MXM Public event: STRIKE! Challenges of Trade Unionism in Brexit Britain

STRIKE! Challenges of Trade Unionism in Brexit Britain

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*Fri 28th Oct 2022

630-830pm (Starting sharp at 630pm)

London Irish Centre, 

50-52 Camden Square, 

London NW1 9XB

£5 suggested entry

This event brings some of the most experienced speakers directly involved at the forefront of the class struggle exploring challenges of defending working class people under increasing attacks by the Tory state in the contexts of a growing far-right state, racism in the colonial capitalist global crises in general.

Speakers: 

Steve Hedley (former Assistant Gen Sec RMT Union)

Suresh Grover (The Monitoring Group, former Stephen Lawrence family campaign coordinator)

Glenroy Watson (Chair of RMT's 2023 Black & Ethnic Conference)

Arnie Hill (London Black Revs)

Chair: Malcolm X Movement

*This event will be audio-visually recorded for upload onto social media, please let the chair know if you do not wish to be recorded  

*We apologise that there are steps leading into the room

'Europe' Formed through A Colonial Genocide Against Africa, Asia and Islam

The Malcolm X Movement will be holding an event (details HERE) for Cedric Robinson and his amazing work - Black Marxism. Below is an extract from that work, this is an extract from Robinson explaining the genesis of modern Europe and European-ness, and how from the feudal times that feudal and the colonial conceptual nature of 'race' and 'racism' was at the heart of the developing concept of what Europe is and has become. This process took place in counter-opposition to the civilisations of Africa and Asia which were inspired and organised by the faith of Islam. This process of genocidal colonialism that developed a racialised white supremacist character, is fundamental in understanding how re-build a Black (non white) but also African and Asian revolutionary analysis and practice towards liberation. These and other connected themes will be explored and discussed at our event.

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Islam and Eurocentrism 
Extract from Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism, The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, p97-100, 1983

The history of Europe for the millennium following the fifth century of the Christian era had not been markedly uni-linear. That immense span of time had contained little if any basis for teleological certainty. Indeed, there had been eras such as the eighth century when the very presence of Western high culture had been faint, preserved in scattered outposts whose own fate was made doubly uncertain by barbarian invasion and the pathetic social and material conditions of the pagan societies that surrounded them.

By the year 700, European learning had fled to the bogs of Ireland or the wild coast of Northumbria. It was in the monasteries of Ireland that fugitive scholars pre- served a knowledge of the Latin and even of the Greek classics. It was in a monastery in Northumbria that the greatest scholar of his time, the greatest historian of the whole Middle Ages, the venerable Bede, lived and wrote. And it was from the monasteries of Ireland and England, in the eighth and ninth centuries, that English and Irish fugitives would return to a devastated Europe.

Christendom slowly recovered. During what would be called the Dark Age, allied with barbarian chiefs and kings, converted or otherwise, the church gradually grew into the most mature base for the feudal organization that characterized the early Middle Ages. It acquired land, and the peasants and slaves who made that land productive and valuable. Without the slightest sense of its moral bankruptcy, moreover, the leaders of the Christian Church unmercifully exploited its human base, legitimating the brutality of the nobility, their secular kin, and sharing the profits from the labor of bound workers and a foreign trade more than eight centuries long that delivered European slaves (among other goods) to Muslim merchants. Feudal Europe, for a time, however, proved to be capable of expansion while rotting from within-but it was only for a time.

By the thirteenth century, that phase of European development was at a close; the system collapsed. The ruling classes of feudal Europe were succeeded by their Mediterranean factors: merchants, traders, and bankers. They in turn spawned or defined the roles for those actors who supplied capital, technical, and scientific expertise, and administrative skills to the states that would lead the emergence of capitalist Europe. By then, however, European culture and consciousness had been profoundly affected. Legend, as we have seen, acquired the authority of history. Moral authority continued to dissipate. The mystifying veil, which the feudal ruling classes had created to hide, or at least soften the crushing oppression that they had put in place, was in tatters. Prester John's [1] first appearance in the European imagination of the twelfth century was consequently understandable.

The legend, if it indeed originated from within the ruling class, accomplished two very disparate ends: for one it presented Europe's intelligentsia with a powerful and splendor, Roman counterpoint, inspired by Christian idealism, biblical imagery and splendor, Roman law, and Greco-Egyptian civil craftsmanship. Here was the ideal Christian society, measure by which the failures secure in its political body and spiritual soul, It was the and insidious corruptions of actual Christendom could be calibrated in detail. A model Christian Empire, which, when compared to Europe, displayed those faults that had contributed to the inability to defeat Islam either spiritually or militarily. This was the legend's internal function.

Its other significance, however, was even more critical. The legend transmuted the world beyond Europe, "the Indies," into Eurocentric terms. Whatever was the reality of those lands and their peoples, came to be less and less important. For the next 300 years, between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, the legend of Prester John provided Europe's scholars and their l learned coreligionists with a structured a obfuse prism through which the authenticity of every datum, every traveler's report, every intelligence of its foreign trade, every fable of its poets, and every phatic foible of its soldiery could be screened and strained. Even direct evidence was not immune, for in the next century, G. K. Hunter tells us, this "frame of reference" was sustained:

"The new information which the English voyages of the sixteenth century brought to the national culture had to be fitted, as best it could, into a received image of what was important. This means that the facts were not received in quite the same way as they would have been in the nineteenth century. Historians of the last century were much taken with the idea of the Elizabethan imagination liberated b the voyagers. But there is little evidence of this outside the unhistorical supposition, "that's how I would have reacted." The voyages certainly did expand of physical horizon, but it is not clear that they expanded the cultural horizon at the same time. The image of man in his theological, political and social aspects could not be much affected by the discovery of empty or primitive lands." (G.K. Hunter in Shakespeare in His Own Age, 1964, p40)

The architects of European consciousness had begun the construction of that world-view that presumed the basic structure of other than European societies was at its foundation a European structure, that the moral, ideological, and spiritual scaffold of these societies was the same bottom structure discernible in European culture, that the measure of mankind was indeed the European. The legend of Prester John and his wondrous realm, the formidability of this purely Christian king who waited in patience for his Christian allies at the other end of the world, all this was the form impulse in its appropriate medieval costume. Thus, when the miraculous kingdom could not be located in the deserts and steppes of central Asia or even Cathay, it did not cease its fascination but was transferred to the south beyond the upper Nile The of other people fantasy and its attendant resolve to bend the very existence and being into convenient shapes were important beginnings for the destruction past. While the vitality Islam had seemed to mock the pathetic feebleness of of Christ's chosen, humiliating them in defeat and with the persistent threat of further occupations and invasions, the legend was compelling. And a basic lesson of propaganda learned: Europe's destiny was incompatible with the autochthonous non-European worlds. An increasingly prominent concomitant of the European millennium (roughly from the tenth to the present century) would be the refutation of those terms.

In freeing itself from Muslim colonization, Europe once again had a vigorous bourgeoisie and the state institutions to begin the construction of its own extra- European colonialism. From the fifteenth century on, that colonialism would encom pass the lands of Asian, African, and New World peoples and engulf a substantial fraction of those peoples into the European traditions of slave labor and exploitation. Capitalists were, from this point on, no longer dependent upon the material restraints Europe presented for the primitive accumulation of capital. What Genoese, Pisantine, and Jewish capitalists accomplished for Portugal and Spain in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, on their expulsions from Iberia they transferred to north western Europe. Soon after, an English bourgeoisie succeeded those of Belgium and the Netherlands in the domination of the now-extensive world system. We have, however, gone far beyond our immediate interests in the Muslim part in Europe development. Here we must conclude, still somewhat arbitrarily and abruptly, the survey of the significance of Islam in European history. For the moment it will have to be sufficient to remind ourselves that Islam once represented a more powerful civilization, and, again, one closely identified in the European mind with African and Black peoples.

In retrospect the Western potential for creating the Negro had moved closer in a way to its realization. The cultural and ideological inventory was at hand. A native racialism had already displayed its usefulness for rationalizing social order, and with the advent of the Islamic intrusion into European history it had further proved its value by its transformation into an instrument of collective resistance and a negation of an unacceptable past. For the Negro to come into being all what was now required was an immediate cause, a specific purpose. The trade in African slaves, coming as it did as an extension of capitalism and racial arrogance, supplied both a powerful motive and a readily received object.

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[1] 'Prester John' was a myth, whereby European colonialists imagined a perfect Christian utopia ruled by Prester John that existed somewhere in the 'pagan' lands of the 'East'. ie., it was a legend that justified and motivated the colonialists to colonise and conduct genocide - MXM

MXM Easter Rising Event Report - 'The Most Important 1916 Centenary Event'

'This is the most important 1916 event I have addressed' - Bernadette Devlin MacAliskey
Event report on Malcolm X Movement's and Crimes of Britain's event 100 Years Since the Irish Easter Uprising

Friday 13 yesterday turned out to be a fantastic day to salute the revolutionaries and martyrs of the great Irish Easter Uprising in 1916.day the 13th there was a tiny bit of bad luck that was overshadowed by an enormously informative and inspiring evening. The Malcolm X Movement's event was entitled 100 Years Since the Irish Easter Uprising, and we were honoured to have two special guests, both of whom very kindly flew in especially for this event, being former PLO Ambassador to Ireland and veteran senior Palestinian revolutionary Saeb Shaath, and the most well known and respected living female Irish revolutionary Bernadette Devlin MacAliskey. It was also a great privilege to have on the panel leading global Black radical decolonial scholar Hakim Adi and finally our young comrade Gerard MacNamara from the excellent and highly successful social media project Crimes of Britain as well as MXM coordinator Sukant Chandan chairing the event. The revolutionary 'craic' was being had in full effect! The room was packed with over 80 people in total in attendance.

Sukant Chandan opened the event for the MXM as chair by stating that the historical importance of the 1916 Uprising are many including the fact that it was the only anti-imperialist uprising in Europe during the first imperialist war, and that it electrified the anti-colonial peoples especially of the British empire as it struck the enemy right on its doorstep at such a critical moment. Chandan stated the reason the MXM has put on this event and the reason that of all the centenary commemorations across the world why this one stands out is due to the fact that no one until this event has brought clearly the global anti-imperialist analysis from Africa and Asia into the analysis to 1916. Chandan singled out Peter Middleton for particular thanks who was in attendance and whom in the 1990s, was a leading political organiser in London for Irish freedom, including amongst many other the weekly protests outside Downing Street.

Gerard MacNamara from Crimes of Britain and co-organisers of this event made his maiden public speech, and a brilliant talk outlining the history of British colonial looting and genocide against the Irish people, in the forced famines against the Irish for example in taking away millions of gallons of butter away from the Irish, tearing off roofs of houses so people could not squat them and how this colonial supremacism AKA white supremacy/racism against the Irish is still normalised today. MacNamara stated that Channel 4 recently floated the idea of having a comedy on the Irish famine. While at the time of the famines a British army colonel stated: "you must pay or get out, I tell you, I care no more about turning you out on the roadside than I do about shooting the bird which flies across my path".

Hakim Adi made a very informative speech as to how the Irish struggle had inspired Black / Pan-African liberation, including stating how Claude McKay, a leading Halrem Renaissance man of Jamaican heritage spent time in London uniting with Irish revolutionaries in the 1930s. Adi also relayed how much the Irish struggle informed many ideas in the leader of the millions-strong global United Negro Improvement Association, Marcus Garvey, who named his own building Liberty Hall after the Irish revolutionaries building in Dublin also called Liberty Hall that is still a trade union hub today.

Saeb Shaath gave a impassioned contribution imparting knowledge to the attendees as to the plots of the British colonialists in their oppression of Ireland and how they developed their oppression to then export to the rest of the people of the British colonies. Shaath focused especially on colonial partition, of which the British are the global masters, and how they have divided and partitioned many countries and regions, including Palestine and the Arab world. Shaath then recounted the current situation of British imperialist meddling in the North African and Middle Eastern regions. There were many cheers and applause for Palestinian liberation throughout his contribution from the audience.

Bernadette Devlin MacAliskey very generously flew in from Derry especially for this event but the flight was delayed for an hour so she entered the event at 830pm. However, she was welcomed by great cheering and applause and everyone spontaneously and en-masse chanted her name in unison to welcome her, reflecting the great respect and admiration her role and sacrifices for Irish freedom and socialism inspires. Devlin spoke in her typically eloquent and articulate manner on a number of issues that captivated all in attendance. She stated that she has spoken at many centenary events, events attended by great numbers of people but that the MXM event she was addressing was the most important one that she had spoken at because while Irish people have been commemorating and saluting 1916 for 99 years, it was an event like this that brought together all the global dimensions and impact of 1916. Devlin stated that the Irish people who were starved out of Ireland by the British colonialists first went to the North Americas as Irish speakers not English speakers. Devlin explained that they were not a part of the colonial 'white' club, and that there was a process that turned Irish people into white people, and that was through realising that if they spoke English that they could not be visibly defined as being phenotypically be seen as anything other than white. Devlin stated that she did not identify with those of Irish heritage that saw themselves as white in the USA, but she identified closely with the Black Panthers, with the Native American movement and other radical movements. Devlin's contribution was met with great applause and a long standing ovation.

The event saw young Black and Asian and radical white British youth and Irish patriots and revolutionaries gather together to understand each other and to unite with each other. No one else is doing this important work in England in bringing together communities of resistance, communities of oppressed peoples.

The full speeches have been recorded on video and will be uploaded in the coming two weeks and will be shared across MXM accounts and supporters on social media.

The MXM would like to give a big thank you to all our speakers, and all those who attended and put in the hard work to make this event a success.

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Next MXM public event:
1926 General Strike: 9 Days That Shook Britain

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Email: 2015mxm@gmail.com

Stand-up for Palestine! Resist Colonial Bullying!

The following is a comment from Malcolm X Movement coordinator Sukant Chandan on the current crisis engulfing the Labour Party as a result of bullying from the UK state and its elements from its junior ally, Israel:

This is madness, Ken Livingstone is right, the pro-Israel lobby - along with the imperialist press - are attempting (and doing quite well) in blunting, neutering and shutting down all criticism of the white colonial settler state of 'israel' and support for the Palestinians and wider struggle for Arab liberation against the colonial settler apartheid state. This line of attack is also another means by which to knonk off balance, confuse, divide and weaken the Corbyn led parliamentary Labour Party and wider left, and its working well.

Those leading this attack are using one correct thing: that the Palestinian cause is used by anti-Jewish racists, we have a fair few nut jobs like this such as former KKK grand wizard david duke who has plenty of mates in and around pro Palestine circles. However, this correct issue is used in a underhand and incorrect manner against all those who support Palestine.

We need to UP the anti-imperialist militancy against imperialism and its allies in the region, we need leading voices who are unapologetic and can use this current witch hunting to educate and inspire greater militancy while vigilantly guarding against colonial supremacism of any kind including anti-Jewish bullshit.

Labour MP Naz Shah (who beat Galloway in Bradford last election) has been a total embarrassment and has sought to protect her career and money from it over and above any principles and any chance of a stiff retort to the current witch hunting. She has been hounded and apologised three times and is being used to intimidate others into similar slavish and cowering climb downs. And why? Cos Naz Shah shared a picture which said israel should be re-located to the USA; a lazy attack on israel's colonial occupation, but calling it 'anti-semitic' is stretching things very very far.

The behaviour of pro-israeli zionists and imperialists is such an important example of how many in a group of people oppressed by european colonialism and racism (Jewish people) can in response turn around and act like the assymetric (smaller mirror images) of the colonialists and imperialists themselves. Well done Ken, but you're down the river without a paddle, there is no sign that Labour and the left are willing and able to turn the tables on this, and every sign they are quivering at the knees and are buckling one person after the other. I they kept George Galloway on their team and not shut him out into the cold where he has taken all kinds of positions that are deeply problematic, maybe George could have led a real push back and he often does when we are pushed into a corner.

Like I always say: we peoples of the resistant global south deserve better, much better than all this, and one day, the global south diaspora here on this island will form united anti-imperialist decolonial organisations to fight for our peoples.



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Remember Britain's Most Notorious Massacre in India, and the Act of Vengeance it Inspired

On the 13 April 1919 in Amritsar, Punjab the Brits using Asian (Gurkha) mercenaries conducted a massacre of up to 1000 peaceful anti-colonial protestors. Thousands of people were gathered on one of the region's most popular festival. General O'Dwyer was a sadistic leader of the British colonialists and ordered the South Asian mercenaries to shoot down men, women and children in their hundreds. It is said that a small child who witnessed the massacre later dedicated his life to avenge this massacre.

This massacre was avenged by Shaheed Udham Singh who shot dead the Brit general responsible at a public meeting in London on 13 March 1940. Shaheed Udham Singh was a individual operator attached to the left nationalist and socialist and communist trends of the national liberation movement especially the party of mutiny or the 'Ghadar' Movement of Punjabi people of all faiths. Shaheed Udham Singh was put on a secret trial where he called himself 'Mohammed Singh Azad' to symbolise Indian peoples unity towards freedom. He was executed by hanging and went to his martyrdom with honour and pride in his heart. He is considered a revolutionary saint by millions across India, Pakistan and across South Asia. The struggle of South Asian peoples against British imperialism continues today.

Easter Rising Rebels Vindicated: Unification of Ireland Remains the Issue

Malcolm X Movement coordinator Dan Glazebrook writes the following below, in an article published by the leading USA anti-imperialist left website - Counterpunch.

Please note that the MXM is holding an event to commemorate the centenary anniversary of the Easter Uprising on Friday 13 May 6pm at the Marx Memorial Library in London (EC1R 0DU), with special guest speaker and leading republican socialist and feminist - Bernadette MacAliskey, please see the Facebook event page here and the event page on this website here.

Irish Unification Remains the Issue: Easter Rebels Vindicated by New Report

When members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army took up arms and proclaimed an Irish republic on Easter Monday 1916, they sought, first and foremost, an independent nation based on the political equality of all its citizens. But they also believed that independence would put an end to the economic dismemberment that British rule had visited on the country to such devastating effect over the previous centuries.

Following the closure of the Irish parliament and the country’s forced incorporation into the UK in 1801, Britain imposed a vicious form of ‘free trade’ designed to strangle Ireland’s nascent manufacturing industry lest it come to rival that of the English mainland. Ireland was doomed by successive Acts of Parliament to remain an agricultural adjunct to British industry, growing wheat to feed the laboring masses in Liverpool, Manchester and London, whilst its own, increasingly pauperized, population lived on a precarious diet of potatoes.

The Great Famine of 1849-52 was the result: despite a blight of the potato crop on which the vast majority of Irish survived, Irish wheat continued to flow to England, and the liberal government closed down the soup kitchens in accordance with the inhuman doctrine of laissez-faire and ‘self-help’. By the time the famine ended, the population had been reduced by a quarter, with one million starved to death and a further million fled to America. Freed from the depredations of British rule, the rebels believed, Ireland would undoubtedly be able to lift herself out of such debilitating levels of poverty and suffering.

Indeed, even the industrial development that did later occur was strictly limited to the protestant-dominated counties in Ireland’s Northeast. And although Belfast had, by the dawn of the twentieth century, become a hub of the UK shipbuilding industry, the sectarian policy of both employers and unions ensured that it was only protestants (the descendants of British colonial settlers) who were employed there, and never the indigenous (Catholic) population – a fact seemingly whitewashed out of modern British accounts. As one republican told me when I visited the City recently, “although the Titanic was built just down the road, as far as we were concerned, it might as well have been built on Mars”.

Despite briefly taking control of the Irish capital, the Easter rebels were soon overwhelmed by British troops and after six days, the uprising was over. Despite surrendering, sixteen of the rebellion’s leaders were then executed by the British, including one – James Connolly – who had to be strapped to a chair in front of the firing squad due to his injuries.

Despite the suppression of the rising, a mere six years later independence was achieved. But it was not the unified republic for which the rebels had fought. Following the Irish war of independence of 1918-1921, Britain finally negotiated a partial withdrawal; but it made sure it clung on to the wealthiest, and only industrialised, region: the ‘six counties’ of Ulster, which were to remain part of the UK.

The decline of Ulster’s shipbuilding industry, however, began in the 1960s following the growth of air travel and competition from abroad. Since then, Northern Ireland has been largely portrayed, in a twentieth century reboot of the ‘white man’s burden’, as a drain on the British economy which the British government has been selflessly bearing, at great cost to its own interests, solely for the good of the region’s inhabitants. The implication is that the Irish economy would be insufferably bogged down by having to take responsibility for the six counties of Ulster, and only a ‘great power’ like Britain is able to keep the region afloat. Uniting the country, so the narrative goes, might satisfy the deluded fantasies of a few zealous ideologues, but the price tag would be plunging living standards for the Irish people.

A detailed academic study published last week, however, has blown this colonial mythology out of the water. The report, entitled Modeling Irish Unification, was overseen by Dr Kurt Hubner, director of the institute of European Studies at the prestigious University of British Colombia in Canada, and concludes that “Political and economic unification of the North and South would likely result in a sizeable boost in economic output and incomes in the North and a smaller boost in the [South of Ireland].” To be exact, the authors of the study calculated that the combined economies of Northern Ireland and the Republic could grow by over €35 billion over eight years if they reunified.

The UK’s Financial Times wrote that “If the economy of Northern Ireland adopted the Republic’s tax regime and the euro, the resulting productivity increases and lower cost of trade could cause the province’s economic output per head to rise by as much as 7.5 per cent, according to the report, which was compiled by academics in Canada and Europe. Northern Ireland would benefit disproportionately because of the “catch-up effect”. In other words, it would open up an economy that is effectively closed, since most of its trade is with the rest of the UK, while living standards are lower, the report says”.

Indeed, the report is particularly damning on the impact of British rule on living conditions in the North: “The economies of Ireland north and south are interlinked and interdependent, but they are not aligned,” it says, adding that Northern Ireland “has relatively low living standards, inward-oriented industrial policies, high levels of output in low value-added sectors, a small private sector, and an overreliance on the public sector”.

These findings echo other recent reports that underline how Northern Ireland has gone from being the wealthiest to the poorest part of Ireland since being torn from the rest of the country in 1922. The FT notes, for example, that “the republic’s economy grew 7.8 per cent in 2015, while the North’s shrank by 0.8 per cent in the third quarter of last year.” And a recent report by the Rowntree Foundation has revealed that around one fifth of the population live in poverty, “with significantly lower employment and levels of pay hindering attempts to address poverty”. It also found that average weekly pay was around £20 lower today than a decade ago for all but the wealthiest, with the low-paid even worse off than this. Such are the fruits of British rule in Ulster.

One might have thought that the Canadian report, representing the first rigorous academic study of the economic impact of unification, and with findings that so clearly fly in the face of the ‘established wisdom’, ought to have been headline news in the UK.

After all, it has certainly been taken seriously by experts in the field. Marcus Noland, Executive Vice-President and Director of Studies at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, for example, called Modelling Irish Unification “an important, timely examination of the economics of Irish unification, applying state-of-the-art modelling techniques to the issue at hand. The modelling work illustrates a variety of channels which are likely to be at play in the Irish case and concludes that Irish unification would be economically beneficial to both parts of the island, especially for smaller, poorer, Northern Ireland.”

Michael Burke, meanwhile, economic consultant and former Senior International Economist at Citibank in London, said that “The issue of the benefits of a unified Irish economy are unfortunately largely overlooked. This paper goes some way to correcting that and will help develop discussion in this neglected area.”

As far as the British press is concerned, however, it can stay neglected. In fact, the only reference I could find to the report in any British newspaper was the story quoted above in the Financial Times (famously dubbed by Noam Chomsky ‘the only paper that tells the truth’, designed, as it is, to provide its wealthy readership with accurate information to guide their investment decisions).

As for the rest, they have apparently been too busy mocking the SNP over the devastating impact of low oil prices on the Scottish oil industry which, it is claimed, would make independence untenable. This, of course, fits in much better with the prevailing British media narrative on issues of self-determination, which essentially boils down to a chauvinistic claim that ‘these impudent nations could never survive without us’. The truth, of course, is that the Easter rebels were right: it is surviving with dignity within the UK that is fast becoming the real impossibility.

On this Easter's Supremacist Massacres - from Glasgow to Lahore

The following is a piece by MXM coordinator Sukant Chandan, followed by a short commentary from MXM coordinator Saqib Deshmukh, and finally by a few comments from our comrade in Lahore, Taimur Rahman. - MXM Coordinators Team

Easter's Supremacist Massacres:
Asim Shah in Glasgow, Lahore, Daesh and more, reflections on the spread of sectarianism and supremacism


"It has been a mixed Easter, on the one hand Palmyra has been liberated from the Nato's supremacist forces, also we are celebrating 100 years since the uprising of the anti-colonial Irish Easter Uprising revolt that inspired all colonially oppressed peoples across the British empire, but also we have seen on-going massacres of these supremacist forces in Libya, Iraq, Pakistan and its ugly manifestation in Glasgow. How many more innocents and children have to be devastated and killed before there is an almighty fight back by our peoples?"

By all accounts Asim Shah was a very friendly and respectful member of his community in Glasgow. He died for the 'crime' of respecting Christians and their celebration of Easter. It seems he was killed in a sectarian attack by someone who claimed his perversion of Islam allowed him to take the life of another Muslim. In Lahore we have another sectarian attack against Christians, while in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and in many other countries we see violent sectarianism and supremacism spread in communities across the globe.

While the Western media promotes a narrative whereby it seems that only Muslims are conducting this supremacism and sectarianism, a closer more accurate look into this phenomenon shows a much bigger picture whereby this supremacism's conceptual roots are to be found in modern colonialism in the genesis of what has become known by the more deceitful code names and concepts of colonial and imperialist institutions as the 'West', 'Europe', 'Whiteness', 'Democracy' etc.

'Coloniality' is conceptual framework to justify the physical and actual exploitation and oppression of colonialism against everything: women, girls, nature, colonially racialised peoples, 'Black' people, other colonial peoples, oppression and mental genocides against the ways people see themselves, their histories and the world and universe, nature and its animals and plants. This coloniality is constantly adapting itself and sophisticating itself as the main ideological framework of the capitalist-imperialist system, or otherwise known through their code names as 'Europe', 'West' and even 'human rights', 'Arab spring' and other tag names.

The first thing colonialism did in the lands and people they conquered and continue to is to enforce the colonised people to see themselves through a colonial framework, to essentialise or generalise themselves as the colonialists see themselves: as God's chosen people, or going even further (lower?) than that, the way colonial and imperialist culture secularised God and turned God into himself, the rich white western man who likes us to believe he IS God on earth, as Gill Scott Heron said, 'the white man has a God complex'. Anyone outside this category of human supremacy is outside or below Humanity, and as such can be treated that way and mental genocides, actual genocides and crimes of massive levels such as the destruction of Iraq, Libya, Congo and other places can be justified, and there will be no revolt amongst the supremacists, rather the supremacists will put the onus of blame on the victims of their coloniality and imperialism.

This internalisation of coloniality is evident in nearly every oppressed community in the world, it springs from the poisoned fountain of colonialism and modern imperialism's mass culture, media and institutions projected all over the world. The most profound example of a community hitherto oppressed by colonialism and imperialism is found amongst Jewish people. Some Jews internalised colonial supremacism to such an extent that it adopted that framework, allied and leaned on colonialism and imperialism to steal the land of another colonised people - Palestine and the Palestinians - such was the basis of the founding of a white colonial settler state of 'Israel'.

The same framework of supremacism has been promoted by the colonialists and imperialists amongst Muslim peoples, resulting in an asymmetric mirror image of white supremacism which this time wraps itself in false shrouds of not of Judaism in this regard, but of false shrouds of Islam. It was and remains the Brits and Yanks who are the main global promoters of this supremacism, the Brits instituted the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which is the godfather of Daesh in the Muslim world (whereas the UK and USA are the global godfathers of Daesh and similar militias and organisations), and the Brits and Yanks have always relied on viciously supremacist forces to pursue their strategic interests across the world. They rely on the same sectarian governments, Daesh states of Qatar, Saudi, UAE etc in their wars of divide and ruin against Libya, Afghanistan, Syria and others.

Like the colonial supremacism adopted by pro Israeli Jews, some Muslims are internalising and projecting this supremacism that has led to many hundreds of young Muslims leaving England to go and fight alongside Daesh in Libya, Somalia, Syria and Iraq, but at the same time like Jews but more so in some cases they are also victims of colonial and imperialist oppression.

Muslims are imperialism’s global focus and target of racism: Muslims are racialised by imperialism, which seeks to put into the minds of the masses that Muslim = Middle Eastern, Asian, and African = barbaric rapists and beheaders = refugees and immigrants in Europe/West. 'Muslim' is the tag by which imperialism has primarily targeted all Black and Asian people with this racism in the media, and in the real physical world, it is through the racist and imperialist 'war on terror' (rather should read: war of global imperialist terrorism) that has seen whole countries destroyed by imperialism's proxy forces who are guided by the West's covert military intelligence and forces.

In India the BJP government has to steer the Indian state in a pro-BRICS framework, India has existed for a long time in the non-aligned political world, it is in a global alliance that seeks to end the imperialist hegemony on the planet, so the BJP have had to steer the gargantuan ship that is India along the same ocean paths that it has been traversing. At the same time the BJP have also adopted exactly this colonial supremacism in essentialising the endlessly diverse and complex India into a 'Hindu' society, a cover for a sectarianism against all other groups that are not defined as kosher Hindus etc by the BJP and similar forces. The BJP and Daesh and the Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) operate in very similar frameworks, so much so when one listens to the BJP 's view on society, it is very easy to mistake it for the way Daesh and the Ikhwan see the world and society and 'others'. This results in some people who happen to be Hindu in London argue against voting for the imperialist labour candidate Sadiq Khan because of a colonially informed sectarian narrow mindedness and instead support imperialist tory candidate Zac Goldsmith.

In the heart of coloniality, in the heart of whiteness in this country of Britain we see the situation that we saw in British-ruled India: the state insitutionalised division of communities based on nationality, 'race', and religion, a colonial division promoted as somehow beneficial to the said communities under concepts such as 'multiculturalism', whereas this is just the old colonial divide and rule strategy and has nothing to do with what is actually needed as a multi-cultural/religious/national united struggle of peoples for liberation. I have heard people in the Hindu, Sikh, Christian, leftist, Muslim community all come out with forms of colonial supremacism. I have for years heard people accuse the group that Glaswegian Asim Shah was from as 'heretics, outside their definition and outline of Muslim and 'Islam', once this otherisation has been done, horrific things always follow. I have met people from the religious group that Asim Shah was from approach me at events I have spoken at and have said that their community too is under attack and should be supported; I always agreed. I have heard of Muslims who have jobs in the mainstream UK media argue that Muslim groups in Syria 'aren't really Muslims, and they are heretics', comments and views that facilitates the sexual enslavement and mutilation of whole communities. I have heard many people in religious groups and leftists come out with homophobic comments. All these prejudices and sectarian attitudes directly support supremacist wars and murders that only benefit imperialism, and traumatically impact all oppressed communities. Countless reprehensible lynchings of people who are motivated by this bigotry in our global south homelands seems to not shift this bigotry, perhaps a more closer to home sectarian murder against the martyr Asim Shah will make those who are promoting this prejudice think again? Belgium and the UK has seen an alarming rise of sectarian murders and attacks from within the Muslim community grow as a result of UK state sponsored was of supremacism, as well as a general rise in anti-white racist attacks and attitudes.

In India, due to the BJP's oppressive internal/domestic policies against anyone who is outside of their upper class, upper caste, supremacist outlook has sparked mass movements amongst communities and persons allied directly and indirectly who are lower class and castes, anti-casteism forces, socialists, progressive Indian nationalists, communists, and just anyone who wants peace and unity between our peoples. Young Dalit rights activists, Muslims and young communist leaders have taken centre stage in India and have launched a renewed struggle against these sectarian forces and the sectarian BJP government. The Indian people are doing just fine without relying on imperialism conceptually or physically, in a counter distinctive manner to example as what happened in the Arab Sting, wherey pro imperialist liberals, and supremacist forces were the ground forces for Nato in the divide and ruin of Libya and Syria. India is rocking the BJP establishment, and it is fast looking like the BJP are crumbling in the face of this peoples resistance.

Similarly in Libya and Syria, there are political forces who believe in the unity of diverse communities of faith, ethnicities who have been fighting for five years the supremacist death squads launched by leading Nato and imperialist powers and their regional allies: an alliance of which that is THE matrix of power behind these vicious forces.

However, just as the struggle against the Nazis and fascism in europe could produce an internalised colonialism amongst Jews which resulted in a supremacist state - Israel, similarly there are some people who while rightly wanting to oppose the supremacist Nato death squads are in some cases responding with fighting this fire with fire, rather than with water, they are fighting racism with racism, instead with a counter supremacist force of solidarity and unity. In Syria and Libya it is Muslims who are doing the overwhelming and greatest amount of sacrifice and fighting to liberate ALL the communities in their countries, but some are putting more emphasis on what they see as eurocentric Christian communities, and giving the impression that these are a 'white western' type of force, when that is also so wrong on so many levels. Some people within anti-Nato pro Syria/Iran/Russian communities are joining in with the European far-right and fascists in promoting the scapegoating of refugees and immigrants as 'terrorists', 'rapists', 'alien to European white culture' or that their arrival in Europe is some 'Jewish plot' to destabilise Europe. The rise of fascism on a mass and state level in the West is a direct threat to further intensified hatred against Russia, Syria, Iran and other Asian and African countries and their diaspora in the West, they are not allies, they are our enemies and trojan horses of Nato and the imperialist countries. The more the West goes into crises, the more fascism will entrench itself, those who purport to fight Nato should think again before facilitating these fascist forces.

The leading countries and struggles in the world that are giving example to the world that we can resist and live in a more unified liberated way are shown by the leaders of Bolivia (Morales), Ecuador (Correa) and Venezuela (Chavez and now Maduro) and the grassroots movements they are involved in and allied to; it is represented by the successes of the Chinese revolution and socialist construction which united and uplifts hundreds of millions of people led by a socialist and anti-imperialist ideology, and it is represented by the anti-imperialist unity oriented Indian masses, and the anti-Nato resistance in Libya and Syria. There is no doubt that the imperialists are putting in a massive amount of efforts and resources to ensure that white supremacy racism is promoted en masse amongst not only the white masses in the West but also internalised by non-white communities in the West who ape the oppressive views and mentalities against Black and Asian people and especially immigrants and refugees. All indicators also point to imperialism working hard to promote similar narratives and frameworks amongst global south peoples struggles; this is a problem that requires serious learning and understanding of what modern coloniality and imperialism is and frameworks, ideologies and struggles that counters that.

It has been a mixed Easter, on the one hand Palmyra has been liberated from the Nato's supremacist forces, also we are celebrating 100 years since the uprising of the anti-colonial Irish Easter Uprising revolt that inspired all colonially oppressed peoples across the British empire, but also we have seen on-going massacres of these supremacist forces in Libya, Iraq, Pakistan and its ugly manifestation in Glasgow. How many more innocents and children have to be devastated and killed before there is an almighty fight back by our peoples? Syria has shown we can fight back and win. India is showing that people can turn the tables on the oppressors and fight back. People in Mali, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Niger, Nigeria and many other countries people of all faiths and no faiths are resisting. It is through the development of this resistance into a tsunami that will wash away colonialism's and imperialism's contribution of supremacism, looting, rape and genocide against our peoples.


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Saqib Deshmukh:

I've been fortunate in my life to meet and work with Pakistani Christians both in Pakistan and in the UK. There have always been tensions but it is in recent years that this has been intolerable and in a country which historically has taken in millions of refugees it's concerning that groups such as Christians and Shia folk are no longer welcome. Behind the scenes the project to attack minorities in Pakistan continues and the role of intelligence services who support the Taliban elements such Jamaat-ul-Ahrar needs to be examined.The use of these as militia and death squads outside of state institutions is deeply disturbing and shows how powerful this template of operating has become


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Taimur Rahman:

Seven myths that demobilised the Pakistani left against extremists resulting in tragic lost historic opportunities.

Oh yes. It has failed massively. It has failed because of stupid self-defeating ideas that I have been criticising for years. Lets start with each of them.

1. "Taliban are anti-imperialists". You would think such an inane argument could not be made but you will be shocked to read who all supported this view (Tariq Ali, Dr. Riaz, Asim Sajjad Akhtar).

2. "Fighting extremism is a US agenda": This was the position of the overwhelming number of grassroots leftists who argued that since US was condemning Taliban we should not condemn them.

3. "Fighting Extremism isn't a working class issue. It is a liberal issue": As if the rich or liberals were the only ones getting blown up or affected. Insane position I know but it dominated the left in Pakistan.

4. "Fighting Extremism is not the principle contradiction." A leftist way of saying it is not a priority. Mun chupatay phir rahay hain yeh log.

5. "Public is not with extremists, we don't have to worry about them". Take a look at Qadri's funeral.

6. "We should negotiate with extremists.Violence begets violence. We need a 'political' (i.e. non-violent) solution" ROFL.

7. And my personal favourite "They are too strong, we will be killed". We are getting killed anyway.

Your twitter RIP's and fb prayers are meaningless if they do not translate into actual struggles against religious extremism.

Your tweets about how the bombings make "you" so upset are not only irrelevant but serve only to draw attention to yourself at a time when attention needs to be focused on solving the actual problems.

Get into the grassroots movement against extremism. You know where they are. They've been calling you to action for years. You just haven't bothered to spare any time for this issue. You've been too busy with your job, your studies, your family, your x, your y, your z. Face it. You've been obsessed with "you".

Stop working for yourself and start working for people. Then we will see an end to violence in Pakistan

Public event: 100 YEARS SINCE THE IRISH EASTER UPRISING: A Historic and Unique Blow to British Colonialism!

100YEARS SINCE THE IRISH EASTER UPRISING
A Historic and Unique Blow to British Colonialism!

The 1916 Irish Easter Uprising against British colonialism was one of the most important global revolutionary developments at the time, and shook the empire to its very core and inspired a new wave of revolutionary struggle against colonialism throughout Africa and Asia. This event seeks to bring this history and legacy to new generations of Black, Asian and working class anti-imperialist socialist youth. This event brings some the best of anti-imperialist voices to speak to this subject and to inform and inspire us.

SPECIAL GUEST SPEAKER: BERNADETTE MACALISKEY - A leader of the Bogside resistance, one of the youngest MPs ever and veteran republican socialist

SAEB SHAATH - Former PLO Ambassador to Ireland speaking on the impact of the Easter Uprising on the struggle of the Arab peoples against colonialism

HAKIM ADI - World renowned Black radical scholar and historian speaking on the impact of the Uprising on African liberation

Gerard MacNamara - From 'Crimes of Britain', speaking on the importance of the Uprising on anti-imperialist youth today

Chair: Sukant Chandan - A coordinator at the Malcolm X Movement

Other speakers tbc

Fri 13 May, 2016
Doors open at 6pm, 630pm sharp start, ends at 9pm
Marx Memorial Libray
37a, Clerkenwell Green, Farringdon EC1R 0DU
£5 suggested entry

This event is organised by the Malcolm X Movement and Crimes of Britain

Attending this event means that you are giving consent to possibly be in the video footage of the event which will be uploaded on social media.