The double bomb explosion which rocked the Zaventem Airport and the Maelbeek Underground Station near the headquarters of the imperialist European Parliament and Commission in Brussels, Belgium killed about 32 people and injured over 300 on March 22, 2016.
Fifteen of the deceased were Belgian nationals and the remaining 17 were foreign nationals.
In the aftermath of the November 13 attacks in Paris last year, the Belgian authorities had been expecting an attack on Brussels. They subsequently locked down Brussels public transport, universities, crèches and schools for four days.
Homes in Muslim working class neighborhoods were raided daily and suspected “Islamists” were arrested by Belgian armed police.
The Belgian government was right to be fearful of the colonized peoples fighting back inside Belgium itself.
These struggles shake off white people’s sense of invincibility and encourage other oppressed peoples to dare to struggle against white power.
The African Socialist International (ASI) recognizes the right of Arab people to unite and overthrow imperialist white power.
They have the right to overturn the artificial borders and dictators’ monarchs that siphon the wealth of the Arab masses.
We sympathize with the resistance coming from colonized people on every front on this planet.
Although we don’t agree with terrorism being used as a primary form of struggle, we recognize the struggle of oppressed Muslims in Europe and around the world as part and parcel of the downtrodden masses of the world to end the parasitic relationship which binds oppressor and oppressed nations.
Understanding Belgium attacks requires going to source of contradiction between oppressor and oppressed nations
These latest explosions were not the starting point. White rulers have repeated endlessly that “it is their way of life that is being attacked,” and that they will not cow into barbarism.
Meanwhile they call for more actions against colonized peoples such as closing borders of countries that are part of the European Union and creating anti-immigration and emergency laws.
White people, left to themselves, are unable to come to the essence of this contradiction as stated by African People’s Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela:
“The North Americans, like most Europeans, assume they have some idea of the basis of the contradictions because of the fantasies passed on to them historically about the source of their comparative wealth and ‘good fortune.’
“Nevertheless, those are resources stolen from others that have become increasingly difficult for them to afford in their malls and supermarkets. It’s somebody else’s oil, wrenched from the earth with bloody consequences, for which they now have to pay more.
“The bauxite, coltan, gold and diamonds along with the cocoa beans, cotton and cheaply produced clothing have cost the rest of us dearly and our combined struggles to seize control of our lives and resources are affecting the ability of North Americans and other Europeans to enjoy a parasitic economy that requires global misery of an oasis of white happiness.” (“An Uneasy Equilibrium” Pg. 64, by Chairman Omali Yeshitela).
This is a conflict between peoples who live on less than $2 USD a day and worldwide parasitic capitalism. It is not a religious question.
The problem is that Arab workers have not yet achieved ideological independence from the Arab petty bourgeoisie.
“Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.” (Quote from Karl Marx in “An Uneasy Equilibrium”Pg. 75)
Do the Belgium attacks signify that the arrival of a new era of struggle and world transformation is upon us?
These suicide bombings must be viewed in the context of over 25 years of U.S.-led Western aggression of the Middle East and Muslim peoples around the world. How many innocent people were murdered by Belgian soldiers in Afghanistan or killed by weapons supplied by Belgium to Assad’s enemies?
We are not going back to any normality of colonial peace in Europe or in the Middle East.
“The current irreversible crisis of imperialism is the result of the imperialist ‘pedestal,’ the very foundation of capitalism, freeing itself from its supporting role of the capitalist edifice. Objectively, this is the meaning of Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Venezuela, Bolivia and other countries where the people are attempting to liberate themselves from the yoke of the empire.” (“An Uneasy Equilibrium” Pg. 86)
The people who carried out the Paris and Brussels attacks were born and grew up in Europe where they experienced oppression, exploitation and humiliation as colonized peoples.
In the absence of a viable revolutionary alternative, they turned to militant Islam where they found some degree of ideological coherence.
According to lexpress.fr, a French liberal imperialist magazine, “Belgium, a small country of 11 million inhabitants, is the European country with the greatest number of volunteers who went to fight in Syria or Iraq, proportionally with its population. Some 494 ‘Belgian jihadists’ were identified: 272 are in Syria or in Iraq, 75 are supposedly dead, 134 returned and 13 are on the way from Syria or Iraq…”
These attacks are reflections of the worldwide growing tension between oppressed nations and oppressor nations.
These struggles in Ferguson, Missouri in the U.S., Palestine, Venezuela, Afghanistan, etc., are all an integral part of this irreconcilable conflict between parasitic capitalist nations and colonised host nations.
For the Arab workers to free themselves from any bourgeois control they need to come to terms with the genesis of parasitic capitalism as explain in “An Uneasy Equilibrium” on Pg. 67.
“The truth is that today’s capitalist-imperialist structures, the ones being challenged in a thousand different ways, are structures that originated in the very genesis of capitalism as it emerged through the assault on Africa and the majority of humanity from the primordial sludge of backward and disease-ridden Europe. The parasitic capitalist system was born on the shores of Africa.”
Belgium is not an innocent country. It was built with decapitation, lynching, mutilation, amputation, castration and rapes of Africans in the Congo
The world needs to know about Leopold II’s colonialism crimes in Congo, where he presided over the looting of Congo’s rubber and ivory, and the genocide of 10 million Africans between 1898 and 1908. The looting of Congo’s rubber was key for the rising pneumatics industry.
The London Independent liberal newspaper’s July 27, 2006 issue gives an account of the savagery of Leopold II’s Belgian officers as they ordered their soldiers, “to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades, also their sexual members, and to hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross. This blood-curdling business carried on for more than 12 years before word leaked out.”
According to religioustolerance.org, “In Belgium: Léopold II is perceived by many Belgians as the ‘King-Builder’ because he commissioned a great number of buildings and urban projects in Antwerp, Brussels, Ostend and elsewhere in Belgium…He funded these buildings with the wealth generated by the exploitation of the Congo.”
U.S president Jimmy Carter and his advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski created the first army of Islamist to bring down Soviet Union in Afghanistan
The call for the fall of Bashar al-Assad is one example that unites all Islamist forces to Gulf state monarchs and to the rulers of the U.S., France, Turkey, etc.
Islamists want to re-create the caliphate, a union of all Muslim states in the world.
We must be clear that the leaders of Al Qaida, Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State are all representatives of the petty bourgeoisie.
This does not stop each group from pursuing its own agendas and interests.
The responsibility of the U.S. government in the rapid growth of Islamist forces is paramount. Their invasion of Iraq in 2003 and support for the aggression of Syria since 2011 have been instrumental in galvanizing the recruitment of fighters into Islamic states and other similar organizations.
According to a 2015 report from the Congressional Research Service, “the U.S. has, since 2011, spent an estimated $7.7 billion in Syria in combined military and ‘humanitarian’ aid––much of which ends up in the hands of ISIS.” U.S. president Obama is guilty as hell.
We need to remind the world that it was Jimmy Carter (president of the U.S. from 1976 to 1980) and his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski who created the first Jihadist in Afghanistan to bring down the former Soviet Union Socialist Republic (USSR). This is the process that gave rise to Bin Laden and al Qaida.
As African Internationalists, our job is not to embrace the crisis of imperialism as our own, but to deepen it.
We say deepen the crisis, and bring African Internationalism into every city in Europe.
Smash white parasitic capitalist power!
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