich (6). The accounts listed above coexist with more about the violence of the ghetto, self-destructive behaviour, sexuality, new forms of phallocratic mentality and, above all, the police brutality and exclusion built into the American system. The project of rap and of the new black cinema is to create heroes for the ghetto and of the ghetto. But, in truth, the influence of hip-hop now extends to almost all components of black American culture. This is especially the case in the sphere of everyday speech, and it is no exaggeration to say that a parallel language has developed alongside conventional US English since the era of slavery, with its own turns of phrase and expressions, grammatical constructions, intonations, curses and ways of naming people, objects and things. This language is largely not understood by Americans of European descent and absent from the dominant modes of communication. It is this language that is taken up by rap and enriched, in order to set down — in a new context — the old problem of black emancipation in a society whose power and wealth structures have remained, for the most part, racist. That is also the case in the realms of style, hairstyle, painting, dance and theatre.

The new ‘intellectuals’ who articulate these discourses define themselves as ‘real niggaz’. Mixing anger and sarcasm, they are not immune to a form of neomaterialist nihilism and consumerism that the capitalist system can, in any event, accommodate.


Achille Mbembe
Translated by Lucie Elven.

The best of times, the worst of times
US in the spring of the pandemic

Covid-19 brought economic chaos to the US, and with that a possibility for huge political policy changes. But if Joe Biden wins the presidential election, he’s promised nothing will change.

by Thomas Frank   June 2020

Musical diversion: Jodi Beder helps neighbours cope with lockdown in Mount Rainer, Maryland, March 2020 Andrew Caballero-Reynolds · AFP · Getty

It is the worst of times in America. The pandemic that disaster-preparation types have been warning about for decades is finally here, and of course we haven’t prepared very well. Our leviathan government, the subject of so much feigned rightwing terror in ordinary times, turned out to be unable to rise from its easy chair when the crisis came. Our president, the former TV star Donald Trump, has proved himself incompetent if not positively injurious to public health with his stupid rambling remarks, which, until recently, he addressed daily to the cameras. And now, almost the entire country is in quarantine lockdown. New York City, where the virus has had its deadliest run, was a few weeks ago burying stacks of coffins in mass graves dug by bulldozers.

Quarantine has meant deliberately smothering the economy, which just a few months ago was running at maximum capacity. In America we have no mechanism for putting the economy on hold — people just lose their jobs or close their doors — and overnight we went from one of the fastest-running economies of my lifetime to Great Depression II, skipping all the intermediate steps and going straight to massive unemployment and a vast extinction of businesses large and small.

Here in the land of the individual, the individual is utterly overwhelmed, swept anonymously along on the tides of disease and economic collapse. Beloved family members are dying alone in some hospital; yesterday’s trendy restaurants are shuttered and forgotten, their ambitious young chefs filling out unemployment forms along with millions of others.
Here we are, suffering dire shortages of masks and testing equipment and even hand sanitiser, and our punditburo is unable to persuade our former trading partners to agree with us that the world is flat and they need to ship us the goods immediately

All this is happening during what might well be the best of times for America. Here in my little corner of the country we have been enjoying the most spectacularly beautiful springtime I have ever seen. For the comfortable, white-collar people around me, this pandemic has played out in a landscape that looks like a Fragonard painting: as the first fears came, the daffodils were blooming and then the tulips; the magnolia trees and the cherry blossoms; the azaleas and the rhododendrons; and now the dogwood blossoms arch pale overhead as I jog the peaceful, traffic-free roads of Bethesda, Maryland. That ironic contrast holds true everywhere you look.

Their beliefs confirmed

Just about everyone with a voice in America claims these days that the pandemic confirms their prior beliefs in some resounding way. Say the media types, this reinforces what we have been telling you all along about President Trump’s ignorance and folly. Say the conservatives, this proves what we have been telling you all along about soft-hearted liberals and their suicidal desire to let anyone into the country. For them the pandemic has been a carnival of smugness.

It is growing clear, however, that instead of reinforcing the cherished beliefs of the American consensus this episode has shattered them. For decades this country has offshored our manufacturing capacity because duh, that’s what everyone agreed the info-age called for. We were going to be a white-collar nation that made innovative things like prescription drugs and legal textbooks; things of the mind that weighed so very little. And now here we are, suffering dire shortages of masks and testing equipment and even hand sanitiser, and our plummy punditburo is unable to persuade our former trading partners to agree with us that the world is flat and they need to ship us the goods immediately. Death laughs in our stupid neoliberal faces.

The American system of healthcare-for-profit, constructed over the decades with the enthusiastic input of both political parties, has shown itself incapable of rising to the pandemic challenge. For a simple reason: it wasn’t built for purposes of public health. In my lifetime, the underlying assumption of that system has always been that healthcare is a privilege; you get access to it by being a successful and prosperous person. It is a meritocratic system in the way it rewards high-achieving doctors and innovative pharma scientists, and in the way it parcels out care. Poor people with lousy or no insurance who want their broken bones and organ failure healed are routinely bankrupted by astonishing medical bills (1). The suggestion that we should stop bankrupting such people and instead give them free tests or treatment for Covid-19 is so contrary to the consensus view of healthcare in this country that it is difficult to see how this necessary step is to be taken. The psychological breach with how we have always thought about healthcare will be wrenching.

Perhaps Covid-19’s most healthful effect is what it has done to our understanding of social class. A short while ago, all right-thinking Americans agreed that work that didn’t require a college degree was second-class work, heavy and blundering and polluting; the people who did it were often Trump voters whose way of life was crumbling because it deserved to. Only a few years back, billionaire Democratic politician Michael Bloomberg thrilled students at Oxford University with heady theories of how the information age prioritises ‘how to think and analyse’ over the simplistic skills of farmers and industrial workers (2).
Here in the land of the individual, the individual is utterly overwhelmed, swept anonymously along on the tides of disease and economic collapse

Today only those farmers and industrial workers stand between us and the abyss. Many of them are out there risking their lives in the virus-sphere every day. Others are being ordered back to work at their low-wage jobs regardless of their vulnerability to Covid-related death. They are falling ill in the grocery stores and the meat-packing plants while the white-collar, information-age types who order them to work sit safely at home, working by email and Internet conference, and enjoy a miraculously rising stock market, courtesy of Congress and the Federal Reserve.

If you guessed that this is a situation in which working people might decide they’ve had enough, you are correct. Although it’s hard to know for sure since local labour reporting is virtually dead in America, there are signs that worker militance might have revived itself. One of America’s most famous anti-union lobbyists recently warned his clients of the possibility of a ‘partial workforce rebellion’ (3), and there appear to be unauthorised wildcat strikes here and there (4).
Anything could happen

Each of these items points to the same thing: the sudden, vivid extinction of the comfortable worldview that American leaders adopted and forced on the world in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. The situation in America is pregnant with possibility. Anything could happen.

Here, however, we come to the dark, pathological irony of American liberalism. The institution that ought to be moving us past the deathly old mode of thought is the Democratic party — indeed, it is just about the only institution that might conceivably do such a thing nowadays — and yet just a few weeks before the coronavirus exploded in America, that same Democratic party succeeded, with joyful public celebration, in stamping out any possibility that American political thinking would in fact change. Its leaders are determined that this crisis will go to waste.

Let me explain. For much of the last year, the Democratic party held debates among would-be candidates for the presidency. At first, in an accurate reflection of the thinking of the left, many of the Democrats on the national stage appeared to have broken decisively and even creatively with the shibboleths of the past.

But after the institutional favourite, former vice-president Joe Biden, won the South Carolina primary at the end of February, most of the remaining candidates abruptly quit and endorsed him. The one candidate who persisted, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the leading reformer of our era and a beloved figure of the young, held on a little longer but also eventually bowed to the overwhelming odds.

The candidate who emerged from this jumble of discontent was the man who promised to do the least. His party is now preparing to give us a national election that will be little more than a referendum on the hated Donald Trump. Finally we have a climate in which the American public would unquestionably choose dramatic change were it offered to them, and the party of change has contrived to ensure that it will not be offered. Instead our choice is between two elderly and conservative white men, both with a history of stretching the truth, both with sexual harassment accusations hanging over them, and neither representing any possibility of energetic democratic reform. The old order has been miraculously rescued once again.

Such is the climate of opinion in America that, with the right leader, remarkable things would be possible. Instead we are presented with Joe Biden, an affable DC veteran with a hand in many of the defining disasters of the last 30 years: worker-crushing trade agreements, the Iraq war, cruel bankruptcy legislation, mass incarceration, the infamous attack on civil liberties known as the Patriot Act. The man even boasts of having been chummy with segregationists back in the day.

There’s a good chance he will win. Despite his views, Biden is a familiar and well-liked politician in the classical tradition, while Donald Trump, in his pathological narcissism, oozes resentment and always finds new ways to make himself despicable. Plus, it’s hard to see how someone can bungle an economic and public health crisis as badly as Trump has with Covid-19 and be asked by voters to repeat the performance.

‘Nothing would fundamentally change’ if Biden becomes president, he told his wealthy donors (5). It’s a hell of a slogan for a moment like this.

My leftwing friends all tell me they are depressed. With their hero Bernie Sanders, who looked so strong in January, beaten, they find themselves locked indoors, watching people be rude to each other on Twitter.

I share the mood, but I think there’s more to it. The prospect of no positive reforms in the wake of this catastrophe is bad enough, but each day’s news informs us that the old order is not sitting still. Every day there is some new scheme for bailing out corporations, or a power-grab by Silicon Valley. The Democratic governor of New York Andrew Cuomo is taking the opportunity of quarantine to bring in tech billionaires to re-engineer the future (6).

The gnawing anger beneath the pandemic is that democracy itself is being rewired in our absence. The system has failed us, the system is guaranteed to go on failing us, but while we the people are out of the picture, others are making grand, world-altering decisions. The powerful are rewriting the social contract while we watch TV and console ourselves with booze and simple chores.


Thomas Frank
Thomas Frank is the author of Listen, Liberal, or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, Metropolitan Books, 2016.

Original text in English

(1) See Kaiser Health News’s ‘Bill of the month’.

(2) ‘Bloomberg attacks farmers and industrial workers’, talk at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, 17 November 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aATHavwhosY/.

(3) Lee Fang and Nick Surgey, ‘Anti-union operative warns business of historic rise in labor activism’, The Intercept, 1 May 2020.

(4) ‘Covid-19 strike wave interactive map’.

(5) Jennifer Epstein, ‘Biden tells elite donors he doesn’t want to “demonize” the rich’, Bloomberg, 19 June 2019.

(6) Naomi Klein, ‘Screen New Deal: under cover of mass death, Andrew Cuomo calls in the billionaires to build a high-tech dystopia’, The Intercept, 8 May 2020.

Trump and Netanyahu’s Palestine sell-out

Trump’s Palestine plan: enshrining occupation

Cécile Marin, February 2020 

Sources: www.peacenow.org; ‘Peace to prosperity’, January 2020

https://mondediplo.com/maps/trump-peace-plan

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=PALESTINIANS

The impact of the slave trade on Africa

Monday 8 June 2020. Yesterday, protesters in Bristol tore down a statue of British slave trader Edward Colston (1636-1721) and threw it into the harbour. 

Elikia M'bokolo, April 1998

https://mondediplo.com/1998/04/02africa

Monday 8 June 2020. Yesterday, protesters in Bristol tore down a statue of British slave trader Edward Colston (1636-1721) and threw it into the harbour. Colston was a member of the Royal African Company, which between 1672 and 1689 transported roughly 100,000 men, women and children from west Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas, where they were sold as slaves. As Elikia M'Bokolo wrote back in 1998, 'The figures, even where hotly disputed, make your head spin. Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean

• 

• Bolivia's coup

  Renaud Lambert
  
  Wednesday 10 June 2020. The New York Times has finally refuted the hypothesis that Evo Morales committed electoral fraud, which served to justify Bolivia's coup d'état last November. This was a theory that the NYT itself was happy to propagate only months ago. Few media outlets have continued to follow the developments in Bolivia, as Latin America only exists for the Western press when it can be used as a weapon of domestic policy. Earlier this year, a study from the Massachusett s Institute of Technology found that Bolivia's right-wing coup was based on faulty data from the Organisation of American States (OAS). As Renaud Lambert wrote in our December issue, when Morales was declared the winner of October's election the OAS, 'the US's strong arm in the region, entered the frame and soon became a key actor in a crisis it claimed to be just observing.'
• https://mondediplo.com/2019/12/02bolivia