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Self-Determination

Palestine Takes Seat At UN General Assembly In ‘Historic First’

September 11, 2024 News Desk, The Cradle. , , , ,
Palestine was seated for the first time among UN member states on 10 September during the first session of the 79th General Assembly in New York. Permanent Observer to Palestine at the UN, Riyad Mansour, was seated at a table labeled “State of Palestine” between Sri Lanka and Sudan. The seating was approved by UN General Assembly president Philemon Yang. “This is not merely a procedural matter. This is a historic moment for us,” said Egyptian ambassador to the UN Osama Mahmoud Abdelkhalek Mahmoud. Israel’s representative at the UN strongly denounced the seating of Palestine among the UN member states.

Aligning Our National Organizations With Co-Op Principles

August 20, 2024 Rebecca Kemble, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
In his 2010 Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) article “What should our movement look like in 2040?,” John McNamara, past president of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC, “the Federation”) and current Co-Director of the Northwest Cooperative Development Center, used the metaphor of building a house. He saw the first four years of the USFWC (2004-2008) as the foundation laid by the cooperation and collaboration amongst three democratic regional formations: the Western Worker Cooperative Conference, the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy and the Midwest Worker Cooperative Conference.

Haitian Community Defenders Fight US-Armed Death Squads

April 2, 2024 Danny Shaw, Truthout. , , ,
As the stars illuminate the dark alleyways of Solino, Ezayi’s heavy beige Timberlands stomp across the cracked concrete. He is on a mission. The night lookouts who stand guard at the western barricades against the marauding paramilitary gangs of the mass murderer Kempès Sanon do not have money to eat. When the night watchmen don’t eat during their shift, they get weak, drink kleren (moonshine) to trick their hunger and have a higher tendency to shirk their duties, or worse still, fall asleep. The enemy armed with modern weapons by the U.S. lurks around the corner.

The Demand For A Ceasefire Is Necessary But Not Sufficient

November 12, 2023 Ajamu Baraka, Black Agenda Report. , , , , , ,
“The nightmare in Gaza is more than a humanitarian crisis. It is a crisis of humanity,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters in New York, adding that the need for a ceasefire is becoming “more urgent with every passing hour.” Hundreds of thousands of people are demonstrating across the planet in opposition to the outrage of being forced to witness the barbaric state terror and collective punishment of the occupied and oppressed people of Palestine by the illegitimate settler-colonial state of Israel. The flood of images of dead Palestinian children and even the audio of Palestinian women screaming in between the sounds of bombs being dropped on buildings in the pitched black darkness of Gaza that house the 2.2 million displaced Palestinians sparked a moral outrage that politically is being expressed by the call for a ceasefire.

In Haiti, Kenya Chooses Imperialist Servitude Over Pan-African Solidarity

August 3, 2023 The Black Alliance for Peace. , , ,
The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) condemns in the strongest possible terms Kenya’s proposal to lead what amounts to a foreign armed intervention in Haiti. Kenya has offered to deploy a contingent of 1,000 police officers to help train and assist Haitian police, ostensibly to “restore order” in the Caribbean republic. Yet, their proposal is nothing more than military occupation by another name; an occupation of Haiti by an African country is not Pan-Africanism, but Western imperialism in Black face. By agreeing to send troops into Haiti, the Kenyan government is assisting in undermining the sovereignty and self-determination of Haitian people, while serving the neocolonial interests of the United States, the Core Group, and the United Nations.

The US Brings In Black Misleaders To Support Military Intervention In Haiti

July 31, 2023 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , ,
At a recent meeting, CARICOM members, under pressure from the United States, changed their position to support western military intervention in Haiti. Black leaders from the US, Rwanda and Kenya were brought in to justify the move. Clearing the FOG speaks with Erica Caines of the Black Alliance for Peace's Haiti/Americas team to discuss the long history of outside intervention in Haiti, current resistance in support of people's-centered self-determination and what people in the United States can do to center Haiti in our work. Caines reminds us that Haiti was the spark that lit de-colonization movements throughout the Caribbean and Latin America and urges our solidarity with the Haitian resistance.

People’s Summit Calls For Respect Of Democracy And Self-Determination

July 22, 2023 Zoe Alexandra, People's Dispatch. , , , , , ,
Without sovereignty and mutual respect, dialogue between regions is impossible. Throughout the days of debate and work at the People’s Summit held parallel to the III CELAC-EU Summit, trade union activists, community leaders, left political leaders, artists, and students from across Latin America and the Caribbean and Europe ratified the importance of spaces for democratic and plural debate between equal partners. The summits occurred simultaneously in the Belgian capital of Brussels from July 17-18 after a eight-year pause. The People’s Summit, held at the Free University of Brussels, was organized by a broad coalition of over 100 organizations, collectives, unions, political parties, and movements.

National Conference For Black Self-Determination And Pan-African Unity

May 17, 2023 Tunde Osazua, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
From June 23rd to the 25th, a historic gathering of Black radical organizers will take place in the city of Atlanta, hosted by Community Movement Builders . The National Black Radical Organizing Conference will serve as a rallying point for individuals dedicated to our collective liberation struggle. Under the theme of "Unity in our Lifetime: Connecting the National Black Struggle for Self-Determination with Pan-Africanism," this conference aims to propel our movement to new heights and reaffirm our unwavering commitment to dismantling systemic oppression. During conference keynotes, panels, plenaries, workshops, and screenings, a diverse array of critical topics will be explored, ranging from base building and mass work to ideological positioning, the non-profit industrial complex, political prisoners, policing, gender, incarceration, and the vital role of students and youth in our liberation struggle.

Trapped By Empire

February 13, 2023 Van Jackson, Dissent Magazine. , , ,
In 1898, the Treaty of Paris ended the Spanish-American War and transferred Guam and the Philippines to the U.S. empire. In the Second World War, the United States focused on the Pacific not just as a theater of war but also as an avenue to reclaim colonial territories. In the early Cold War, the Pacific had fleeting importance to policymakers as a site for nuclear testing. And during the Vietnam War, the United States used its Pacific territories—in particular Guam—to stage large-scale bombing and counterinsurgency campaigns across Southeast Asia. As America’s rivalry with China has accelerated in recent years, U.S. moves in East Asia tend to draw the most attention—including expanded military base access in the Philippines just announced this February.

US Citizen Hunger Strikes To Stop Human Rights Abuses In Western Sahara

May 5, 2022 Nonviolence International, Popular Resistance. , , ,
Washington, D.C./Boujdour, Western Sahara – Ruth McDonough, a US/British citizen, began a hunger strike on Wednesday, May 4, in order to bring attention to human rights abuses occurring in Boujdour, Western Sahara. Dr. Tim Pluta, US/Irish citizen, will be supporting McDonough as caretaker. Both McDonough and Pluta have been guests in the home of the Khaya family since March 15, 2022. Their arrival came on day 482 of an arbitrary detention in which Moroccan agents had periodically broken and entered the Khaya family home, attacked, beaten, and raped Sultana Khaya and her sister, Waara, in front of their 84 year old mother, Mitou. The agents had also destroyed nearly all furniture, cut electrical wires, turned off the water, poisoned the well water, tortured the sisters and injected Sultana with unknown substances, and forcibly prevented visitors entrance to the house.

How Palestine Is A Critical Feminist Issue

March 28, 2021 Nadia Elia, Middle East Eye. , , ,
Within minutes, the signatures started coming in, not as a trickle but a surge - from the US and Palestine, but also from England, Ireland, Australia, Argentina, Sweden, Canada, Kenya, Italy and more. On 15 March, to mark Women’s History Month, the newly formed Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) had just launched its first public action: a pledge and open letter asking US women, feminist organisations, social and racial justice groups, and people of conscience to adopt Palestinian liberation as a critical feminist issue.

The Fight For Belarus

February 12, 2021 Kayla Pop, Anticonquista. , , ,
In August 2020, following the Belarusian presidential election, opposition protests began in the Eastern European country. The protesters, backed by imperialist forces abroad, called for the resignation of Alexander Lukashenko. In response, pro-government demonstrations were also held in defense of Lukashenko. Since then, political tensions have remained high in Belarus, where the threat of a new color revolution looms. I recently spoke with Nadezhda Sablina, a Belarusian columnist for the Minskaya Pravda, a local paper in the country. Nadezhda provides an anti-imperialist overview for what is taking place.

The Triumph Of The Commons In The UK

October 30, 2020 Dr. Simon Kaye, Shareable. , , ,
United Kingdom - There are thousands of community-powered initiatives in action across the UK. Projects to bring broadband to a rural place that wasn’t expecting it to arrive for years, generate renewable energy, or make the most of treasured local spaces or assets. Schemes to deliver addiction services, protect neighborhoods from natural disasters, or manage social housing in an equitable way. In none of these have the communities in question needed supervision from the state or transactions with big businesses. 

Defending Radical Black Self-Determination

November 10, 2017 Ajamu Baraka, counterpunch.org , , ,
By Ajamu Baraka for Counter Punch - It is absurd and an insult to argue that Russian propaganda efforts “deepen political and racial tensions in the United States,” as proposed by Julia Ioffe in a recent article in the Atlantic. But the linking of the legitimate struggle of African/Black people in the United States against systemic oppression with “foreign” influences has been a recurrent feature of the ideological and military containment strategy of the U.S. state ever since the Soviet Union emerged as an international competitor to the four hundred-year-old colonial/capitalist Pan-European project. From the early twentieth-century activism of the Pan-African Conferences through the Garvey movement, the socialist African Blood Brotherhood and the International African Service Bureau born out of the rise of fascism in Europe and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in the 30s, Black radicals formulated a theoretical understanding of and practical response to the realities of colonial and capitalist racist oppression throughout the African world. And with the taking of state power by the Bolsheviks and the establishment of the Soviet Union and the Third International (COMINTERN), many black radicals gravitated to revolutionary Marxism, as both a critique of the Western capitalist dominance and a theory for disrupting that dominance.

Catalonia: One Million Demonstrate For Self-Determination Vote

September 23, 2017 Esquerra Revolucionària, www.socialistalternative.org , , ,
By Esquerra Revolucionària for Socialist Alternative - On the 11th September one million people spilled onto the streets of Barcelona shouting loud and clear their intention to vote during the 1st October referendum, making it clear that they were not going to let the ruling Partido Popular (People’s Party/PP) deny them this right. Yet again, as has happened on each Diada [‘National Day of Catalonia’] since 2012, the Catalan people have demanded their right to democratically decide what links they wish to maintain with the rest of the Spanish state, including their legitimate right to independence. Against this protest in support of the right to decide, which the Catalan people are overwhelmingly in favour of (as confirmed by all the polls) backed up by increasing support from the those who live in the Spanish state, as a whole, the PP government and the Spanish bourgeois are using repressive measures not seen since the Francoist dictatorship; police raids and continual harassment against the press; judicial intervention to prevent a political event from taking place in Madrid concerning the right of self-determination; news censorship preventing the Catalan TV channel 3 from showing content on the referendum. The offensive has taken unprecedented steps and not just against freedom of expression and association.
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