People Before Profit blog

A legacy of scholarship and struggle: W.E.B.Du Bois and the political affairs of his twilight years

Mon, 26 Aug 2013 19:59:00 +0000

Introduction

In the coming weeks, commemorations of the March on Washington will acknowledge Martin Luther King's iconic "I Have a Dream" speech. Others will recall the addresses of labor leader A. Philip Randolph and the activist and future Congressperson John Lewis along with the inspiring musical performances of Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Marian Anderson, and of course Mahalia Jackson.

Likely to get lost in the mix of history and memory is another speech-effectively recounted in Charles Euchener's Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington-NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins' announcement of W. E. B. Du Bois's death in Ghana the day before the March. In one breath, Wilkins praised Du Bois; in the next breath, he maintained a severe distance from the towering intellectual and civil rights activist. To the thousands gathered at the Washington Mall on that warm August day, Wilkins praised Du Bois's famous 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, remarking that it was Du Bois's "voice that [called] to you to gather here today in this cause." However, Wilkins quickly lamented that "in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path." Wilkins' reference to "another path" meant Du Bois's vocal advocacy of socialism and communism, convictions Du Bois proclaimed in the closing decades of his life during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.[1]

Yet, there are other memories of that historic day. Black intellectual John Oliver Killens recalled that as he gathered with James Baldwin, Sidney Poitier and others at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D. C., on the morning of August 28, 1963, someone walked in an announced that "The old man died." According to Killens, no one had to inquire about the old man's identity. "We all knew who the old man was, because he was our old man. He belonged to every one of us. And we belonged to him," Killens stated. A writer with a keen ability to flesh out the feeling of a particular historical setting, Killens continued: "More than any other single human being, [Du Bois], through the sheer power of his vast and profound intelligence, his tireless scholarship and his fierce dedication to the cause of black liberation, has brought us and the other two hundred and fifty thousand souls to this place, to this moment in time and space." However, Killens also knew that on that August day in 1963 he was firmly in history's grasp. His awareness beamed. "There was a kind of poetic finale that made sense to us," Killens noted, "that [Du Bois] should die on the very eve of this historical occasion. He was a man of irony. He had run a tremendous race, and now it would be up to us, all of use everywhere, to take the torch and carry it forward. He had left us a legacy, of scholarship and struggle."[2]

Wilkins' striking announcement and Killens' recollection of Du Bois's death powerfully illustrate the combative politics of the modern civil rights era. These historical snapshots also forcefully remind us of the visceral anticommunist rejection of Du Bois's radical politics during his twilight years. Today, 50 years after his death, Du Bois's later years remain obscured and underappreciated. Only a handful of scholars-namely the work of the late Manning Marable, Gerald Horne, Amy Bass, and Eric Porter, among others-have incisively chronicled Du Bois's latter decades. In this year of half-century anniversaries of momentous civil rights events (e.g., King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Medgar Evers' murder, Sixteenth Street Baptist bombing, etc.), let us also recall the importance of Du Bois's "legacy of scholarship and struggle"-particularly that of his later years. It is imperative that communities committed to justice not only remember Du Bois's death, but also explore Du Bois's work from his closing decades to generate renewed energy, inspiration, and intellectual capital to tackle the economic and racial injustices that continue to bedevil humanity. Du Bois's global perspective, critique of capitalism, and support for multiracial solidarity beckon our attention.

A Short History of W. E. B. Du Bois's Twilight Years

I locate W. E. B. Du Bois's twilight years from 1934, when he exited the NAACP, to 1963, the year Du Bois passed away. The year 1934 marked a career-shifting development, both professionally and personally. Given Du Bois's passing in such a momentous year and amidst the growing heat of the Cold War, questions about his legacy deserve recognition as well.

Du Bois resigned from the NAACP in 1934 over the most effective approaches to civil rights. Parting ways with an association he co-founded also meant the termination of his quarter-century career at The Crisis magazine, the NAACP's magazine he founded and edited. Thereafter Du Bois returned to college teaching at Atlanta University, where he remained until 1944. While in Atlanta Du Bois traveled across the globe to places such as Germany, Russia, and Japan, and published important studies like the Marxist-framed Black Reconstruction (1935) and an autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1939). By the late 40s-in his seventies-Du Bois's international perspective on global justice found a home with Left organizations such as the Council of African Affairs and the anti-nuclear Peace Information Center. The aging but still insightful scholar even ran for the U. S. Senate in 1950. Amidst the Cold War hysteria over Communism, Du Bois's pointed critiques of the deep relationship between capitalism, colonialism, and racism-in short, his cogent analysis of the global color line-raised the ire of rabid anticommunists and drew additional attention of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. As a result, Du Bois found himself arrested for refusing to register as the representative of a foreign principal. Ultimately acquitted in November 1951, Du Bois's experiences steeled a resolve that focused on proposing a socialist solution to a world gripped in the chaos of gross injustice, a message he committedly proclaimed in numerous speeches throughout the 1950s. Since the State Department seized Du Bois's passport for most of that decade-a practice it continues to inflict on principled dissidents in our own day-Du Bois's stateside sequester limited his global travel but did not prevent his socialist vision from impacting the world. Du Bois's writings continued to make their way into the hands of hungry readers, such as the summary of his McCarthy persecution from In Battle for Peace (1952), and his midcentury newspaper columns with Amsterdam News, Chicago Defender, People's Voice, National Guardian, and Freedom. During 1958 and 1959 with passport in hand, Du Bois commenced another global excursion, traveling to England, Sweden, and France. In Russia Du Bois sojourned for five months, and in a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev persuaded the premier to sponsor an Africa Institute. Continuing eastward, Du Bois's two-month stay in China included meetings with Mao Zedong and the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Thousands turned out to greet Du Bois in February 1959 when he delivered a lecture in China the day he turned 91.[3]

Over the next few years, Du Bois continued to write and to advocate for justice. However, two developments of note occurred in October 1961. On October 1, Du Bois wrote to Gus Hall, formally requesting membership in the Communist Party. "I have been long and slow in coming to this conclusion," Du Bois wrote, "but at last my mind is settled." The same month Du Bois penned his membership letter, he received an invitation from Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah to continue work on a long-germinating project, the Encyclopedia Africana. In Ghana Du Bois and his second wife, the Communist writer and activist Shirley Graham, welcomed a steady stream of guests and disciples at their comfortable Accra residence. Du Bois's faltering health in 1962 necessitated an emergency trip to London and a recuperation period in Switzerland followed by a return trip through Russia and China. Back in Ghana, Du Bois visited the American Embassy to renew his passport. Officials refused, citing legal requirements that no member of the Communist Party could have a U. S. passport. Embittered but passionately principled, Du Bois became a Ghanaian citizen. Du Bois spent his remaining days under U. S. surveillance, and despite a weakened constitution, he entertained guests and continued to think and plan the Encyclopedia Africana. Du Bois died in late August 1963, the day before Martin Luther King announced his iconic dream for America's future. Du Bois's widow relayed that in the days leading up to his death, Du Bois was aware of plans for and "greatly interested" in the March on Washington. At Du Bois's state funeral in Ghana, mourners heard a number of eulogies as they processed to his final resting place. As the journalist William Branch reported in Amsterdam News, a torrential rain pelted those present as the ceremony concluded-a sign Africans took as a libation from heaven in recognition of Du Bois's life well lived.[4]

The legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois's life after death demands our attention as well. One place we observe Du Bois's legacy is to recall the creation of W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs. Founded in the 1960s by Du Bois comrade Bettina Aptheker (and daughter of former Political Affairs editor Herbert Aptheker) along with the tireless efforts of many others including the CPUSA's Jarvis Tyner, the Du Bois Clubs naturally caught the attention of the U. S. government, but also riled up rabid anticommunists like Richard Nixon. In 1966 Nixon, then chair of the Boys Club of America, made the ludicrous claim that since "Du Bois" rhymed with "Boys" W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs sought to dupe would-be members of Boys Club of America into joining the Communist cause. While long since disbanded, Tim Wheeler reported earlier this year in Peoples World that Du Bois's legacy is alive and well with former Du Bois Club comrades. Former members gathered not only to recall their history, but also to pool social and intellectual capital to pledge renewed commitments to justice. We also see Du Bois's legacy in his hometown of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where contests over his memory blazed in the late 1960s and 1970s but also even as recently as 2004 over the naming of a school in Du Bois's honor.[5]

Let us also not forget that at a meeting in 1968 to commemorate Du Bois's century mark, some of the twentieth century's most notable people maintained the legitimacy of Du Bois's closing decades through bold, public proclamations. For example, in the tumultuous year of 1968-turning points in international and domestic affairs-Du Bois continued to be a flashpoint of controversy even as sympathetic interests sought to champion his legacy. Martin Luther King delivered a speech titled "Honoring Du Bois" at a Freedomways ceremony at Carnegie Hall celebrating Du Bois's 100th birthday. "History cannot ignore W. E. B. Du Bois," thundered King only three months before his assassination, "Because history has to reflect the truth and Dr. Du Bois was a tireless explorer and a gifted discoverer of social truths. His singular greatness lay in his quest for truth about his own people." King also demanded a robust reckoning with Du Bois's politics. He stated, "We cannot talk of Dr. Du Bois without recognizing that he was a radical all his life. Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years . . . It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a communist. Our irrational obsessive anticommunism has led into too many quagmires . . . . Dr. Du Bois has left us but he has not died." At that same meeting, a young history professor named John Hope Franklin gave a keynote, cognizant of the moment's historical gravity. Franklin observed that, "The manner in which the death of W. E. B. Du Bois was reported in some quarters here in the United States is itself a curious commentary on the extent to which the country of his birth was out of touch with him." Conscious of the politicization of Du Bois's memory, Franklin jumped to his defense: "[I] wish I could erase from my memory the picture of Dr. Du Bois at eighty years of age handcuffed like a common thief, accused of being the agent of a foreign power. Even his subsequent exoneration [in 1951] cannot obliterate . . . the impression that, perhaps, will always remain: that he was the victim not merely of the fanaticism that characterized those years, but that he was being punished for what he had represented for more than half a century."[6]

W. E. B. Du Bois for the 21st Century

Both praised and excoriated for his principled convictions and critical analysis of the world in which he inhabited, it is important to pause at the half-century mark of Du Bois's passing and consider the enduring power of his historical witness. Although commemorations and celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington will likely overlook the anniversary of Du Bois's death-or relegate him to a mere footnote of that historic event-Du Bois remains relevant for our own time. As Keith Feldman stated in a recent Al Jazeera article, "[W]e turn to Du Bois to plumb the thick emancipatory dreams persistently articulated by and for the world's darker peoples, to draw on their searing legacies and insights . . . We need Du Bois today, perhaps more than ever."[7]

Why do we need Du Bois now more than ever? First, Du Bois's international perspective was not only prescient, it is vital for the global moment of which we are a part. Second, Du Bois's critique of capitalism, along with capitalism's contemporary problems, demand envisioning more equitable solutions to current dilemmas. Finally, Du Bois's cognizance about multiracial alliances in the quest for racial justice-something he did not always see-is crucial as claims about today's so-called post-racial moment conceals gaping inequality even as it seeks to levy more power for the ruling classes. The prophets of today's so-called post-racial age, while they champion examples of individual racial and ethnic solidarity, often fail to analyze the structural inequalities that continue to divide those same individuals.

Du Bois remains relevant first because he framed his analysis of history and society in international perspective. After all, Du Bois first made his famous and prophetic pronouncement about the color line as the problem of the twentieth century in London. Convened in 1900, Du Bois's "Address to the Nations of the World" at the first Pan African Conference portended a life of organizing, writing, and otherwise agitating for justice across the globe. From numerous works of his later years such as Black Folk Now and Then (1939), Dusk of Dawn (1940), Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945), and The World and Africa (1947), we read how Du Bois understood the interdependence of the world's peoples, and how empires and unjust regimes commit themselves to a sadistic dynamism of exploitative practices. In the Introduction to his 1947 Appeal to the World, Du Bois presented racial justice in the United States in global terms. He wrote, "Therefore, Peoples of the World, we American Negroes appeal to you; our treatment in America is not merely an internal question of the United States. It is a basic problem of humanity; of democracy; of discrimination because of race and color; and as such it demands your attention and action. No nation is so great that the world can afford to let it continue to be deliberately unjust, cruel and unfair toward its own citizens." Today's interconnected and interdependent world is not just about snazzy smartphones, Skyping with friends, or the crowdsourcing of knowledge at Wikipedia; it is also about understanding the interconnection of capital and labor-mediated through amazing technological advances-and how the moneyed and ruling classes seek to harness such technologies to wrest both power and profits from working-class and middle-class folks.

Du Bois's relevance also has to do with his incisive criticism of capitalism. Du Bois deftly drew analytical connections between capitalism, race, empire, class, and democracy, particularly in his later works. Du Bois's 1952 book In Battle for Peace, a summary of his McCarthy trial, makes these connections. "As, then, a citizen of the world as well as of the United States of America, I claim the right to know and think and tell the truth as I see it," Du Bois proclaimed, "I believe in Socialism as well as Democracy. I believe in Communism . . . I believe in free enterprise among free men and individual initiative under physical, biological and social law . . . . We claim that America leads in democracy. This claim is old and has at times approached truth. It is not true today. For democracy, while logical in theory, is difficult to achieve and maintain in practice . . . . Wealth is not and never was entirely the result of individual effort; it always involved some measure of group co-operation."[8]

Another place to place to observe Du Bois's critique of capitalism is to return to his October 1961 letter of application to the Communist Party, referenced above. Speaking confidently with conviction, the 93-year-old Du Bois wrote to Gus Hall: "Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism-the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute-this is the only way of human life. It is a difficult and hard end to reach, it has and will make mistakes, but today it marches triumphantly on in education and science, in home and food, with increased freedom of thought and deliverance from dogma. In the end communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day." While in hindsight Du Bois's confidence in communism's ascendancy seems to overreach, it is true today that a Communist Party rules the world's most populous socialist country.

In Du Bois's final book, his posthumously published Autobiography (1968), he commented, "I believe in communism. I mean by communism, a planned way of life in the production of wealth and work designed for building a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely profit of a part. . .Once I thought that these ends could be attained under capitalism, means of production privately owned, and used in accord with free individual initiative. After earnest observation I now believe that private ownership of capital and free enterprise are leading the world to disaster." Du Bois linked these observations about capitalism and communism to particular political and economic events of his twilight years. Strikingly, and sadly, Du Bois's prescient words describe our own day, and deserve lengthy quotation. "Even today the contradictions of American civilization are tremendous," Du Bois wrote in his Autobiography's Postlude, "Freedom of political discussion is difficult; elections are not free and fair. Democracy is for us to a large extent unworkable . . . Those responsible for the misuse of wealth escape responsibility, and even the owners of capital often do not know for what it is being used and how. The criterion of industry and trade is the profit that it accrues, not the good which it does either its owners or the public. Present profit is valued higher than future need. We waste materials. We refuse to make repairs. We cheat and deceive in manufacturing goods. We have succumbed to an increased use of lying and misrepresentation . . . I know the United States. It is my country and the land of my fathers. It is still a land of magnificent possibilities. It is still the home of noble souls and generous people. But it is selling its birthright. It is betraying its might destiny."[9]

Finally, Du Bois is relevant today for his vision of a multiracial coalition to work vociferously for justice. In the midst of his McCarthy persecution, his 1951 loyalty trial, Du Bois experienced the generosity and goodwill of a multiracial, cross-class coalition of comrades. As Gerald Horne suggests in his book Race Woman, Shirley Graham Du Bois helped to usher in a wider coalition of comrades who would maintain solidarity with the couple in the face of intense federal scrutiny. In Du Bois's In Battle for Peace (1952), he wrote, "I find, curiously enough then, that my experience in the fantastic accusation and criminal process is tending to free me from that racial provincialism which I always recognized but which I was sure would eventually land me in an upper realm of cultural unity, led by 'My People' . . . . I am free from jail today, not only by those efforts of that smaller part of the Negro intelligentsia which has shared my vision, but also by the steadily increasing help of Negro masses and of whites who have risen above race prejudice not by philanthropy but by brotherly and sympathetic sharing of the Negro's burden and identification with it as part of their own . . . . I therefore thank all Communists and Socialists who stood out for my right to advocate peace, just as I thank all conservatives and liberals for daring to stand for what they conceived to be right, despite the 'Red' smear. I utterly refuse to be stampeded into opposition to my own program by intimations of dire and hidden motives among those who offer me support."[10]

These quotations taken from several of W. E. B. Du Bois's later works document his analytically based international perspective, present his cogent critiques of capitalism, and disclose his vision of multiracial democratic solidarity. Despite the sobering and difficult circumstances of Du Bois's closing years-not unlike our own times that demand sober analysis and committed action-from Du Bois's later work we can both recall his "legacy of scholarship and struggle" and continue to benefit from his "legacy of scholarship and struggle" for the days ahead.

Coda: Reading W. E. B. Du Bois

While Du Bois's full corpus deserves careful study, in this historical moment the tremendous work he produced in his twilight years demands our undivided attention. In the midst of a busy final three decades narrated above, consider the roster of Du Bois's published books during his latter decades. Keep in mind, Du Bois was in his late 60s when he published Black Reconstruction in 1935 and 93 when he published the third and final volume of the Black Flame trilogy. Two posthumous books also reflect work completed during his later years.

W. E. B. Du Bois's Late Career Books

Black Reconstruction 1935

Black Folk Then and Now 1939

Dusk of Dawn 1940

Color and Democracy 1945

The World and Africa 1947

In Battle for Peace 1952

Ordeal of Mansart 1957

Mansart Builds a School 1959

Worlds of Color 1961

ABC of Color 1963, 1970

The Autobiography 1968

The immediate task for our own time is to continue to cultivate a principled consciousness coupled with a critical perspective on today's most vital issues. One way to achieve these goals is to engage in perpetual historical study, investigation, and analysis of Du Bois's writings. Secondary works are of tremendous value in narrating the multiple contexts of Du Bois's later years-and the scholars noted above have produced excellent work-but I also urge a close reading of Du Bois's own words. In addition to the volumes listed above and referenced in the footnotes, recent publications provide access to Du Bois's global vision such as Bill V. Mullen and Cathryn Watson's, W. E. B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line (University Press of Mississippi, 2005) and Eugene Provenzo and Edmund Abaka's W. E. B. Du Bois on Africa (Left Coast Press, 2012). Two valid on-line proletarian options, which I'd recommend to Du Bois students of all ages and backgrounds, are Dr. Robert Williams's WEBDuBois.org. Williams's site is the most up-to-date compendium of Du Bois on the Internet. While the large majority of the site provides tremendous material on the first half of Du Bois's life, Williams continues to update links to the work of Du Bois's later career. Finally, thanks to a number of timely grants and the heroic and painstaking work of archivists, the digitization of Du Bois's Papers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst will continue for many years to come. The user-friendly Credo digital archive yields a tremendous amount about Du Bois's twilight years, including a large collection of photographs and rare video footage. Begin reading here.

I end this Coda with Du Bois's own words. I select a prayer that comes from a series of meditations Du Bois wrote while teaching at Atlanta University around 1910. As Herbert Aptheker explained in his Introduction to the collection he edited and titled Prayers for Dark People, these prayers resurfaced toward the end of Du Bois's earthly sojourn in 1961 as Aptheker was editing Du Bois's enormous archive. These prayers were not published until 1980, 17 years after Du Bois's death. Timely when he first uttered them, timely when Aptheker discovered them in 1961, Du Bois's mediation remains important today.

Grant us, O God, the vision and the will to be found on the right side in the great battle for bread, which rages around us, in strike and turmoil and litigation. Let us remember that here as so often elsewhere no impossible wisdom is asked of men, only Thine ancient sacrifice-to do justly and love mercy and walk humbly-to refuse to use, of the world's goods, more than we earn, to be generous with those that earn little and to avoid the vulgarity that flaunts wealth and clothes and ribbons in the face of poverty. These things are the sins that lie beneath our labor wars, and from such sins defend us, O Lord. Amen. Micah 6:1-8.[11]

[1]Charles Euchener, Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington (Boston: Beacon, 2011), 182-184.

[2]John Oliver Killens, "Introduction," in W. E. B. Du Bois, An ABC of Color (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 9-10.

[3]Books that effectively chronicle Du Bois's closing years include Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boulder: Paradigm, 2005), Gerald Horne, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2010), Eric Porter, The Problem of the Future World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), and Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 1-15, 54-93.

[4]W. E. B. Du Bois to Gus Hall (October 1, 1961), in W. E. B. Du Bois, The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, Volume 3 Selections, 1944-1963, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), 438-440; Horne, W. E. B. Du Bois, 186-191; Horne, Black and Red, 331-357; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Encyclopedia Africana," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (March 2000): 203-219; Jonathan Fenderson, "Evolving Conceptions of Pan-African Scholarship: W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson & the Encyclopedia Africana, 1909-1963," Journal of African American History 35/1 (Winter 2010): 71-91; Yunxiang Gao, "W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois in Maoist China," Du Bois Review 10/1 (2013): 59-85; Julius Lester, "Introduction," in W. E. B. Du Bois, The Seventh Son: The Thoughts and Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Julius Lester (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 1:147-152.

[5]See, for example, Bettina Aptheker, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006), 93-94; Bettina Aptheker, "W. E. B. Du Bois: Personal Stories/Political Reflections," 17th Annual Du Bois Lecture (2011), http://www.thewebduboiscenter.com/w-e-b-du-bois-center/events; Douglas Robinson, "Du Bois 'Duplicity' Decried by Nixon," New York Times (March 9, 1966), http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/05/specials/dubois-nixon.html; Tim Wheeler, "Du Bois Clubs Reunion: Memories, Battles Yet to Be Fought and Won!," Peoples World (June 18, 2013), http://peoplesworld.org/dubois-clubs-reunion-memories-battles-yet-to-be-fought-and-won/; Amy Bass, Those About Him Remained Silent: The Fight Over W. E. B. Du Bois (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

[6]Martin Luther King, "Honoring Dr. Du Bois," in W. E. B. Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890-1919, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 12-20; John Hope Franklin, "W. E. B. Du Bois: A Personal Memoir," The Massachusetts Review 31/3 (Autumn 1990): 409-428.

[7]Keith Feldman, "A Haunting Echo: W. E. B. Du Bois in a Time of Permanent War," Al Jazeera (February 10, 2013) available at http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/20132772031503974.html.

[8]W. E. B. Du Bois, In Battle for Peace, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1952]), 114-117.

[9]W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1968]), 35, 273.

[10]Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 140-141; Du Bois, In Battle for Peace, 107-108, 112.

[11]W. E. B. Du Bois, Prayers for Dark People, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 29.

*[Biographical note: Phillip Luke Sinitiere (Ph.D., University of Houston) is Professor of History at the College of Biblical Studies. A scholar with specialties in American religious history and African American studies, he is co-author of Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace (NYU, 2009), and co-editor of Protest and Propaganda: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Crisis, and American History (Missouri, 2013) and Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith (Oxford, 2013).]

Photo: BET

Work in Indiana and make less than in 1967

Sun, 18 Aug 2013 07:24:00 +0000

In 1967 I worked a full-time job in a fast-food restaurant in Michigan; because this restaurant was unionized, under collective bargaining with HERE, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees, AFL-CIO, I received an hourly wage of $1.60, 20ȼ, or 14.29%, more than the 1967 federal minimum wage of $1.40 an hour. Today, mid-2013, I am working in a warehouse in Indiana through a temp service for $9.00 an hour; that means, in real terms, I am making less than I made in 1967, both in terms of the minimum wage, and my wage of 20ȼ over the minimum wage. In this, I am but a typical Hoosier worker.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of the U.S. Department of Labor provides a most useful table for calculating real wages in terms of past income, its historical table of all the changes in the calculation of the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) from 1913 to the present, holding the average of the years 1982-1984 as the benchmark of 100.

With a 1967 yearly average CPI of 33.4, and a current (June 2013) CPI standing at 233.504, we can calculate that it would take a wage of $9.78 an hour to have the same purchasing power of the 1967 minimum wage of $1.40 per hour, and it would take a wage of $11.11 an hour to equal the purchasing power of my then-earned $1.60 an hour. Or, I would have to earn 78ȼ an hour more just to have the purchasing power of the 1967 minimum wage, and $2.11 more in order to have the purchasing power of my then $1.60 per hour. A good measure of just how much, not only I, but many other workers, have lost in the interim! An interim characterized ever since the 1970s by stagnant wage rates, only sporadic increases in the minimum wage, and continuing inflation: in real terms, workers have lost purchasing power, and the economy has been sheltered from the full effect of this loss only by more and more people relying on credit: credit cards, loans, and cashing in on housing equity before the housing bubble burst and brought on the current recession. All this while CEO pay has jumped to 354% of the average worker's pay, the largest such gap in the world (even greater than China's), according to the AFL-CIO - and the massively increased productivity gains since the 1960s have almost entirely gone to the already very rich, the famed 1% that Occupy movements brought to the public's attention.

Here in Indiana we have an especially able measure of workers' loss and even descent, in many cases, into the working poor.

That's because the state government agency, the Council for Economic Development, calculated and determined that a "livable wage" in the State of Indiana in 2001 would need to be at least $10.00 an hour for a single person. Since Indiana's cost of living is approximately equal to the national average, and Indiana's "livable wage" is equivalent to the notion of the Living Wage that has been employed both by economists and economic activists, and which is set to be 130% of a poverty wage, we can use the data above provided by the BLS to calculate just what would constitute a Living Wage and a poverty wage that would have general validity across the U.S.

From this data we can see that a Living Wage in June 2013 would have to be $13.18 in order to have the same purchasing power of the $10.00 an hour "livable wage" of 2001. This would make a poverty wage $10.13 an hour or less.

But Indiana's economic shift from a manufacturing hub, with its concomitant loss of good-paying, frequently union, jobs [Indiana lost 200,000 jobs in manufacturing alone from the late 1970s to 2010. Building Indiana, August 27, 2010, "Study Details Indiana's Manufacturing Industry,"

This doesn't include job losses in other sectors.], and its transformation into a "logistics economy" of warehouses (due to Indiana's central location and access to airports, railways and interstate highways) ; the "logistics economy" has greatly expanded since then.] and low-wage service industries, means that a typical Hoosier wage now is only $9.00-$10.00 an hour, and in retail and food services even less. (Here in Central Indiana where I live, warehouse employment, often only or primarily through temp agencies, is ubiquitous and pays only $9.00-$10.00 per hour.) What that means is that numerous Hoosier workers are in fact toiling for poverty-level wages. $9.00 an hour is only 88.45% of the upper-bound poverty wage of $10.13, and even $10.00 an hour is still only 98.717% of this wage. In terms of a Living Wage it's even worse: $9.00 an hour is only 68.29% of the $13.18 per hour Living Wage rate, and $10.00 an hour is only 75.87% of it.

For those making even less, a large number of Hoosier workers, the situation is even worse-and to top it off, the inadequate federal "poverty guideline" of $1,211 per month for food stamps for a single person such as myself, and the state "income standard" of only $710 for a single person to qualify for Medicaid without out-of-pocket costs, or "spend-down," means many working Hoosiers, though in poverty, are still too "rich" for welfare!

In fact, if one works a full-time job at the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, one makes too much to qualify for food stamps. Thus are the poor double-whammied: first by inadequate income, second, by being too "rich" for needed welfare benefits.

The response of the two houses of Indiana's legislature, the Indiana General Assembly, both Republican/Tea Party-dominated, and Indiana's last two Republican Governors, Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence, who've controlled the Governorship since 2004, has been only to attack working people and the poor for "greed": Indiana became a right-to-work state in 2012; the previous year it reduced unemployment benefits by 25% and capped them at only $360 per week (or the full-time job equivalent of $9.00 an hour; but only high wage earners would qualify even for this amount!); further, under present Governor Pence, setting up insurance exchanges and expanding Medicaid coverage to those who make 133% of the federal poverty level under Obamacare, even though federal assistance would be provided, have been refused.

Indiana's poverty rate averaged 14.1% from 2007-2011 under inadequate federal guidelines under inadequate federal guidelines, up from 10.6% in 2006 (data from U.S. Census) and its economic well-being marred by drops in per capita income. (Indiana ‘s per capita income dropped steadily from 2005-2009, and has only risen 1.4% in the last ten years. Indiana ranks 40th nationwide in per capita income; its per capita income in 2012 was only 86.4% of that for the U.S. as a whole, down from 90.6% in 2002.

Such is work and wages in Indiana, where Hoosier workers make only 86ȼ for every dollar in wages paid elsewhere (stated by an organizer with Justice for Janitors, SEIU Local 1).

Photo: Creative Commons 3.0

Reposted from The Examiner.com

Mandela - schmaltzy icon or revolutionary leader?

Sat, 17 Aug 2013 06:11:00 +0000

Sooner or later the news will break that Nelson Mandela has died, and the frenzy whipped up by the media about ‘what will happen next' will resume. The news of his passing and the obituaries are already written and recorded. In many cases eulogies have already been presented, and new ones will be made as soon as the looming announcement is made.

Mandela's condition is variously described as improving, steadily improving, serious but stable, and responsive to treatment. He is receiving the best that the world class South African private health care system can provide, as the Heart Hospital specialises in intensive care and life support, principally, but not only, for coronary patients. But the fact that he's there and not in one of the other hospitals that he's been treated at underscores the seriousness of his situation.

Thousands of messages, drawings, posters and photos from Mandela's masses of admirers decorate the outer walls of the hospital. It's a moving scene of spontaneous feeling amidst the indifferent roar of city traffic. Many of the messages are from schools and youth groups, written by children for whom his time in prison and momentous release are distant legends. People bring their families to visit the place, lay flowers or write their greetings.

In a world singularly lacking in inspiring, visionary and uncorrupted leaders, Mandela seems to be needed more than ever. Though he has been out of the public eye for several years, his authority as a reconciler, peacemaker and champion of the oppressed still resonates, both in South Africa and around the world.

He was admitted to hospital in June, suffering a recurrence of the lung infection that has dogged him on and off since his prison days. He had been hospitalized several times since 2011, and with each round of treatment the speculation over his demise has intensified. Whatever public hysteria there may be when he goes will have become a self-fulfilling media prophecy.

The intense veneration that surrounds Mandela is being stoked and pumped for all it's worth by most formal areas of South African society - government, the tourist industry, publishing, education, and of course the print and broadcast media. ‘Follow Mandela's legacy' is the logo flashed up on public broadcaster TV channels. The streams of TV advertising between programmes are laden with references to the former African National Congress leader, with exhortations to be like Madiba (the clan name that has morphed into an affectionate sobriquet).

In 2009, the UN General Assembly declared 18 July, Madiba's birthday, as International Nelson Mandela Day. The theme of this year was ‘Take action, Inspire Change, Make Every Day a Mandela Day'. And the emphasis of this year's Mandela Day was on food security, shelter and literacy. "Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity," he had said in 2005. "It is an act of justice."

Masses of people congregated around the Heart Hospital on 18 July to sing and celebrate. Ministers sang ‘happy birthday' on a TV special held at the Union Buildings, the official seat of government. Pupils in schools across the country sang ‘happy birthday' in unison at 8.00 local time. President Zuma handed over new houses to poor residents in Danville, near Pretoria.

‘A Celebration - The Man & The Icon', was the headline on the cover of the South African edition of Reader's Digest in July, not a magazine renowned for celebrating revolutionaries. Inside there was a reprint of an old interview with Madiba, highlighted by quotes from Bill Clinton, Bono and others. "Mandela is the closest thing the world has to a secular saint," ran a citation from Time magazine managing editor Richard Stengal.

How are we to disentangle all this from the reality that Mandela represented in his long career as a liberation fighter? The secular sainthood bestowed on him now, and inevitably all the more so in the coming period, is a soft-focus image of a smiley old man dishing out platitudes about inspiration and motivation.

Mandela Day and the image of Mandela we are constantly fed seem to be all about charitable good deeds, or smiling and laughing with Princess Diana, another secular saint. Unwittingly perhaps, and keen to keep Mandela its own, Madiba's lifelong political home, the African National Congress, is happy to promote this cheesy image. And yet Mandela never saw the war on poverty, or on HIV-AIDS, for instance, as having anything to do with charity. It was far more about social justice.

The mountains of glossy Mandela coffee table books, or pocketbooks of anodyne ‘inspirational' Madiba quotes promote a schmaltzy iconography that tends to displace the more arresting accounts in the biographies or autobiographies of Mandela's comrades - people such as Joe Slovo and Mac Maharaj, both leading communist party members before and after the banning of the party in the early 1950s.

As SACP general secretary in the early 1990s, Slovo was Mandela's minister of housing in South Africa's first democratically elected government, inaugurated in 1994. Slovo - the unfinished autobiography of ANC leader Joe Slovo gives a penetrating insight into Mandela's political development.

Initially, in his student days and as a young activist, he was very anti-communist, and aligned to the nationalist liberal-bourgeois mainstream of the early ANC. Mandela was known for heckling communists at ANC meetings - "heckler and disrupter in chief," as Rusty Bernstein later recalled. Later, Slovo found that Mandela's political understanding of Marxism and the history of the communist movement had deepened markedly.

Mandela's great teacher and role model was Walter Sisulu, an immensely influential communist and ANC leader. It was Sisulu more than anyone who shaped the ANC's allegiance with the communist party (the party was first called the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), and then after it re-launched itself underground in 1953 the South African Communist Party (SACP).

Mandela, Sisulu and Oliver Tambo established the youth wing of the ANC in 1944, and represented a new generation of young leaders who gave the ANC a more radical direction. This became particularly crucial following the formal creation of apartheid after 1948, when the ultra-right wing and white supremacist National Party took power.

Some of the best accounts of this era are in Mandela's much sold but little read Long Walk to Freedom, and Padraig O'Malley's Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa.

The increasing militancy of the ANC and the broader Congress Movement, which encompassed other population groups that were oppressed by the apartheid government, eventually led to the realization by Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo, Slovo and other leaders that armed action had to be incorporated into the ANC's tactics and strategies.

Mandela's great contribution to the ANC as a leader in the 1950s was to turn the movement in favour of armed struggle. He was the first commander in chief of Mkhonto we Sizwe (MK), formed following the Sharpeville massacre in 1961. "For almost three decades," he recalled in 1993, "our army and people were compelled to engage in a war of the disadvantaged against the privileged, a slow but intense war of attrition."

SACP leader Chris Hani in addition to Slovo led MK after the 1963-64 Rivonia trial -so-called because of the location where the banned ANC strategized for armed action. The trial aimed to decapitate the ANC, imposing life sentences on 10 ANC leaders, including Mandela, mainly for their activities in the armed struggle. Mandela was the only one of the Rivonia prisoners who was not a member of the SACP central committee.

The history of all this is available from the books, speeches and other publications that one can download from www.anc.org.za the website of the ANC. This, plus the various accounts still available, presents a rounded portrait of Mandela as a political leader whose ideas and actions were rooted in revolutionary traditions.

The SACP was instrumental in shaping the course of ANC policy up until the early 1990s, and the input of communist thinking was key to the movement's regeneration and momentum.

Before the Mandela Miracle and the Rainbow Nation of 1994, the ANC's chief champion on the world stage was the Soviet Union and its allies. The West - the US, Britain, France, West Germany and others - routinely opposed sanctions against the apartheid regime and labelled the ANC and Mandela as terrorists. Without the support of the Soviet Union it is unlikely that the ANC would have managed to wage the level of struggle it did during the years of exile and underground operations.

Mandela never wavered in his respect for the SACP its role in South Africa or sought to distance the ANC from it when opportune. "It is special," he said of the SACP's place in 1995, " because of the critical role the party  has played in our country's history, because of its relevance to today's politics; and because it is bound to make an impact on the future of our  society."

He also believed strongly in the Alliance, comprising the ANC, SACP and the trade union confederation COSATU, which remains a core institution in South Africa's political landscape.

As he mentions in his autobiography, he differed from communists in his belief that class antagonisms could be reconciled, but he saw in them crucial and dependable allies in the liberation struggle.

In the years immediately after his release from prison and the unbanning of the ANC, the SACP and other organizations, the National Party government under FW De Klerk sought to cripple the ANC and sever its links with the SACP in a mass of covert and semi-covert ways.

Using a loose clandestine network of security operatives and right-wing elements, it promoted violence between supporters of Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosutho Buthelezi and the ANC, and thousands of other random killings and attacks.

The aim was to destabilize the ANC by depicting it as steeped in violence and disorder, in particular in order to enflame fears among the country's white minority population about what would happen to them under majority rule in a unitary state.

Mandela condemned the regime for playing a double game of being in talks with the ANC in the Conference on a Democratic South Africa, but all the while stoking violence throughout the townships. He and SACP leader Chris Hani worked together closely, and toured the country together to urge peace making in communities.

He saw the urgent need to foster reconciliation, not only to tackle the violence affecting the country, but also in order to narrow the divisions that apartheid had created between the population groups. Doing so was the key to gaining the stability needed to sustain any sort of democratic future.

Hani's assassination in April 1993 put South Africa on the verge of civil war. Mandela put all his efforts into calming the situation, wholly eclipsing De Klerk in moral authority and gravitas. A white assassin had murdered Hani, a point the ANC leader used astutely:

"A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster. A white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, this assassin."
Mandela set the course for reconciliation needed to sustain the democratic transformation - the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), beginning with the country's first ever democratic elections. The South African ‘miracle' and the ‘rainbow nation' were born, and with them much of Mandela's global kudos.

But Mandela's iconic status owes much to his role as a team player and disciplined ANC cadre. That he became the symbol of the struggle and the worldwide campaign against apartheid was a conscious decision of the ANC leadership imprisoned on Robben Island or in exile.

Once he was released he frustrated many an interviewer by rooting his motivation for his part in the struggle in the decisions and orientation of the ANC and the liberation movement, and not in some one-man crusade steeped in the aura of personal charisma.

And yet it is the latter view that prevails. Outside the ANC and the Alliance, Madiba is rarely depicted in his political context. Conservative politics in South Africa and elsewhere opportunistically use his image and stature to draw a negative distinction between him and the current ANC.

And in the mass media and popular culture we tend to get an apolitical, toothless Madiba devoid of revolutionary identity, and wholly at odds with his views on fighting social injustice. Worse, there is the unseemly squabbling among some of his family over the use of his name, and more recently the money grubbing cretinism of the Being Mandela reality show, featuring two of his granddaughters.

For the school children and other youngsters who come to the Heart Hospital in Pretoria to paste a ‘get well' message to Madiba and have their photo taken alongside his portrait, his life and example have much to offer that is dynamic and revolutionary. Far more so than the sentimentalized, branded and saintly figure being propagated in his twilight days.

Photo: Wiki

"Humanitarian Intervention": A fraud and a danger for world peace

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 06:54:00 +0000

Samantha Power, appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate to replace Susan Rice as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is one of the best known advocates of a foreign policy orientation variously known as humanitarian intervention or Responsibility to Protect (R2P).

This is not good news for those who want a responsible U.S. foreign policy. Ms. Power, an Irish immigrant and a journalist with legal training, has had a long interest in the issue of genocide and crimes against humanity. In her journalistic capacity, she observed the Bosnia War in the early 1990s. She has written a number of books, the best known of which is "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" (Flamingo, 2003). Her thinking on how to respond to threats of mass violation of human rights was strongly influenced by the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, in which between a half a million and a million people were slaughtered, and the Kosovo War in 1998-1999.

The frame of reference for Ms. Power's thinking sees the United States as self-evidently a force for good in the world, when and if it chooses to act to end the brutal abuses of despotic regimes overseas. U.S. administrations are to be criticized for their failures to act forcefully, not their interventions. She was shocked when the United States, in her opinion, failed to act more forcefully to intervene in Rwanda and the Balkans. She also thinks that there should have been an intervention to overthrow the bizarre Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in 1975 to 1978 (there was, but by socialist Vietnam and not "the West"). She was a strong advocate for U.S. and NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, and pushes for more forceful intervention in Darfur in the Sudan.

In addition, she sees the main source of violations of human rights worldwide as being national governments and ruling elites who use violence to control their peoples. She pays little attention to economic injustices which, in any given year, kill more innocent people that direct armed action does, through starvation, malnutrition and preventable diseases. And she is criticized for emphasizing the failure of the United States to intervene against certain states, while not talking and writing nearly as much about the fact that the United States, France, Britain and other wealthy capitalist states have themselves been the major supporters of many brutal genocidal regimes: Suharto in Indonesia, the military regimes in Central and South America, the apartheid regime in South Africa, and others. She had criticized Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians, but hastily backed away from those views at her confirmation hearings. It is likely that she will be part of the faction in the Obama administration that pushes for more direct intervention in Syria.

Samantha Power did not invent the "humanitarian intervention" stance by herself. It has been promoted by others, including Power's predecessor as U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, and former French cabinet minister Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Medicins sans Frontieres. Kouchner was Minister of Health in a Socialist Party government but then Minister of Foreign Affairs under right wing President Nicolas Sarkozy. Specific humanitarian interventionists such as Power, Rice and Kouchner are often accused of as being "leftists" but in fact their political advocacy brings them on a converging trajectory with right wing groups such as the neo-cons (in the case of Kouchner, supporting Sarkozy's push to intervene in Libya). Power has been close to President Obama since his Senate days, and would have been given a top post in the Obama administration much earlier had she not, during the 2008 presidential campaign, blurted out to a reporter that she thought Hillary Clinton was "a monster".

Her predecessor, Susan Rice, did not get the job of Secretary of State because of the Republican campaign against her on the issue of the Benghazi attack in which the U.S. ambassador was killed. But as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. she has been known for her attacks on socialist Cuba which have sometimes been quite intemperate.

The humanitarian intervention or R2P stance has spawned the creation or got the support of numerous NGOs.

While the humanitarian position was originally formulated, supposedly, in response to massively genocidal situations, it is subject also to mission creep. In her confirmation hearing, Power emphasized that she was going to work to shape up the United Nations, and specifically that she would use it to go after Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and Russia, all of whom she accused of persecuting "civil society", but in none of which is anything going on remotely similar to the Rwanda genocide. The comments on Venezuela led to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whose election on April 14 is still not recognized by the United States, to back away from efforts at reconciliation with the Obama administration. http://english.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/130719/washington-endorses-samantha-powers-criticism-against-venezuela

The Humanitarian Intervention/R2P policy stance as articulated by people like Power, Rice and Kouchner and as practiced by NATO and by the U.S. and Western European governments can be criticized for additional things:

*It weakens the United Nations and other real international bodies, and works to substitute NATO military force for international cooperation.

*It weakens the state sovereignty of the poorer countries in the world; this sovereignty is essential to prevent the wealthier capitalist powers from riding roughshod on other nations and forcing them to accept trade and financial arrangements that are opposed to the interests of their working class and poor farmers.

*It willfully ignores the law of "unintended consequences"; in the case of Libya, for example, it glosses over the fact that the violent overthrow of the Gadafi regime has had some extremely negative consequences, including civil war in Mali and the loss of formerly generous Libyan financial aid to very poor African countries.

In several of the cases which have been used to push the argument for humanitarian intervention by the U.S.A., NATO or the wealthy powers, it can be shown that these powers had a lot to do with creating the circumstances for genocide in the first place.

In the Bosnia and Kosovo cases, the United States, after the Second World War, provided refuge for fascist ultra-nationalists of all groups (including Serbs, Croatians and others), and worked for decades to exacerbate ethnic tensions in socialist Yugoslavia. Sometimes right wing Serbian "Chetniks" and Croatian "Ustashe" were known to fight it out within ethnic enclaves of the United States itself, but the point was to undo the fragile ethnic unity of Tito's socialist Yugoslavia. "Displaced persons", included Nazi collaborators, were allowed to settle in the United States and continue to agitate for their irredentist ethnic causes. When the Yugoslav communists could not keep things together after the death of Tito, these elements came to the fore with programs of ethnic cleansing.

The case of Rwanda involved commercial and geopolitical rivalry between the United States and France in Central Africa. Rwanda, and its twin state, Burundi, were never French colonies. They had been independent African kingdoms until taken over by Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany in the 1890s. After the First World War they were awarded to Belgium, to punish Germany and to compensate Belgium for German depredations during the war. Nobody asked the mass of the Rwandan and Burundian people for their views on the matter; nor did it occur to the victorious Entente powers that Belgium's record in colonial administration in Central Africa was not exactly spotless!

Both Germany and Belgium found it convenient to rule Rwanda and Burundi through their indigenous monarchs, who were derived from the Tutsi social group, about 17 percent of the population of Rwanda. The social stratification of the two kingdoms involved a differentiation of wealth, prestige and power between an elite group of the dominant Tutsis and the subordinate Hutu farmers. Instead of trying to soften these differences, the German and Belgian colonial regimes made them more rigid. Thus, when the two countries gained independence in 1960, violence between Hutus and Tutsis flared. Long before the 1994 genocide, there had been bloodletting in both places, both of whose monarchies were overthrown. In Ruanda, the Hutus became dominant and many Tutsis were exiled.

The wealthy developed countries, France and the United States, did not play a constructive role. The French, under the presidency of the Socialist Party's Francois Mitterand, saw an opportunity to expand trade and influence into another "francophone" state, Rwanda. They began to channel support to the government of President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, in spite of the fact that its policy toward the Tutsi population was moving in a genocidal direction. http://porfinenafrica.blogspot.com/p/el-genocidio-de-ruanda.html The United States began to tilt toward Tutsi rebels living in Uganda. Washington brought a major leader of the Tutsi exiles in Uganda, Paul Kagame, to the U.S. to participate in a military training course, and flew him back to assume command of the Rwandan Patriotic Army, composed of exiled Tutsi fighters, in 1990.

There is much yet unknown about the specific roles that outside forces, particularly France and the United States, played in the lead-up to the Rwandan genocide. Two days after the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were killed when their airplane was shot down over the Rwandan capital, Kigali, two French agents and the wife of one of them were murdered by parties unknown in their house in Kigali, raising the suspicion that they might have known too much about French-Rwandan cooperation and the plans for the genocide. http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade+world/rwanda A French parliamentary investigation after the fact is seen as a snow job by some. But a new investigation is ongoing.

Kagame, now president of Rwanda, has been praised by some for bringing order and prosperity to his country. But some of that prosperity may have come from continuing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo next door, where Rwanda is accused of participating in the violent looting of Congolese mineral wealth. The deaths in the various Congolese civil wars, still ongoing, have passed five million, or five to ten times the maximum number who died in the 1994 Rwanda genocide. In addition, Rwandan laws prohibiting denial of the 1994 genocide have been used to persecute dissidents.

In other cases, including especially Darfur in the Sudan and the multiple conflicts in the Sahel region of West Africa, massive human rights crises have been caused by conflict arising from competition over resources. In both places, advancing desertification has led herding communities to push into areas traditionally inhabited by crop cultivators, leading to bloodshed and massive refugee problems. The "West" has worsened these situations by its trade and economic policies, and by the military intervention in Libya which has spread former Libyan fighters and vast quantities of armaments all over the Sahel region. This has given France a convenient excuse for yet more "humanitarian intervention", in this case in Mali.

In each of these cases, the imperial policies of the "humanitarian" developed capitalist states set the stage for the ensuing bloodshed. In each case U.S. and European based multinational corporations were the beneficiaries of the intervention. Yugoslavia's publicly controlled industries, including the Yugo automobile works, were destroyed, to be replaced by multinationals. In Ruanda, the replacement of French by U.S. interests has been so great that the country is now an Anglophone and not Francophone state.

There is real danger that with appointments such as those of Power and Rice, the Obama administration may be moving in an even more interventionist direction. All progressive people should oppose this, and struggle instead for a policy that eschews military solutions even under a "humanitarian" pretext, and instead, changes U.S. trade and economic policy in such a way that the kinds of situations which are likely to produce mass killings and refugee crises can be stopped before the blood begins to flow.

Photo: Creative Commons 3.0