The African freedom fighter Dedan Kimathi was hanged on Feb. 18, 1957, while Queen Elizabeth II was on her throne, head of state of Britain and the Commonwealth realms, including Kenya. As head of state, she did nothing to stop Kimathi’s murder nor the execution of over a thousand other freedom fighters in Kenya.

Kimathi was a Field Marshal of Kenya’s Land and Freedom Army. It was labeled the Mau Mau by the media. Being captured with a loaded revolver was enough to send Kimathi to the gallows.

The capitalist media are shedding tears over the death of Queen Elizabeth, who died in Balmoral Castle when she was 96. However, they say nothing about the monarchy’s brutal colonialism and racism abroad and in Britain, a long and ruthless legacy that the Royal Family has overseen and still profits from.

Liberation fighters from Kenya, India, Ireland, and other former colonies who lost their lives struggling for independence from the British government and monarchy are not remembered by the capitalist media.

There’s no mention of Dedan Kimathi being hanged in Nairobi’s Kamiti Maximum Prison when he was 36.

The media helped lynch the Mau Mau in Kenya. They called Jomo Kenyatta a “terrorist.” Typical was Time magazine which described one of the former Land and Freedom Army leaders as “one of the Mau Mau’s bloodthirstiest killers.” 

Queen Victoria’s stormtroopers seized Kenya in 1895. British aristocrats stole the land, with Lord Delamere alone grabbing 160,000 acres.

Africans were forced at gunpoint into “native reserves,” which were modeled on Indian reservations in the United States.

Oppression sparked resistance. On May Day in 1950, the East African Trade Union Congress issued a call for independence and majority rule. These genuine labor leaders in Kenya were immediately arrested by British Prime Minister Clement Attlee of the Labour Party.

One hundred thousand workers joined a general strike to protest. Nairobi was paralyzed for nine days. It took a mobilization of the British army and colonial police to crush this uprising.

Freedom demanded that an armed struggle be launched. Kenya’s Land and Freedom Army was born.

Kenya’s colonial governor, Evelyn Baring, responded by declaring a state of emergency on Oct. 20, 1952. The governor’s family-controlled Barings Bank was founded in 1762 by the slave trader Francis Baring.

Royal fascist terror

Baring ordered the colonial police to frame up Jomo Kenyatta and other independence fighters and imprison them. There was no jury.

According to Caroline Elkins’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Imperial Reckoning,” Baring guaranteed a conviction by paying the judge a 20,000-pound bribe.

Baring hoped Kenyatta’s frame-up would demoralize Africans. Instead, it ignited years of guerrilla warfare.

Mau Mau fighters liberated weapons and ammunition from the colonialist army and police. Mau Mau-supporting blacksmiths made hundreds of guns.

Britain mobilized 55,000 soldiers and cops to fight the Mau Mau. The Royal Air Force bombed guerrilla strongholds in Aberdares Forest and Kirinyaga.

Caroline Elkins estimated that the colonial forces threw 300,000 Kenyans into concentration camps and forced another million into 800 “emergency villages” built with the Africans’ own slave labor.

For Africans in Kenya, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was their Hitler. Guards used Alsatian dogs to maul women inmates at the Athi River camp, and the guards themselves clubbed prisoners arriving at the Manyani camp.

Six hundred children were confined in Kamati camp alone. Almost none survived.

Prisoners labeled as “hard-core Mau Mau” were selected to bury the children. “They would be tied in bundles of six babies,” recalled former inmate Helen Macharia.

Uncle Sam helped this genocide by financing Nairobi’s Embakasi Airport. Now called Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, it was built by the slave labor of Mau Mau prisoners.

According to David Anderson’s “Histories of the Hanged,” 1,090 Africans were hanged in Kenya during this righteous uprising. Just for supplying food to guerrilla fighters — labeled “consorting” — the British settlers sent 207 people to their deaths.

A posse led by Ian Henderson, a notorious torturer of Mau Mau suspects, finally captured Field Marshal Kimathi on Oct. 21, 1956.

Henderson later spent 30 years as head of the secret police in Bahrain. But, his cruelty couldn’t stop the freedom struggle in Kenya.

Twenty thousand Mau Mau guerrillas didn’t die in vain. Kenya declared its independence on Dec. 12, 1963.

Mandela was inspired

Queen Elizabeth will have a grand funeral. There was no funeral for Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi.

Kimathi was buried secretly by the British colonialists, who feared his gravesite becoming a memorial for Africans. A series of prime ministers, including Tony Blair, refused to reveal the location of Kimathi’s grave.

That was cruel and inhuman for Dedan Kimathi’s family and all Africans. It wasn’t until 2019 that Field Marshal Kimathi’s grave was discovered beneath Kamiti Maximum Prison.

Africa remembers its heroes. Kimathi’s execution is commemorated, and streets are named in his honor. A statue of Dedan Kimathi was unveiled in Nairobi on Dec. 11, 2006.

When Nelson Mandela visited Kenya in July 1990, he said, “‘In my 27 years of imprisonment, I always saw the images of fighters such as Kimathi, China and others as candles in my long and hard war against injustice. It is an honour for any freedom fighter to pay respect to such heroes.”

“China” referred to Waruhiu Itote, known as “General China.” The pseudonyms that Mau Mau leaders used for security reasons were sometimes named after socialist countries. Dedan Kimathi was known as “General Russia.”

In 2005, Mandela again visited Kenya and Denan Kimathi’s widow, Mukami Kimathi. “Mandela told me he is grateful for our struggles in the fight to liberate Kenya,” she said. “He said his experience had taught him how painful it is to fight for independence.” 

Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi was avenged every time Africans seized a white-owned farm in Zimbabwe. After that, Britain and the United States put economic sanctions on Zimbabwe for daring to take back the land.

Mao Zedong wrote, “To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.”

Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi’s death was heavier than Mount Tai. The death of a royal parasite in a castle, not so much.

Originally published at Censored News on March 1, 2011. 

A Special Report by Kevin D. Annett
March 1, 2011
William Combes
Eyewitness, 1952-2011

Update: William Combes died of lethal injection at St. Paul’s Catholic hospital in Vancouver on February 26, 2011. Genocide survivor, an eyewitness of killings and of the abduction of ten aboriginal children by the Queen of England and Prince Phillip on October 10, 1964, at the Kamloops Catholic residential school.

VANCOUVER, Canada — The aboriginal man who claimed to witness the abduction of ten fellow residential school children by the Queen of England and her husband in October 1964 at the Catholic school in Kamloops, B.C. has died suddenly at the Catholic-run St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver.

William Combes, age 59 and in good health, was scheduled to be a primary witness at the opening session of the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS) on September 12 in London, England. I last saw William ten days ago, on the eve of my departure for a European speaking tour, and he looked better than I had seen him in years.

According to his partner Mae, William was in stable health and was assigned a new doctor at St. Paul’s Hospital this past week. William was then committed to the hospital for “tests”, and his health began to immediately deteriorate. He died suddenly yesterday of a still-undisclosed cause.

The Vancouver Coroner’s Office refuses to comment on William’s death. William was the sole survivor of a group of three aboriginal boys who claim to have witnessed the abduction of ten children during a royal visit to the Kamloops residential school in mid-October 1964 when both the Queen and Prince Philip were in Canada.

“They took away those ten kids and nobody ever saw them again” described William, in several public statements made over the airwaves of my former Vancouver Co-op radio program, and in the following signed and witnessed declaration made on February 3, 2010:

William Combes statement:

“I am an Interior Salish spirit dancer and am 58 years old. I live in Vancouver, Canada. I am a survivor of the Kamloops and Mission Indian residential schools, both run by the Roman Catholic church. I suffered terrible tortures there at the hands, especially of Brother Murphy, who killed at least two children.

“I witnessed him throw a child off a three-story balcony to her death. He put me on a rack and broke some of my bones, in the Kamloops school basement, after I tried running away. I also saw him and another priest burying a child in the school orchard one night.

“In October 1964 when I was 12 years old, I was an inmate at the Kamloops school and we were visited by the Queen of England and Prince Phillip. I remember it was strange because they came by themselves, no big fanfare or nothing. But I recognized them and the school principal told us it was the Queen and we all got given new clothes and good food for the first time in months the day before she arrived.

“The day the Queen got to the school, I was part of a group of kids that went on a picnic with her and her husband and some of the priests, down to a meadow near Dead Man’s Creek. I remember it was weird because we all had to bend down and kiss her foot, a white laced boot.

“After a while, I saw the Queen leave the picnic with ten children from the school, and those kids never returned. We never heard anything more about them and never met them again even when we were older. They were all from around there but they all vanished.

“The group that disappeared was seven boys and three girls, in age from six to fourteen years old. They were all from the smart group in class. Two of the boys were brothers and they were Metis from Quesnel. Their last name was Arnuse or Arnold.

“I don’t remember the others, just an occasional first name like Cecilia and there was an Edward. What happened was also witnessed by my friend George Adolph, who was 11 years old at the time and a student there too. But he’s dead now,” Combes said.
—

I believe that William Combes died of foul play and that his murder was arranged by those who stood to lose from his speaking out about his witnessing of the child abductions and other crimes of murder and torture at Catholic Indian residential schools.

I am writing a soon-to-be-issued eulogy for my friend and fellow fighter, William Arnold Combes. Like another murdered front-line Native activist, Johnny Bingo Dawson, who was killed by the Vancouver police in 2009, William will never be forgotten – and those who killed him will, like the system that caused the death of so many children, be brought to real justice.

His murderers have not won. William’s videotaped statements, including his witness of the 1964 abductions, have been registered in the archives of our ITCCS, and will be made public at our opening session on September 12, 2011. I will be proposing to the ITCCS executive that William Combes and Johnny Dawson both be named post-humous Honorary Elders of the Tribunal. In his name and memory, and for all the children.

See the evidence of Genocide in Canada at www.hiddennolonger.com and on the website of The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State at www.itccs.org . Watch Kevin’s award-winning documentary film UNREPENTANT on his website www.hiddenfromhistory.org

As we previously reported, senior Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was murdered earlier this year while covering an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. Early reports indicated that Abu Akleh was killed by Israeli weapons fire. 

The IDF followed its murder of Abu Akleh with an attack on her funeral procession. Her procession included Muslims, Christians and Jews. Abu Akleh herself was a Christian. The Israeli forces beat pallbearers and other attendees. 

Until recently, the Israeli government denied any culpability in Abu Akleh’s death. However, on Sept. 5, 2022, the IDF released a statement admitting a “high possibility that Ms. Abu Akleh was accidentally hit by IDF gunfire fired towards suspects identified as armed Palestinian gunmen.” 

Eyewitnesses reported that Israeli troops appeared to be firing directly at journalists. The IDF indicated that the stormtroopers responsible for Abu Akleh’s death would face no criminal charges or prosecutions.

Translated: “We launched an attack on Palestinian refugees and murdered a prolific Palestinian journlaist because that is what Zionists do.”

Blood of Palestine on hands of U.S. defense industry

As Abu-Akleh was an American citizen, her family requested a meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden during his July visit to Israel. The family simply wanted to express their concerns and demands for justice directly. Biden refused the meeting, instead inviting Abu Akleh’s family to visit Washington, D.C. 

The U.S. has provided Israel with $63 billion in military aid and security assistance since 2001. $8 billion of this aid came in 2021 and 2022. The planes that terrorize Gaza City are from the U.S. The semi-automatic rifles that murder Palestinian teenagers are from the U.S. The entire military infrastructure of Israel is provided by the United States of America, which is why Biden’s refusal to meet with Abu Akleh’s family is so cold and detestable. 

The U.S. defense industry’s hands are covered in Palestinian blood. Israel enforces apartheid while Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon make billions in profits. The least the President could do is meet with the family of the slain Palestinian-American journalist.  

IDF continues siege of Jenin

Unfortunately, the IDF raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank that killed Shireen Abu-Akleh was not an isolated incident. The raid is part of a broader swath of Israeli offensives against Palestinian communities in Gaza and the West Bank. Syria has also felt the wrath of this offensive. 

On Sept. 5, 2022, the IDF launched another attack on Jenin with artillery and ground forces. Sixteen Palestinians were injured, and one was martyred. The Palestinian person killed was a 29-year-old man attempting to capture the vicious Israeli attack on the social media site TikTok. The IDF claimed that the operation in Jenin was aimed at demolishing the home of an alleged “terrorist.” Indeed, the IDF regularly demolishes the homes of Palestinians they label as “terror suspects” as punishment for their families. 

This attack, much like the one that killed Abu Akleh, also included IDF forces firing at journalists and other individuals trying to capture the raid on video. The U.S. accuses countries like Cuba and China of violating freedom of the press while materially supporting an apartheid regime that targets journalists with impunity. No U.S. journalist has ever been shot and killed while reporting by military forces in Cuba or China.

The global anti-Zionist community must unite in solidarity with Shireen Abu-Akleh, the Palestinian people, and all those who would attempt to uncover the truth about Zionist apartheid.

Down with Israeli apartheid! Free Gaza! Israeli settlers out of the West Bank!

The entire student loan program amounts to loan sharking. Forty-five million people owe $1.7 trillion. Every cent should be wiped off the books.

The compound interest collected by the banksters is strangling millions. People in their fifties and older are still trying to pay off their loans. 

Four years after graduation, Black college graduates owe almost twice as much as white graduates.

President Biden’s loan forgiveness program may help millions. But, unfortunately, it’s still modest and not enough.

That didn’t prevent The Wall Street Journal from denouncing it as a “coup.” Trying to get blood out of a stone has always been a capitalist specialty. 

Biden was forced to act despite his rotten record in Congress. As a senator from the State of DuPont ― also known as Delaware ― he helped push through the misnamed 2005 “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act.”

It prohibited anyone from getting their student loan debt wiped clean by filing bankruptcy. 

Also rooting for this bill were the plastic loan sharks. Delaware is the country’s credit card capital because it allows these outfits to charge the highest interest rates.

While they want to prevent working and poor people from using bankruptcy laws, capitalists love bankruptcies. Donald Trump filed for bankruptcy six times. 

If you owe a bank a few thousand dollars and can’t pay it, you have a problem. When billionaires owe billions, the banks have a problem. 

As Trump bragged to CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell, “I’m the king of debt.” He claimed to have told his lenders, “I’m going to give you back half.”

His daddy’s record of stiffing creditors didn’t prevent Donald Trump, Jr., from saying student loan forgiveness results in “nurturing incompetence and irresponsible behavior while penalizing hard work and fiscal responsibility.” 

When has any member of Trump’s family been engaged in hard work?

Making college unaffordable

Just as hypocritical are members of Congress. Super right-winger Majorie Taylor Greene from Georgia called forgiving student debt “completely unfair.” She had $183,504 in Paycheck Protection Program loans written off.

Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly also attacked canceling student debt. Kelly had his $987,237 PPP loan canceled. 

Possibly more repulsive was Indiana Rep. Jim Banks. He responded to the news by tweeting, “Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments.”

According to Banks, poor people should be cannon fodder for Big Oil instead of going to college.

One of the biggest reasons for the huge student debt is skyrocketing tuition. Capitalists don’t want poor people in college.

The City University of New York was free for more than a century when its enrollment was more than 90% white. Now when a majority of its students are people of color, tuition is $7,510 per semester.

The University of California system has increased tuition 20 times since the 1970s.

Nobody in socialist Cuba has to pay tuition or medical bills. Education and health care are considered to be human rights in Cuba.

Meanwhile, medical debts are the biggest reason for personal bankruptcies in the United States. People fighting cancer or other diseases shouldn’t have to worry about whether they can pay both their hospital and landlord.

An ancient curse

For thousands of years, moneylenders have been ripping-off poor people. Many of the class struggles in the ancient world were between creditors and debtors.  

In societies divided between rich and poor, agriculture has been intertwined with money lending for thousands of years. The whole nature of farming — where months separate harvests — puts the agricultural producer at the mercy of the usurer.

Almost 3,800 years ago in Babylon (not the town on Long Island, New York), the Code of Hammurabi had to protect farmers from greedy moneylenders. It proclaimed if a “storm wipes out the grain or the harvest fails, or the grain does not grow for lack of water, in that year he need not give his creditor any grain in payment.” 

In the Bible, Deuteronomy 15 proclaims, “At the end of every seven years, you must cancel debts.” That’s a good program today.

The laws of Solon were an attempt to resolve this conflict in Athens over 2,500 years ago.

A debtors’ revolt occurred in Rome during the very first years of the republic. The Roman historian Livy wrote about how this led within two years to the “secession of the plebeians.” 

The plebeians left the city and camped out on the “sacred mount.” It may have been the first recorded general strike in history.

The “secession” only ended when the wealthy patricians agreed to the appointment of “tribunes of the people,” which had a veto over the consuls.

We need thousands of people’s tribunes to tell the banksters to go to hell. We’ll make the banks pay reparations and cancel the student loans.

Walkers in Eau Claire, Wis., after a pipe ceremony. From “Leonard Peltier’s Walk to Justice” on Facebook

On Sept. 1, Argentina’s current vice-president and former two-term president, Cristina Fernandez Kirshner (CFK), narrowly escaped assassination when a pistol misfired just inches from her head. The assassin had concealed himself in that evening’s supportive crowd, which mass daily outside her residence to defend her. 

CFK, the most popular politician in the country, is targeted with politically motivated corruption charges wrapped in a campaign of outright threats taken from the right-wing lawfare playbook. If the assassination attempt had been successful, who knows what the streets of Buenos Aires would look like today?

According to Pagina12, when supporters of former president Mauricio Macri demonstrate, they come “with mortuary bags or with gallows or guillotines … and signs saying ‘Death to Cristina.’” Offices of Fernandez’s political organization Frente de Todos have been firebombed and shot up.

In Macri’s four-year term, he saddled Argentina with the International Monetary Fund’s largest loan in its history, $46 billion, condemning the people to years of austerity and privatization with an impossible repayment schedule. 

President Alberto Fernandez declared a public holiday on September 2, characterizing the attack as the worst since the end of the military dictatorship in 1983. The U.S.-backed dictatorship and Operation Condor and the threat of political violence returning were on the minds of demonstrators who marched in cities across Argentina, rejecting the attempted killing.

The Buenos Aires Times reported the outpouring in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, massing in the place made internationally famous by the heroic Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, whose demands and tireless campaign for the estimated 30,000 murdered and disappeared youth helped end military rule.

“I’m here today because what happened yesterday cannot be permitted in our society,” Leandro, a 28-year-old doctor, tells the Times. “I feel that something very serious happened. We have not seen political violence in our society for a long time. We said ‘Nunca más’ in ’83. We are saying ‘Nunca más’ to political violence.”

A 32-year-old service worker says he and his friends support the vice-president and her achievements in office. “The years of the Kirchner governments have been the best years of my life. We won many rights: gay marriage, the Gender Identity Law, the Transgender Employment Quota Law,” he explains. “I really hope for a commitment from all sectors of the political arena to protect democracy, and to lessen hate speech.” 

In addition to her current role in the Senate, Vice President Fernandez was president from 2007 to 2015 and is considered the most popular candidate for the 2023 election. Fernandez has stated she believes the outcome of the court case against her was predecided to try to block her future candidacy. If she had been found guilty the prosecutor was calling for a 12-year prison sentence and a ban against her ever running for public office again. Even before the assassination attempt, women’s organizations, especially, mobilized in her support. Among the avalanche of support for Fernandez and condemnation of the attempted assassination were messages from Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken via Twitter.

Just about elections?

Elections are not revolutions that change the economic system. Nonetheless, powerful global forces in these internal electoral campaigns have sharp political divisions, particularly in Latin America.

Next year the notorious Monroe Doctrine will celebrate its bicentennial in the midst of a desperate attempt by the U.S. to maintain the economic and political hegemony enjoyed by its wealthy rulers since the end of World War II.

In 1823, the Monroe Doctrine laid claim to the Americas as integral to the U.S. empire. Attempts at independence have been met by invasions, assassinations, coups, U.S.-backed and trained military dictatorships, and new forms of disruption and intervention in the digital age. 

The U.S. relentless economic, financial, commercial and media war against socialist Cuba – along with the slanderous listing of the country as a state sponsor of terrorism – is a six-decade example. Other current examples include the U.S. appointment of a faux president of Venezuela; sanctions and slander against Nicaragua; coups in Honduras and Bolivia (since reversed); and rants by U.S. elected officials threatening coup and assassination against the new leadership in Colombia.

In June, the Biden administration hosted a sham Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, excluding Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, only to face sharp, direct and well-earned criticism from the president of Argentina, Alberto Fernandez, who also spoke as rotating chair of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and others. 

Brazil’s national election is this fall and Argentina’s is in 2023. In Brazil, Luiz Inacio (Lula) da Silva, the front-runner presidential candidate, supported the formation of BRICS economic alliance – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – that challenges U.S. international economic hegemony by opening up new trade routes and development partners. Argentina and Iran are now BRICS candidates, too.

As the U.S. imperialism and NATO provoked war in Europe continues, and now, while the U.S. aggressively antagonizes the People’s Republic of China over its Taiwan territory, the White House will certainly not welcome the expansion of BRICS in Latin America.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 AT 6:00 PM EDT

Baltimore: Meet John Parker who traveled to Donbass
22nd Street & N. Calvert Street, Baltimore

On Sept. 3, abortion rights activists mobilized to counter a monthly protest of the Planned Parenthood Manhattan Health Center by anti-abortion forces. In August, the New York Police Department had attacked the clinic defenders, arresting five. New York City for Abortion Rights organizes the monthly clinic defense. 

The anti-abortion group Witness for Life is based at the nearby Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on the Lower East Side. Clinic defenders began the day with a picket outside the church, then dispatched activists to provide support to Planned Parenthood escorts at the clinic and blockade nearby intersections to intercept roving gangs of anti-woman bigots.

Outside the clinic, dozens of abortion rights defenders held rainbow umbrellas and a banner that said “Your body, your choice” to block the chanting anti-abortionists.

All attempts to invade the clinic or stop patients from entering were successfully blocked. One entering patient aptly gave the middle finger to the bigots.

Comically, one of the anti-abortion goons wore a red MAGA hat and walked outside the clinic chanting, “Make America great again.” His cohorts made him change his hat and change his chant halfway through their stunt since it too clearly exposed their far-right allegiances.

Provocations continued after the “pro-life” group left the clinic. When abortion rights supporters held a wrap-up rally outside the church, a driver attempted to assault them with their vehicle. Then bigots threw eggs from the roof of a building across the street; they only succeeded in egging the SUV of one of their supporters.

Naturally, the NYPD was nowhere to be seen when these attacks on abortion rights activists took place.

The Supreme Court coup that overturned Roe v. Wade has emboldened the ultra-right against the rights of women, trans people, people of color, and all workers. Even in a pro-choice, “blue” state like New York, the fascists are trying to advance. 

The clinic defenders – multigenerational, people of color and white, queer and trans – show that only the workers and oppressed will stop their advance, not the cops or politicians.

For info on upcoming clinic defense actions, follow NYC for Abortion Rights on Twitter.

December 12th Movement
Press statement
September 2, 2022

In 2022, in the richest country the world has ever seen, Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, has no water for drinking, cooking, bathing, flushing a toilet, or fighting a fire. As of this moment, the situation is predicted to continue “indefinitely.” We are calling on President Joe Biden to expeditiously authorize billions of dollars in emergency funds to address both the current humanitarian crisis triggered by the climate crisis-induced flooding and the implementation of long-term action steps to correct decades-long operational neglect of Jackson’s water systems.

The situation in Jackson is not new nor unexpected. As Jackson Mayor Antar Lumumba said. “We’ve been crying out for more than two years, saying that it’s not a matter of if our [water] systems will fail but a matter of when our systems will fail.”

Almost 17 years to the day of the Katrina man-made disaster, the citizens of predominantly Black Jackson are facing the same problem which the citizens of then-predominantly Black New Orleans had. As Jelani Cobb noted in 2005, “Katrina can be viewed as the first of a series of crises that seem to have become a referendum on Black citizenship.”

Jackson is the latest crisis in that series which now includes Flint, MI, Detroit, MI, and Newark, NJ. Clearly, the referendum has voted thumbs down on Black citizenship.

The citizens of Jackson are the victims of structural and environmental racism. And we are concerned that this latest disaster of capitalism does not become a cover to force people out of Jackson as part of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Black people around the U.S.

What Black people have learned through these crises is that we must organize to take care of ourselves. We cannot depend upon anyone else to do it out of benevolence or simply because it is the humane thing to do. We will join with other groups around the country to get aid to Jackson. But the investment needed to address the roots of the problem has to come from the federal government. We’ve got to bring that pressure to bear on Joe Biden.

Two years ago, President Biden said that Black people made his election possible, that we had his back and he’ll have ours. Well, the time to have our backs is now. Send the aid to Jackson as quickly and extensively as you have been sending it to the Ukraine.

“THAT’S OUR BLOOD DOWN THERE!”
NO MORE KATRINAS!

Wall Street and the Pentagon view the People’s Republic of China as their number one enemy. China is the target of U.S. imperialism’s “Pivot to Asia.” 

China’s economy may already be larger than the United States. The American Enterprise Institute―one of the best-known capitalist think tanks ― admits China surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest manufacturer back in 2010. 

That’s historically significant. Factories in the United States exceeded Britain’s production in the 1890s.

China is now the “workshop of the world.” In 2021, China built nearly 17 million more motor vehicles than the U.S.

This tremendous economic growth is the result of China’s socialist revolution. It’s not just a matter of China making more than a billion tons of steel a year or having more miles of high-speed rail than the rest of the world.

When Mao Zedong declared “China has stood up” in 1949 and the People’s Republic of China was born, Chinese people lived to be, on average, just 36 years old. 

By 2022 life expectancy had more than doubled to reach 77.3 years. That’s a longer lifespan than in the United States.

Despite these tremendous gains, some communists and revolutionaries contend that capitalism has been restored in the People’s Republic of China. They point to the 606 billionaires in China, including 67 in Hong Kong. 

The capitalist world market

The People’s Republic of China is entangled in the capitalist world market. Almost $2.5 trillion in foreign direct investment has poured into China since 1992. 

This represents millions of Chinese workers being exploited by foreign capitalists. For example, in 2021, General Motors made 2.9 million cars in China. 

That’s almost 700,000 more vehicles than it sold in the U.S. Tesla is investing $7.5 billion in its Shanghai “gigafactory.”

Unlike China before liberation, none of this investment is colonial in character. Foreign corporations have to share technology and know-how. Elon Musk ignored California’s safety regulations during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but he has to follow Chinese laws.

Mistakes shouldn’t be repeated

Decades ago, many revolutionaries had already considered the Soviet Union to be capitalist.

Mikhail Gorbachev ― who opened the door to capitalist restoration ― didn’t come out of nowhere. He rose in the bureaucracy under both Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

There were hundreds of thousands of Gorbachevs in the Soviet government and Communist Party. They were supporters of Gorbachev’s anti-Marxist “new thinking” that sneered at the class struggle. These elements shared Gorbachev’s illusions about U.S. imperialism and capitalist society in general. 

Most of the “oligarchs” came from their ranks. They stole trillions of dollars worth of socialist property that workers and peasant farmers had built over a dozen five-year plans.

Aided the liberation of Angola, Namibia

Yet as late as 1988, Soviet-built MiG-25 jet fighters gave the People’s Armed Forces of Liberation of Angola air superiority in the crucial battle of Cuito Cuanavale. A coalition of liberation forces decisively defeated the apartheid army from South Africa, backed by the Pentagon.

These included the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), the armed wing of the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO); uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed section of the African National Congress (ANC), and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba. Also present were military advisers from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the Soviet Union.

Less than two years after this battle, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison on Feb. 11, 1990.

Apartheid South Africa first invaded the newly independent People’s Republic of Angola in 1975. Africa called, and Cuba answered. Cuban volunteers shed their blood beside their African comrades.

Critics of the Soviet leadership could see for themselves which side of the world the Soviet Union and its allies were on.

It’s been over 30 years since socialism was tragically overthrown in the Soviet Union. This was a greater defeat for workers and oppressed people everywhere than Hitler crushing the German working class.

To have written off Soviet socialism in the decades before Gorbachev rose to power confused revolutionaries. It disarmed communists when the real counter-revolutionary threat appeared.

Socialism vs. COVID

Those that claimed that the Soviet Union was already capitalist 50 or 60 years ago apparently didn’t understand that capitalism can’t function without a huge body of unemployed workers. Frederick Engels, the co-thinker of Karl Marx, called jobless workers the industrial reserve army.

Capitalists know this well. Sam Insull ― whose crooked Midwestern utility empire collapsed in the Great Depression ― declared that “the greatest aid to the efficiency of labor is a long line of men waiting at the gate.” Meaning women and men desperately seeking a job.

But there was no industrial reserve army in the Soviet Union. Instead, the country suffered from a labor shortage.

This was one of the features of Soviet society that made it incompatible with capitalism. The Soviet economy was planned. A state monopoly of foreign trade kept the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at bay. 

In contrast to the Soviet Union, millions of workers in the People’s Republic of China are without a job. The unemployment rate for youth between 16 and 24 years old reached 19.9% in July. 

Particularly affected are the record number of 10.75 million college graduates. Before liberation in 1949, there were only 117,000 college students in China. 

A big reason for the lack of hiring has been the anti-COVID actions that socialist China took. The capitalist media attacked these absolutely necessary health measures. 

Huge cities like Beijing and Shanghai were temporarily closed. Unarmed socialist police in Wuhan delivered meals to people in their homes.

This was a clear contest between capitalism and socialism. In the U.S., 1,046,243 people have died from COVID-19 as of Sept. 1. 

Meanwhile, 14,922 people died in the People’s Republic of China, which has over a billion more people than the United States. (China’s total includes 9,701 people who died in the capitalist Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong.) 

No capitalist government on earth could have done what socialist China did in fighting the pandemic. Banksters and billionaires wouldn’t have allowed it. Profits are more precious than life to billionaires and their media stooges.

John Tyson (chicken billionaire) and other dead-animal capitalists got Trump to issue an executive order keeping the meatpacking plants open and shielding themselves from lawsuits. As a result, over 59,000 meatpacking workers caught the virus, and 269 died.

Kept on a leash

China has a sizeable capitalist class, with 606 billionaires forming its crest. These capitalists are kept on a leash.

Liu Han’s $6 billion stash didn’t prevent him from being executed in 2015. A millionaire (much less a billionaire) has never been executed in the United States.

A handful of banks play a dominant role over the U.S. government. The Communist Party of China runs China’s banks.

The commanding heights of China’s economy are controlled by the Communist Party. While production has stagnated in the imperialist countries, China’s steel production leaped from 400 million tons in 2007 to over a billion tons today.

You can’t explain China’s fantastic economic growth except by admitting there’s some other social system than capitalism in charge.

If socialism had been overthrown in China, there would be no need for a separate regime for capitalist Hong Kong, which has its own currency. China liberated Hong Kong from British colonialism in 1997. 

After the Soviet Union was destroyed, Wall Street’s next target was China. But, to many in the military-industrial complex, NATO’s 78 days of bombing Yugoslavia was a poor substitute.

Their frustration was behind the deliberate bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

NATO’s war against Yugoslavia was a class war. Despite all the concessions that Tito had made to imperialism, what remained of Yugoslavia in 1999 was socialist in class character.

Sometimes retreats are absolutely necessary. For example, the Long March was a glorious retreat that saved the Communist Party of China from being destroyed.

Mao Zedong argued for the Red Army to take the Long March to escape encirclement. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to make a sharp economic retreat in the early 1920s by launching NEP, the New Economic Policy.

Karl Marx contemplated that following a socialist revolution, the working class might have to “buy off the band” of well-to-do elements.

Confronted by world imperialism, the People’s Republic of China has allowed both foreign and domestic capital to flourish. It was a case of bending instead of being broken.

Growth of China’s working class

While the capitalist class has grown in China, much more spectacular has been the growth of the working class.

The Chinese Revolution’s biggest problem was the small number of workers in the country. In 1949, workers were perhaps 1% of the population.

Today the working class in the People’s Republic of China is hundreds of millions strong. Thousands of strikes occur against private capitalists.

Chinese workers credit communism for China’s tremendous advances in health and economic growth. The social weight of the working class has been responsible for China’s extensive reforms in health care and education over the last 20 years.

Those who claim that a counter-revolution has taken place in China should show when this overthrow occurred. Comrade Mao Zedong famously wrote that a revolution is not a dinner party.

A counter-revolution is far bloodier. The events following Mao’s death couldn’t have changed China’s class character.

Just as a rising class needs to smash the state machine of the old ruling class ― as was done in the French and Bolshevik revolutions ― so would a counter-revolution need to smash the apparatus built by the Chinese Revolution. That hasn’t happened.

To claim that the concessions made to capitalists over the last 45 years amount to overthrowing the Chinese Revolution is reformism in reverse.

There are many more chapters to be written in the Chinese Revolution. The working class in the People’s Republic of China ― which includes millions of workers from minority nationalities like the Uyghurs and Tibetans ― will have the last word.

Long live the Chinese Revolution!