Come For the Satanic Eclipse, Stay For the Commie Earthquake, Illegal Invaders and Bootlegged Baby Parts


A Swiss student in faux spacesuit flies a paper rocket during a Mission to Mars project
(Photo by STEFAN WERMUTH/AFP via Getty Images)

ABBY ZIMET
Apr 09, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

Lordy. Our apocalyptic circus of bigots, morons, loudmouths and clowns has stayed in town too long. To wit: a ceaseless GOP House "shit show," racists freaking out at too-tanned NCAA players "invading," pastors cancelling autism awareness as "demonic," Klan Mom decrying black market harvesting of baby organs - thanks Dr. Fauci! - and now, from God or the Gazpacho police, an earthquake and end-of-the-world eclipse telling us to "repent." First, maybe repent for an electoral college that gave us this lunacy.

The seedy grandstand for the mayhem is the (barely) GOP-controlled House, which for a while has been "imploding in plain sight." After skipping town for Easter, they left behind yet more flops earning yet more declarations of "Republicans in disarray." Amidst a "Great Resignation" that's seen the highest number of lawmakers quitting in 40 years, two more Reps - Gallagher and Buck - are bowing out, leaving the GOP a paltry one-seat majority. The showboats of what Raskin calls the "chaos-and- cannibalism caucus" still don't like their Speaker for (five months late) keeping the government open with a $1.2 trillion spending bill, Comer's Biden impeachment effort has crashed and burned like his other "investigations," the sole accomplishments of the shortest and least productive House session since the Great Depression are re-naming some Veterans Affairs clinics and authorizing a coin to mark the Marine Corps' 250th anniversary, and even George Santos says he's (inexplicably) running again as an Independent 'cause the GOP is too "embarrassing."

For once, he has a point. Self-righteous blowhards venting ignorance and hate, they seem to do nothing but voice imaginary grievances when grownups do things they don't like. When the effort to remove Fani Willis from Trump's election interference case failed, they shrieked, "It's all rigged!" and "There is no justice in America today." When Kamala Harris touted an effort to keep guns away from dangerous people, yahoos who send out Christmas cards of their kids cradling AR-15's bayed, "What the hell is this evil?" When a Transgender Day of Visibility coincidentally fell on Easter, they ranted it was part of a "years-long assault on the Christian faith" and the Catholic Biden - to Trump, one of "MANY PEOPLE THAT I COMPLETELY & TOTALLY DESPISE BECAUSE THEY WANT TO DESTROY AMERICA," would now "commandeer" Christmas with a Trans-Siberian Orchestra playing and say what? When a Florida school planned Autism Awareness Week, the pastor cancelled it as "demonic" (like "Santa Clause") because "anything that exalts itself above the name of Christ should be brought down."

And when racist moron and Michigan state rep Matt Maddock - who boasts he's America's "Most Conservative" pol, tried to imprison "war criminal" Gretchen Whitmer for requiring masks during COVID, got kicked out of the House GOP Caucus as too conspiracy-y even for them, posts things like "the left hates farmers," "government controls your air conditioning," "bail reform kills people," "communists are lonely, bitter, angry cowards with sad kids," and whose wife is under indictment as one of Michigan's fake electors - saw three buses at Detroit Airport and some scary dark guys alight, squawked they were "illegal invaders" and "everyone knows" Whitmer is "bussing in illegals and asking (us) to shack them up in their homes for $6,000 a year." Except they were the Gonzaga Bulldogs basketball team there to play in the NCAA Mens Sweet 16 March Madness against Purdue. Confronted with his "spectacular stupidity" and the facts, even by supporters, he snarled back - “Sure kommie. Good talking point" - and doubled down with replacement theory: "How long till the #HostileMedia calls the invaders homesteaders?" He seems nice.

The implausible queen of this GOP rabble is grandstanding, hate-mongering, self-promoting "purveyor of political pageantry" Marjorie Taylor Greene, a useless, performative troll most recently appointed to chair the "useless, performative impeachment" of Homeland Security's Alejandro Mayorkas by Mike Johnson in hopes of shutting her up as she tries to oust him for keeping the government running, or something. Among other memorable ventures since her Jewish Space Laser and school-shooting-survivor-harassing days: Inventing an Antifa plan for a "Trans Day of Vengeance," arguing 8-to-10-year-old Uvalde victims should've been armed with JR-15 rifles, spreading a replacement theory video about "the Democrat (sic) open border plan to entrench single party rule," and after Mexico's president proposed several U.S. actions to ease border crossings, refuting them with a "Declaration of War" against Mexican cartels for fentanyl trafficking, even though it's mostly produced in China and smuggled into this country not by migrants but U.S. citizens or other legal visitors.

Last month she also hosted, with live stream, a "Hearing Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting" to explore "the "aborrent (sic) truth of the industrial abortion complex (to) profit off the murder of unborn babies." She'd announced the event, based on repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories that Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue for profit - including grafting "the scalps of unborn babies onto the backs of rodents in a study funded by Anthony Fauci under the NIH" - with a beaming photo of herself that, noted one observer, "looked oddly bubbly for a hearing on dead babies." Her two speakers were David Daleiden, who in 2015 released heavily edited videos of himself as a fake biomedical researcher trying to buy fetal tissue, after which Planned Parenthood successfully sued him for $2 million; and Terrisa Bukovinac, who in 2022 was convicted with another anti-abortion activist of blocking access to a health clinic, stealing 115 aborted fetuses from a medical waste truck, burying most of them, and keeping five they claimed without evidence were "born alive and then murdered."

Greene said she wanted the hearing, attended by five people though she invited every member of Congress, to be a graphic, gory, in-your-face rebuttal to genteel talk of "women's health care." And so it was, with her use of pointedly incendiary language and images: "abortionists," not doctors, "babies sucked out while still alive" by an instrument "more powerful than a household vacuum," "tiny brains and hearts," "over 63 million people murdered in the womb" - misinformation so prevalent House Dems created a website to refute it - and no mention of vital medical advances facilitated by fetal tissue research. Still, wise-acres weren't buying it: "Baby Organ Harvesting is my Norwegian Death Metal cover band," "Marge hungry," "Do you know how many fetus livers it would take to make a single kabob?", "Curious how she'll tie it into Hunter's dick pics," "She should do her genealogy - she would have led lots of witch trials if she was alive back then," and, "This is absolutely ridiculous. No one harvests baby organs. Infants are only run through hydraulic presses to make baby oil, and THAT'S IT!"

But not even abortion, or terrorists collapsing Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, or earthquakes in what Rudy Giuliani called "the communist states" of New York and New Jersey - with its epicenter at Trump's Bedminster golf course deemed "Ivana's revenge" -come close to the "Super Bowl for Conspiracists" that is an eclipse. Marge was on it: "God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent." So was her squinty-eyed, right-wing boyfriend Brian Glenn - Wonkette calls him "the dude she has been having what we assume is very sweaty, pale, Godly white-person sex with" - who very scientifically "explains astronomy" and eclipses with, “I think we're going to see where the largest kind of a spiritual awakening in this country that people are realizing how much evil has creeped (sic) into (our) lives." He also warned of its fallout, "combined with earthquakes, and this infestation of locusts that have been dormant for years that all of a sudden will attack mankind, and oh then throw in Joe Biden trying to get into a war with eye-ran." He seems nice too, also smart.

There are about three, mathematically predictable solar eclipses a year, and many unpredictable earthquakes caused by shifting tectonic plates, not God being mad about gay marriage; both have occurred since creation, and you can read about them here and here. Regardless, news of these events made the right wing lose whatever's left of their minds. Alex Jones - not much left there - called the eclipse "a dress rehearsal" for declaring martial law if Trump wins the election. He cited “Major Events" like "Masonic rituals (to) usher in a New World Order," noting the eclipse trajectory in the U.S. forms an “Aleph” and “Tav,” the first and last Hebrew letters, signaling end times. Another genius saw a "perfect cover story if our terrorist government wanted to take down the power grid and cause mass chaos while blocking citizen communications (to) unleash a dictatorship" before Trump can win. And to ensure "no Satanic forces come through" during the eclipse, Steve Bannon hosted a live Mass with newly fired, financially sketchy, MAGA Bishop Joseph Strickland "in prayer and penance for our country."

It didn't help that a nerdy NASA project in Virginia measuring changes in electric and magnetic fields - Project APEP, short for Atmospheric Perturbations Around the Eclipse Path, referencing the snake god of darkness - planned to shoot rockets at the moon during the eclipse. To one wise wingnut, that meant there would be "rituals performed by Masonic, Satanic, Esoteric, Gnostic, Brotherhood of the Snake and other occult-like groups." And because if it's Monday, it must be the frog-raining end of days, several red states, Oklahoma and Texas among them, issued various disaster warnings and executive orders because when in doubt or fear just go totalitarian. In Arkansas, "out of an abundance of caution," lying Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency over a possible "backlog of deliveries by commercial vehicles transporting essential items of commerce" during maybe four minutes of darkness. In truth, noted one of her constituents, "The real emergency is that "the governor of an entire state is a fucking moron."

In honor of the fraught occasion, Fox News took its usual, balanced, erudite approach and went with racist paranoia on the subject of the dangers of an eclipse at the border even though it was so cloudy it wouldn't have much effect. Host Dana Perino: "A rare celestial event collides with a policy failure on the ground." Host Bill Hemmer: Officials bracing for higher traffic under cover of darkness "means a real opportunity for smugglers and cartels and migrants to come right in..." Vile correspondent Bill Melugin: "While everybody is gonna be looking up, if you're looking down here at the border, here's some of what you're gonna see." He offers video of "a surge of illegal alien evaders" (two poor guys scrambling through brush) with, "You'll see illegal immigrants dressed in dark clothing, sometimes camouflage...And you'll see outnumbered border agents trying to respond as these guys flood in" (one sad guy gets caught) "as they're trying to sneak into the United States." Cruelty, as usual, is the point here, and the eclipse gives us one more ugly, feckless chance to flaunt it.

Four years ago, amidst a pandemic needlessly killing hundreds of thousands, the "leader" of all these loathsome, inept people was showing them how it's done, sputtering nobody's thanking him for the great job he's doing, yet more tests bring more cases: "So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.'" Somehow, now it's worse. For the eclipse, he released a deeply weird, insanely narcissistic ad declaring, to the soaring music of 2001, "The Most Important Moment In Human History." As awe-struck crowds watch, we see the sun slowly eclipsed by....his wattled, blubbery, grotesque silhouette. Comments: "The most accidentally honest ad Trump's team ever put out," "this fucking moron won't even let himself be upstaged by the solar system," "what a freak," "not a cult," "how can I make this about me?," "going all in with the anti-Christ thing," "Stephen Miller is no Leni Riefenstahl," "fat boy ate the sun," "total eclipse of the brain," "dark side of the buffoon," "totalitarian eclipse." For a laugh, someone added light passing ear to ear. Not a laugh: "So, Trump will bring darkness to us. Got it."


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ABBY ZIMET has written CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women's, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. Email: azimet18@gmail.com
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Dominican Republic’s Neofascist Paramilitaries Double Down on Right-Wing Repression

New expressions of ultranationalist violence censoring Black women and migrants harken back to the Trujillo dictatorship. Anyone deemed a threat to Dominican values is a potential target.

By Amarilys Estrella

April 11, 2024

Source: NACLA





“Could you please report this tweet! And if you have the space[,] share with others in your trusted circle of friends to do the same?” I received this text message after the Dominican ultranationalist group Antigua Orden Dominicana posted a tweet outing a queer couple in the country. Over the past decade I have become accustomed to these kinds of requests for support aft er ultranationalist groups catch wind of an individual known for their activism “in support of Haitians” or “espousing gender ideology.” The comments on the offending posts quickly become littered with death threats, racist and xenophobic epithets, and accusations of treason. Often, those who face surveillance and repression due to being identified through traditional and social media are racialized Black women and femmes

The Antigua Orden Dominicana (AOD) is an ultraright-wing, neofascist paramilitary group whose goal is to protect the Dominican Republic “at all costs.” Members of the movement don black combat boots and black military-style uniforms emblazoned on the arm with the Dominican flag and the words “Dios, Patria, Libertad,” (God, Country, Liberty). On Facebook, where AOD has more than 77,000 followers, the group has described itself as a nationalist movement “created for the expulsion of Haitians from Dominican towns and cities.” Over the past decade, AOD members—often while the Dominican national police look away—have regularly disrupted marches and vigils organized by feminist and antiracist groups to denounce human rights violations against Black Haitian migrants and dark-skinned Black Dominicans, women, and LGBTQIA+ communities. Most recently, in October 2023, AOD members threatened and harrassed participants at a vigil in Santo Domingo in solidarity with Palestinians.

Although AOD’s anti-Haitian, anti-Black, and homophobic intimidation tactics might at first appear to be the work of a fringe group, the paramilitary movement is in fact part of a larger historical and regional pattern of right-wing state and non-state violence, censorship, and threats against Black women and migrants over the past century. In recent decades, the Dominican Republic has seen a retrenchment of right-wing, fascist movements that increasingly depend on the solidification of neofascist paramilitary groups. While paramilitary groups were present during previous right-wing regimes and dictatorships, their presence today points to the new contours that shape repression against anyone deemed a threat to Dominican sovereignty.

As the Dominican Republic gears up for the 2024 presidential elections, the scapegoating of Haiti, Haitian migrants, and their descendants is expected to rise. Most recently, these disruptions have extended into educational spaces, where concerns about a bilingual children’s book written in Spanish and Haitian Kreyòl, as well as false narratives about erotic poetry being taught to children, have become lightning rods for the right wing to call for the banning of books and the firing of Black feminist educators. As Black, queer, feminist, and antiracist movements mobilize to denounce state and non-state violence, the number of threats and disruptions from right-wing groups such as AOD will only continue.
Black Dolls, Black Stories

In 2021, Ana María Belique, a Black Dominican woman of Haitian descent, published the bilingual children’s book La muñeca de Dieula, Poupe Dieula. The book, which tells the story of a girl whose mother sews her a Black doll, was part of larger project to enable Black women and girls to see themselves reflected in popular culture. In 2019, Belique and other members of the antiracist movement Reconoci. do launched Muñecas Negras RD, an initiative that creates Black dolls as a way to build intimate spaces of recognition while generating income for marginalized women. It was the beginning of what Belique dubbed pensamiento crítico bateyero, a Black feminist thought and praxis born out of the experiences of Black Dominican women and girls of Haitian descent from sugar cane communities known as the batey.

Women designers living in bateyes—who often face limited work opportunities due to the denial of citizenship to Dominicans of Haitian descent—carefully crafted each doll using locally purchased cloth, thread, and yarn (for the hair). While the first batch was primarily purchased by people living outside of the Dominican Republic, the next generation of dolls were gifted to children within the creators’ own community and sold in Dominican feminist spaces.

Muñecas Negras RD has provided a space for Black Dominican women of Haitian descent to speak about their experiences with gender and racial discrimination. As one of the founders, Maribel Pierre explained, “People think that when they call you Black they are offending you, not knowing that when they call you Black they are reminding you where you are from, who you are, who your ancestors are.” These sentiments, shared by many creators who participated in the making of the dolls, were the impetus for Belique to write La muñeca de Dieula. The story is inspired by one of the young girls of the batey who would often stand by the window to peak in and see what the older girls and women were crafting and discussing.

After the book’s release, Belique and the book’s illustrator and publisher, Michelle Ricardo of Proyecto AntiCanon, were set to present at the 2022 International Book Fair in Santo Domingo. On social media, AOD and its ultranationalist supporters soon began heralding Belique’s book as a sign of the Haitianization of Dominican society. They warned that the book was being read in public schools and teaching children Haitian Kreyòl. They also directly threatened Belique and Ricardo and called for the boycott of the book presentation at the fair, which led to the cancellation of the event. Instead, Ricardo read a poem about the intimidation and threats, which led to further intimidation and threats on social media.
The Rise of Neofascist Groups—and Their Repression

Groups such as AOD argue that the Dominican Republic is a sovereign nation that has a right to defend itself from accusations of human rights violations such as racism, xenophobia, homophobia, or misogyny. In addition to the recent assault on Palestine solidarity demonstrators and backlash against La muñeca de Dieula, far-right groups have repeatedly leveled threats and aggression against human rights defenders, disrupting events including rallies denouncing statelessness, artistic anticolonial performances, human rights commission hearings, and a vigil after the police murder of George Floyd in the United States. While the majority of these events took place in Santo Domingo, far-right groups and individuals have also disrupted educational panels held in New York City, where AOD has a presence.

These kinds of self-identified nationalist disruptions have been on the rise over the past decade. Amaury Rodríguez, a Dominican author and translator whose work highlights Dominican, Caribbean, and Latin American history from below, notes: “The use of repressive forces to squash social protest has become commonplace.” The presence of neofascist paramilitary groups is part of the new contours shaping the repression against anyone deemed a threat to Dominican values. For the human rights activists documenting how threats that emerge in the virtual world spill into physical spaces, the proliferation of nationalist and fascist groups on social media platforms such as Facebook has become increasingly concerning.

In December 2016, at an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights session in Panama City, several Dominican human rights organizations provided a report on the increasing threats of violence against human rights defenders, in particular members of social movements and organizations speaking out against racist and xenophobic government policies. The report detailed how right-wing, self-identified nationalist groups were creating videos and posts online that sought to expose what they referred to as anti-Dominican propaganda. Members of the Dominican civil society delegation listed a series of intimidation tactics, which they put in the context of a long history of threats and physical violence experienced by human rights defenders in the country. They also noted that they had documented and shared their concerns with Dominican authorities, who had not responded to their reports. Since then, at least one of the members of the delegation left the country over concerns for herself and her family.

Civil society groups have continued to call attention to unchecked far-right violence. In October 2022, participants in the jornada anticolonial suffered physical aggression at the hands of AOD, which had called on its members to disrupt the event. For nearly two decades, various social organizations have participated in a series of events each October to denounce national celebrations that glorify Christopher Columbus, colonization, and slavery. In a press conference after the incident, civil society organizations called on President Luis Abinader to demand that groups such as AOD halt their threats and physical aggressions. Despite formal complaints submitted to the prosecutor’s office, there have been no formal investigations or responses from the state.
A Long History of Censorship and Threats

Threats against human rights defenders, and particularly Black women and femmes, are happening alongside an increase in repressive policies that respond to a fear that antiracist organizing and so-called gender ideology threaten racial harmony and Christian patriarchal values across Latin America and the Caribbean. While there has been a rise of right-wing conservative movements across the hemisphere in recent years, the right has held almost uninterrupted power in the Dominican Republic for almost a century. This current moment might look different, but a look back at this past century reveals what many have deemed the continuation of Trujillismo.

In 1930, Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo came into power after a military coup he helped lead against President Horacio Vásquez. While anti-Haitianism in the Dominican Republic predates the Trujillo dictatorship, it was during his reign that anti-Haitian discourse peaked and turned into genocidal violence. Trujillo orchestrated the 1937 Haitian Massacre by ordering soldiers and enlisting civilians to target Haitians, Dominicans of Haitian descent, and dark-skinned Black Dominicans along the Haitian-Dominican border. To date, there has been no public apology by the Dominican government for this massacre of more than 17,000 Black people. Trujillo was also responsible for the 1960 murder of the Mirabal sisters, who were involved in the June 14 Revolutionary Movement against his dictatorship. The Mirabal sisters’ assassination made them symbols of popular and feminist resistance.

In 1961, Trujillo was assassinated, and political unrest ensued until the election of democratic liberal Juan Bosch Gaviño, who entered office under the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) in 1963. Bosch’s rule came to an end, however, seven months after he took office. He was ousted in a coup by military generals sympathetic to the Trujillo regime who were concerned about Bosch’s radical support for labor rights and the poor. Bosch’s exile was followed by further unrest and the United States’ occupation of the country in 1965. Bosch ran again for president in 1966 against Trujillo’s former puppet president Joaquín Balaguer Ricardo, who, over the next 30 years, would hold onto power at all costs. Balaguer’s presidency between 1966 and 1978 is referred to as Los doce años (the 12 years) when it is estimated that more than 1,200 people were murdered by Balaguer’s paramilitary group, known as La Banda Colorá. He returned to power in 1986.

Balaguer represented the continuation of Trujillismo through ongoing anti-Haitian rhetoric. Under his rule, Haitian migrants and their descendants faced racist and repressive tactics, until he finally, but reluctantly, left office in 1996. In that year’s elections, Balaguer’s support for the winning presidential candidate, Leonel Fernández Reyna of the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD), over a Black Dominican of Haitian descent, José Francisco Peña Gómez, paved the way for present-day racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic policies in the country. Throughout this century of repressive policies and violence, Black women and femmes have continuously been at the center of resistance movements—from the fight for agrarian reform that led to the death of revolutionary leader Mamá Tingó in 1974; to the human rights campaigns against anti-Haitianism and anti-Blackness led by the late activist Sonia Pierre; to the recent organizing by antiracist, feminist, and queer youth movements.
New Political Party, Same Right-Wing Policies

In 2024, the Dominican Republic will vote in presidential elections. Over the past four years, the country has been led by President Abinader of the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM). When the PRM came into office for the first time in 2020, many welcomed the change after 16 consecutive years of rule by the PLD. In 2010, the PLD oversaw a conservative constitutional reform that introduced a full ban on abortions and same-sex marriage and brought an end to birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented migrants. Also, during the PLD’s time in the presidential office, in 2013, the Constitutional Court issued Ruling 168-13, an egregious judgment that retroactively stripped more than four generations of Black Dominicans of Haitian descent of their Dominican citizenship.

At the time, Abinader—already involved in politics and himself a descendant of Lebanese immigrants—had participated in an event called “Abrazos Solidarios” (Solidarity Hugs), denouncing the ruling. After a failed presidential bid in 2016, Abinader’s election in 2020 led many to be hopeful, as well-known figures from Dominican civil society joined the PRM as representatives in different ministries and government offices. However, as Rodríguez notes: “This new government turned out to be completely the opposite of what Abinader promised young voters, women, and progressives during his presidential campaign. Once in power, Abinader proceeded to take off his mask, a liberal facade, retracting his initial support for abortion and using xenophobic and racist anti-Haitian language to instill racial hatred and prejudice against Haitian immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian origin.” According to Rodríguez, Abinader’s government has enacted “a continuity of reactionary policies aimed at further marginalizing Haitian workers and their families in the Dominican Republic. In fact, the Abinader administration is twice as reactionary as it incorporates anti-Haitian racist laws and fascist violence into its repertoire of social control and neoliberal restructuring.”

Like the rising right elsewhere in Latin America, the current Dominican government similarly infringes on people’s rights, stoking anti-immigrant sentiments and trotting out discourses that malign the dignity of women, LGBTQIA+ people, and migrants. Abinader continues to engage in the age-old tactic of scapegoating Haitian migrants and their descendants for the ills of the country. He has promoted the building of a wall along the Haitian-Dominican border, and in September 2023, his administration fully closed the border in response to the development of an irrigation canal on the Haitian side of the shared Massacre River. Abinader argued that building this canal was detrimental to the Dominican environment and, in a show of force, stationed Dominican military officials along the border, preventing the movement of people and goods. As Rodríguez argues: “Abinader’s racist rhetoric and chauvinism—greatly magnified by traditional Dominican media—has created a dangerous climate for people of color in general including Black Dominicans, Haitian immigrants, Dominicans of Haitian origin as well as activists, independent journalists, educators, cultural workers, progressive and left-wing intellectuals. Under Abinader’s rule, the Dominican state is moving toward the establishment of an apartheid system that will further segregate people of Haitian origin regardless of whether or not they were born in the country.”

Abinader has also continued to use decrees to enable the profiling and removal of Haitian migrant laborers and their descendants. Among those targeted for deportation are pregnant migrant Haitian women, a practice fueled by fears that migrant women are taking over public hospitals and draining limited resources. In September 2021, Dominican authorities restricted migrant women’s access to the public health system to cases of emergency and began denying entry into the Dominican Republic of any pregnant migrant beyond six months of gestation. As media networks overflowed with videos and stories of pregnant women or mothers with newborn babies being escorted out of hospitals and detained by immigration officials, the Santo Domingo-based observatory for migrant rights in the Caribbean known as OBMICA denounced the “unprecedented violation of the fundamental right to health care.” Based on the Dominican government’s own accounting, authorities deported nearly 800 pregnant Haitian women between November 2021 and April 2022 alone, leading to condemnation from United Nations experts.

According to Amelia Hintzen, fears of an increase in the number of Dominicans of Haitian descent were evident and documented as early as 1969, when the deputy secretary of the General Directorate of Migration wrote a memorandum to then President Balaguer about the “grave problem” of “the large number of Haitian nationals who have invaded our territory.” It would take another 35 years from the date of this memorandum for authorities to execute legal actions stripping the children of Haitian migrants of their Dominican nationality. In 2004, lawmakers passed General Law on Migration 285-04, which regulated the entry and employment of foreigners in the country. It also sought to end jus soli, the right to soil or birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Dominican constitution at the time, by expanding its definition of “in transit.” Under Law 285-04, all children born to “foreign mothers” must be handed a pink constancia de nacido vivo, certificate of live birth, as opposed to a white one for legal citizens. The newborns are then registered in the Foreign Registry Book, commonly referred to as el libro de extranjeros, the book of foreigners.

The 2010 Constitution enshrined these practices by redefining Dominican nationality. It continues to state that at least one parent must be of Dominican nationality in order for a child to be recognized as a Dominican national. In practice, however, the administrative staff of hospitals hold major discretion when determining whether a mother will receive a white or pink slip, based on their perceptions of the mother’s race and ethnicity. Through Dominican state policies and ongoing outcry from ultranationalists, anyone perceived to be a Haitian woman and their children become a threat to the Dominican nation.
Resistance: Glimmers of Hope

In late 2023, a defamation campaign against Lauristely Peña Solano, cofounder alongside Michelle Ricardo of the Proyecto AntiCanon that published La muñeca de Dieula, led to Peña Solano being ousted from the school where she taught. She was accused of having assigned her students “inappropriate” poetry readings. Feminist activist and lawyer Susi Pola believes that the far-right online smear campaign against Peña Solano was based on “fear and resistance to change from hegemonic conservatism” by the ultraright-wing sector concerned with her “gender ideology” discourse. In an open letter to the school’s families, Peña Solano notes that she has been harassed by ultraright-wing actors and their “bot army” for many years. These attacks were based on her community and human rights projects.

Peña Solano is just one of the most recent in a long list of Black and racialized women and femmes in the Dominican Republic who have been subjected to online defamation campaigns and threats of violence. In her open letter, she speaks directly to the parents: “It is very comfortable to want to clarify your intentions of not harming the school and its director, when they have clearly done everything to harm me, all in the name of good customs and morality, I remind you that throughout history the inquisitors, dictators, and fascists have used that same excuse.”

As Rodríguez notes, the far-right is not only looking to other Latin American and Caribbean spaces, but also actively engaging with far-right political parties beyond the hemisphere, such as Vox in Spain. “The emergence of the far-right and xenophobic Vox party in Spain has created ample opportunities for networking between Dominican center-right and far-right politicians and European rightists,” Rodríguez notes. Among the examples of these ties have been meetings between a Vox representative and Dominican lawmaker Omar Fernández, son of former President Fernández and a member of the center-right Fuerza del Pueblo party. These meetings are quite telling of the mindset of Dominican conservative politicians, who have the audacity to think it is not a big deal to meet or establish political ties with xenophobic, neofascist politicians who target immigrant communities in Spain, including those of Dominican origin.

Still, Rodríguez is clear: “Repelling the fascists is possible.” He points to the importance of a “strong left built on the basis of unity, democracy, and political clarity, in other words, a left that is anti-imperialist in outlook and is adamantly committed to combating all systems of oppression and exploitation including racism and the denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.” Rodríguez highlights the important lessons learned during the leftist movement that emerged in the 1960s, which are contributing to the internationalism and anti-imperialism of groups such as the Movimiento Socialista de Trabajadoras y Trabajadores (Socialist Workers Movement, MST), and the myriad of antiracist, feminist, and queer collectives that continue to confront the current wave of neofascism.

These efforts take different forms. As Muñecas Negras RD expands across different bateyes in the Dominican Republic, for instance, they seek to create a space to highlight the work of Black women within their own communities in the past and present. They speak of the importance of recognizing their mothers and grandmothers’ labor as midwives in a context in which Black women are being denied access to birthing in hospitals. As the author and activist Belique explains: “At Muñecas Negras we try to break all social, racial, and gender stereotypes that represent us as inferior. Working with girls, adolescents and young people, we teach that blackness is beautiful, it is valuable, and that we are capable of creating beautiful things.” Muñecas Negras RD and bilingual books such as Belique’s La muñeca de Dieula represent a threat to neofascist groups’ conservative ideologies. They also provide glimmers of hope in resisting this most recent and dangerous iteration of the far right.

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Amarilys Estrella  is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Affiliate of the Center for African and African American Studies at Rice University. She is also a founding member of the collective We Are All Dominican.

Roundtable on Current U.S. Foreign Policy: Militarism Unhinged

By Phyllis Bennis, Jeffrey Sachs , Jackson Lears 

April 11, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Source: Susan Melkisethian - Poor People's Campaign DC 2018. Flickr



I invited three insightful analysts of present-day U.S. foreign policy to share their thoughts in a roundtable discussion. Here are excerpts from Phyllis Bennis, Jackson Lears and Jeffrey Sachs.

— Norman Solomon

Question: How would you assess the most important aspects of current U.S. foreign policy?

Phyllis Bennis: I think the most important aspects are the most problematic ones. The focus on militarism that leads to a military budget this year of $921 billion, almost a trillion dollars, an unfathomable number translates to $0.53 out of every discretionary federal dollar going directly to the military. And if you add in the militarism side of things, the federal prison system, the militarization of the borders, ICE, deportations, all those things, you come up with $0.62 out of every discretionary federal dollar.

So the militarism is, I think, the single most important problem. The issue of unilateralism remains a huge problem when the rise of the so-called “global war on terror” essentially wiped out the possibility of a post-Cold-War peace dividend, which had currency for about a week, as I recall, and that unilateralism continues.

We’re seeing that kind of continuing problem of U.S. foreign policy, and then the rising competition at the major power level — U.S.-Russia, U.S.-China, all are shifting – all are moving in a greater way towards a military competition rather than the economic competition, because that’s where the U.S. is unchallengeable; U.S. military capacity. You know, the U.S. spends more than the top ten, the next ten countries on their military all together, including big spenders like China, like Russia, like Saudi Arabia, like India.

These are overall problematic aspects that are the most crucial at the moment. Of course, the critical moment right now has to do with Israel and U.S. support for Israel. It was always assumed in the U.S. that you could never lose votes by being too pro-Israeli. And what a surprise. Turns out you can and Biden is. But that doesn’t seem to be enough, at least so far, to create a change in real policy. So we’re seeing the U.S. playing this role as the sole power that is enabling and protecting Israeli genocide, Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism, as well as the destruction of and undermining of international law.

So this whole issue that is now causing sort of a split in the Democratic Party, but not yet a full-scale split. Too much focus on what Biden personally believes, as if that should have any bearing whatsoever on U.S. policy. But it clearly does. Not taking into account the massive shifts in the discourse, the shifts in Jewish public opinion regarding Israel, you know that less than two years ago, 25% of American Jewish voters said that they believe Israel is an apartheid state; 38% of young Jewish voters said the same thing. So we’re in this shifting position where there’s just not enough pressure yet to force a shift in the policy now.

I think the framework of diplomacy, not war, is fundamental. That’s been the demand of the broad sectors of the anti-militarism, anti-war movements of the last 20 years, going back to actually before that, to the first Gulf War, where the call was for diplomacy and not war. And right up to the present. I think that needs to be our continuing demand for what the government position should be. That doesn’t mean that’s enough for the position of our movement. There is a difference between what we demand of the government and what we demand of ourselves. But I think what we’re seeing right now in the hot wars is that the U.S. is fighting against the calls for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations, both in Gaza most urgently and in Ukraine and that’s incredibly dangerous.

Jackson Lears: I appreciated Phyllis’ starting emphasis on the diversion of necessary resources from urgent needs at home in the military budget. This enormous, bloated, almost unimaginable, huge military budget. We are looking at a progressive left that to me seems so fragmented and incoherent in many ways, and so unsure of itself, that its leaders can’t seem to make the connection between the military budget and the domestic problems that are being forced to go unaddressed. So it’s important to keep emphasizing that connection between domestic and foreign policy, and a U.S. peace movement would have to do that.

It would also have to be an anti-imperialist movement — and this to me, with the situation we’re in today, involves fundamentally the problems of a dying empire that refuses to face up to its decline. The need for international cooperation has never been more urgent with respect to climate change, but also to the renewed nuclear arms race.

And yet U.S. policymakers are still mired in imperial delusions, fueling fights to maintain and extend their hegemony in Ukraine, Palestine and even in the South China Sea, and refusing to recognize the emerging reality of a multipolar world which is expressed in so many ways economically in the rise of the BRICS countries but also simply in the refusal of other nations to go along with what the imperial hegemon expects them to do.

Multipolarity is a fact of life. It’s increasingly important in international affairs. It’s staring us in the face and it dictates the need to retreat gracefully and intelligently from empire, which is a tricky business, I realize. But I think it’s absolutely crucial for our own and indeed the planet’s survival. The other point I want to mention in connection with this, though, is the complicity of media stenographers in promoting what is essentially a very narrow range of opinion.

U.S. policymakers are increasingly out of step, not only with the younger portions of the population, but with the majority of the population on all of these issues of militarism and imperialism extending an already-overextended empire abroad, while neglecting crucial problems at home, and indeed crucial global problems such as climate change and nuclear war.

The mainstream media landscape is extraordinarily monochromatic and complicit in every way with government policies. And yet it doesn’t represent the popular point of view. Which is why the obsessive references by our policymakers to “protecting our democracy” ring so hollow, so hypocritical and unconvincing.

So it does seem to me there’s an opportunity here for a peace movement to address that gap, to speak to that disconnect between elite opinion and broad popular opinion. And it seems to me, as I said, any peace movement has to be an anti-imperialist movement. So there has to be a kind of realistic recognition of the actual power relations, the huge economic investment, but also the huge ideological and emotional investment, of powerful people in the existing order.

We have to acknowledge that obstacle and we have to figure out ways to address it. But we also have to figure out ways to broaden the appeal beyond a narrow ideological framework of anti-imperialism. And I have two words to suggest — not ways of depoliticizing, but of softening the political edge and broadening its appeal. And those words are veterans and churches. As I’m recalling from peace movements of the past, both of those groups played critical roles, and I think they’re both positioned to do so now more than ever. Veterans For Peace, for example, is an extraordinarily savvy and politically smart organization that is doing a lot of important work to change the conversation. And it’s an uphill slog. There’s no getting around it. The stenographers are always going to be at work protecting their access, making up stories, embracing Israeli, Ukrainian and U.S. government propaganda uncritically. But I do think we have a potential opening here if we could figure out ways to walk through it.

Jeffrey Sachs: U.S. foreign policy has one gear and one direction, which is war all the time, nonstop. There’s no diplomacy at all. They don’t understand diplomacy one bit. And most of the actual motives of the foreign policy are disguised, or let’s say falsified, in the official narratives. So we have three wars, two hot, one cold going on right now.

Ukraine and Gaza, the two hot wars, and very high tensions with China as a cold war in Asia. It’s just U.S. belligerence. Morning till night, till morning till night. The Ukraine war is a war of NATO’s enlargement, actually, pure and simple. It goes back 30 years. It was a strategy to weaken Russia after 1992, after the Soviet Union dissolved, they couldn’t take yes for an answer and make peace.

They wanted to fill in all of the space that the Soviet Union had left behind with American hegemony and military bases. So, NATO enlargement began. It kept pushing towards Russia’s borders. The Russian absolute red line was Ukraine, a point made repeatedly by the Russians, actually repeatedly, including by William Burns, the U.S. ambassador to Russia in 2008 and now our CIA director, in a famous memo that we know of only because of Julian Assange, who made public what should have been absolutely public for the U.S. And that is that nyet means nyet when it comes to expanding NATO to Ukraine.

Well, long story short, we don’t have a reverse gear. We don’t have a diplomatic gear. They just kept trying until today.

There’s no pausing when it comes to Gaza. This is also a war that is caused by now 57 years of Israel’s determination to hold onto everything that it got in the 1967 war. And everything else has been delaying tactics. But from 1967 onward, the goal has been hold onto the territory, settle it, put in hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers.

Now we have “facts on the ground” for 57 years of disaster and cruelty. And we have a genocide going on right now. I absolutely believe that Israel is violating the 1948 Genocide Convention and not even in subtle ways.

Then we have the tensions with China. This is blamed on China, but it’s actually an American policy that began under Obama because China’s success triggered every American hegemonic antibody that says China’s becoming too big and powerful. It’s now a threat because of its size, not because of its actions, but because of its size. China has not been involved in one war for more than 40 years, but we regard China as the belligerent.

And so we have surrounded China with our military. We’re building up new alliances in the Pacific Rim of China. We are trying to control choke points. And when China reacts, we say, you see there are a danger there. Want to take over the world.

So long and short of it, we have a foreign policy that is built by the military-industrial complex. It is not in the interests of the American people. It is maintained through lies and fear-mongering. It is leading to destruction, as it has been for decades in wars all over the world. And Biden — we don’t know about Biden’s capacities at this point, physically and mentally, but he has demonstrated no capacity for diplomacy at all.

The situation is absolutely dreadful. I think we all are saying strongly: diplomacy. What happened to it? Where did it go? We don’t even see a word of it. It’s unbelievable. And learning, again, to listen, to talk, to exchange, and the idea that actually peace is not a bad thing and we should try to do it.

Bennis: I think what we need is both a strengthening of the specifically-focused movements — most particularly about Gaza, which I’ll get to in a few seconds — but we also need broad anti-militarism, anti-military-spending movements, particularly those that link to the other movements that are focusing on labor rights, on anti-racism, on environmental justice, on immigrant rights, on LGBTQ rights, on women’s rights. In all of those areas people are paying the price for the cost of the war focus of U.S. foreign policy.

In that context, we need much broader outreach from the Palestinian rights movement. There is a lot of focus on consolidation of the movement, on getting the strongest and the most powerful expressions. But in my view, what’s actually more powerful and more important than that right now is building on the breadth of that movement that we’re seeing rising spontaneously.

It was a thousand black ministers in The New York Times signing on to the demand for ceasefire. The rabbis for ceasefire occupying the Security Council chamber at the U.N. These things are hugely important in terms not just of being part of a movement, but of showing the world the breadth of this movement. So I think that broadening becomes much more important, grabbing the spontaneous opposition that’s out there and pulling that into the movement with less concern about the role of the left within that and the anti-imperialist component of it.

I think right now we need to talk about people’s lives, and that means a movement demanding an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Ceasefire isn’t the most left, the most anti-imperialist demand, whatever. It’s what we need to stop the killing, and that’s the movement that we need right now. We also need those broader anti-militarism movements. But right now we need a movement for a ceasefire.

Lears: I want to agree strongly with Phyllis that in the current emergency the absolutely urgent task is the ceasefire in Gaza. I have never felt the pain and sadness and anger that I’ve felt for the last few months — probably not since the Vietnam War — when I have known in such detail what was going on with my country’s avid assistance and complicity.

We are all endlessly confronted by day the number of lives that are being destroyed and families torn up out of their surroundings and deported shamelessly, children targeted, actually targeted by snipers. I mean, it goes on and on. If you pay any attention, if you refuse to look away, then you are outraged and appalled.

And what’s so striking to me about my colleagues in the academy — not all of them by any means, at Rutgers we have a chapter of the Faculty for Justice in Palestine, and I signed on to it, and we back up the students supporting Palestine, of whom there are many — but what I find so strange about what seem like a majority of my colleagues is that there’s a kind of business-as-usual approach to everyday life which I find very hard to emulate.

And I feel like we have to try to reorient the everyday discussion away from business as usual on social media. A recognition just in human terms of what’s happening. So, you know, it’s not as if I feel like you have to have a clearly worked-out vision of American empire to criticize what’s happening in Gaza. You just have to have a few shreds of human sympathy. And that’s what I think we need to try to address and work with as advocates for peace and opposition to a genocide. Think about the Air Force flier who immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy with the words “Free Palestine” on his lips. He was yet another example of where we are now in this crisis.

Question: What are the most important dangers of nuclear war?

Lears: I think one can start answering that question by simply saying that they’re the same dangers that have always been there — accidents, miscalculation, confrontation. All of these events could involve either human or algorithmic error. On one occasion 40 some years ago a mistaken computer very, very nearly got Russian missiles launched on the basis of the way the sun happened to be hitting the clouds — this is what the computer mistook for an incoming invasion. This was in the beginning of the Gorbachev era. A Russian colonel risked his career and his life probably, by calling off the launch because he sensed it was a mistake. And he was right. So that’s how close we came.

And I’m sure that incident influenced Gorbachev and his gestures toward Reagan. And Reagan himself was influenced not only by the people in the street demanding a nuclear freeze, he was also profoundly influenced by the movie “The Day After,” which he watched twice. I’m no fan of Reagan’s, believe me. I was I’m sure where my anti-war colleagues were with respect to almost everything he did. But on this question, he became a nuclear pacifist, though that didn’t survive the influence of his advisers, Richard Perle in particular.

All of this is history. Times have changed. We still have all the same dangers, all the same cataclysmic possibilities. But we have a different context now, which is again, to return to what seems like a leitmotif here: the refusal of diplomacy and the scrapping of any arms-control treaties that have resulted from previous diplomacy. Hence the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved their Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds, the closest it’s ever been.

We have no lines of connection open to other major nuclear powers, and especially Russia. We’re not in touch the way Cold War presidents were in touch, even in the worst days of the Cold War. And we don’t have the same popular sense of threat and urgency that I think existed during most of our lives from childhood on.

All of us lived under the shadow of nuclear war. All of us encountered those diagrams with concentric circles surrounding the cities where we happened to be growing up – charts and graphs that showed where a nuclear bomb’s impact would be the greatest and how it would continue for hundreds of miles outside that ground zero. We don’t have those kinds of things staring us in the face anymore. And it’s not part of our popular culture the way it was back in the sixties and seventies and earlier. We need to rekindle that sense of threat and urgency, along with reviving diplomacy.

That is where we are. And I would say the danger is particularly strong in the Middle East, given the nature of the current Israeli government, especially the fanaticism of the cabinet, along with Netanyahu himself. It’s possible that Israel’s government could turn to nuclear weapons if their ethnic cleansing project is thwarted. And in Europe we are in comparable danger, given the eagerness of blustering NATO leaders to provoke Putin, who responds in kind. We’re starting this dance of death again, the dance we thought had ended with the end of the Cold War. One of the partners has to step aside.

Bennis: The only thing I would add, I think there is an escalated danger from accidental escalation towards a nuclear weapon. And that’s particularly in Ukraine, certainly possible in many places, but particularly in Ukraine. It’s different than in Syria, where the U.S. and Russia were faced off against each other, including troops as well as pilots and whatever on the ground, on opposite sides. But in Syria, they had a military-to-military hotline. There were some arms-control agreements still intact, and they provided at least the basis for a conversation between the two sides if things got even hotter. And now the possibility of an “accidental escalation,” which are never really accidental because the wars that create the circumstances in which they could occur are not accidents, but in the sense that it’s not the intention of the people at the top of the power pyramid on either side to launch a nuclear weapon.

And yet escalation happens. That’s the accidental nature of it. So I think that the lack of direct military-to-military contact, the lack of diplomatic contact, the lack of existing arms-control agreements, the virtual collapse of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. I think it is a more dangerous moment.




Phyllis Bennis is an American writer, activist, and political commentator. She is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Her work concerns US foreign policy issues, particularly involving the Middle East and United Nations (UN). In 2001, she helped found the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and now serves on the national board of Jewish Voice for Peace as well as the board of the Afro-Middle East Center in Johannesburg. She works with many anti-war and Palestinian rights organizations, writing and speaking widely across the U.S. and around the world.

Bus Drivers Strike with Climate Activists in 57 German Cities

By Berit Ehmke, Yanira Wolf 

April 11, 2024
Source: Labor Notes

Transit workers founded the alliance #WirFahrenZusammen (“We ride together”), calling for better working conditions and expansion of public transit as two keys to meeting Germany’s climate goals. The banner with the lemons reads, "We won't let ourselves be squeezed out!" 

Photo: ver.di



Public transit workers across Germany have broken new ground by coordinating our contracts—nearly all of them nationwide have expired over the last four months—and shutting down bus systems with strikes in 57 cities.

To add to the pressure, we’ve done something new for our union and for Germany: we’ve formed an alliance between local transport workers and climate activists, including the students who have been leading massive school walkouts.

The devastating effects of climate change are already rocking Germany: major heat waves, flooding, and water shortages. A growing movement demanding climate action has made real headway—our energy and industrial sectors have almost halved their climate pollution over the past 30 years. But on transportation, our third-biggest source, we’ve made nearly zero progress.

To beat climate change we need more buses on the road. We’re building a movement to double bus service. After three decades of cuts and privatization, we need a major federal funding boost.

But these jobs have become so tough that most agencies have huge worker shortages. To make the climate impact real, we’ll also need to raise the floor for wages, breaks, and schedules—making this a good enough job that workers will sign on and stick around.

STOPPING A TAILSPIN

What led our unions to try coordinated strikes? We’ve tried many other strategies since the huge cuts started in the 1990s, with little success. The 87,000 transit workers, mostly organized in our union ver.di, are split across 17 regional contracts; typically they bargain on their own, prioritizing job security. Workers across Germany ended up with very different wages and working conditions.

By 2017, rider numbers had been growing for years, but ravaging cuts had made the transit system dysfunctional. Delays, cancellations, and overcrowding were daily hassles. System cuts meant longer working hours, long unpaid breaks between paid shifts, no chance of using a toilet during a shift, fewer weekends off, stalled pay increases, and angry passengers. Thousands left the driver’s seat, and few chose to start.

To end this defensive spiral, many union activists thought we would have to become a synced force at the bargaining table, even if our contracts were legally separate. We organized local meetings and regional “action conferences” to find common goals and develop a united strategy.

In our 2020 contracts, members decided to line up the next expirations in nearly every state in 2024. This allowed us to plan two nationwide strikes this year: one on February 2 for 24 hours, and another starting on February 29 for 48 hours, timed to coincide with a big climate action day March 1. Each region could also plan several more strikes between January and now.

Another new idea: we’re fighting for “minimum standards.” We compared contracts to see who had, for example, the fewest paid holidays, longest hours, lowest weekend pay, and least paid time off for union activities. We made it a priority at every bargaining table to raise up the lowest local provisions and lift the national floor.

BUSES FIX THE CLIMATE

Our strikes were meant to make sure politicians and the media could not ignore us. But we knew striking wouldn’t bring much economic pressure, since our employers rely on government funds. We needed public opinion and popular movements on our side.

In 2019 activists with Fridays for the Future, a youth organization that has led weekly school walkouts, had approached ver.di union staff with an idea for joint action. Many staff organizers thought the alliance was a good idea, and proposed it for members to discuss and decide on. We were not able to implement the whole campaign at our first attempt in 2020 due to the pandemic, but we were able to build upon it.

In local strategy meetings around the country, members decided to give the new coalition a try. Together, climate organizers and transit workers founded the alliance #WirFahrenZusammen (“We ride together”), calling for better working conditions and expansion of public transit as two keys to meeting Germany’s climate goals.
RIDE-ALONGS

Nationwide alliances can be hollow—they have to be filled with life locally. At first, transit workers often mistrusted climate activists. A few even left the union in protest. Some saw climate activists as annoying, privileged cyclists who flouted traffic rules. Some climate protesters had used roadblocks as a tactic, which delayed buses and made the job harder.

So organizers put a lot of effort into arranging meetings where union members and climate activists discussed campaign plans together. Young climate activists, most of them women, joined older bus drivers to ride along for a whole shift and hear about the job. Others went to bus yards and listened to workers in each department.

Starting on the global climate action day last September, we organized a public petition from riders and allies, supporting the union demands on working conditions plus the political demand to add €100 billion to federal funding for local transport ($109 billion) by 2030.

As activists collected thousands of signatures, more union members saw the value of the alliance. By March, 200,000 people had signed. People could also sign up to get invited to the next local meeting or action.

CAKE AND COFFEE

Where activists and workers started to trust each other, our meetings and rallies grew more vibrant. The young activists introduced creative tactics—new chants, confronting politicians at talk shows and offices. They introduced interactive elements at meetings or rallies, like collectively marking the dangerous spots in town for bikes, pedestrians, and bus drivers on a map. Rather than just standing at the bus depot gates, strikers marched through dozens of cities.

Climate activists brought their Fridays for the Future experience and networks, but what helped even more was their sincere curiosity to learn from workers, and their willingness to adapt and stand back when needed.

Workers started inviting activists to participate in union meetings and speak at gatherings. Activists and workers set up shared Whatsapp groups. We built joint committees to decide on campaign action plans—where all could contribute, but workers had the final word.

Gradually, in shop after shop, workers and climate activists built personal bonds. Even doubtful workers were impressed when activists showed up to strike lines with cake and coffee at 3 a.m., then joined eight-hour picket shifts.

We’re still in negotiations, but we’ve had one big victory already: people and movements came together who otherwise don’t.

Student activists now better understand transit workers and their lives. They learned how to join people from different backgrounds in democratic decision-making and disciplined actions, and they witnessed the power of the strike.

Bus workers have gained just as much. We learned creative new tactics, enlivened our meetings and picket lines, and finally felt some recognition for our important jobs.

It would be too much to say that all the workers are climate activists now. But we have a new outlook: driving a bus is a climate job worth fighting for, and we don’t have to fight alone.

Berit Ehmke  is staff with ver.di, Germany’s second-largest union with 1.9 million members, mainly in service jobs, including nurses, postal workers, teachers, and bus drivers

Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao… Hope Comes from the Young for a World-Weary Socialist

By Milind Wani

April 12, 2024
Source: Radical Ecological Democracy



An Invitation and a Conundrum!

When the announcement and the invitation reached my inbox, I read it in a state of contained excitement. The Academy of Democratic Modernity (ADM) had invited me (and others like me from all over the world) for a conference entitled “The Art of Freedom”. I was intrigued by the title. For one, the words sounded uncomfortably like those used by any number of pop psychologists and quasi-spiritual gurus (read charlatans!) that abound in the real and virtual space offering teachings (read placebos!) on all kinds of “arts” as the ultimate solution to the different ambitions, problems and challenges life besets us with – “Art of Seduction”, “Art of Living”, “Art of Leadership”- to name a few. On the other hand, being slightly aware of what ADM is all about, I thought that perhaps they got the order of the words in the reverse by mistake. Shouldn’t it rather be “Freedom for/of Art”, I wondered, considering the stifling of freedom of artistic expression all over the world in the name of protecting culture/hurting religious sentiments? (Remember Charlie Hebdo?).

On closer reading of the invitation letter, I realized that it was I who was wrong. What was being implied by the term “art” was akin to what Erich Fromm, the great philosopher and psycho-analyst, meant when he wrote books like The Art of Loving or The Art of Listening. What Fromm says about loving and listening is that these are acquired (artistic) skills, the mastery (stage 3) over which can be gained only by learning (stage 1) and practice (stage 2) – the latter two being prior requirements that need to be met in order to be able to master the practice. According to Fromm, just as a carpenter (or a musician) grows in her skillset, first as a novice learner and then to the level of mastery by dint of daily and disciplined practice according to norms that have evolved over time, the art of loving or listening can be likewise mastered, only through learning and practice (& praxis!). Fromm also posits the process as being dialectically open-ended, where each stage reinforces and deepens the other two and so on (for each level of mastery already points to new learnings and practices and so on). If this analogy is correct, I surmised, then the term “The Art of Freedom” is indicative of certain learnings, political practices, understanding, disciplines, values, etc, that are required for the bringing to life the idea of freedom at the individual, social, political, aesthetic and civilizational level.

A Struggle against Genocide

But I think I have jumped the gun! I should have begun perhaps by first saying something about the ADM – the Academy of Democratic Modernity. For the uninitiated, the ADM has appeared in the context of the long struggle the valiant Kurdish people have been waging for freedom, sovereignty and autonomy against the oppression, violence and genocide inflicted by colonial powers like Turkey, Iraq and Syria. The Kurdish struggle is a national liberation movement for the self-determination of the Kurdish people with the goal of building a socialist and democratic nationhood on the already existing basis of common geography, culture, history, beliefs, etc. Categorically this struggle is not for building a nation-state as its goal, but for implementing their indigenously developed concept of/for Democratic Confederalism which has been theorized by their charismatic leader Abdullah Öcalan, who has been incarcerated since 1999, most of it in isolation. No one has seen him since 2015. Despite extreme prison hardships, he has put to good use his protean and fertile intellect and ironwill (much like the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, to whom he is compared) to write many volumes expounding and elaborating his ideas.

Portrait of Abdullah Öcalan. Pic. Milind Wani

The Kurdish Project – A Utopian Vision for the Planet

Drawing from his studies of modern thinkers as various as Murray Bookchin, Marie Mies, Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, Michael Foucault, Fernand Braudel and Gorden Childe, as well as dwelling on lessons of myths (e.g. the Goddess Innana), religious insights, ancient history (e.g. the empire of Hitties (1600 BCE), the battle of Carthage (146 BCE), and historians (e.g. Herodotus), etc. – the breadth and scope of his scholarship is astounding, at once cross-cultural, trans-historical and pluri-civilizational – he proposes the concept of Democratic Civilization (more below). The concept can be metaphorically imagined as a multi-dimensional net or quilt where delicate and beautiful threads weave together his gleanings from the above-mentioned studies, in order to offer a magnificent, utopian vision for a better world. This does not mean that his intellectual engagement with these great thinkers is uncritical. While acknowledging the originality of their views, he also points to their lacunas. For instance, while citing with appreciation two of his “favorite sentences” from Braudel, “Domination always secretes capital” and its corollary “Power can be accumulated – just like Capital” (Öcalan 2020, p.12), he cautions that such brilliant insights also need to be examined in the light of Braudel’s “economic reductionism” (ibid). Out of such critical engagements he posits,

“the option of democratic civilization…as a model for a systematic approach seems necessary…First of all, this option offers an alternative to the central world civilization system. Democratic civilization is not just a present and future utopia; it also seems very necessary and highly explanatory for a more concrete exploration of historical society.” (Öcalan 2020, p.13)

To understand why the concept of democratic civilization is important, one must read his argument(s) in full, something which cannot be elaborated within the space of this essay. But be that as it may, out of this immense labour has emerged the theorization of a Sociology of Freedom that is founded on the three pillars of Ecology, Jinology (Science of women) and New Socialism (so termed to distinguish it from the erstwhile scientific socialism of the totalitarian kind). Collectively his prison writings (more than 10 deeply argued works of comprehensive scholarship) offer a world-view and vision that is at once proudly utopian in its optimism and pragmatic in its approach. Not for Öcalan the tempting and easy recourse to lazy, superficial and prescriptive thinking without the effort of rigorous and back-breaking intellectual labour. Rather one can’t help but get the feeling that Öcalan, while writing these books, was perhaps in an unintended fashion also throwing a gauntlet at fellow revolutionaries across the globe to get serious by embarking on a similar study of their own society (and civilization) – much as Marx did in his times through his provocative polemical pieces. This, along with his prison hardship and spirit of self-sacrifice seems to have anointed Öcalan into the hearts of millions of Kurdish (& non-Kurdish) people as a modern saint-revolutionary – even as this evokes worrying thoughts about the dangers of personality cult. Still, his writings (see: https://www.ocalanbooks.com/#/) clearly have found great traction, resonance and application with the Kurdish people

.

Portrait of Kurdish activist Fidan Doğan.

 Pic. Milind Wani.

Towards a New Political and Moral Consciousness

The Academy of Democratic Modernity (ADM) is committed to spreading Öcalan’s ideas and the rich experience of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and its paradigm of Democratic Modernity. Their publication activities are intended to start discussions with activists, academics and various anti-system groups and social movements in order to move forward in their search for a radical alternative to capitalist modernity and to realize a free life. Through their educational work, they want to create a new understanding of democratic politics, social enlightenment and a new political-moral consciousness. Some dimensions of social issues they address are the sociology of freedom, weaving together lines of resistance, democratic autonomy, women’s liberation, youth autonomy, social ecology, communal economy and art & culture. Through the development of platforms and networks, ADM wants to contribute to the strengthening of the international exchange of experiences and interweave existing struggles, in line with the proposal of World Democratic Confederalism. ADM believes that to overcome capitalist modernity, concrete local and global institutional alternatives are needed. They hope that if we succeed in expanding democratic politics in everyday life – through alliances, councils, communes, cooperatives, academies – the huge political potential of society will unfold and be used to solve social problems. In this sense, ADM through its activities seeks to contribute to the unfolding of Democratic Modernity and Democratic Socialism.

The Art of Freedom Conference

The aim of the conference was (in the face of the growing crisis of capitalist modernity and its multiple manifestations) to primarily explore the possible paths out of the crises through discussions on different perspectives and solutions. What are the fundamental aspects of the urgent and radical intellectual, moral and political renewal of opposition to the system? Starting from this question, the conference aimed to collectively discuss different aspects of resistance against the system. The idea was to create an open space – not only for the necessary theoretical debates, but also for different movements to come together and share their experiences and strategies- to think together about strengthening their practice and common struggle.

Over 180 people from 5 continents, 30 countries, and various organizations, movements and parties travelled to Basel from 17th to 19th November for the conference entitled “The Art of Freedom – Strategies for organising and collective resistance”, convened by the “Academy of Democratic Modernity”.

Panel discussion at the Art of Freedom Conference. 

Pic. Milind Wani

The conference came about by an understanding that an international democratic intervention that opposes the system is more necessary than ever in this era of crisis. What form will this new internationalism take? – given that anti-system forces over the last 200 years have failed in two ways, one by coming to power (e.g. Scientific Socialism of the Soviet era!), or by leaving the political arena empty in favor of social mobilization of grassroots-based groups that eschew electoral politics as being suspect and inscribed by the logic of capitalist modernity. Is it possible to present an alternative by developing a system against the three pillars of capitalist modernity – viz. capitalism, industrialism and the nation-state? In Öcalan’s words,

“Since power tries to conquer and colonize every individual and social unit, politics must try to win over and liberate every individual and social unit that it rests upon. Since every relationship, whether that of an individual or a unit, is related to power, it is also political in the opposite sense. Since power breeds liberal ideology, industrialism, capitalism and the nation-state, politics must produce and build an ideology of freedom, eco-industry, communal society, and democratic confederalism. Since power is organized in every individual and unit, every city and village, at local, regional, national, continental, and global levels, politics must respond in kind. Since power enforces numerous forms of action at all these levels, including propaganda and war, politics must be countered at every level with appropriate propaganda and different forms of action” (Öcalan 2020, p. 353).

Doing Real Politics NOT RealPolitik

Democratic Confederalism, as a basic political form of democratic modernity, will play an essential role in reconstruction work (what in Gandhian parlance is the other side of struggle (sangharsh), i.e. nirman (constructing anew!)). In place of capitalist modernity which administers through orders, Democratic Confederalism governs by doing real politics through discussions and consensus. Of prime importance are the political and moral dimensions because the very existence of society is at stake. Öcalan expounds,

“The language of democratic modernity is political. It envisages and builds its systematic structure using the art of politics. The moral and political society aspect…evokes politics not power. Moral and political society’s problem today is beyond that of freedom, equality, and democracy, it is existential; its very existence is in danger. The multidimensional attacks of modernity make moral and political society’s priority defending its existence. The response of democratic modernity to these attacks is resistance in the form of self-defense. If society is not defended, there can be no politics. Let me be perfectly clear, there is only one society, and that is moral and political society. The problem is to rebuild society under the more developed conditions of modernity, which has been highly eroded by civilization and, has been subjected to invasion and colonization by power and the state.” (Öcalan 2020, p.354)

Öcalan defines this“a new political world” (ibid) where Democratic Confederalism offers the possibility of democratic nations as the fundamental means of solving ethnic, religious, urban, local, regional, and national problems that arise from modernity’s monolithic, homogeneous, monochromatic, fascist model of society that is implemented by the nation-state. Öcalan proposes an internationalist structure in the form of confederations for the political tasks,

“The global union of democratic nations, the World Confederation of Democratic Nations [or World Democratic Confederalism], would be an alternative to the United Nations. Continental areas and broad cultural spaces could form their own Confederation of Democratic Nations at the local level” (Öcalan 2020, p.357).

For democratic forces, three tasks arise from this framework: intellectual, moral and political. At the intellectual level this would entail the construction of the World Confederation of Cultures and Academies, at the moral level the Global Confederation of Sacredness and Moral Studies, and at the political level the World Democratic Confederalism

.

Posters at the Art of Freedom Conference. 

Pic. – Milind Wani.

Art of Freedom as an Aesthetic Dimension of Emancipatory and Liberatory Praxis of Revolution

Today, democratic forces are confronted with the challenge of (re)politicizing societies and creating democratic subjects. Given this context, politics i.e. political practices (in the plural!) that are not based on state and power, but on the grassroots diffusion of political power in society, is what the Art of Freedom is all about. One is reminded of Fidel Castro’s characterization, in response to a question by Frei Betto, of the revolutionary process of building socialism as being a work of art requiring an aesthetic vision. This type of social politics creates the possibility for liberation. Democratic and popular forces and those against the hegemonic system must reclaim their history of resistance and further this legacy by creating spaces in which freedom is learned and lived immediately.

The aim of the gathering (see video: The Art of Freedom: Strategies for organising& collective resistance / Event-Film of the Conference) was to address central questions that are currently facing emancipatory and liberatory politics. How can we connect the idea of democratic socialism with the reality of life today? What is the role of intellectual struggle, historical consciousness, ecology, women’s liberation, class struggle, etc.?

On the other hand, we are still confronted with the politics of the nation-state that homogenizes societies and which leads to a permanent struggle against multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society. In various places around the world, social movements are resisting capitalist colonialism and peoples and societies repeatedly exert their right to self-determination. Therefore a central theme of the conference was to discuss perspectives of self-determination and autonomy in the 21st century. However, emancipatory politics today is not only confronted with the question of a correct theory that provides answers for the intricate reality of practice. What forms of organization and institutions should the forces of democratic modernity take in building a more peaceful, safe, ecological and just world?

The conference provided a collective space to identify common challenges, to try and create answers, for questions to blossom and for intellectual exchange on the practice and concepts between various movements, with the aim of bridging gaps between struggles, broadening common perspectives, and weaving together strategic lines of resistance. It was an invitation to lay new bricks in the theoretical and practical construction of strategies for organising and collective resistance – this being the critical task to initiate dialogue on the respective strategies of political forces. (For an overview of the proceedings please visit: https://democraticmodernity.com/blog/review-art-of-freedom)

Posters at the Art of Freedom Conference. 

Pic. Milind Wani.

Kurdish Hospitality

It would be amiss of us to limit this article to the happenings at the gathering. Throughout our travel and stay, my colleague Shrishtee Bajpai and I experienced the magnanimity of spirit, generosity of heart, and warmth of soul of the Kurdish families that hosted us unconditionally and spoilt us silly with their love, food and gift-souvenirs. It was heartening to find kindred souls – whether it be the Marxist-Leninist couple with whom we stayed the first night (& who despite language barriers asked us about the Marxist movement in India, and particularly about Charu Mazumdar, the firebrand revolutionary of the 60s), or the family that loved songs from old Raj Kapur films, or the extremely romantic retired football coach and his equally romantic wife who instantly adopted Shrishtee as her daughter and me as her brother. And how can we ever forget the extremely kind-hearted political exile who accompanied us everywhere with a gentle smile, even as he carried in his sad heart the burden of memories of a martyred brother, another who had suffered a mental breakdown due to extreme torture, a younger sister and devastated parents back home? Much as we would like to, for reasons of security, we cannot name them.

Love as Eros Or Love as Agape?

Nor would the account be complete without mentioning the inspiring delegates and organizers- especially the young people, full of idealistic fervor, ardor and love for their homeland and a spirit of self-sacrifice to match. I have rarely met young people, even within the hallowed spaces of so-called social radicals, who are so clear about the demands of the task at hand and with the willingness to make the sacrifices in order to reach their goal- which is nothing short of a radical socialist revolution. Not for them the dreams of romantic relationships and enjoying sexual freedom. Given that romantic love is frowned upon in traditional and patriarchal societies (often leading to the extreme violence of honor killings!), don’t they see that the transgressive potential of love could break open the hierarchies of oppression? Can they not see that to fall in love is the most natural and beautiful thing? Of course, they do!

Patiently, with eyes too wise for their young years, they explain to me – a world-weary, heart-sick, wizened and cynical old socialist – that they are not against individuals falling in love. But, given their historical, cultural and social circumstance, it’s not a luxury that young social revolutionaries like themselves can afford. The task ahead is too important and urgent to spend time on personal gratifications. Extremely conscious of the heartrending and horrendous atrocities being undergone by their people back home due to the ongoing cultural genocide inflicted by the colonizers, they are ardently self-conscious of the ultimate sacrifice in the form of martyrdom that has been demanded from many of their fallen comrades. Under such circumstances, they ask me, would it not be selfish of us to think about our own personal happiness? I have no answer. They are hence happily living a life wedded to revolutionary dreams- marked by hardship, camaraderie, solidarity and self-denial. If the forging of a socialist consciousness requires one to pass through the crucible of the iron-heat of revolutionary process, then these young idealists are willing to pay the ultimate price of acquiring it. I asked myself, what right do I have to wear the badge of cynical disenchantment and disillusionment when young people like these have not given up the good fight for a just world?

Today’s Dreams are Tomorrow’s Reality!

On the penultimate day, there was a cultural evening where we got to see the vibrant and defiant Kurdish songs of protests and dances of solidarity – a microcosmic representation of the joyous Kurdish culture of resistance. I couldn’t help but join in. I lost myself in the whirls and the swirls till the end, when the whole hall rose to the crescendo of the song dear to all resistance fighters over the world,

Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao…CiaoCiaoCiao

Another world is not only possible – given the world situation, it is fiercely needed.

Cultural evening on the penultimate day of the conference.

 Pic. Milind Wani.

Milind Wani works with Kalpavriksh (kalpavriksh.org) on issues related to Social Wellbeing and Justice. In particular he is interested in exploring the potential of inter-faith dialogue and the teachings of various spiritual/ wisdom traditions to help face the polycrisis besetting the human and more-than-human world. He is the co-editor of the two books entitled “Ecosophies of Freedom – Suturing Social, Ecological & Spiritual Rift” (co-edited with Sucharita Dutta Asane) and “Pluralities, Faith and Social Action” (co-edited with Siddhartha (Pipal Tree Trust)).

Acknowledgement: Informal discussions with delegates (too many to name individually!) as well as publications in the form of booklets and posters that were made freely available at the venue, have been useful while writing this essay. The author has freely drawn upon all these sources of information. He would like to express grateful acknowledgement for the same.

Reference:

Öcalan, Abdullah. The Sociology of Freedom – Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization, Volume III. 2020. PM Press.