“We have no interest in occupying your country,” President Obama told the people of Afghanistan and the world, on December 1.
He then proceeded to outline in detail his plan to intensify the occupation of that country through an 18-month surge of an additional 30,000 U.S. troops. In boosting U.S. troop strength to 100,000 – after having already doubled the American military presence since assuming the presidency – Obama has definitively claimed the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan as his own.
It is the responsibility of all peace loving peoples – including and especially black people in the United States – to bring the struggle against escalating U.S. crimes against peace and humanity in the so-called Af-Pak theater of war to President Barack Obama’s doorstep.
The Black is Black Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations wholeheartedly endorses the Emergency Anti-Escalation Rally organized by a range of anti-war forces on Saturday, December 12, in front of the White House. As the Black is Back Coalition declared in our march on the White House on November 7, “We demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the Middle East and especially from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the cessation of U.S. military aggression against the people of Pakistan.”
In addition to our endorsement of the Emergency Anti-Escalation Rally, the Black is Back Coalition reaffirms our anti-imperialist solidarity with the world’s peoples who are fiercely resisting U.S. and other imperialist wars of aggression and colonial domination.
As we have recognized all along, the nature of U.S. imperialism did not change with the election of a black man as president and if there was any doubt about that, Obama’s intensification of the wars against the peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan is the greatest validation of our view.
In making the fantastic and ludicrous claim that the U.S. troop surge is intended to speed up an American exit from Afghanistan, President Obama insults the intelligence of both the American and international public. Obama’s drone missile attacks and Special Forces operations daily violate the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Pakistan, threatening to embroil the region in a general conflagration involving nuclear weapons.
Following directly in George Bush’s footsteps, Obama waves the bloody shirt of 9/11 to justify endless, global imperial war, “whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere,” while cynically claiming that, “unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination.”
He spends a million dollars per soldier to occupy one of the poorest nations in the world, while declaring with a straight face, “We do not seek to occupy other nations.” Even without reminding Obama and the world that the U.S. North American State itself rests on occupied land forcibly wrested from the still-oppressed indigenous peoples, many of whom are ensconced in concentration camps, euphemistically called “reservations,” the history of U.S. occupations is legendary.
This history includes U.S. invasions of Haiti and Cuba, where even now the U.S. is attempting to divert international attention from the torture camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuban territory still occupied by U.S. marines.
While U.S. occupation does not always take the same form as many of the European imperial powers of the past, it is not insignificant that the U.S. has more than 700 military bases spread throughout the world, many of them on African soil currently being reinforced by the U.S. Africa Command, a virtual occupation of an entire continent.
The Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations calls on the peoples of the U.S. and the world ¬– especially African people who have endured more than five hundred years of imperialist oppression and dispossession – to rise to the challenge presented to us by this vicious, desperate move by the U.S. government in its efforts to rescue a dying, crisis-ridden imperialism at the expense of the freedom and well being of the world’s peoples.
On every front, in every community, we must make it clear that we see through the fraudulent efforts to make us complicit in U.S. crimes against the Afghan and other peoples.
As Obama prepares to spend $40 billion of our money to intensify the attack on the people of Afghanistan he has yet to address the hundreds of billions of dollars of lost revenues in the African community from foreclosures as a result of the targeting of black people for subprime mortgages. He has yet to offer meaningful relief for those thousands of Africans made homeless and destitute by Hurricane Katrina and other weather systems in the Gulf Coast region.
He has yet to come up with programs to address black unemployment rates which tower above every other sector of the U.S. population at more than 16 percent overall and 50 percent for African teenagers.
And what about the mass incarceration of Africans in the U.S. where more than a million of our people fill prison cells, bringing blood tinged revenue to previously dying sectors of the U.S. economy?
Even now, years after the passage of laws that made Obama’s presidential candidacy and election possible, too many brave African men and women activists who lead the struggles to enact those changes are seeing their lives rot away in prison cells or in a furtive existence in exile as punishment for their heroic efforts to win our freedom.
The Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations is a broad based organization of black people from many walks of life and across the social, political and ideological spectrum working together to build a movement to stop the U.S. colonial wars against Africans and oppressed peoples inside the U.S. and around the world.
We believe that real peace is neither possible nor sustainable without social justice and the right of all oppressed peoples to self-determination. While we work to build an anti-imperialist movement in opposition to U.S. colonial wars, we believe this movement will represent itself in the world as a continuation of the legacy of resistance by our people to all forms of oppression and injustices, whether within the U.S. or abroad.
No! to the war against the peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan! No! to occupation and murder in defense of a status quo that requires the eternal starvation and immiseration of the majority of the world’s peoples! No! to kidnappings and torture in the name of freedom and democracy!
Reparations Now!
