“we are being slowly eased into a world where we are all potentially guilty until we can prove otherwise.”

In Frantz Kafka’s The Trial, Joseph K, the central character, is driven to paranoia and despair after finding himself charged with an unnamed offence about which no evidence is ever presented. Kafka wrote what he thought was a grotesquely exaggerated parable to show what can go wrong – and how easily so – when societies lose their power to hold  rulers accountable. Yet little did he know that, barely half a century on, his attempt at far-fetched dystopia would be rendered not just a banal plausibility but a hardened, crude reality for countless innocents across the world. The idea that anyone could be detained on suspicion of a crime of whose nature they cannot be told, the evidence for which they cannot see, would have seemed preposterous to the 13th century drafters of the Magna Carta let alone to a notionally “civilised” modern society such as 21st century Britain. And yet, this is precisely the sort of moral quagmire we have sleepwalked into. Last week, I took part in a discussion programme (“The World This Week“, presented by Phil Rees) that touched upon the subject of the detention without charge of UK citizens. In particular, the programme focused on the fact that many of the people affected, such as Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan, are facing the serious prospect of being extradited to the United States, all for alleged crimes taking place in the UK. It’s important to note that we are not talking here about someone being detained for a few hours, or even days, while urgent investigations are being carried out – which would have had at least some semblance of logic. In fact, most of these men have been held for years: five years in the case of Talha Ahsan, eight in the case of Babar Ahmad, and twelve for two others – all of whom, let us remember, have not been charged with any crime whatsoever. The case of Talha Ahsan, a poet and first class SOAS graduate, who suffers from Asperger’s, is worth highlighting for being both representative of the others and indicative of the sheer senselessness of what passes for due process in this country. Despite having spent half a decade in prison, Talha has, to this day, seen no charges being levelled againt him, nor has he ever been questioned by either UK or US police. Furthermore, his lawyers are yet to be granted the chance to see any evidence against their client, and have thus been left with the task of fighting shadows and spectres. Predictably, Talha’s predicament, and that of the others, has met with almost total indifference by their own government. For all his rhetorical flexing of patriotic muscles, David Cameron (like Blair and Brown before him) has shown himself to be a meek and docile servant to US interests. Instead, the coalition’s much vaunted civil liberties agenda – supposedly providing a corrective swerve to New Labour’s decade-long assault on our freedoms – has so far given us the brilliant prospect of seeing every text, email and phone-call we ever make being recorded and monitored by the State. In effect, we are being slowly eased into a world where we are all potentially guilty until we can prove otherwise. These are not issues restricted to Muslim Britons either. Two prominent cases are those of Richard O’Dwyer and Gary McKinnon, whose planned extradition rests solely on the premise they represent a serious, existential threat to the United States, whose government, (as I mention in the programme) was revealed as recently as two weeks ago to have been training, on U.S. soil, members of the MEK, an organisation which figures on its own list of terrorist groups. I recommend that readers watch the contributions by my co-guests, Hamja Ahsan (brother of Talha) and Makbool Javauid (human rights lawyer), who both provide an excellent summary of the cases and a bleak glimpse into the threats facing civil liberties in this country. As prominent lawyers, legal experts and civil liberties campaigners have pointed out, UK citizens, whatever their colour, creed or political persuasion, should be tried in their own country, based on evidence they can see and challenge. Anything less is simply not good enough. Of course, had this been a story from China or Russia, the obviousness of such a straightforward demand would have made any further commentary redundant. And yet, we allow for this to happen on our shores, and in our name. We pretend that defending these men is not our responsibility, that their persecution is not a seal of shame on our justice system, that their tragedy is someone else’s problem. Indeed, that these men – who remain innocent until further notice – have been allowed to languish in prison for years without a public outcry is a sad indictment of how far we’ve slumped towards accepting an official line that tells us we’re facing an overwhelming, imminent “security threat” about to engulf us all, and that we must sell our freedoms – hard-earned over centuries of struggle against the powerful – on the cheap to keep this threat at bay. Alas, it seems most of us have bought into the idea that destroying these and other people’s lives is a price worth paying for a false sense of “peace” and “security”. As such, we ought to keep in mind another, less mentioned, aspect of Kafka’s famous novel: the tragic essence of Joseph K’s predicament is not that he is facing a faceless, sadistic bureaucratic monster, against whom all resistance seems utterly futile, but that he is facing it alone. Still, whereas we can’t do much about the fictional Joseph K, there is a lot we are able to do to help Talha Ahsan, Babar Ahmad, Richard O’Dwyer, Gary McKinnon and others. For instance, we can support initiatives such the meeting (details below) due to be held tomorrow, on May 23rd in London, to raise awareness of Talha’s case and that of the others. This is possibly one of our very last opportunities to redress a colossal injustice and stand up for the civil liberties we claim as our own.  We shouldn’t waste it. UNJUST EXTRADITION OF BRITISH CITIZENS TO THE US MUST STOP PUBLIC MEETING WEDNESDAY 23RD MAY 6-8PMHEND HOUSE (also Zakat House), 233 SHAFTESBURY AVENUE, LONDON WC2 BEE For more info on those facing detention without charge and extradition to the US, visit the campaign websites for Talha Ahsan, Babar Ahmad, Gary McKinnon, Richard O’Dwyer and Friends Extradited. See Also: Politics When Innocence is Not Enough: Talha Ahsan and the Rise of the (In)Security State

John F. Kennedy and McGeorge Bundy outside the White House, June 13, 1962 (Source: nybooks.com)

Professor Inderjeet Parmar, chairman of the prestigious British International Studies Association, has written an interesting book: Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (Columbia University Press, 2012) in which he argues that philanthropic foundations have provided “a key means of building the ‘American century,’ or an American Imperium, a hegemony constructed in significant part via cultural and intellectual penetration.”

In making the case for this uncontroversial conclusion, he acknowledges that his work builds upon Edward Berman’s “excellent monograph” The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy: The Ideology of Philanthropy (State University of New York Press, 1983). Yet despite these kind words, rather than extending and deepening Berman’s seminal study, Parmar seems to have only revisited it to provide a less radical alternative (albeit Gramscian).

With his sights firmly set on documenting the role of foundations in constructing “global knowledge networks”, Parmar mistakenly concludes that the creation of such networks “appears to be their principal long-term achievement.” However, on a more accurate note, he subsequently adds that “despite their oft-stated aims of eradicating poverty, uplifting the poor, improving living standards, aiding economic development, and so on, even the U.S. foundations’ own assessments of their impact show that they largely have failed in these efforts.”

But while the Big Three foundations may well have created strong global knowledge networks, their principal long-term achievement has simply been to undermine efforts to promote a meaningful democratic alternative to capitalism, both at home and abroad. With foundation knowledge networks being just one instrument among many that have been used to consolidate capitalism.

Other significant tools to enforce American global hegemony include the military, and a commitment to shaping public opinion through propaganda (which is based on the foundations’ “belief in the pervasiveness of popular ignorance and the consequent need for elites to ‘educate’ the people in ‘right thinking’”).[1]

Providing evidence of the central role of foundations in manufacturing consent (both of the masses and of elites), Parmar investigates the work of Hadley Cantril’s Office of Public Opinion Research, a body formed at Princeton University in 1940, with a $90,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Using archival records, Parmar illustrates that Cantril worked with military intelligence agencies during the war, and undertook studies of public attitudes towards Latin America; adding that by 1943 Cantril had received a further $50,000 from the government that did not include “unspecified amounts from the coordinator of inter-American affairs.”

Parmar also points out that the U.S. Army opened a Psychological Warfare Research Bureau within Cantril’s Princeton office. However, despite undertaking archival research into such matters Parmar apparently forgot to conduct a literature review on this subject,[2] only citing one other writer (Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion), whose valid criticisms of foundations he then chose to ignore.

Parmar makes no mention of Cantril’s central role in the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Communications Seminar (1939-40), which had already acknowledged the need to develop ways to manufacture public consent for desired policy changes. He ignores Cantril’s official invitation to study public opinion in Latin America by the US government’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Nelson Rockefeller (in 1940) – an opportunity that Cantril accepted.

Similarly, Parmar fails to inform his readers that, in 1942, Cantril had set up Research Council Inc. with his associate Lloyd Free, then secretary of the Rockefeller Communications Seminar. This is significant because Research Council Inc. then received “almost limitless” funds from the government, mostly in the form of covert funding channelled to them from the CIA.

Christopher Simpson highlights, notably in his book Science of Coercion, that Nelson Rockefeller was “among the most prominent promoters of psychological operations, serving as Eisenhower’s principal advisor and strategist on the subject during 1954-55”; adding that during the 1950s the Rockefeller Foundation was “used as a public front to conceal the source of at least $1 million in CIA funds for Hadley Cantril’s Institute for International Social Research.”

Indeed, Simpson suggests that these CIA funds were used to “gather intelligence on popular attitudes in countries of interest to the agency” and that Cantril’s studies “could serve as a checklist of CIA interventions of the period: Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Poland, and others.”

As such, in this context alone, it is clear that the Rockefeller Foundations’ successes extended far beyond the creation of elite “knowledge networks”, and actually enabled the efficient slaughter and propagandising of civilians all over the world.

Parmar goes on to document the role that the Big Three foundations played in facilitating imperial bloodbaths, but again tends to emphasise the longevity and significance of political networks, not those of murdered political dissidents. He argues that one of the Ford Foundation’s “most controversial” projects took place in Indonesia during the 1950s and 60s. An in-humanitarian intervention that was first criticised in David Ransom’s ground-breaking article “The Berkeley Mafia and the Indonesian Massacre.”

Published “in the left-wing magazine Ramparts, in 1970,” Parmar noted how Ransom “claimed that Ford, along with the Rockefeller Foundation and the American state, had consciously used its Indonesia programs to train anti-Sukarno economists and social scientists, cadres of leaders who would run Indonesia once Sukharno ‘got out.’”

Although, Parmar highlights Ransom’s apparently unnecessary “journalistic hyperbole”, ultimately he chooses to side with Ransom’s critical account against Ford’s nonsensical pluralistic defence.

It should be recognised that in 1965, when General Suharto was brought to power — with a helping hand from his Western friends — the Ford Foundation quickly moved to establish a new assistance program for his bloodthirsty dictatorship. And as Parmar observes, the “massacre of hundreds of thousands of ‘communists’ did not warrant even a footnote” in Ford’s internal reports.[3]

A letter sent to New York from Indonesia on April 10, 1966, from an influential member of the liberal elite (Francis P. Miller) which was passed on to the Ford Foundation’s president, McGeorge Bundy, noted…

…that “Indonesia is vastly different”; the people “now feel that they are masters of their own souls … the country is … violently anti-communistic.  … There is an atmosphere of sustained holiday-spirit and exhilaration over the change; and a virtual worship of the young people who have been forcing all elements against the Sukarno clique and regime.” Miller was “struck. … [by] the virtual hilarity over the liquidation of several hundred thousand fellow-countrymen (the estimate given me by more than one credible Indonesian was 400,000).” Indonesians, in Miller’s experience, had never before known “as much freedom in critical judgments of Sukarno and his policies.” Suharto, conversely, was enjoying “extraordinarily solid and enthusiastic popular support.” (p.145)

Thus, in addition to developing their requisite elite networks in the region, the Ford Foundation was evidently happy to work closely with the CIA to ensure that Indonesia and their natural resources were won for the West; even if it meant the CIA-aided massacre of approximately one million civilians.[4]

In Chile, however, where the U.S. government already exerted considerable influence over their countries internal politics, foundations approached the issue of regime change in a slightly less brutal fashion. In this instance, the foundations not only supported the Milton Friedman(ite) economists, known as the Chicago boys, who “ended up advising Pinochet’s military regime” but also provided ongoing aid to the left-leaning (but far from radical) economists based at the the University of Chile — the dependistas.

Here, as Parmar acknowledges, the fact that many of the dependistas successfully entered the Frei administration — prior to Allende’s election (in 1970) — provides “direct evidence that there was no fundamental ideological divide between the two schools of economic thought.”

Seen in this light it thus becomes clearer why the Ford Foundation, initially at least, did not feel that a military dictatorship would be necessary for Chile. But upon Allende’s rise to power this optimism faded and funding for the dependistas at the University of Chile was abruptly cut off, while in stark opposition the Catholic University’s Chicago boys continued to be well remunerated, even continuing to “receive funding [for the] four years after the military coup, for which they had actively prepared in advance.”[5]

Consequently, that a military coup would ultimately be seen by the CIA and the U.S. government as a necessary safeguard for their corporate interests, should not have surprised anyone in the the foundation world.

The ensuing Pinochet dictatorship was not all good news for capitalist power brokers in the region as the foundations were loathe to see all their hard efforts at cultivating a “pluralistic” technocratic elite (not just grassroots opposition) washed away in a bloodbath. On this score, Parmar writes:

An internal report by Ford shows that after the military coup, foundation officials chose to focus on “preserving” the “valuable human resources” of which their knowledge networks were constructed. Naturally, Ford wanted, during the brutal coup and its repressive aftermath, in which thousands were arrested (approximately 13,000) or killed (approximately 2,700), to focus on the academic community it had helped build and thereby preserve “valuable skills.” But, according to [Jeffrey] Puryear, Ford excluded assistance to “confirmed political militants.” At the University of Chile alone, at least two thousand academic staff (22 percent of the total) were dismissed. Ford chose to grant $500,000 to several of its previously funded organisations to help “rescue” scholars it had funded or who worked in “program-related fields.” The aim was to ensure internal and external refugee scholars’ “productive employment” through travel grants, fellowships, or salary-support supplements. The foundation was in “network-preservation” mode. (p.212)

As Parmar, and Edward Berman before him, have amply illustrated there is no doubt that foundation-supported elite networks have fulfilled a vital service to the longevity of capitalism in the twentieth century and beyond. However, for obvious reasons it is critical that these soft forms of power be considered alongside their natural corollary, that is, the hard and ultra-violent expressions of raw military power.

NOTES:
[1] Parmar, Foundations of the American Century, p.2, p.3, p.11, p.32.
[2] Parmar, Foundations of the American Century, p.79, p.81. The following section draws upon my own summary of this literature, documented in full in Michael Barker, “The Liberal Foundations of Media Reform? Creating Sustainable Funding Opportunities for Radical Media Reform,” Global Media Journal, 2 (1), 2008.
[3] Parmar, Foundations of the American Century, p.135, p.142, p.145.
[4] Parmar writes: “According to Peter Dale Scott, some of the long-term recipients of Ford Foundation funding — including student groups — were deeply involved with the Indonesian military, whose self-image had increasingly developed to encompass a leading political role in national affairs.In particular, groups that had played a role in the failed CIA-sponsored rebellion of 1958 were mobilized, in the 1960s, by the Army’s ‘civic action’ programs. The right-wing Islamic Masjumi party and its allied Socialist Party of Indonesia, led by [Djojohadiksumo] Sumitro, were also backed by the CIA, to the tune of several million dollars. Some SPI intellectuals and their associates in the army were also in close contact with Guy Pauker, an academic at Berkeley and RAND consultant: Pauker was openly advocating that the army take ‘full responsibility’ for Indonesia’s future, take on the PKI, and ‘strike, sweep their house clean.’ Pauker, a vehement anticommunist, was among the scholars who taught army officers at Seskoad counterinsurgency, economics, and administration.” (pp.143-4) Parmar, Foundations of the American Century, pp.143-4. Note that the research activities of the RAND Corporation were intimately entwined with those of the Ford Foundation.[5] Parmar, Foundations of the American Century, p.192, p.198, p.219.

A Sudanese worker inspects the damage to an oil-processing facility in Heglig last month. South Sudan seized Sudan’s main oil field in the town in April, sparking intense fighting. Under strong international pressure, South Sudan withdrew. (Ashraf Shazly, AFP/Getty Images / April 23, 2012)

Once again Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir waved his walking stick in the air. Once again he spoke of splendid victories over his enemies as thousands of jubilant supporters danced and cheered. But this time around the stakes are too high.

An all-out war against newly independent South Sudan might not be in Sudan’s best interest. South Sudan’s saber-rattling is not an entirely independent initiative; its most recent territorial transgressions – which saw the occupation of Sudan’s largest oil field in Heglig on April 10, followed by a hasty retreat ten days later – might have been a calculated move aimed at drawing Sudan into a larger conflict.

Stunted by the capture of Heglig, which, according to some estimates, provides nearly half of the country’s oil production, Bashir promised victory over Juba. Speaking to large crowd in the capital of North Kordofan, El-Obeid, Bashir affectively declared war. “Heglig isn’t the end, it is the beginning,” he said, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal. Bashir also declared a desire to ‘liberate’ the people of South Sudan from a government composed of ‘insects.’ Even when Heglig was declared a liberated region by Sudan’s defence minister, the humiliation of defeat was simply replaced by the fervor of victory. “They started the fighting and we will announce when it will end, and our advance will never stop,” Bashir announced on April 20.

Statements issued by the government of South Sudan are clearly more measured, with an international target audience in mind. Salva Kiir, President of South Sudan, simply said that his forces departed the region following appeals made by the international community. This includes a statement by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which described the attack on Heglig as “an infringement on the sovereignty of Sudan and a clearly illegal act” (Reuters, April 19). A day before the hasty withdrawal, South Sudan government spokesman Barnaba Marial Benjamin claimed there had been no conflict in the first place. His statement was both bewildering and patronizing. He considered Sudan, which was then rallying for war to recapture its oil-rich area, a neighbor and “friendly nation”, and claimed that “up to now we have not crossed even an inch into Sudan” (Associated Press, April 19).

The fact remains, however, that wherever there is oil, political narratives cannot possibly be so simple. Sudan is caught in a multidimensional conflict involving weapons trade, internal instabilities, multiple civil wars and the reality of outside players with their own interests. None of this is enough to excuse the readiness for war on behalf of Khartoum and Juba, but it certainly presents serious obstacles to any attempt aimed at rectifying the situation.

Stirring Conflict

In a statement published last July, Amnesty International called on UN member states to control arm shipments to both Sudan and South Sudan. It accused the US, Russia and China of fueling violations in the Sudan conflict through the arms trade. While China was reportedly supplying the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) with conventional weapons, Russia provided Antonov aircraft and Sukhoi SU-25 fighters.

US support of South Sudan is already well-known. “The US reportedly provided $100 million-a-year in military assistance to the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army),” reported Russia Today on April 19, citing a December 2009 diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks.”

The same cable was used by Amnesty to argue against arming both sides of a potentially volatile conflict.

A day after Amnesty’s call was issued, South Sudan became a sovereign nation, and soon after it became a member of the United Nations and the Africa Union. A hyped sense of achievement was celebrated by the countries that supported the SPLA in Sudan’s long and bloody civil war between 1983 and 2005, which cost an estimated 2.5 million lives. Both Sudanese governments had then promised a new dawn of political freedom and economic prosperity.

Neither the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement nor the January 9-15, 2011 referendum managed to actually redeem the many disputes between both countries. In fact, even before South Sudan gained its independence in July, a conflict in South Kordofan broke out between the Sudanese army and the SPLA. Both sides reportedly committed crimes against civilians.

Various international institutions and media continue to warn of possible starvation in the tumultuous region.

Deadly Embrace

With a single act of aggression, a whole set of conflicts are prone to flaring up. It is the nature of proxy politics, as many armed groups seek opportunities for territorial advances and financial gains. News reports already speak of a possible involvement of Uganda should the fledging war between Khartoum and Juba cross conventional boundaries. “As the possibility of a full-fledged war became unnervingly higher, General Aronda Nyakairima, chief of Uganda’s defense forces, said that his army might be compelled to intervene if Bashir did overthrow South Sudan’s regime,” reported Alexis Okeowo in the New Yorker website (April 20).

Both Sudans are fighting their own war against various rebel groups. Despite the lack of basic food in parts of the region, plenty of weapons effortlessly find inroads to wherever there is potential strife.

According to political author and columnist Reason Wafawarova, US interest in South Sudan is neither accidental nor motivated by humanitarian issues. He told Russia Today, “It would not be surprising if the US is trying to capitalize on the vulnerability of South Sudan in its efforts to establish the AFRICOM base somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.” RT goes on to reference Sudan’s Al-Intibaha newspaper for its reports on Israeli weapon supplies to Juba.

US and Israeli military support of Juba is not a new phenomenon. Sudan’s civil war (1983-2005) could not have lasted as long as it did without steady sources of military funding. And while the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the January 9-15, 2011 referendum, and finally the independence of South Sudan in July were all meant to usher in a new era of peace and cooperation, none actualized. Sudan’s territorial concessions proved most costly, and South Sudan, destroyed and landlocked, was ripe for outside exploitation.

Both countries are now caught in a deadly embrace. They can neither part ways completely, nor cooperate successfully without a risk of war at every turn. Bashir also knows he is running out of options. While Khartoum has already “lost three-quarters of its oil revenue after the secession,” according Egypt’s Al Ahram Weekly, “now it is poised to lose the rest.”

Way Out?

The crisis in the Sudans cannot be resolved by empty gestures and reassuring statements. The conflict in that region has been festering for decades, and war has been the only common language. Powerful countries, including the US, Russia, China, but also regional Arab and Africa players, have often exploited the conflict to their advantage. In a recent analysis, the International Crisis Group in Brussels advised that a “new strategy is needed to avert an even bigger crisis.”

The bigger crisis lies in the fact that Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party (NCP) is facing political instability at home, preventing any real commitment previous agreements. The crisis group recommends that the “UN Security Council must reassert itself to preserve international peace and security, including the implementation of border monitoring tasks as outlined by UN Interim Security Force in Abyei.”

Expecting the Security Council to act in political tandem seems a bit too optimistic. Considering that the US is arming and supporting South Sudan, and that Russia and China continue to support Khartoum, the rivalry in fact exists within the UN itself.

While UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s did condemn the south’s seizure of the oil field, much more is needed. For a sustainable future peace arrangement, Sudan’s territorial integrity must be respected, and South Sudan must not be pushed to the brink of desperation. Rivalries between the US, China and Russia cannot continue at the expense of nations that teeter between starvation and civil wars. And whatever hidden hands continue to exploit Sudan’s woes now need to be exposed and isolated.

Reality TV: “creating the illusion of watching things as they would be with no cameras there.”

Previously articles on Baudrillard have explored the capitalist code and reproduction. This week we explore the implications of these theories for meaning and communication, explaining why, for Baudrillard, everyday meaning is completely penetrated by capitalism. We also explore why, in spite of this penetration, capitalist power is not complete.

Public opinion is one of the new realities which results from the code. It does not exist separately from the specific options provided by pollsters. Often, responses involve guessing what is expected or assumed by those asking the questions. Baudrillard thinks this is a fatal problem with surveys and questions. Respondents always respond the way they think the questioner wants. The process of questioning is therefore entirely circular. The questioner gets out what they put in. (This response to the questioner is also taken to undermine psychoanalysis). Often, public opinion also generates events rather than reflecting them. It becomes yet another model.

Social relations are reorganised in terms of binary codes, such as question/answer and stimulus/response pairings. In cases such as data mining, even individuals can be mapped as sets of digital information. The whole of social reality becomes subject to a regime of ‘descriptive transparency’. Baudrillard sees this process as an infinite division of social reality – the application of a series of binary oppositions. The reading of texts becomes a perpetual test, like a question-answer test. Dialogue between text and reader disappears. Instead, textual choices locate the reader at a point in the code. This creates a densely monological relation. The system makes a naked demand to which no response is possible.

Similarly, objects become tests. The object no longer exists to serve a use. It is a sign which locates the consumer at a particular point in the code. People learn to respond to and decode the code in its own terms, as a series of either-or options. The system tries to induce constant active participation in this process, seeking a joyous, spontaneous feedback. Television, for instance, requires viewers to constantly complete an image they have only partially processed. The system also seeks a kind of permanent mobilisation: people are still fixed in place, whether in factories, consumption sites, prisons, schools, or retraining. This process is a mirror of the code’s attempts to imagine everything as having a place. Rather than a system of production, the system becomes a reading strip, filled with signs to be coded and decoded. Everyone is turned into a terminal for the system.

The system does not appear to be totally controlling, because it is binary. For Baudrillard, this binary system is a way of introducing tactical flexibility into a monopoly system. It is not a genuinely competitive system, but rather, a system of counting or doubling (two identical alternatives). The World Trade Centre is seen as a symbol of the system’s omnipotence, and of its practices of doubling.

This system of testing and questioning alters the construction of meaning. There is now a new regime of truth – not of the mirror or the panoptical gaze, but a ‘manipulative truth’ of a code which interrogates via tests, remembers one’s preferences, or genetically determines things in advance. It is a regime of collective voyeurism – the public spying on itself. It leads to a new kind of uncertainty arising from an excess of information of indeterminate meaning.

For Baudrillard, this regime is a kind of formal participation which is often portrayed as full participation. It is not full participation because there is practically no way of saying “no” to the system. It effectively induces a kind of psychological participation. This participation is now replacing repression as the main form of control. Our intelligence and ability to communicate are reduced theoretically to the ability to provide contrasting or appropriate responses to increasing varieties of stimuli.

This leads, for instance, to a crisis of electoral representation. The so-called representatives control the process of opinion-formation so well, they no longer represent something outside themselves. They become unrepresentative for this reason. Opinion surveys and television represent nothing. They illogically project the new order – the order of statistics, operationalism and simulation – onto a traditional value-system of representation and free will. The two orders are actually incommensurable.  But the illusion of their compatibility moralises the regime of simulation. It creates a moral philosophy of information.

Baudrillard sees this new regime of truth as a regime of doubling. The world is catalogued and analysed, turned into models, then artificially resurrected from the models made of it. This creates a doubled world which is at once artificial and strangely similar to the original. It short-circuits and then duplicates reality through signs. This leads to a world in which the ‘real’, the ‘event’, and real antagonism are prevented in advance.

Baudrillard takes as examples the replacement of people touching each other with touch therapy, of localised food-production with artificially-produced ‘natural’ foods, of walking as a part of life with jogging as a fitness regimen. In another passage, Baudrillard discusses reality TV (and one might add, spaces under CCTV surveillance), as creating the illusion of watching things as they would be with no cameras there. He discusses the routinising of strikes in a similar way. And he talks of therapeutic methods as the functional isolation of the social.

In another essay, he speaks of today’s films as seeming a little too good, too perfect, missing the blemishes and the ‘imaginary’ of the phenomena they imitate. It is as if they are perfected of their processual origins, of the marks of history. They no longer have meaning or aesthetics strictly speaking. For instance, today’s action and sci-fi films increasingly approximate to sequences of special effects. They often lack the charm of their technologically simpler predecessors. But they approximate ever more closely to a perfect simulation of reality. For Baudrillard this is a symptom of social changes, of the replacement of reference by simulation.

It means that television and film are now socially ineffectual. They are image, not imaginary. The action takes place ‘on the screens and nowhere else’. Even when events are real, as in humanitarian crises, the viewer can’t really imagine them. They are consigned to a special, televisual location. And this ‘cool’, deintensified location increasingly spreads to news and politics along with fiction.

The message is lost in the medium, the medium in the real, and the medium and real alike in the hyperreal. The distinct effects of the media are now indiscernible from the wider context. There are no remaining ‘media’ in the sense of mediations which communicate between distinct realities. Such a ‘dialectic’ of communication is replaced by the circularity of the model. Television – and computers – lack irony and artifice. They lack symbolic exchange.

Cinema, in contrast, was once an ‘image’ in an older sense. But it is being contaminated. Films increasingly exist only through a persistent commentary and reinterpretation. It becomes harder to reach the film itself, rather than texts referring to texts. This in turn makes them dysfunctional. They are a means of manipulation in all directions at once (they carry police press releases but also activist press releases as fact). They both simulate within the system and carry the simulation which destroys it. They condemn terrorism but also spread its effects. Events now have no existence beyond the screen which deflects them.

Baudrillard discusses porn in these terms: as sex without sexuality, without sensuality or pleasure, or something more sexual than sex, performing the brute descriptive fact of sex without any real investment, as combinations of encoded possibilities. It functions to neutralise sex, and to spread an energy of neutralisation. It is not contrasted with ‘good sex’ somewhere else. Rather, it seems to suggest that sex does not depend on the existence of pleasurable sex or sexual desire. Sex still functions without desire.

The dream of cloning goes even further, pursuing the emergence of humans from the genetic code, without a sexuality linked to death. Perhaps it would even reproduce a particular identity infinitely, without any difference appearing. The android is another example here: too perfect to be true, like humanity stripped of its blemishes and its processual origins.

There are other examples. Faces stripped of masks. Skin treated as a complete cover without orifices. In mapping, there is a lack of unexplored spaces where imaginary sites can be placed. In other fields, things are cloned or reproduced as distinct segments or modules (such as academic modules or specific skills), with the possibility of reconstructing the whole from any of the interchangeable parts. This is the end both of autonomous parts and of the meaning of the whole. The clone, like the reproduced work of art for Benjamin, loses its aura. It may even become akin to a cancer cell, proliferating without regard for its context.

In various fields, the fading of meaning, the neutralisation through overexposure of the signs associated with pleasure and enjoyment, occurs. This process is itself seductive – there is a pleasure in the process of overexposure itself. Things only have lightness through their secrecy or absence. When everything is present and visible, it becomes a brute material fact, like a rotting body, or like sex in a porn video.

The pure image is the end of the imaginary. By destroying the distance between the thing and its image, it stops the functioning of Lacanian/Freudian fantasy mechanisms. For Baudrillard, like Lacan and Freud, there cannot be an imaginary or real except at a certain distance from the object. The overexposure of objects through simulation brings about the end of the imaginary. Pure images, transparent to each other, shatter if brought into relations, yet contact and penetrate each other all too easily.

The imaginary relies on what is known in psychoanalysis as the scene, a site which is invested with unconscious energy, which is repeated in fantasy and trauma, and (in Lacan) imagined to be the site where the absent cause of desire exists. In order for such a scene to be imagined, there need to be gaps and incomplete spaces where it can be imagined to be. Overexposure and ‘obscenity’ (the absolute proximity of the thing seen) thus destroys the scene.  It is replaced by a ‘screen’, or a surface without depth.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the imaginary functions because of its relationship to the Real, which is not a representable secret. Forcing the revelation of the secret leads to its loss, like the goose that laid the golden eggs. It creates an experience of unbearable obscenity or excessive reality. When there are no secrets left, there is no longer a site to invest with the Real, and construct an imaginary around. Forcing the subject to reveal its secret necessarily fails, because the secret is really a connection outside the self, a relation.

Without the imaginary, there are no breaks between things.  The separations which create difference and intensity are struck with inertia. One is then opened to the undivided multiplication of each phenomenon to excess. Hypervisibility, the loss of secrets and illusions, leads to a kind of indifference: ‘heaven becomes indifferent to the earth’. The simulation or generation of reality from models destroys the social role of the imaginary.

A universal market of signs, models and values leaves no space for the imaginary. It becomes impossible to simulate things in the old way: a fake crime is treated as a real crime, and so on. The imaginary disappears because of the lack of a vanishing point where intensities can be invested. Because the system has reached its limits and is saturated, something else takes its place in the imaginary. Intense energies displace themselves from the system, back into the field of symbolic exchange.

“Under Narey’s supervision, the mass rape and torture of children was allowed to continue with a level of institutional complicity that would shock even those most cynical of the prison service. “

A small but revealing sidenote to the recent media furore over “Asian grooming” was added last week by Martin Narey, former head of Barnado’s. On BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, Narey said: “For this particular type of crime, the street grooming of teenage girls in northern towns … there is very troubling evidence that Asians are overwhelmingly represented in the prosecutions for such offences.”

His comments, criticising the government for ignoring the racial element to this abuse (as opposed to the instances of abuse committed by white Britons, which of course carry no racial connotations, whiteness being defined — as Gary Younge has shown us — as the absence of race) were picked up by the media. They were used to support a racialised moral panic whose sheer brashness was reminiscent of an earlier time in British history.

What was missing from this coverage was any mention of Martin Narey’s history. The Guardian, which uncritically reported Narey’s comments, apparently did not refer to their own excellent investigation carried out a month earlier by journalists Eric Allison and Simon Hattenstone. The investigation, titled ‘A true horror story: The abuse of teenage boys in a detention centre’, interviewed the many victims of Neville Husband, a prison officer who raped, tortured and abused a large number of boys who had been confined to young offender’s institutions. (The victims state that Husband was not alone in his actions.)

Given the predominance of the term “abuse” in such cases, it is worth going into a couple of the details about what took place under state supervision. One victim noted: “I was raped repeatedly, tied up and ligatured [around the neck]. It was the worst of the worst.” The same boy was gang-raped repeatedly, while tied up, at the house of Neville Husband. “He opened my mouth and spat into it time and time again.” The gruesome details continue, with multiple victims. Dr Elie Godsi, a former senior psychologist for the Home Office, stated: “This is one of the worst cases of sexual abuse I have come across in 17 years of working for the Home Office.” What is being described here is rape and torture, of course, terms which in the English language are somewhat more specific than “abuse.” Some children were driven to suicide while they were still in prison. It is not known how many eventually did so as adults.

Husband’s case was so outrageous, and so distressing to its victims, due to the level of rampant institutional complicity that it involved. At a number of stages the police and prison services were made aware of the rape of children in their care. One boy went immediately to a police station on being released (in 1977) to report the rape, only to be immediately dismissed. The police “had evidence of his obsession with child pornography dating back decades”, and “Husband’s interest in young boys was known as far back as 1969, 34 years before he was convicted.” It was only in 2003 that Husband was finally convicted of sexually abusing five young male inmates between 1974 and 1984. There has never been an inquiry into Medomsley Detention Centre, where some of the worst instances of abuse took place.

What connection does this have with the recent “grooming” case? It turns out that Martin Narey, who bravely came forward to confront the Asian community, was director general of the prison service from 1998 until 2003, when Neville Husband was convicted. He had been the assistant governor at both Frankland and Deerbolt Young Offenders Institutions, in which capacity Husband had been under his supervision. Last month, following the Guardian’s investigation, Narey admitted that, according to the Guardian, “the service dealt inadequately with sexual abuse during his tenure.”

This is putting it somewhat lightly. Under Narey’s supervision, the mass rape and torture of children was allowed to continue with a level of institutional complicity that would shock even those most cynical of the prison service. Many would argue (myself included) that Narey himself carries some direct complicity. (His career, by the way, didn’t end there: Narey moved from the prison service to become the head of Barnado’s in 2005, a charity which decided six years later to work with the UK Border Agency in running a detention facility for the children of migrants and refugees.) All this, I should add, is not mere historical detail. Many victims of rape in Young Offender’s Institutions are still very much alive; they were consistently refused government compensation until 2009. Government resistance went as far as bringing doctors to testify in court that the child victims of rape were “genetically predisposed to being abused”.

The recent sexual abuse and rape “grooming” cases are, of course, horrific. Any failings of the police, social services and CPS to investigate should be carefully analysed and rectified, and those responsible should be held accountable. But we might excuse some of the victims of Neville Husband and his friends in the police force, prison service and justice system for treating Martin Narey’s comments with derision. They might legitimately ask that Narey concern himself not with the complicity of the “Asian community” (an absurdly and deliberately nebulous term) in abuse and rape, but with his own complicity and the institutions for which he worked at a high level in abuse and rape on a greater scale, over a longer time period, with even younger victims who — being confined in prison, and children — had no way out.

And if these victims argue that Martin Narey should be answering questions at an inquiry, rather than offering his comments on recent abuse cases, it would be difficult to disagree with them. Still, there is some benefit to be gained from Narey’s recent media appearances. It seems the general rule of invoking racism to deflect attention from one’s own complicity in crimes still holds: and as a case study this might prove useful to others who carry similar levels of complicity, or perhaps to academics studying race.

After all, it would hardly be an exaggeration to suggest Husband’s case demonstrates that large swathes of Britain’s criminal justice system have proved themselves to be institutionally and deliberately complicit in the worst imaginable kinds of abuse, rape, and torture of children. The “invoking-race-as-distraction” trick — which has an illustrious history in England, from Elizabethan antisemitism to the English Defence League — might, in this context, be a highly useful method of preventing serious questions about institutional complicity arising.

Ilan Pappe (Photo: Paula Geraghty)

I have been a political activist for most of my adult life. In all these years, I have believed deeply that the unbearable and unacceptable reality of Israel and Palestine could only be changed from within. This is why I have been ceaselessly devoted to persuading Jewish society—to which I belong and into which I was born—that its basic policy in the land was wrong and disastrous.

As for so many others, the options for me were clear: I could either join politics from above, or counter it from below. I began by joining the Labor Party in the 1980s, and then the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash), when I declined an offer to join the Knesset.

At the same time, I focused my energies on working alongside others within educational and peace NGOs, even chairing two such institutions: the left-Zionist Institute for Peace Studies in Givat Haviva, and the non-Zionist Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies. In both circles, veteran and younger colleagues alike sought to create constructive dialogue with our compatriots, in the hope of influencing present policy for future reconciliation. It was mainly a campaign of information about crimes and atrocities committed by Israel since 1948, and a plea for a future based on equal human and civil rights.

For an activist, the realization that change from within is unattainable not only grows from an intellectual or political process, but is more than anything else an admission of defeat. And it was this fear of defeatism that prevented me from adopting a more resolute position for a very long time.
After almost thirty years of activism and historical research, I became convinced that the balance of power in Palestine and Israel pre-empted any possibility for a transformation within Jewish Israeli society in the foreseeable future. Though rather late in the game, I came to realize that the problem was not a particular policy or a specific government, but one more deeply rooted in the ideological infrastructure informing Israeli decisions on Palestine and the Palestinians ever since 1948. I have described this ideology elsewhere as a hybrid between colonialism and romantic nationalism.[1]

Today, Israel is a formidable settler-colonialist state, unwilling to transform or compromise, and eager to crush by whatever means necessary any resistance to its control and rule in historical Palestine. Beginning with the ethnic cleansing of 80 percent of Palestine in 1948, and Israel’s occupation of the remaining 20 percent of the land in 1967, Palestinians in Israel are now enclaved in mega-prisons, bantustans, and besieged cantons, and singled out through discriminatory policies.

Meanwhile, millions of Palestinian refugees around the world have no way to return home, and time has only weakened, if not annihilated, all internal challenges to this ideological infrastructure. Even as I write, the Israeli settler state continues to further colonize and uproot the indigenous people of Palestine.

Admittedly, Israel is not a straightforward case study in colonialism,[2] nor can the solutions to either the 1967 occupation or the question of Palestine as a whole be easily described as decolonization. Unlike most colonialist projects, the Zionist movement had no clear metropolis, and because it far predates the age of colonialism, describing it in that way would be anachronistic. But these paradigms are still highly relevant to the situation, for two reasons. The first is that diplomatic efforts in Palestine since 1936 and the peace process that began in 1967 have only increased the number of Israeli settlements in Palestine, from less than 10 percent of Palestine in 1936 to over 90 per cent of the country today.

Thus it seems that the message from the peace brokers, mainly Americans ever since 1970, is that peace can be achieved without any significant limit being placed on the settlements, or colonies, in Palestine. True, settlers have periodically been evicted from Gaza settlements and some other isolated outposts, but this did not alter the overall matrix of colonial control, with all its systematic daily abuses of civil and human rights.

The occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the oppression of the Palestinians inside Israel, and the denial of the refugees’ right of return will continue as long as these policies (occupation, oppression, and denial) were packaged as a comprehensive peace settlement to be endorsed by obedient Palestinian and Arab partners.

The second reason for viewing the situation through the lens of colonialism and anti-colonialism is that it allows us a fresh look at the raison d’être of the peace process. The basic objective, apart from the creation of two separate states, is for Israel to withdraw from areas it occupied in 1967.

But this is contingent upon Israeli security concerns being satisfied, which Prime Minister Netanyahu has articulated as the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, and the rest of Israel’s political center has articulated as the existence of a demilitarized future Palestinian state only in parts of the occupied territories. The consensus is that, after withdrawal, the army will still keep an eye on Palestine from the Jewish settlement blocs, East Jerusalem, the Jordanian border, and the other side of the walls and fences surrounding the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Whether or not the Quartet, or even the present US administration, seeks a more comprehensive withdrawal and a more sovereign Palestinian state, no one in the international community has seriously challenged the Israeli demand that its concerns first be satisfied. The peace process only requires a change in the Palestinian agenda, leaving the Israeli agenda untouched.

In other words, the message from abroad to Israel is that peace does not require any transformation from within. In fact, it even leaves Israel room for interpretation: the Israeli government, apprehensive of the reaction of hardline settlers, was unwilling to evict them from isolated posts in the occupied territories. That even the weak Palestinian leadership has refused to accept this rationale has allowed the Israelis to claim that the Palestinians are stubborn and inflexible, and therefore that Israel is entitled to pursue unilateral policies to safeguard its national security (the infamous “ingathering policy,” as coined by Ehud Olmert).[3]

Therefore, it seems safe to conclude that the peace process has actually deterred the colonizer and occupier from transforming its mentality and ideology. As long as the international community waits for the oppressed to transform their positions, while validating those upheld by the oppressor since 1967, this will remain the most brutal occupation the world has seen since World War II.

The annals of colonialism and decolonization teach us that an end to the military presence and occupation was a condition sine qua non for meaningful negotiations between colonizer and colonized even to begin.
An unconditional end to Israel’s military presence in the lives of more than three million Palestinians should be the precondition for any negotiations, which can only develop when the relationship between the two sides is not oppressive but equal.

In most cases, occupiers have not decided to leave. They were forced out, usually through a prolonged and bloody armed struggle. This has been attempted with very little success in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In fewer cases, success was achieved by applying external pressure on the rogue power or state in the very last stage of decolonization. The latter strategy is more attractive. In any case, the Israeli paradigm of “peace” is not going to shift unless it is pressured from the outside, or forced to do so on the ground.

Even before one begins to define more specifically what such outside pressure entails, it is essential not to confuse the means (pressure) with the objective (finding a formula for joint living). In other words, it is important to emphasize that pressure is meant to trigger meaningful negotiations, not take their place. So while I still believe that change from within is key to bringing about a lasting solution to the question of the refugees, the predicament of the Palestinian minority in Israel, and the future of Jerusalem, other steps must first be taken for this to be achieved.

What kind a pressure is necessary? South Africa has provided the most illuminating and inspiring historical example for those leading this debate, while, on the ground, activists and NGOs under occupation have sought nonviolent means both to resist the occupation and to expand the forms of resistance beyond suicide bombing and the %ring of Qassam missiles from Gaza. These two impulses produced the BDS campaign against Israel. It is not a coordinated campaign operated by some secret cabal. It began as a call from within the civil society under occupation, endorsed by other Palestinian groups, and translated into individual and collective actions worldwide.

These actions vary in focus and form, from boycotting Israeli products to severing ties with academic institutes in Israel.

Some are individual displays of protest; others are organized campaigns. What they have in common is their message of outrage against the atrocities on the ground in Palestine—but the campaign’s elasticity has made it into a broad process powerful enough to produce a new public mood and atmosphere, without any clear focal point.

For the few Israelis who sponsored the campaign early on, it was a definitive moment that clearly stated our position vis-à-vis the origins, nature, and policies of our state. But in hindsight, it also seems to have provided moral sponsorship, which has been helpful for the success of the campaign.

Supporting BDS remains a drastic act for an Israeli peace activist. It excludes one immediately from the consensus and from the accepted discourse in Israel. Palestinians pay a higher price for the struggle, and those of us who choose this path should not expect to be rewarded or even praised. But it does involve putting yourself in direct confrontation with the state, your own society, and quite often friends and family. For all intents and purposes, this is to cross the final red line—to say farewell to the tribe.

This is why any one of us deciding to join the call should make such a decision wholeheartedly, and with a clear sense of its implications.

But there is really no other alternative. Any other option—from indifference, through soft criticism, and up to full endorsement of Israeli policy—is a wilful decision to be an accomplice to crimes against humanity. The closing of the public mind in Israel, the persistent hold of the settlers over Israeli society, the inbuilt racism within the Jewish population, the dehumanization of the Palestinians, and the vested interests of the army and industry in keeping the occupied territories—all of these mean that we are in for a very long period of callous and oppressive occupation. Thus, the responsibility of Israeli Jews is far greater than that of anyone else involved in advancing peace in Israel and Palestine. Israeli Jews are coming to realize this fact, and this is why the number who support pressuring Israel from the outside is growing by the day. It is still a very small group, but it does form the nucleus of the future Israeli peace camp.

Much can be learned from the Oslo process. There, the Israelis employed the discourse of peace as a convenient way of maintaining the occupation (aided for a while by Palestinian leaders who fell prey to US–Israeli deception tactics). This meant that an end to the occupation was vetoed not only by the “hawks,” but also the “doves,” who were not really interested in stopping it. That is why concentrated and effective pressure on Israel needs to be applied by the world at large. Such pressure proved successful in the past, particularly in the case of South Africa; and pressure is also necessary to prevent the worst scenarios from becoming realities.

After the massacre in Gaza in January 2009, it was hard to see how things could get worse, but they can—with no halt to the expansion of settlements, and continuing assaults on Gaza, the Israeli repertoire of evil has not yet been exhausted. The problem is that the governments of Europe, and especially the US, are not likely to endorse the BDS campaign. But one is reminded of the trials and tribulations of the boycott campaign against South Africa, which emanated from civil societies and not from the corridors of power.

In many ways, the most encouraging news comes from the most unlikely quarter: US campuses. The enthusiasm and commitment of hundreds of local students have helped in the last decade to bring the idea of divestment to US society—a society that was regarded as a lost cause by the global campaign for Palestine. They have faced formidable foes: both the effective and cynical AIPAC, and the fanatical Christian Zionists. But they offer a new way of engaging with Israel, not only for the sake of Palestinians, but also for Jews worldwide.

In Europe, an admirable coalition of Muslims, Jews, and Christians is advancing this agenda against fierce accusations of anti-Semitism. The presence of a few Israelis among them has helped to fend off these vicious and totally false allegations. I do not regard the moral and active support of Israelis like myself as the most important ingredient in this campaign. But connections with progressive and radical Jewish dissidents in Israel are vital to the campaign. They are a bridge to a wider public in Israel, which will eventually have to be incorporated. Pariah status will hopefully persuade Israel to abandon its policies of war crimes and abuses of human rights. We hope to empower those on the outside who are now engaged in the campaign, and we are empowered ourselves by their actions.

All of us, it seems, need clear targets, and to remain vigilant against simplistic generalizations about the boycott being against Israel for being Jewish, or against the Jews for being in Israel. That is simply not true. The millions of Jews in Israel must be reckoned with. It is a living organism that will remain part of any future solution. However, it is first our sacred duty to end the oppressive occupation and to prevent another Nakba—and the best means for achieving this is a sustained boycott and divestment campaign.

See also: Comment | Hind Awwad “Six Years of BDS: Success!”

This article is an original extract from The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, published by Verso on 15th May 2012, in which a cast of international voices argue for boycott, divestment and sanctions. The book features contributions from: John Berger, Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, Mustafa Barghouti, Ken Loach, Neve Gordon, Naomi Klein, Omar Barghouti, Ilan Pappe and many more.

The Case for Sanctions Against Israel
Audrea Lim (Editor)
Publication: 15th May 2012
ISBN: 978 1 84467 450 3
Price: £9.99
256 pages
Publisher: Verso Books

British rock musician and Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters spray-paints the words “No thought control” on Israel’s West Bank separation barrier in Bethlehem. (Photo: AP)

As the world watched the Arab Spring, many Palestinians saw traces of Palestine’s revolution, particularly of the first Intifada—the popular uprising of 1987—and in the beautiful spirit of the young revolutionaries.

The fall of the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt was celebrated in Palestinian households not only because it promised a return of Arab resistance, a constant dimension of the Palestinian cause but hijacked by the dictatorships for so many years, but also because it was a reminder that Palestine continues to bring people together: those struggling in many places around the world against injustice of all kinds.

As we continue to watch the revolutions unfold—from Wall Street to Madrid, from London to Seattle—we can see Palestine in every Tahrir Square. The Egyptian spring is partly a result of the previous regime’s heavy complicity in maintaining Israeli occupation and colonization; the Egyptian student mobilizations in solidarity with Palestine during the second Intifada, in 2000, were important precursors to January 2011.

The injustice result-ing from Israel’s occupation, colonization, and enforcement of apartheid is heavily linked with corporate greed, environmental degradation, education cuts, and privatization of healthcare that are today being protested in North America and Europe. The channeling each year of billions in US tax dollars away from education, healthcare reform, and social services at home, to support Israel’s military machine, has linked the struggle for Palestinian rights with the causes of equality and social justice in the US and elsewhere.

The BDS movement has provided a way for us to break our collective chains. In 2005, one year after the International Court of Justice had ruled that Israel’s wall, built on occupied Palestinian territory, was illegal—and inspired by the South African anti-apartheid struggle—a majority of Palestinian civil society called upon people of conscience all over the world to impose broad BDS initiatives against Israel. The comprehensive rights-based approach of the call for BDS is perhaps its most important attribute. This is exemplified by the three demands that it makes: for an end to the occupation and return to the pre-1967 boundaries; for recognition of the fundamental human rights of Palestinian citizens; and for the right of Palestinian refugees to return. These demands address the injustice done to all Palestinian people, and do not reduce Israel’s oppression to occupation.

Twenty years of the sham “peace process” have given the false impression—often dominant even today—that the Palestinian people are only those in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and that Israel’s occupation is its only form of oppression of Palestinians. This has marginalized the majority of the Palestinian people—those inside Israel and in the diaspora—and their rights; and it has allowed Israel to get away, unquestioned, with its more severe and legally problematic forms of oppression.

The BDS movement has worked on changing the discourse addressing Palestinian rights to include the rights of all Palestinians. The movement has called for an end to Israel’s multi-tiered system of oppression, comprising occupation, colonization, and apartheid—the latter including systematic legal discrimination against Palestinians in Israel, and a sixty-three-year-old denial of Palestinian refugees’ right of return.

Setting the record straight on Palestinian rights—and reinserting both Palestinian citizens of Israel and, crucially, Palestinian refugees, at the center of the debate—could not have been achieved without a strong Palestinian leadership. The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), established in April 2008, has emerged as the principal anchor of and reference for the global BDS movement. The BNC, the broadest Palestinian civil society coalition, is made up of the largest coalitions, networks, and unions of Palestinian citizens of Israel and refugees, as well as of those living in the West Bank and Gaza. The BNC has consistently provided a strong and unified Palestinian voice, and continues to lead and guide the global BDS movement, while fully respecting the principle of context sensitivity—the idea that the call for BDS should be implemented in each community in a way that suits the particular circumstances in the local environment, as decided by local activists.

Over the past six years, BDS has provided the most effective vehicle of solidarity with the Palestinian people and a successful way of challenging Israeli impunity. The victories the BDS campaign has achieved have exceeded all expectations for such a young movement, even when compared with South Africa’s BDS campaign. In particular, the campaign has grown rapidly in the wake of the 2008–09 Israeli massacre in Gaza and the attack on the Freedom Flotilla. The movement has now expanded far beyond the confines of a traditional solidarity movement to include active and dedicated participation from trade unions, faith groups, mainstream NGOs, and political parties.

A quick review of some of the largest and most successful campaigns reveals this growth. One of the most successful BDS campaigns is that against Veolia, a French multinational involved in developing the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR), an illegal tramway linking Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements, and cementing Israel’s hold on occupied territory, in addition to Israel’s involvement in a variety of waste and transport infrastructure services for illegal settlements. The French multinational has been successfully targeted all over the world, but especially in Europe.

In Stockholm, a civil society campaign led to Veolia losing out on a €3.5 billion contract for the operation of the city’s metro system. The determined and internationally coordinated campaign against Veolia has led to its loss of contracts totalling more than €5 billion in France, England, Wales, Ireland, and Australia combined. In late 2010, Veolia and Alstom, another French multinational involved in the JLR, announced that they would sell their shares in the operating consortium.

The fact that both Veolia and Alstom are being replaced by Israeli companies with little experience, rather than by well-known international companies that would be more qualified to take their place, can only be seen as a success for the campaign: no international companies are willing to become targets of our highly effective and visible movement.

The BDS movement is showing corporate supporters of Israeli apartheid that there is a price to pay for their active complicity. The campaigns against Veolia and Alstom will continue until they cease to be complicit, and provide appropriate reparations. Churches in the UK, Sweden, the US, and beyond are investigating and implementing their own BDS campaigns, largely in response to the Kairos document—a document prepared by prominent Palestinian leaders calling on churches around the world “to say a word of truth and to take a position of truth with regard to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.”

Kairos Palestine unambiguously endorses BDS as one of the key nonviolent forms of solidarity that international faith-based organizations are urged to adopt: “We see boycott and disinvestment as tools of justice, peace and security.” Trade unions have historically been at the forefront of struggles against injustice, particularly that against South African apartheid. Trade unions in South Africa, France, Belgium, Ireland, Sweden, Italy, Australia, Canada, Brazil, India, Norway, and elsewhere have recently adopted aspects of the BDS campaign.

In the UK, the Trades Union Congress, representing seven million workers, is about to embark on activities to educate its entire membership about the necessity of boycotting Israeli apartheid. The trade union congresses of South Africa, Ireland, Scotland, and Brazil, and many individual unions around the world are in the process of severing links with the racist Histadrut labor federation. Just days after Israel’s attack on the Freedom Flotilla in May 2010, the Swedish Dockworkers Union, heeding the Palestinian trade union movement’s call to block Israeli ships, blocked five hundred tons of cargo coming from Israel.

They were joined by the heroic action on the part of ILWU Local 10’s dockworkers in Oakland, California, who blocked an Israeli ship from docking for twenty-four hours, and by dockworkers in South Africa, India, Turkey, and beyond. The CUT—the largest and most important trade union in Brazil, representing over 20 million workers, has recently endorsed BDS as the basis for its solidarity activism, and is working on a program to spread BDS among its membership.

Labor-led sanctions within the BDS framework have become the leading form of solidarity with the Palestinian people within the international trade union network. The academic boycott—arguably the most challenging of all forms of boycott—has widely spread the debate on the entrenched complicity of Israeli academic institutions in planning, justifying, and perpetuating the state’s colonial and apartheid policies, including its war crimes in Gaza, Jerusalem, and beyond. The May 2010 Congress of the British University and College Union (UCU) made history by voting to boycott the Ariel University Center of Samaria (AUCS), an Israeli colony-college in occupied Palestinian territory, and to sever all relations with Histadrut, the racist Israeli labor body that is a key pillar of the Israeli state’s apartheid policies.

University workers in the Canadian Union of Public Employees passed a motion calling for an academic boycott of Israel in February 2009. Academics also vowed to pressure their institutions to sever financial relationships with Israel. Recently, the University of Johannesburg made history by severing links with the University of Ben-Gurion, becoming the first university in the world to sever links with an Israeli academic institution.

Students in the US, the UK, and elsewhere have organized campaigns for the boycott of Israeli products, and for divestment from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation. In the wake of Israel’s attack on Gaza in January 2009, students in thirty-three college campuses in the UK “occupied” parts of their campus demanding, among other things, divestment from Israeli companies and companies profiting from the occupation.

In February 2009, Hampshire College in the US became the first to divest from companies complicit in Israel’s occupation, just as it had been the first in the US to divest from apartheid South Africa. In 2010, students at UC Berkeley worked on a well-organized and publicized divestment campaign, winning support from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Naomi Klein, Judith Butler, Hedy Epstein, and other notable figures. Jewish Voice for Peace has organized a campaign calling on pension giant TIAA-CREF to divest from five companies supporting the occupation. Their campaign has been endorsed by a number of organizations and student groups across the US.

Creative consumer boycott campaigns have provided an excellent way to engage wider sectors of the general public in the BDS movement. Code Pink’s “Stolen Beauty” campaign targeting Ahava, an Israeli cosmetics company manufacturing its products in a settlement, has been successful in convincing a number of retailers to drop Ahava in the US, Canada, and the UK. The campaign has spread to Canada, Australia, and parts of Europe as a result of its creative protests and use of social media.

In France, a large coalition of more than a hundred NGOs and five political parties has organized a campaign for the boycott of Agrexco, Israel’s largest exporter of agricultural produce. Agrexco has been targeted with popular boycotts, blockades, demonstrations, and direct action throughout Europe. In Italy and the UK, campaigners took direct action pressuring supermarkets to drop the Agrexco brand. In September 2011, Agrexco was ordered into liquidation.

As with South Africa, sanctions by governments and official bodies have been implemented only after boycott and divestment have become wide-spread at the grassroots level. In the six short years of the Palestinian BDS campaign, we have witnessed a number of government actions in the form of sanctions. To name a few, an Israeli academic team from Ariel College was excluded from a prestigious competition on sustainable architecture organized by the Spanish Government in 2009, because the college is located in a settlement in the West Bank.

The Norwegian government’s pension fund, the third-largest in the world, divested from Elbit Systems in 2009 at the recommendation of the ethical council, due to the company’s involvement in supplying Israel’s illegal wall with security appliances, and the Israeli army with drones. A year later, the Norwegian government’s pension fund divested from two other Israeli companies as a result of their activities in the settlements. Deutsche Bahn, a government-owned German railway operator, has ceased its involvement with the Israeli A1 rail project, which cuts through the occupied West Bank.

Perhaps the most visible form of BDS action is in the realm of cultural boycotts. Far from being “above politics,” Israeli cultural institutions play a key role in the “Brand Israel” campaign of the Israeli foreign ministry, boosting the state’s image and whitewashing its colonial policies and war crimes. A growing number of cultural superstars have joined the cultural boycott of Israel and are refusing to provide cultural cover for Israeli apartheid.

Artists that have cancelled concerts and events in Israel include, among others, the late Gil Scott-Heron, Elvis Costello, the Pixies, Mike Leigh, Klaxons, and Gorillaz Sound System. Most significantly, Hollywood superstars Meg Ryan and Dustin Hoffman cancelled their attendance at the 2010 Jerusalem Film Festival following the attack on the Freedom Flotilla. In addition, cultural figures such as John Berger, Roger Waters, Ken Loach, Judith Butler, Naomi Klein, the Yes Men, Sarah Schulman, Aharon Shabtai, Udi Aloni, John Greyson, the late Adrienne Rich, and John Williams have explicitly supported the Palestinian cultural boycott of Israel.

A number of cultural figures have also refused to participate in Israel’s official cultural events for political reasons, including Augusto Boal, Roger Waters, André Brink, Vincenzo Consolo, and Nigel Kennedy; and cultural figures such as Bono, Björk, Jean-Luc Godard, Snoop Dogg, and others have declined offers to take part in events in Israel—or have agreed but then cancelled without giving explicit political reasons.

Another measure of success for the global BDS movement can be gauged from Israeli reactions to the BDS campaign. In July 2011, the Israeli Knesset passed a law that essentially criminalizes boycotts of Israel, as well as individuals and organizations calling for them. The Reut Institute, a prominent Israeli think tank, has categorized the BDS campaign as a “strategic threat” that could turn into an existential threat. Furthermore, key Israeli politicians have issued alarmist statements about the growth of the BDS movement and the isolation of Israel.

After Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress in May 2011, he spoke with Knesset member Binyamin “Fuad” Ben-Eliezer. “Listen, Bibi,” growled Ben-Eliezer, “I congratulate you on your hug from Congress, but it will not take us off the path to confrontation. Our situation in Europe is very bad. President Obama said everything we wanted him to say … As a former industry and trade minister, I tell you: the markets are closing. We will suffer a devastating economic blow.”

President Shimon Peres has also voiced fear that Israel might be subjected to economic boycotts and sanctions. “There’s no need for boycotts,” he said. “It would suffice for ports in Europe or Canada to stop unloading Israeli merchandise. It’s already beginning.” Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Barak has also chimed in on the subject. “There are elements in the world, quite powerful, in various countries, including friendly ones, in trade unions, [among] academics, consumers, green political parties,” he warned, “and this impetus has culminated in a broad movement called BDS … which is what was done with South Africa.”

Since its initiation, the BDS movement has expanded and achieved effectiveness far beyond what was originally imagined to be possible in just over six years. The call of the movement is increasingly being answered by mainstream and powerful actors. Cultural superstars, global financial institutions, major trade unions, faith groups, political parties, governments, and individuals of conscience of every kind—all are beginning to take action. Our global movement has in fact begun to isolate Israel.

See Also: Comment | Ilan Pappé: the boycott will work, an Israeli perspective

This article is an original extract from The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, published by Verso on 15th May 2012, in which a cast of international voices argue for boycott, divestment and sanctions. The book features contributions from: John Berger, Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, Mustafa Barghouti, Ken Loach, Neve Gordon, Naomi Klein, Omar Barghouti, Ilan Pappe and many more.

The Case for Sanctions Against Israel
Audrea Lim (Editor)
Publication: 15th May 2012
ISBN: 978 1 84467 450 3
Price: £9.99
256 pages
Publisher: Verso Books

Members of the Swadhyaya Parivar, or self-awareness community, assemble at a “Women Self-Development Meet 2004″ in Ahmadabad, India. (Source: cellar.com)

Global justice is a topic that has permeated the mainstream for many years; however, its current manifestation in the likes of Stop Kony 2012 or the selective support for regime change in the Middle East is clearly problematic through the manner in which it furthers the interests of the United States and its allies. But Motta, Nilson et al. take their analysis further, by focusing on grassroots social movements in the Global South, and their relationship with intellectuals.

Adopting the role of ‘activist scholar’, these academics often visit social movements for long periods of time, to not only research, write and analyse the politics of the movement, but to also contribute to its progress. The book draws strength from the wealth of experience the different contributors are able to offer.

The ‘pink tide’ of socialist movements in Latin America, revered by much of the left, is interrogated at the grass-roots level, giving the reader an insight into the everyday workings of organisers making exciting changes in Venezuela.

The book addresses fundamental questions such as why “exploitation and oppression sometimes demobilise, and at other times spark collective action” brings the theoretical analyses of Gramscian hegemony and counter-hegemony into the 21st century in a way that many modern theorists struggle to frame adequately.

Readers hoping for accounts of organising similar to the books by radical/anti-colonial activists such as Stokely Carmichael or Trevor Ngwane may find some sections a challenging read. Prior knowledge of theoretical concepts is sometimes assumed, making the book more of a highly engaging academic text, rather than a narrative of social movements for those less familiar with some of the related philosophical concepts.

Competing intellectual visions of anti-state and state-centric anti-capitalist revolutions offer compelling arguments on a theme that has often divided the radical left.

Nonetheless, an insight into organising in Egypt in the run-up to the mass uprising and the removal of Mubarak offers a far more robust description than the mainstream reports of crisis, disorder and online social media. Whereas much of the press portrayed discontent in the region centring on unemployment, the book recalls that “Politics and workers’ rights are inseparable. Work is politics by itself”.

The way in which the more formal state-centric campaigns around legal cases and citizens’ rights overlaps with struggles for autonomy and social upheaval is portrayed in an enlightening chapter on South Africa. The role of NGOs and the pitfalls of what are perceived as ‘single-issue’ campaigns are deconstructed in other important chapters.

The exploration of contradictions in academic research within social movements based in Africa, Asia or Latin America is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Notions of class or national privilege are of huge significance, and navigating these challenges is essential for the many development students who graduate every year.

Further questioning the usefulness of academic work in these social movements, and how to avoid neglecting the voice and agency of local activists, is probably the biggest question facing those interested in ‘activist scholarship’. Ensuring that the knowledge produced by the activist scholar is simply an addition to the different forms of knowledge contributing to the progression of a social movement is well communicated by a number of the contributors.

The idea that there is a hierarchy of knowledge is problematised, but often hard to reconcile, as it is rare (but not unheard of) for a movement’s activists to publish their own analysis.

Social Movements in the Global South is an important contribution to a critical discourse on international development, linking macro-economic and imperialist policies with the relationships between different actors in grass roots social movements.

Although often presenting new questions rather than offering answers, the book enters the terrain of some of the most exciting movements for liberation across the globe, while honestly self-criticising the discipline used to communicate such important stories.

Social Movements in the Global South
Dispossession, Development and Resistance
Edited by Sara C. Motta and Alf Gunvald Nilsen
(Rethinking International Development series)
296 pages, Hardback.
Palgrave Macmillan (2011)

A scene from Cymbeline, performed by South Sudanese Theatre Company at Shakespera Globe (Photo: Ellie Kurtlz)

Last week, on May 2nd, the United Nations Security Council issued a resolution threatening both South Sudan’s ruling SPLM and North Sudan’s Bashir government with non-military sanctions if either parties continued to militarily subvert the ongoing negotiations over issues such as citizenship rights, borders, oil and security. This action, coming on top of months of African Union-led attempts to make the official negotiations meaningful through mediation and diplomacy, is a signal of the severity of the threat of a return to full war for two parties that have rarely seen eye to eye, even since the signing of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that officially ended hostilities.

As the exchange of both gunfire and rhetoric escalates, it is clear to even the most optimistic observer that the separation made official on July 9th 2011 was not a definitive seal on a peace process but one milestone in a journey that may yet stretch for many years.

Nonetheless the world’s 193rd country and its people continue to strive to shape and assert their identity in the global arena, not least as a cultural force. This brings us to the work of the South Sudan Theatre Company, which brought its interpretation of Cymbeline to Shakespeare’s Globe in London earlier this month, on the very day the UNSC Resolution was passed. The co-directors, Joseph Abuk and Derik Uya Alfred, are both veterans of cultural organisations such as the Kwoto Centre and Skylark Dramatists that have, throughout the conflict, given support to South Sudanese artists. They formed SSTC upon independence to celebrate and promote dramatists from the new nation to the world, and have worked with an entirely South Sudanese cast to bring this newly translated script to life in the historic context of the Globe.

The performance, part of the ‘Globe to Globe’ season that sees 37 plays performed in as many languages, is delivered in Juba Arabic, a language borne of the interplay between the classical Arabic spoken in the region since the 7th century – which remains the lingua franca of the Sudanese state to the North – and other Central and Eastern African tongues. Between body language and sparing use of digital displays, with short summaries of each scene, sufficient steer was provided to ensure the audience was not left behind. In fact, in the performance’s best moments even this concession seemed superfluous to the enjoyment and infectious energy that the cast wrought from relatively difficult material.

Given that the basic plot of Cymbeline involves conflict between a strong willed smaller nation (in this case Britain) and its imperial master (Rome) it might be tempting to infer a straight analogy of the South Sudanese liberation experience from the stage.

However, given that the plot also includes poison, cross dressing, several farcical cases of mistaken identity and a king, the eponymous Cymbeline (Arkangelo Mako, displaying impeccable comic timing), who flops his way through proceedings, drawing more laughs than plaudits, and survives as much by accident as design, that temptation is easily tempered.

One imagines that even in English there would be a certain amount of misinterpretation on the part of audience and different highlights appealing to different sensibilities; but the subjectivity of any Shakespearean experience was slightly amplified by the additional language barrier.

The real core plotline – if one can be found – is the cause of much confusion, heartache and, at times, hilarity, to the protagonists, and involves the romance between Princess Imogen (Margaret Karwato) and Posthumus (Francis Paulino). This is reflective of the fashion in which the play veers between high tragedy and comedy, with little room to readjust from scene to scene as the mood dramatically switches. Nonetheless the quality of the production and performances give shape to a messy plot. There was a certain cognitive dissonance between the venue and the event at first. But the cast made the stage their own.

The simple but effective percussive accompaniment gives a sense of urgency to proceedings and the sparing use of props, beyond personal accessories such as the King’s staff, made scenes such as the bedroom theft of Imgoen’s jewelry by Jackimo (Burtus Peter) and the imprisonment and binding of Posthumus by British forces all the more striking in their use of a bed and ropes stretched across the stage respectively. In the latter instance the use of a modern military uniform and whip, a major contrast from the traditional clothes adorning the other characters, gave Posthumus’s guard an added element of malign authority.

Another notable scene was the attempted wooing (and rebuttal) of Imogen by Lachimo. In this instance great timing and interplay between the two actors were accentuated by the use of a tiny proportion of the expansive stage to increase tension. The fluid, confident use of space overall was exemplified by the exuberant finale, where the formal end of the play itself and the celebratory dancing of the cast themselves merge in a chaotic, uplifting moment.

The two main female actresses, Karwato and Esther Bagirasas (the latter as the domineering, plotting Queen in addition to a memorable piece of moonlighting as the Roman god Jupiter!) deserve special plaudits for their presence and consistent energy throughout. Imogen in particular has a large amount of stage time and Karwato dealt with the demands of the expansive and varied script with evident gusto.

Korino Justin, as Imogen’s simpering and well meaning servant Pisanio, shared amusing dialogues with both characters and was also a highlight. Ultimately, however Victor Lado, as Belarius, was the real revelation, bringing grace and gravitas to his role as the wrongly ostracised nobleman who had raised Imogens’ two long-lost brothers to believe in and fight for the King that has rejected him.

The significant South Sudanese contingent in the audience were best equipped to pick up on the nuances of the script, as well as the distinctive flourishes that peppered the performance, from the occasional nuggets of English dropped into dialogue to emphasise or mock an Arabic phrase, mirroring the language as actually spoken, to the penchant of some characters for cowboy hats, something familiar to anyone who has seen SPLM politicians in full regalia.

Cymbeline himself struts with all of the pomp but little of the dignity or eloquence characteristic of elders across South Sudan. Therein lies the most fascinating aspect of this choice of play, and its delivery. The patriarchal authority figure is exposed as easily duped, manipulated and undermined and yet he survives, retains his sovereignty and, in the somewhat rushed denouement, is able to tie up the numerous loose ends of the plot that reveal themselves to him, dispensing pardons and blessings.

There is no mythical epiphany or transcendence and certainly no infallible saviour figure, but there is laughter, life and hope shared by the royals and the commoners alike, there is a fair measure of humility and forgiveness and there is independence, for better or worse.

There is absolutely no doubt that SSTC made this material their own and recognition for Joseph Abuk’s translation of the script is richly deserved. Ironically, in working together to portray British and Roman characters, the cast were able to express themselves in a distinctly South Sudanese fashion. Nonetheless I look forward to seeing and hearing more from and by South Sudanese writers and performers, especially giving the incredible depth and diversity of arts and traditions from across the country.

Audiences here could very well benefit form that exposure, alongside undoubtedly countless more interpretations and reinterpretations of the classic themes so well covered by the Immortal Bard. Whilst it is very difficult in the final analysis to separate the issue of national pride and identity from the merits of the work in its own right, South Sudanese Theatre now has a world stage for the voices of its people to be heard on.

Neither tokenism nor propaganda, this production bodes well for the arts scene of the country as a whole and it is important that initiatives such as SSTC are supported and documented and that the interaction of the international community that South Sudan so recently joined is not reduced to paternalistic directives alone.

For more information on SSTC visit www.southsudantheatre.com.
To find out about the ‘Globe to Globe’ programme visit its website.
For regular news and commentary regarding Sudan and South Sudan
www.sudantribune.com.

Brother Ali performs at XOYO London, 11th May (Photo: Daniel Yang)

Brother Ali is a Hip Hop artist from Minneapolis, USA, commonly introduced with the words ‘big, bald and albino’. His tour in Europe showcases a refined Ali as he introduces his fifth album “Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color” to be released this August. I attended his show at XOYO in London, which he opened with his latest free song ‘Not A Day Goes By‘:

Being a ‘Muslim rapper’ is hardly uncommon and carries a whole host of stereotypes. Yet Brother Ali has a refreshing approach in expressing his faith as one part of who he is. Seemingly more open and accepting than ever, Ali booms down the mic “Whether you’re Muslim…or a Lesbian, these just define one aspect of us as human beings.” Similar to others, his trip to Islam’s holy site Mecca inspired an internal reform, visualised by little more than a thin white beard which drops from his chin.

First time I shed a tear at a hip hop gig when @BrotherAli was doing an acapella about his father and Eyedea passing.

— Illya S (@Illcutz) May 10, 2012

A previously unheard a capella on his progression through life was incredibly raw and touching. The audience were taken aback by the complete openness that Ali displayed in his words, speaking of his grandfather’s suicide and father’s death in a gripping rhyme which silenced all.

Beyond that, my favourite part of the night was Ali’s pause to, as he put it, ‘preach’, on the ills of our exploitative reality. This was carried through to unexpected performances of songs from his new album which carry a thread of revolutionary ideals and a much needed realisation of the global struggle: “The [August] uprisings you had here to Occupy to the revolutions in the Arab world – they are all linked.”

“I want to leave a better world for my son than what was left for me,” he says emphatically as he enters another track. After a fantastic mixture of performances from all of his works (including the notorious ‘Uncle Sam Goddamn‘), Ali ended on the closing track from the album ‘Us’:

“I started rhyming just to be somebody
found out that I already was
cause can’t nobody be free unless we’re all free
there’s no me and no you its just us.”

On promoting the new album, which he claims is his ‘best yet’, Ali emphasised his wish for people to find a way to the content – regardless of how. Watch out for the drop on August 13th.

You can download Brother Ali’s latest mixtape “The Bite Marked Heart EP” for free here.