The Home Secretary can effectively add new organisations at whim - there is some parliamentary and judicial scrutiny but not much. Supposedly, the banned organisations are all “terrorist”. There are currently 44 “international” groups on the banned list, not including 14 groups active in Northern Ireland. Given the depth of the threat to basic liberties posed by this list, scrutiny is needed as to who is on it and why. This is what I aim to perform here.

I’ve covered some 15 of the 44 groups here. In each case, I pose the question of whether the group can really be called an international terrorist organisation posing a threat to Britain. The conclusions are disturbing to say the least.

These are the sections I’ve used:

Terrorist?
This section discusses whether the group concerned can accurately be described as “terrorist” or not, using the standard that a group is terrorist if it carries out deliberate armed attacks on civilians, “the peacetime equivalent of war crimes”. The assessment is made in terms of the group’s actions - no judgement is implied for or against the causes of the various groups.

International?
This section discusses whether the group is active internationally, or is simply taking part in a local insurgency or civil war.

Britain?
Does the group concerned pose any threat in terms of carrying out attacks in Britain?

Why added?
This section suggests possible reasons for the selectiveness of the list, and why particular groups might have been added.

Oversights?
This section compares groups which have been proscribed with others which have not. Its main purpose is to expose the inconsistency and bias of the list - to suggest that the amount and extremity of violence committed by a group, the targeting of civilians, or the threat it poses has very little to do with whether it is listed or not. It is not necessarily meant to suggest that the other groups discussed should be banned - rather, that those which are banned have been unfairly treated.

FARC

Terrorist? Sort of - FARC has carried out massacres of civilians suspected of opposing it, as part of an ongoing “dirty war” between FARC and the Colombian state. But it is basically a guerrilla army. Earlier this year, a Danish court ruled that financing a FARC radio station did not constitute supporting terrorism.

International? No - apart from negotiators abroad, FARC is a domestic group involved in a civil war

Britain? No

Why added? Colombia is a US foreign policy “frontline” with a vicious neoliberal government

Oversights? The AUC, a far-right paramilitary group, has committed more, and more extreme, atrocities than FARC, and yet is not on the list. Around 100 trade unionists and other social movement activists are assassinated by right-wing terrorists every year. Such right-wing violence is the main reason the FARC came into existence. The US has added AUC to its terror list, but continues to aid AUC indirectly through resources given to the Colombian military under Plan Colombia, which are often funnelled to the AUC. The AUC is well-documented as being continuous with the Colombian military and used by it to carry out operations it doesn’t want to be caught handling. Similar groups in Venezuela have been involved in coup plots. In Cuba, American-backed terrorists have carried out a series of attacks on tourist resorts and air travel, most notoriously blowing up a plane full of foreign students in 1976. The self-professed anti-Castro terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, is living freely in America. Posada claims to have been bankrolled by the Cuban-American National Foundation, a right-wing group which receives money from the US government and the company Bacardi. But don’t expect Bacardi to face terrorism charges any time soon.

ETA

Terrorist? ETA yes - though it mainly targets government figures, and has only recently expanded to civilian targets. Alleged supporters, included under EU and UK rules, no - these are civil society youth groups, political parties, non-violent direct action groups and so on, which Spain has rather dubiously classified as parts of ETA, and the British state has gone along with. For instance, an activist of the party Batasuna has been held in Britain pending deportation for being a “terrorist”.

International? Not really - aside from some activity in France, the group is fighting a very local campaign

Britain? No

Why added? Spanish state pressure within the EU

Oversights? Acts of torture and repression by the Spanish state’s shadowy “anti-terrorism” apparatus could easily be used to proscribe cooperation with its security agencies, but at present do not even stop deportations to Spain. The death-squads of GAL, state-linked paramilitaries involved in murders of Basque separatists, are not included on the British list.

Balochistan Liberation Army

Terrorist? No - this group is involved in a standard guerrilla insurgency against the Pakistani state

International? No

Britain? No

Why added? Apparently as part of a deal with Pakistan to get a “terrorist suspect” deported to Britain, in exchange for Baloch human rights activists

Oversights? Pakistan has used state terrorism in border areas, such as collective punishment, and the Pakistani ISI has been connected to alleged terrorists in Kashmir and elsewhere. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of nationalist and separatist insurgent groups around the world. Most of these are not on the list. Two, TPLF and EPLF?, are now the govts of Ethiopia and Eritrea (western allies). Others are operating in Darfur where the west is hostile to the govt. The KLA, formerly proscribed by the US and UN, is now central to the western-backed government of Kosovo. It seems nationalist insurgents only become terrorists when their enemy is an allied state.

CPP (Philippines)

Terrorist? Sort of - the group has carried out assassinations, but is primarily a guerrilla army

International? No - dissident leaders are in exile, but the group has not carried out attacks abroad. Alleged threats made against other Filipino exiles have not been acted on.

Britain? No

Why added? The Philippines is another key US ally in implementing neoliberalism

Oversights? Similar groups operate in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Burma and elsewhere. Clearly singling out the CPP is an act in support of the Filipino regime.

PKK

Terrorist? Not really - the PKK is a guerrilla insurgency involved in guerrilla warfare against occupying forces, though they’ve committed some human rights abuses (targeting teachers for example)

International? Not really - aside from alleged bases in Iraqi Kurdistan, and wider Kurdish support, the group carries on its war entirely within Turkey

Britain? No

Why added? Turkey is a NATO member and close US ally. Also, banning Turkish groups such as PKK and DHKP-C makes it much harder for Turkish dissidents - often wrongly accused of membership of such groups - to claim asylum in Britain.

Oversights? Turkey is a semi-democratic regime with a very strong and insidious “deep state” (see below). The Turkish state has committed far more extreme and extensive human rights violations than the PKK, such as saturation bombing of entire villages, systematic use of torture, and even periodic invasions of the border regions of Iraq. In addition, it seems dubious that only Turkish Kurds are targeted. If the PKK is on the list, Kurdish groups in Northern Iraq (KDP, PUK) should logically be included too, since they used similar tactics to fight for independence. Yet these groups now form the official local government of US-occupied Iraqi Kurdistan, and one of their leaders, Jalal Talabani of the PUK, is the President of Iraq.

Hamas

Terrorist? Yes, with provisos - Hamas has carried out attacks on civilians in Israel, such as rocket attacks and suicide bombings. But it is also a mass social movement, and the democratically-elected government of the Gaza strip.

International? No

Britain? No

Why added? Britain and America basically support Israel against the Palestinians, and ban Palestinian groups as part of this policy of political support

Oversights? The Israeli government is a prime contender for the designation of “state terrorist”. Far more innocent Palestinians are killed by Israel than are Israelis by Palestinian groups. In addition, extreme groups strong among Jewish settlers have been involved in terrorism such as the massacre by Baruch Goldstein and the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. One of these groups, Kach/Kahane Chai, is banned in America and the EU - but not in Britain. Many leaders of the Israeli state have been former members of groups such as Haganah, Irgun and Stern, which carried out terrorist attacks during the Israeli war of independence, such as blowing up the King David Hotel

While people are locked up for planning to fight in Palestine or Iraq, pro-Israeli groups openly recruit for the Israeli Army’s Sar-El programme in Britain, which involves spending two weeks serving at an Israeli military base.

Al-Muhajiroun

Terrorist? No - the group is banned because it “glorifies” terrorism; it is a formerly legal political party.

International? No

Britain? Not unless encouraging unpopular views is considered a “threat”. The government alleges that former members sometimes become terrorists, and that “glorification” indirectly causes terrorism. But by this standard, the government should be arrested for provoking people into terrorism by invading Iraq.

Why added? As part of a criminalisation of political Islamist ideology, and to satisfy press hysteria about rowdy demonstrations by the group.

Oversights? It has often been pointed out that rhetoric just as extreme can be heard any day from speakers in Hyde Park. Neo-Nazi groups such as the NSM and C18 are not proscribed, despite calling for and sometimes engaging in “race war”.

Kongra-Gel

Terrorist? No - it’s a political party, similar to Sinn Fein, formed as an attempt by the PKK to move from “bullet to ballot”.

International? It is Turkey-focused but has global support.

Britain? No

Why added? To please Turkey, and as part of the policy of banning “terrorist” doctrines and “supporters” as well as actual terrorists

Oversights? The group is no different from Irish parties such as Sinn Fein, the Ulster Democratic Party and the Progressive Unionists, who are still legal today and were never banned during the Troubles. Had these groups been banned, it is inconceivable that the Good Friday Agreement could have happened - a lesson which seems to have been forgotten in the treatment of al-Muhajiroun, Kongra-Gel and Batasuna.

Hezb-E Islami Gulbuddin (HIG)

Terrorist? No - this is the political movement of supporters of former Afghan president and anti-Soviet guerrilla leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Like most Afghan warlords, Hekmatyar has been associated with war crimes, but not the kind of deliberate targeting of civilians usually associated with the label “terrorism”.

International? No

Britain? No, aside from British troops occupying Afghanistan

Why added? Because Hekmatyar sided with the Taleban after being expelled from the Northern Alliance at America’s behest. He was the Northern Alliance leader and pending Afghan president before the west shipped in Karzai

Oversights? Hekmatyar is no worse than dozens of other Afghan warlords, including some who are part of the official government. Rachid Dostum, a warlord based in northern Afghanistan, has a particularly bad reputation for rapes and massacres, was caught killing thousands of prisoners of war after the US invasion - and is a key figure in the occupation-backed government.

Al-Qaeda

Terrorist group? If it exists, yes - but intelligence specialists have claimed that al-Qaeda has become an “idea” rather than a group. The leadership group around bin Laden, although mostly still at large, do not appear to be operating as an organising force and are only seen in occasional propaganda videos. So who counts as an al-Qaeda member? Dangerously, the government seems to consider anyone who sympathises with Islamist ideas or who has trained in Afghanistan to be in al-Qaeda; most of these people are not terrorists

International? Yes.

Why added? This is supposedly the whole point of the “war on terror” - this list wouldn’t be a list without it! Though actually, al-Qaeda was only added to the list after the 911 attacks.

Britain? Supposedly, although confirmed attacks and plots here have all been “home-grown”. Bin Laden has publicly stated that Britain is only at risk because of its involvement in foreign wars, and that countries such as Sweden are not at risk.

Oversights? Western intelligence services, along with those of countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, built up the network of foreign fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Pakistani ISI and Indonesia’s Kopassus are widely suspected of continuing to use local Islamist groups to carry out operations too politically thorny for the spooks themselves. Security cooperation with these organisations has not been prohibited because of their links to “terrorism”. Rather, they have been given blank cheques. Kopassus, proscribed in the US after it was found to have been involved in an attack on Americans in Papua, was de-proscribed as part of the “war on terror”, despite its long-standing links to the Bali bombers.

Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), Algeria

Terrorist? Today, yes - before, no. In 2002 the BBC reported that it ‘focuses its attacks on military targets, and is not believed to be implicated in the killing of civilians’. Its recent switch to attacks on civilians and abductions of westerners is a classic example of the self-fulfilling prophecy - by criminalizing national insurgent groups, the west creates the threat it fears.

International? The group has recently adopted the al-Qaeda label, presumably to get attention, and attacks foreign targets within Algeria, such as western tourists.

Britain? No. The group does not operate outside Algeria.

Why added? The list includes virtually every political Islamist organization the government could find - these groups make up about half the 40-strong list. The government adheres to a conspiracy theory which views all these groups as offshoots of al-Qaeda, and has sought to criminalize political Islam in general, regardless of context

Oversights? Algeria’s secret police, the DRS, operate outside official control and are responsible for systematic torture. Of course, they are not proscribed - far from it. Western states hand suspects over to the DRS and use evidence obtained by it through torture. Algeria’s ruling regime is itself an outgrowth of an armed opposition group, the anti-colonial FLN, which carried out terrorist attacks.

Hizbollah (Lebanon)

Terrorist? The armed wing, yes - Hizbollah has carried out shellings against civilians, suicide bombings and other attacks. But the organisation also runs social services, media and political activities which are not terrorist; these are implicitly covered by the ban. Hizbollah’s TV station - a legitimate source of alternative, if biased, news - has officially been shut down in Europe.

International? Not really - the group is not known for operating outside Lebanon.

Britain? No.

Why banned? Hezbollah is anti-Israel, anti-western and allied to Iran.

Oversights? Almost all the various sectarian factions in Lebanon have their own militias, but only Hizbollah is banned. The semi-fascist Falange movement, associated with the Maronite Christian community, perpetrated a number of atrocities against civilians during Lebanon’s civil wars, such as the notorious Shabra and Shatilla massacres. Surprise surprise - it is not on the list.

November 17 (Greece)

Terrorist? Probably fair comment - the group has carried out assassinations, bombings and bank robberies, although the targets are usually government-connected.

International? No

Britain? No, except for the British embassy within Greece

Why added? Probably because Greece is an EU member and political ally. The Turkish leftist DHKP-C is also banned, and about half the EU proscribed organisations list is made up of leftist and anarchist groups from southern Europe (though most of these have not made it onto the British list).

Oversight? Like ETA, November 17 was set up to resist an American-backed fascist regime. Armed opposition in southern Europe is deeply connected to the political context in which the army and secret service colluded with right-wing parties to criminalise social movements, keep the left from power and push their societies towards fascism. The persistence of some of these groups after “transitions to democracy” is due to the incompleteness of the transition and unfinished business which was never addressed. In fact the major perpetrator of massacres and attacks in southern Europe are the deep-state and far-right networks connected to the Gladio project, Nato’s undercover plan to sabotage the European left. The Bologna bombing, used as a pretext for a mass roundup of activists, was later revealed to be the work of Gladio, working with the Italian secret service and a neo-Nazi group, Ordine Nuovo. Needless to say, none of these groups is proscribed - not Gladio, and not the far-right groups linked to it. In Turkey, activities of the deep state - “shadowy forces in the army, the judiciary and the bureaucracy long suspected of working with the mafia to advance their ultra-nationalist agenda” - have long been alleged, and recently brought to the surface by the exposure of a cell plotting bombings and assassinations. The cell, referred to as Ergenekon, included several army officers and a senior prosecutor. Surprise surprise, Ergenekon is not on any of the terror lists.

International Sikh Youth Federation

Terrorist? No. The group is accused of supporting militancy in the Punjab, but is mainly active in the west. It appears to have been targeted mainly for its beliefs and indirect support. It exists mainly in Britain, Canada, Germany and the US, but has been forced to officially dissolve due to criminalisation. The other proscribed Sikh group, Babbar Khalsa, carried out attacks in the past, but has not committed a majot attack for some time.

International? Yes - this is primarily a Sikh diasporic group.

Britain? No

Why added? Presumably under pressure from India to shut down groups operating out of the west.

Oversight? ISYF was legal in India until 2002 when it was banned by the far-right BJP which was then in power. The BJP is linked to the RSS, an extreme group involved in pogroms against non-Hindus in India. In 2002, RSS supporters in BJP-controlled Gujarat state carried out large-scale attacks on Muslims in which 2000 were killed and hundreds of thousands left homeless. Like Sikh and Muslim groups, the RSS receives financial and moral support from some Hindus abroad. Unlike them, it is not on any of the terror lists. Instead, the BJP regime was courted as an ally in the “war on terror” owing to its anti-Muslim rhetoric and support for neoliberalism.

Mujaheddin-e-Khalq (People’s Mujahideen, Iran)

Terrorist? No - this was formerly an armed opposition group in exile, seeking to overthrow the Iranian regime. In 2007 a special court ordered the British government to de-proscribe the group, and last month the ruling was upheld on appeal. Despite this, the group still appears on the list as of June 2008.

International? No

Britain? No

Why added? Nobody knows - probably as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Iran. The group was banned in America in 1997 as a goodwill gesture to an incoming reformist government in Iran; at the time, it was allied with Saddam Hussein.

Oversight? Bizarrely, although banned in both America and Britain, this group is based in occupied Iraq, and is actually receiving support from the American government! It has been reported that America intends to use this group to invade Iran should there be a war with the country. The paradox of the British and American organisations “harbouring” a group they themselves have declared to be terrorist has largely been ignored. This is also the group which supplied evidence on Iranian nuclear programmes which caused international controversy earlier this year. Although absurd, the situation is not new - the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA/UCK) had a similar status during the bombing of Yugoslavia.

The full list can be found at:

http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/legislation/current-legislation/terrorism-act-2000/proscribed-terrorist-groups?version=1

Statewatch’s coverage of the UK, EU and other “terror lists” can be found here:

http://www.statewatch.org/terrorlists/terrorlists.html

“Imperialism”… We’ve all heard it. But what is it?

Something very old, yet also something very new. At its most basic, domination of one society by another goes back as far as states - although not as far as humanity, being pretty much unknown in indigenous societies. But the depth of today’s imperialism is relatively new. The historic pre-capitalist empires, such as the Roman Empire, the Aztec Empire and the Chinese Empire, had a logic of “tribute extraction”, where subject-peoples were required to pay a tribute of money, soldiers or resources to the imperial capital. They were usually allowed to keep their local rulers, economies and ways of life. For this reason, “imperialism” as a term is usually reserved for the type of empire which arose with capitalism and modern society.

There were actually two waves of modern empire-building, the first in the sixteenth century when Spain conquered much of the Americas and white settler-colonies were formed in other places like what’s now the USA, Canada and Australia, and the second in the nineteenth century when European countries colonised most of Asia and Africa. In the first stage, indigenous peoples in the target colonies were mostly wiped out, with around 90% of the population killed throughout the Americas. Although some of the losses were from disease, a lot were caused by genocidal policies of attacking indigenous peoples and destroying their resources and environments. In the USA for example, indigenous people were driven from their lands to make way for cattle ranches and frontier farms. A policy was put in place to exterminate buffalo, the main source of food for the Native Americans of the Great Plains, and a series of brutal wars were waged against recalcitrant peoples. Black Africans were captured as slaves and shipped to America to work on plantations. Today the old settler-colonies in North America and elsewhere are established as part of the northern or First World. South and Central America, and the Caribbean, occupy a more ambiguous position in today’s world. The first wave of colonialism, which corresponds with the initial emergence of modernity in Europe, is often ignored in accounts of colonialism, partly because its motives were rather different from later phases.

What is more often thought of as classical imperialism was the colonisation of Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century. By this time, Europe - having accumulated wealth through plunder and foreign trade - had begun to industrialise massively, and on doing so, has gained an advantage over the rest of the world in terms of weapons. Taking advantage of this temporary situation, European states, with Britain and France in the lead, started invading and subjugating the previously independent societies of the rest of the world. The colonisers behaved with incredible brutality in establishing and maintaining colonial rule. The Germans killed hundreds of thousands of people in Namibia, the Belgians were known for cutting off hands in the Congo, and Britain is remembered for a litany of atrocities including the Amritsar massacre, where hundreds of anti-colonial protesters were trapped in a square and gunned down, and the forced resettlement of tens of thousands of people in Kenya and Malaya. This time, however, the goal was not to exterminate local populations entirely. Only a small layer of administrators and soldiers ever migrated from Europe to the new colonies (hence they always relied heavily on colonial subjects, from the same colony or a different one, to maintain control). Rather, this new empire was all about economics. India was initially colonised by the British East India Company, a private company whose existence was all about the “bottom line”. Britain banned clothesmaking and salt production in India, hence creating a massive market for its own exports. Later, Britain attacked China to force the Chinese rulers to accept opium imports from British colonies.

The colonial world came about by means of military force - not at all a matter of cultural superiority, indeed, a great historical low-point for humanity. But this success went to the heads of many Europeans. Colonialism was associated with the emergence of racist ideas, the idea of European “civilisation” as inherently “superior” to all others, the idea different “races” of humans, a European “destiny” to rule the world and so on. The colonies were deemed inferior places, to be reshaped in the image of the coloniser. They became sites for experimentation with technologies of control, violence and subordination.

Most of the colonised countries became independent following protests in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. India led the way in 1947, granted independence by a war-weary Britain in a great victory for the massive non-violent Satyagraha protest movement. Algeria and Vietnam soon followed, expelling the French in guerrilla wars. Decolonisation dragged on until 1975, when the Portuguese were finally forced out of Africa, and even later in a few cases (such as Zimbabwe). Even today there are a scattering of “dependencies” and “overseas provinces” of Britain, France, America and other countries, such as Diego Garcia, French Guiana, Puerto Rico, and New Caledonia/Kanaky. In these places, anti-colonial struggles continue.

It is often argued, however, that while colonialism ended with decolonisation, imperialism did not. Imperialism carried on in myriad new forms, sometimes termed “neo-colonialism”, “economic imperialism”, “cultural imperialism” and so on. In addition, military interventions in militarily weak Southern countries have been a constant feature of western foreign policies from decolonisation to the present day. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are only the latest in a long series of invasions - in Guatemala, Panama, Vietnam, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Lebanon, Grenada and so on.

Theories of imperialism

The most influential theory of imperialism is the economic model first formulated by the liberal author Hobson, but made famous by the socialists Lenin, Luxemburg, Kautsky and Hilferding. According to this theory, imperialism arises from contradictions within capitalism. In particular, because it produces more than it can sell, capitalism produces a surplus which it needs to sell, or put to work in production (a situation known as overproduction or underconsumption). Having exhausted the options available within its existing hotbeds, it seeks new markets and productive resources abroad. This often involves what David Harvey has termed “accumulation by dispossession”. Local people have to be driven off their land and robbed of their tools and possessions so that both the people (as workers) and the land and objects (as productive resources) can be put to work by the capitalists. Hence for instance, in India, Britain found markets for surplus textiles, and products such as tea which could be marketed “at home”. Capitalism is thus viewed as paradoxically needing war and devastation. According to this theory, as long as there’s capitalism, there will be war and imperialism. (War also contributes to ending underconsumption by putting resources to work making weapons, and destroying some of the stock of surplus resources during the war itself).

Imperialism does not, however, mean that colonies are remade in exactly the image of the coloniser. Rather, they are demonised as inferior or “underdeveloped”, as fundamentally lacking whatever it is which makes the dominant society superior. According to anti-colonial psychologists Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi, the colonised subject is burdened with an impossible double demand - on the one hand the imperative to “develop”, to become like the coloniser, and on the other hand an assertion of her or his inability to do so, a refusal ever to recognise that such “development” has happened. The colonial subject who identifies with the coloniser and learns “white” or “European” habits ends up as a reject in both worlds.

In economic terms, a parallel phenomenon is what is known as “dependency”, or “combined and uneven development”. According to a series of scholars such as Prebisch, Baran and Sweezy, Cardoso, Frank, Wallerstein and Arrighi, western economic actions in colonies and post-colonies have taken the form of gearing the colonial economy to production for the colonising society. This happens on unequal terms of trade - western societies sell items they produce above their value because of a monopoly on the technology or knowledge needed for their production, and pay less than the value of the primary commodities assigned to the dependent societies of the South. According to this approach, different societies are not independent entities connected by external relations; rather, the internal dynamics of Southern societies have been altered at a deep level by the North, creating a single, interconnected world with unjust internal relations. This is supplemented by “cultural imperialism”, in which western society is upheld as a global ideal and western consumer images (McDonalds, Mickey Mouse) exported as bearers of capitalist culture.

The North makes it very difficult for dependent societies to break out of their dependency. In Andre Gunder Frank’s classic analysis of United Fruit in Guatemala, it is shown that Guatemalan “development” is driven by the needs of the company - roads, ports and so on are put in place to serve the fruit trade, with United Fruit’s agents in America acting as sellers. Hence, when Guatemala kicked out United Fruit, they were left with a highly skewed economy lacking the means to do anything else. Dependency theorists have suggested various approaches for breaking out of dependency. These include “delinking”, or withdrawing from the world economy; “import substitution”, meaning diversifying local production to meet local needs, producing things which are currently imported from the west; “appropriate technology”, or the deployment of lighter, more labour-intensive technologies to ensure wider distribution of resources and less dependent relations in the South; and a “new international economic order”, involving a redressing of global inequalities. Ideas of fair trade (paying the costs of production rather than the market price), sustainable development (concentrating on ecological and economic persistence over time instead of rapid economic growth) and human development (stressing issues like healthcare, infant mortality and life expectancy instead of economic growth) have also come partly from this approach.

Today it is often debated whether classical imperial relations still hold. For some theorists, ideas like humanitarian intervention, failed states, development, globalisation and neoliberalism are continuations of older patterns of imperialist control. Marxist authors such as David Harvey and Alex Callinicos argue for a basic continuity with classical imperialism. There is still rivalry between imperialist powers. Others such as Wood, Panitch and Gindin argue that imperialism is now largely an economic phenomenon, not relying so much on state power. There is now a single imperialism based on the American economic system. Other theorists argue that a new stage of capitalist control has been reached. William Robinson has argued that a transnational capitalist class now controls the entire world directly, while Hardt and Negri argue that imperialism has been superseded by capitalist “Empire” in which capitalist control is directly exercised everywhere, with the old unevenness smoothed out. Still others argue for a discontinuity between neoliberalism and the latest forms of American empire. Jan Nederveen Pieterse has argued that there is a disjunction between neoliberalism and American empire, viewing the latter as an aggressive attempt to compensate for the problems of the former. Arrighi has recently argued that American economic influence has unravelled, and America is using its one remaining asset - military force - to try to turn back the tide of history, which is pushing economic power towards East Asia.

The economic approach is not the only one. An alternative put forward by some historians blames aristocratic pursuit of prestige for colonialism, arguing that racist ideas are outgrowths of classist ideas of “breeding”, and that colonialism served as a safety-valve for junior members of the aristocracy, and upwardly-mobile “commoners”, to lord it over subject-populations abroad. Schumpeter analyses imperialism as an “objectless expansion” by a “warrior” class within society, which manufactures reasons to perpetuate its existence. Virilio argues further that the logic of colonialism, the dominance by the occupying army over the subject population, is now internalised back into the coloniser societies, as dominance by a military way of seeing and a kind of deep state apparatus. In international relations, it is often assumed that imperialism is a way to strengthen a state’s geopolitical position. This might for instance consist in grabbing and monopolising scarce resources such as oil, uranium and clean water. Military interventions are often highly selective, and sites of resource extraction, such as the Niger Delta, the Gulf oilfields, the uranium-rich areas of the Sahara, and Papua’s Freeport, are crucial sites of contestation.

More recently, increasing emphasis has been placed on the epistemological (knowledge) aspects of colonialism. According to postcolonial theorists such as Spivak, Bhabha, Shiva and Escobar, imperialism did not simply take over societies, but also dismissed and devalued entire systems of knowledge, identity, science, belief and narrative. It assumed that the “modern”, western way of seeing was universally valid, and imposed this way of seeing across the entire world. In doing this, it denied voice to other peoples and agents. Obviously this kind of imperialism is still very much alive today. Hence for instance, Vandana Shiva writes of the preponderance of capitalist monoculture as a threat to other ways of life, and Edward Saïd exposes the prevalence of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes, with related ideas of cultural inferiority. Postcolonial theorists argue that the contact with other peoples and the self-definition through exclusion of colonised “others” is central to the way the West or North has constructed its identity. The modern world is also necessarily the colonial world, or the “modern/colonial world system” as Walter Mignolo terms today’s world. Hence, today’s world is very much a product of colonialism and has not escaped it. In a famous quote from Salman Rushdie, “the British don’t know their own history because it was made somewhere else”.

Against capitalist monoculture, postcolonial theorists often counterpose global dialogue, listening to other voices and revaluing other epistemologies (systems of knowledge), including indigenous epistemologies and “border thinking” arising from points of contact between different discourses. Some postcolonial theorists such as Shiva and Escobar argue against “development”, instead calling for an emphasis on local alternatives. Followers of the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire emphasise the importance of resisting “submersion” in the dominant categories, instead learning to “speak one’s own word”. Authors such as Badie, Chatterjee, Mbembe and Hecht and Simone question the universality of the western state-form, arguing instead for everyday practices. Reflexivity - thinking critically about one’s own assumptions, and not taking them for granted - is emphasised by authors such as Spivak. Postcolonial theory effectively calls for a decolonisation of culture and the mind, as well as of spaces and economies.

The legacy of imperialism

In addition to the persistence of imperial wars, economic imperialism and epistemological dominance, imperialism has effects running through the whole of the social life of the contemporary world. The modern-colonial world has created a world which is globalised, and yet highly uneven and uncertain of itself. Identities have been torn apart by violence, and reappear in mutilated forms, either as creative hybridities and reflexive subjectivities or as aggressive “predatory” identities. Colonial domination left a legacy of questionable boundaries along lines of historical convenience, cutting some populations in half and fusing others into illogical meta-states. It also left a social structure in which the military was extremely strong, laying the foundation for coups, corruption and human rights abuses across the world.

Migration is widely demonised in the west as a supposed symptom of social breakdown and invasion from the “outside”. In fact migration is built into the modern-colonial world. The problems of the South, the attractions of the former colonial power and the uneven distribution of economic resources are all products of colonial history. Colonialism left British and other western citizens scattered across the planet. Caribbean people were encouraged to view Britain as the “motherland”, and actively solicited by the government to migrate to fill labour shortages in the 1950s. But the racist attitudes encouraged by colonialism have also not abated. In many places, policing practices such as stop-and-search reproduce colonial forms of dominance within societies, creating a kind of internal colonialism. In other parts of the world, colonial powers played on existing ethnic divisions (such as Hutu and Tutsi, Sinhala and Tamil) or created new ones (such as African and Asian in Uganda or Guyana) as a way to control discontented locals through a middleman. This exacerbated what might formerly have been benign differences into the hatreds sometimes expressed in ethnic cleansing today.

People who call themselves anti-imperialist are typically opponents primarily of western states and their allies. But today, imperialism has become increasingly complex. Firstly there is the phenomenon of proxy war, where local groups seek the aid of, or are used by, external powers to serve their local interests. Often the proxy is not particularly imperialistic in itself, but simply ends up in a bad alliance. Secondly, there’s the ambiguity of whether societies like the Soviet Union and China can be “imperialist”. Some Marxists deny this, but it is undeniable that these states have subordinated other societies (Chechnya, Georgia, Xinjiang, Tibet) in recognisably imperialistic ways.

Thirdly, there’s the problem of Southern, post-colonial states which themselves invade neighbours or refuse to let parts of their territory secede - Iraq with the Kurds; Indonesia in East Timor, Papua, Aceh; Morocco in Western Sahara; Sudan in the South; India in the northeast and in Kashmir, and so on. Is this to be considered imperialism or not? It seems undeniable that postcolonial states inherited from the coloniser a lot of the colonial mindset, including western ideas of territorial integrity and nationality. So basically, the postcolonial state acts as a continuation of the colonial state in suppressing “insurgency”. But sometimes the issue is complicated because a second power, western or non-western, is backing the rebels. Morocco for instance often accuses the Sahrawi resistance group Polisario of being an agent of foreign powers (it has been documented as operating out of Algeria). At the limit, one comes up against cases such as Darfur - a local conflict between two groups (nomadic herders and farmers), complicated once over by the Sudanese regime’s war against rebels and the alleged involvement of Chad, and once more by the west’s hostility to Sudan and geopolitical ambitions in the region. It becomes almost impossible to tell, without crudifying, who is the coloniser and who is the colonised.

Another legacy of imperialism is the ongoing subordination of indigenous peoples. This takes diverse forms, from continued denial of political recognition to the devaluing of knowledge-systems and the theft of land. In America and Canada, there are large areas of unceded territory which was never taken over by the respective states, but which they now claim as their territory. In West Papua, the Niger Delta and Chiapas, indigenous peoples are in open rebellion against dominant states complicit in neoliberalism. The indigenous challenge is not just about local autonomy, however. It makes demands on people elsewhere to think otherwise. The revaluing of indigenous knowledges is also about learning other ways of seeing, relating in more inclusive and networked ways to the whole of existence (animals, plants, rivers, spirits), questioning industrialism and the western ideas which have been established as global standards.

Finally, there is also the question of whether colonialism has been ended, or rather, generalised to the entire world. On Virilio’s account, the security state is a kind of internal colonialism in which the colonial apparatus is applied backwards, onto the imperial society itself. An article titled “The Parting of the Ways” has shown one example of this in practice - the policing of anti-capitalist protests in London stemming from Metropolitan Police absorption of Peter Kitson’s counterinsurgency guide, written about the Malayan anti-colonial insurgency. Virilio has also claimed that our way of seeing is deeply marked by the military, colonial gaze - seeing as if through a camera or gunsight, instrumentalising problems like a military planner, mapping and counting like a colonial administrator. The fantasy of war against barbarian “others”, a product of colonial reason, is still a staple both of fiction and of politics. The “war on terror” is the most visible of its contemporary manifestations.

To conclude, imperialism is everywhere around us today - not only in the obvious places, in the Iraqi quagmire and the Foreign Office, but in less obvious ones too - in repressive policing and the security state, in stereotypes about black people and Muslims, in immigration “controls” and deportations, in the dominance of instrumental reason and the devaluing of nature, in a western “standard of living” built on unfair trade and global dependency. But if imperialism is everywhere, then so is the struggle against it. The struggle is therefore not just about decolonising Iraq, but also about decolonising our society, our minds, and our ways of seeing.

Written and directed by Ismaël Ferroukhi

Tarik Oumezzane

Against his wishes, Reda (Nicolas Cazale), a young French man, is forced to drive his Moroccan father from the south of France to make the ‘hajj’, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

Reda’s strong sense of filial obligation induces him to put both his schooling and girlfriend on hold. The wide cultural and generational gap between the two is worsened by their lack of communication. Reda finds it hard to accommodate his father, who demands respect for himself and his pilgrimage. This uneasy pair embarks on one of those journeys mean to lift the heart and stir the soul. Along the way the two cross national borders, seas, even continents, but no distance is greater than the one they cross to come to terms with each other. The two embark on a road trip that will change their lives.

During their journey they experience the cold snow mountains of Belgrade, and the hot dry desert of Syria and Jordan. They stay in reasonable hotels but also sleep many nights in their rather battered car. They have reasonable meals in cafés, but also have to survive on boiled eggs and bread for a quite a long period of their journey. A silent old woman dressed in black joins them and become a symbol of some unstated fear. Her face is expressive not only of sadness but of some tremendous nameless tragedy.

The director of the film allows space and time for us to interpret her presence; and with the sight of women wending their way out a distant cemetery the horrors of the Srebrenica massacre are reflected in the old woman’s expression. The journey takes father and son to the city of 1000 thousands mosques: Istanbul. Reda, in his interest to know more of the city, becomes more perceptive; and his desire linger gives him an opportunity to quote back at his father telling him “not to hurry: those who hurried are dead.” Despite believing that their money had been stolen, the father insisted on continuing their journey across Damascus and Amman. The conflict between father and son increases as the father slaps Reda across the face when he took back a charity that the father gave to a beggar and her child thinking that her need was the greater. The discovery of money sets up another dichotomy between the father and son; and while Reda chooses to go night-clubbing, drinking alcohol and associating with a belly-dancer, scenes of the father reading Koran, and praying, are interspersed. The outcome leads to a conflict in which Reda asked his father for forgiveness declaring that surely the father’s religion supports forgiveness.

On reaching Saudi Arabia, the true feeling of hajj becomes apparent in the support given to the father and son by other Hajjis. Reda shows his lingering passion for his girlfriend, Lisa by writing her name in the sand as the other Hajjis pray. A turning point in the film comes when father and son become closer and sit side by side in the desert alongside their car expressing how much they have learnt from their journey. At last they reach Mecca and the father begins his pilgrimage reciting “Labayke allohoma ma labiaka” - “I have come following your call”. That night Reda waits without any sign of his father. He starts looking for his father in sea of people all dressed alike for Ihram, with a rare glimpse of thousands- perhaps millions- of white-robed Muslims descending on the immense mosque. becomes frantic in the press of Hajjis and is restrained and removed by security guards. He finds himself in the ablution place of the mosque where dead bodies lie on a simple rugs covered in while cloth. The silence contrasting with the noise of the pilgrimage outside suggests the sacred nature of the place. The faces of the dead are revealed one by one to Reda by the Imam. His heart cries out when his father is uncovered. Very powerful scenes follow as Rada washes his father’s body. The dead and the living are close. The decisive action of Reda in the final scene to give charity to a beggar sums up the impact of the journey on the young man. Initially exasperated, Reda gradually learns to appreciate his father’s steadfast faith.

Framed by the clod snowy landscapes of the Balkan and the hot dry deserts of the Middle East, the film succeeds in combining many dichotomies: West/Islam; North/South; the have/the have-nots; religion/secularism: the old/the young; first generation Muslim in Europe/the second generation Muslim in Europe; materialism/Charity … all woven into a metaphorical tale of character transformation. Both father and son have learned lessons in faith and love, and discover that neither quality is what it may seem to be. The son begins his journey resentful and rebellious. The father is stern, inflexible, and tunnel-versioned. And both as they near their destination learn great truths about each other. Mecca, a city that seems far away, becomes, through Le Grand Voyage, accessible by car and by the human spirit, bringing with it the possibility that a journey to that city would be a process of self-discovery that we can all undertake. Only by affording each other basic human respect can we come to mutual understanding.

March 2006

Written by Martin Crimp. Directed by Sam Grafton.

Hicham Yezza

First, a disclaimer: I’m NOT a Martin Crimp fan, too many of his lines have that Becket-light scent as far as am concerned, but after watching this, I at least, at last, understand why it won (among other things) the John Witting Award.

The play is a series of revisited vignettes rather than full-blown acts and is based around the story of a young woman named Anne who, at the start of Act 1, is seen telling her life story, a confused and confusing tale of being abused (or not) by her husband (he has allegedly been tying her up to a chair and covering her mouth with duct tape). This she tells to Jennifer and Andrew, a (married) couple of film producers who are seemingly keen on adapting her story for a film (or a play? A musical? It’s not clear). Of course, things do not go as planned; Anne is slowly sucked into the tricky dynamics of the couple’s power games and she quickly discovers how to exercise her own leverage.

Although pretentious dialogue keeps fighting its way into the text, the bulk of the material is reasonably edgy and, when needed, just the right side of menacing. The sexual scenes are handled with suitably mechanical abandon and although they did seem to jolt some spectators two notches up the tension-meter, they might have been too unsettling to allow the audience to regain its original neutral lucidity (was that the intention?). But then again Immersion-Distance is a very precarious equilibrium to establish and a hard trade-off for any director to pull off and the intimacy a theatre of this size instils in the viewer is certainly a factor. Maia Gibbs masterfully juggles the obsessive dichotomy of Helpless girl/All-conquering-Vixen that Anne alternately displays. Gibbs’ ability to shift registers from Soft- Spoken surrender to Top-of-thevoice Indignation is remarkable and although her tendency to overarticulate at certain moments can be distracting, she has certainly delivered a commendable showstealing performance. Sam Psyk is excellent as the resolute, driven Jennifer, her comic delivery is pitch-perfect but her control over the more angry scenes is less pronounced. Confusedly, Ali Blackwell (who plays Andrew) seems to muster a much better delivery in his scenes with Jennifer than with those with Anne (with whom he has fallen in love). Unexpectedly, I enjoyed the Taxi sequences, and although I thought the three principal cast members performed with great competence the same can’t be said about the Actor who plays Simon (Anna’s unstable Husband) who did seem to be taking his instability rather too literally and could have done with a bit more subtlety in his physical “choreography”, his performance lacked punch and was too reminiscent of a Hollywood oddball to be credible, this has certainly made him the weakest link. Although the crowd seemed uncertain at times and jubilant at others, it seems to me the show was a solid success. The play could’ve done with a bit of trimming but the direction and the stage setting were competent and sure-footed and the cast handled this sometimesdifficult text with an impressive panache and dexterity and should be congratulated profusely.

March 2006

by Alistair Nixon

In Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Henry Perowne speaks of September 11th 2001 as his eighteen year old son’s induction into international affairs; “his initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers was intense, but he adapted quickly.” It is a statement that is true certainly for me and also for many of our generation. But the September 11th attacks were only part of the induction.

A counterpoint to the images of the “dissolving towers”, were the equally resonant images of the Guantanamo Bay detainees, removed not just from international law, but also, by insulation, from the environment surrounding them - kneeling, bound, jump-suited blobs of orange, their eyes, nose, ears, hands and mouths rendered obsolete with masks, headphones and gloves. They were the dehumanised victims of a scared and vengeful giant, divested of their most basic human rights – unpeople, as author Mark Curtis put it recently.

Michael Winterbottom’s latest film, The Road to Guantanamo, forcefully asserts the Person within that sensory deprivation kit. It comes at a time when Guantanamo is no longer news. Tony Blair summed up its position well at a recent press conference, referring to it as an “anomaly”. The horrors of Guantanamo have become part of the fabric of every day life. Thankfully, this film puts it back on the agenda. The story is based upon the account of three British detainees at Guantanamo – the so-called Tipton Three, Ruhal Ahmed, Shafiq Rasul, and Iad Asif Iqbal. Travelling to Pakistan for a wedding, they enter in to Afghanistan at the same time American bombing commences. As bombing intensifies, they attempt to get back to Pakistan, but instead become wound up with Taliban fighters, before their arrest by Americans. The Tipton Three spent just over two years at Guantanamo Bay.

The film cuts between the dramatised escapades of the young, clean shaven youths laughing and joking at the quirky otherworldliness of Afghanistan - with occasional flash backs to happier times; flirting with girls at Pizza Hut, riding scooters around a Tipton park - and interviews with their current, thick bearded counterparts. When captured, Ahmed and Iqbal were both 22, Rasul was 24. (Of course, they were by no means the youngest detainees, America having admitted to only recently releasing a 13 and 15 year old.). While our induction to international affairs was watching the horror, theirs was living it. The location filming in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran adds a great deal of believability to the film, as does the mock-up of Guantanamo itself. But as noted earlier, this is not a documentary; it is the dramatised account of the protagonists’ time in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. This is, of course, a partisan account; but it is our best opportunity to hear from those who have been inside Guantanamo Bay. By denying access to Guantanamo to lawyers, aid workers and journalists, the Bush administration has done harm to any defence they may have. Commentators such as David Aaronovitch have noted factual inaccuracies during parts of the film, such as the claim that the teenagers entered Afghanistan before the American bombing started (when in fact it was after).

Beginning the film is a clip of George Bush proclaiming that inside Guantanamo are the ‘bad guys.’ The film maintains the Tipton Three were completely innocent; but if the Tipton Three were not hapless youths, who somehow strayed into Afghanistan, but had gone with the intent of aiding Bin Laden in an assault on the West, would their treatment at Guantanamo have been warranted? The film provides an indirect answer to this question. We are not just witness to the conditions inside the camp, but also the interrogations. They are farcical. So much time and energy is expelled in to dragging a confession from the detainees, that the entire point of the exercise – extracting information on Al Qaeda- is forgotten. At one point, Ahmed is shown a video of a Bin Laden rally in Afghanistan in the year two-thousand. “I see you on the tape,” the interrogator snarls. Ahmed argues it couldn’t have been him, “I was working at Curry’s all of 2000″; but still, the interrogator persists. “How could you have been, if I can see you on the tape?” With interrogators like these, who needs enemies? The scenes at Guantanamo are full of black comedy. They go to show that Guantanamo is indeed an ‘anomaly’. But it is not just a moral or legal anomaly; the practices within Guantanamo fly in the face of rational thought. Regardless, the anomaly that is Guantanamo Bay will blot the consciences of many subsequent generations free from the smoke and haze of the collapsed twin towers. The question, however, is who will feel the most shame? Those who believe Guantanamo is necessary for world security; or those of us whose protests against Guantanamo have amounted to nothing more than mere indignant huffing and puffing. There have been no major protests; Camp Delta has been allowed to slip off the radar. The Road to Guantanamo is of the utmost importance in reminding us what an abomination the prison is, and of the urgency required in doing something to help those who are still trapped within its walls.

Road to Guantanamo is available to buy on DVD, priced £15.99

Airports are salty wounds, full of tight air and crimson stale tears and often, when sitting rigidly on an Africa-to- Europe flight, I can feel the passengers are wounds inside wounds: bundles of dry nerves in a bath of dry uncertainty.

Later on, from up in the sky, Heathrow airport will seem an obstinate lump of concrete and steel, a formidable excrescence: unwelcoming and even irritated at the arrival of yet another wave of “them”. Inside the austere hall of immigration control of Terminal 2, arriving passengers are separated into two groups, a fluid small queue at the far end for the citizens of the free world and another much bigger section for the rest: the people at the edge. And so they quietly join the human snake locked in a lengthy slow-moving march towards the gates of deliverance. You want to learn about social science? About global politics in the twenty-first century? About the “human predicament”? About the “end of history”?

Well: forget your Ivy league PhDs and your LSE Masters. Skip over your Foreign Affairs subscription and your well-meaning punctual attendance at literary festivals and come spend a day at the arrival gates of Heathrow airport. Try it, sit there and watch humanity in all its countless dimensions. Watch the sweaty frowns, the hopeful sighs, the expectant silences, the occasional glances towards the other world at the far end, that of the lucky ones hurrying past impatiently, showing their passports fleetingly to the smiling official like they were glorified bus passes. And who can blame them? Isn’t that what passports are meant to be? As clichés go ‘The World is a Global Village’ has at least the merit of being nearly true. Indeed, if you chose carefully where your world started and where it ended. If you picked a world that contained the good half of the Northern Hemisphere as well as some appropriate outposts, Australia and the Falklands for example. Then that world would, indeed, be one of breathlessly instant communication, dizzyingly cheap frictionless travel and where you would find an increasingly eclectic yet homogenous cultural diet of MTV-speak and industrialscale spiritual angst. That world would be a global village ….

I’m reminded of a moment last summer, as I sat on the terrace of my family home in a sun-drenched Algiers suburb, fifty pages into another half-hearted attempt to complete War and Peace. I wondered about how things would have turned out had two hundred thousand or so qualified engineers, researchers, professors and professionals not fled my country over the past twenty years. Would a North African Silicon Valley have emerged? Perhaps on the site of a dormant coastal village? A place buzzing with that most potent of mixes: blazing talent and raw ambition? Would that have helped make the planet a teeny bit fairer? Or at least less farcical than it is now? This thought-experiment is set to remain just that: an exercise in outlandish speculation. Half a century after the last wave of liberation movements, the Third World is still haemorrhaging crucial brain-power and the First World is still hungrily (yet not that gratefully) sucking it out. No one seems able or willing to stop this demonic one-way phenomena and the political bankruptcy of the elites in most African, Asian and Latin American countries, crippled by incompetence, mismanagement and good old fashioned greed, has certainly not helped.

At the airport, so many different faces have the same quiet fierceness about them: The Egyptian petroleum engineer with his beautiful daughter beside him singing to herself, oblivious to the life-changing episode she is partaking in, the Sri-Lankan computer scientist, with his neat short hair and his serious gaze, absentmindedly inspecting his knuckles, the Malaysian physicist, with his short-sleeved shirt and worried brows. All of them stand in line waiting, locked between the twin poles of the local oppression back home (whether political, social or economical) and the siren calls of overseas prosperity. The simple truth is that most of the time, job migration is not about choosing a different life: It’s about choosing life. Very often nowadays, photogenic experts line up at TV shows to proclaim the end of borders, the abolition of the nation-state and the brand new age of the international continuum. This humanist fantasy, to which even cynics subscribe tearfully now and then (when watching the football world cup final, for instance) is touching and commendable but a fantasy nonetheless. It may be passably comprehensible to a group of bohemian backpackers indulging in cheerful banter (in Esperanto?) in a Jazz-café on the French-Belgian border but has very little resonance for a destitute family in a Palestinian village for whom leaving their very house is too forbiddingly risky an enterprise.

Is a continuous unidirectional migration flow sustainable forever? Of course not. In fact, several patterns are already emerging: the service sector’s drive towards overseas outsourcing will initially increase, but eventually slow down as the gap in labour costs between the west and the rest closes up. Geography will continue its path towards irrelevance as the location of businesses, once mainly dictated by their physical proximity to suppliers and customers, is now based more on rental cost considerations. Time for a prediction: Over the next hundred years, things are set to proceed along one of two distinct tracks, and it’s all depending on our actions globally as a species.

The first avenue, unfortunately appearing to be the most likely, is for the increased worldwide competitiveness over scarcer resources to lead to an ever shrinking island of the prosperous few in the midst of the ever widening circle of the forgotten many. The world would become a global-scale version of a medieval kingdom. The second option, achievable but requiring altruism of which we haven’t shown ourselves capable yet, is for the economic system to move from its currently lop-sided shape to a stable and efficient set of mechanisms covering the entirety of the globe, rather than the current inconsistent pattern of halfmeasures and selectively-adhered-to international trade laws that we have now. As to what this implies for worker migration, it simply means that we should strive for a world where workers are able to move freely around the globe according to their own preferences and skills but - and this is the part that most miss or choose to ignore - that workers are not under undue pressure (whether internal or external) to adopt a particular choice. In other words, a doctor emigrating from Ethiopia to the US is not a glorious symbol of an idealised free movement of people if her choice to emigrate was the result of an absence of choice.

The freedom and ability to stay are as important as the freedom and ability to move and to go away. Democratic reform towards freer societies (but without the ugly interventionist connotations the word has been cloaked in by the media) is hence a crucial step towards genuine freedom of movement for people in the third world. So. What are we to do? Well, for a start, the third world economic and intellectual apparatus should be given a chance to grow organically. The brain drain has to stop and the sooner the better. Of course this is not going to be painless for the Euro-American (and other developed) economies but it would be wise and it would be fair. Indeed, a decreased migration of skilled workers would lead to more vibrant home economies and eventually to a significant increase in living standards in their countries. The closing gap in average employee remunerations between the west and the rest will itself slow down the migration cycle even further and cement a stable international job markets equilibrium. Those in the developed West who are supporting actions towards a fairer world should understand very clearly that change will come at a price: principally, a reduced level of their own affluence and material wealth - a price too many in the west have decided they can’t afford to pay. But considering the long term consequences of our current global levels of production and consumption, they will have to face the realisation that it’s a price they certainly cannot afford not to.

At the Heathrow Immigration desk a friend of mine was once asked by a benign-looking immigration official what her intentions were after finishing her Politics degree in Britain. “I will possibly do a postgraduate course” she replied neutrally and then, feebly “possibly look for a job here”. The immigration officer looked up for a few very heavy milliseconds and then stoically resumed his scribbling. He has seen her before, a trillion times, with a different name, colour and nationality but with that same weary stare and that same fire at the back of the eyes. She was allowed through. The world will grow as a whole or it won’t grow at all.

A new American corporate presence on campus greeted students eager to start the new academic year. No, this wasn’t McDonald’s (which would never be accepted) or Coke (which has long been accepted) but something between the two – Starbucks.

For those who don’t know, Starbucks is a traditional vendor of fine coffees which has been greeted warmly by the café cultures on the continent. You can hardly go a day without hearing of another dozen caffès going bankrupt in Rome and Milan, as Italians flock to the superior American rival. Meanwhile in France, the quality of philosophical conversation in the Parisian Starbucks has been so high, it has developed a new post-Marxist school of thought (“Qui est le ‘Star’,” asks one of its most prominent thinkers, “et qui est le ‘Bucks’? Ca, c’est la question.”) To those who would refute this meta-narrative, and instead opine that Starbucks is frequented by the private- and public-schooled in Britain (who have lots of money, but little taste) and not in many places where people actually drink coffee, and know what it should taste like – I can only say, counter-snobbery is not very productive.

The debate was not, of course, about the coffee. The traditional activists were outraged, and launched an immediate campaign to smash the corporation, or at least shut down the outlet. Whether this campaign was to be launched as an integral part of establishing peace, justice and happiness in the world, or as a minor side issue, was not really addressed. But Starbucks would be demolished and power would return to the people. Eager activists grabbed their laptops and set up a Facebook group, thus confirming the campaign as an issue. Hundreds joined the virtual campaign. Almost ten joined the real one. A Fairtrade alternative was set up outside the library and staffed by dedicated volunteers. The great representative body of students, composed of its most worthwhile and excellent members, passed a motion recommending a Fairtrade alternative. The revolution had arrived.

But, as always, the revolutionary gusto failed to take into account the inevitable counter-revolution. And so it came. A private schoolboy set up a pro-Starbucks facebook group . Hundreds of reactionaries joined. They were the silent majority, they claimed. Even though they were apathetic about everything, we still had to take their opinions into consideration. This, their political advisors told them, was the beauty of democracy. And thus it was that two rival Facebook groups came into existence, with over one and half thousand members between them.

Meanwhile, there was consternation within the anti-Starbucks camp. Someone had artfully daubed ‘Starbucks supports apartheid in Israel’ on the library. This was “offensive, disrespectful vandalism”, said the anti-Starbucks organisers – we do not “wish our peaceful and non-disruptive campaign to be tarred with those who support such offensive tactics.” Many ardent supporters of Israeli apartheid must have gone home in tears to learn that Starbucks have been propping it up all along. How dare a lone graffitti artist suggest that state oppression is this fragile? But the disgust was mutual, and many labelled the self-appointed organisers of the campaign as establishmentarian, or worse, conservative. The group splintered. Militant fringe groups set up, only to leave the campaign and focus on worldwide socialist revolution.

The pro-Starbucks camp, untainted by ideology, has remained strong (it would be grossly immature to use Mussolini’s phrase ‘united in Fascism’ here). The results of a referendum have since recommended a fairtrade alternative to the university - yet the Starbucks flag remains solidly perched on the library wall. And so we come to a tentative finis. There is a parable here somewhere, possibly about good versus evil, but I doubt you’ll be able to find it.

Musab Younis examines Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967) by Stokley Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, and finds a call for genuine democracy and an appeal to grassroots activism that we could do well to learn from today.

It may seem odd to review a book that was published in 1967 and is now (shamefully) out of print. But in less than 200 pages, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, written by Stokley Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, virtually decimates any book published recently in terms of perception, understanding and potential. Its significance is difficult to overstate, and certainly impossible to adequately convey in one article. It is a fiery and impassioned call for the most oppressed group in America – those descendants of slaves, brutally and violently kept in a position of subservience and dependence for hundreds of years – to rise up and claim freedom through political action. But it is couched in the language of the anti-colonial struggle, and at its heart it explicitly seeks the freedom of all people, and the establishment of real democracy and independence around the world.

Regaining Control

Black Power was published two years after the assassination of Malcolm X and one year before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. A growing public outcry about the Vietnam War was taking place, with hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating across America. Muhammad Ali refused his draft in the same year, and was stripped of his title and jailed. The ‘long hot summer’ of race riots in American ghettos, echoing frustration at grinding poverty and racism, was underway. Years of passive, peaceful resistance had led nowhere; many were becoming increasingly radical, inspired by worlwide events. The lengthy period of European colonisation of the Third World was finally ending, following long and bloody wars of independence. The first generation of independent, post-colonial leaders in Africa and Asia was emerging. Change was in the air, and everywhere. In this context, Stokley Carmichael and Charles Hamilton set forth a radical blueprint for the ending of racial problems and freedom for the oppressed of America. They had one simple, revolutionary idea: Black Power. The genuine emancipation of black people, they said, would come from the throwing off of American institutional racism, ingrained in the political and economic system for hundreds of years. “Black people,” said Carmichael and Hamilton, “must get themselves together.”

The authors were well aware of hostility to their ideas. “When the concept of Black Power is set forth,” they note, “many people immediately conjure up notions of violence.” But their aim, as eloquently explained and studiously referenced, was the political organisation of an oppressed, persecuted and exploited group, with the aim of attaining genuine control over their own lives. “If we fail,” they state emphatically on the first page of the book, “we face continued subjection to a white society that has no intention of giving up willingly or easily its position of priority or authority,” but “if we succeed we will exercise control over our lives, politically, economically and physically.” This search for genuine freedom and autonomous development was intimately connected to the anti-colonial struggle and literature of the time. “Black Power means that black people see themselves as part of a new force, sometimes called the ‘Third World’ … we see our struggle as closely related to liberation struggles around the world.” Everywhere, “black and colored peoples are saying in a clear voice that they intend to determine for themselves the kinds of political, social and economic systems they will live under.” The choice of quotations early in the book is indicative: Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon. The latter’s Wretched of the Earth is one of the book’s major inspirations, and provides a quotation that needs no adjustment to bring it up to date: “We do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want to do is go forward all the time, night and day, in the company of Man, in the company of all men.” As with the struggle for freedom in Africa and Asia, it was recognised that freedom is not a gift bestowed by the powerful, but a right won through action and organisation. “Left solely to the goodwill of the oppressor,” they state, with a dry wit that permeates the text, “the oppressed would never be ready.”

Inspired by this new understanding of the colonial situation, Carmichael and Hamilton see the situation of black people in America as intrinsically colonial; not simply a poor minority, black people are an institutionally oppressed group. Quoting The New York Review of Books, which described the situation of black people in America as “an instance of internal imperialism”, they explain that “there is no ‘American dilemma’ because black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power to liberate them.” The economic subjugation of black people in America – like working long days picking cotton in order to be able to afford to buy cotton dresses from whites – mirrored the relationship of African and Asian colonies with the white, colonial powers. The exploitation of labour and resources in the ghetto was seen as an explicitly colonial relation, and when the exploiters arrived with messages of goodwill, they were no different to the missionaries who participated in the “economic deprivation” of Africa. “As in the African colonies,” say Carmichael and Hamilton, “the black community is sapped senseless of what economic resources it does have.” They articulately document the poverty and social alienation in the ghetto; little of the situation is, unsurprisingly, out of date. Carmichael and Hamilton also find echoes of colonial ‘indirect rule’ in the relationship of the white establishment with local black leaders. They see the co-option of black elites into white power structures as identical to the process that occurred in African and Asian countries under colonial rule. Their argument is forceful, and convincing. When tokenism was widely heralded as the way forward, Carmichael and Hamilton saw the few black political leaders as little more than African chiefs submitting to colonial rule: “They have capitulated to colonial subjugation in exchange for the security of a few dollars and dubious status”; they cannot hope to challenge the colonial status of the system itself. The assertion that “black visibility is not Black Power” sounds almost prophetic today.

Institutional Racism

Black Power is perhaps most well-known, at least in Britain, for coming up with the term ‘institutional racism’: “When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children,” explain Carmichael and Hamilton, “that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society.” But when, in the same city – Birmingham, Alabama – five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of adequate food, clothing and shelter, “and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community,” – that, the authors point out, “is a function of institutional racism”. The phrase crash-landed on British soil with the Macpherson report published in 1999 after the inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence, castigating the Metropolitan police for ‘institutional racism’ using a definition virtually identical to Carmichael’s (Black Power was the major work referenced in the report.) And the method of institutional analysis adopted by Carmichael and Hamilton, who examine with real methodological thoroughness the structures of oppression in America, contributed to a tradition that has informed the work of countless thinkers (most notably, perhaps, that of Noam Chomsky). But Black Power is not just a conceptual call to arms and freedom – it documents the exciting and challenging attempt to engage genuine participation in the political system of America and the terrific racism and resistance that faced this struggle. About half the book is dedicated to documenting on-the-ground struggles for political organisation and mobilisation. One chapter describes the voter registration drives of Lowndes County, Alabama (a majority-black county where eighty-six white families owned ninety percent of the land) with an infectious passion and real narrative drive.

Little has changed since Black Power was published forty-one years ago. At that time, the percentage of black children in America born into poverty was 43 percent. Today it is 45 percent. The income of the poorest black households has actually decreased since the mid-sixties. And so on, across the world. The search for genuinely democratic forms of government continues, with renewed strength. The increasing poverty, alienation and desperation of most of the world’s population is well known, and the activist movements of today could learn countless lessons from the call to independence and democracy in Black Power. When many people saw the future of black people as integration into middle-class America, Carmichael and Hamilton rejected this vision – “the values of that class are in themselves anti-humanist,” they declared. Instead, they called for the reorientation of the values of American society. This was to be “an emphasis on the dignity of man, not on the sanctity of property.” It meant “the creation of a society where human misery and poverty are repugnant to that society”; a society based “on ‘free people’, not ‘free enterprise’.” To do this, stated Stokley Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, meant “to modernize – indeed, to civilize – this country”, and work for “the move toward the development of wholly new political institutions.” And today, across the world, many seek the civilising of society; the dismantling of illegitimate authoritarian structures and the rebuilding of democratic ones. Carmichael and Hamilton realised in 1967 the difficulty of the task ahead. Gaining freedom means that “jobs will have to be sacrificed, positions of prestige and status given up, favors forfeited.” Co-option into oppressive institutions is simply not an option. In fact, “it may well be – and we think it is – that leadership and security are basically incompatible.” After all, they incisively explain, “when one forcefully challenges the racist system, one cannot, at the same time, expect that system to reward him or even treat him comfortably.” There remain many who dismiss the struggle for genuine democratisation and freedom as utopian and unachievable, and it would be fitting to end with a final word from this important book: “If all this sounds impractical, what other real alternatives exist?”

AS OF 16/06/2008, Hicham Yezza, editor-in-chief of Ceasefire, was granted bail against the wishes of the Home Office. After thirty-one days in detention, having been arrested under the ludicrous Terrorism Act, Hich is now back in Nottingham but still facing his outrageous deportation. Having donned a fisherman’s hat and grown his hair extra long, he says he is prepared to lead Ceasefire into greener pastures. Stay tuned for exciting anecdotes and cogitations from the great man himself, now finally able to chain-smoke shisha, make ironic facial expressions, and distribute his wisdom in person.

1. Get involved!

Join the facebook group and keep checking the website for updates on Hich’s situation.

Email staffandstudents@gmail.com for more information

2. Donate to Hicham’s legal fund

The legal fight is ongoing and it is crucial that we have the funds to fight it properly. Please try and raise money amongst your friends, and make a bank transfer of any amount to the campaign fund. So far we have received donations ranging from £2.00 to £2,000. Every donation makes a difference to the campaign.

Donations should be transferred to the legal funds account. If you think that you can help, the best way to do it is via online bank transfer. Contact staffandstudents@gmail.com to ask about any related information.

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3. Send us a testimonial endorsing Hich

During the ongoing legal process, we need to collate as many testimonials endorsing Hicham’s character and place in the University of Nottingham, the surrounding community and the UK. This will put pressure on the Home Office to allow him to stay. If you know Hich personally, and wish to lend a hand send you testimonials to hichtestimonials@gmail.com.

4. Write to your MP and the Home Office

We must maintain political pressure on the Home Office, which can be done directly, via letters to the Home Office (and relevant ministers), or via your MP. Many MPs are supporting the case already, and it is crucial you let your own MP know about your concerns.

You can find out who your MP is, and contact them via email, here.

5. Sign the petition

Sign this electronic petition demanding that the Home Office stop Hich’s deportation and respect his right to due process in a court of law : http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/freehich/

See more details of this extraordinary débacle:

www.freehicham.co.uk

But what if the state itself is the problem? Otto Nomus discusses serious resistance.

It has become a banal observation that social control in the UK is all pervasive. The liberal media is frequently worked up into impotent fury about some aspect or other of state surveillance, repressive legislation or closure of public space. Broadsheet commentators rail against a government that has gone a bit too far down the road to 1984, without ever mounting any serious opposition to the mindset that has led to these developments in the first place. The liberal position has always been that we, the masses, need a strong state to keep us in line. Forever trying to distance these ideals from the increasingly ugly reality of neoliberalism, apologists for our fucked up system have nothing but fantasies to offer those who resist state control. We are told that we need independent watchdogs to keep the government in line, a strengthening of the powers of the data commissioner, feeble calls for a cap on CCTV development, etc. Anyone with even the most rudimentary of bullshit detectors will realise that these ‘solutions’ are just more of the same, strengthening one arm of the repressive state to keep the other arm in check. What none of these commentators dares to suggest is that it might be precisely this excess of policing that is the problem in the first place. From Liberty to The Guardian to David Cameron, the consensus is that the police will be empowered to watch over us, and take strong action where necessary. None of these twittering corporate flunkeys have anything to offer to those who want to be free of this shit for good.

From council CCTV in the Market Square, to the all pervasive surveillance culture encouraged by Facebook, it feels like our every move is being watched and recorded somewhere. Those who might want to do something subversive and spontaneous are in constant fear that such acts will not go unnoticed and will be archived in a file somewhere, labelled with their name, biometric details and national insurance number.

With a National Identity Register on the cards we can be certain that there really will be a centralised file on everyone in the next few years. Whilst we can
only dream of having some of the freedoms people of previous generations had, it seems likely that future generations will look back on what we have now with envy. It seems essential that we use what little free space is available to us to fight against the rising tide of authoritarianism, and attack it at its foundations.

The drive for social control, that is made flesh in the ubiquitous cameras, the crackdowns on demonstrations and the snooping of email and phone communications, originates in the hierarchical organisation of society. Capitalist ideology, enacted through the state and the corporation, results in the stratification of society, such that a few profit from the immiseration of the many. This relationship would be incredibly unstable were it not for the massive powers of social control and manipulation that are wielded in order to enforce and justify this arrangement. Having armies and police to smash those who take issue with these economic and social relations helps to prop up this unbalanced system. So too does control of the mass media that ends up influencing how we view these relations. Those who oppose the parasitic forces that rule in our society have to fight both the culture that idealises the status quo and the apparatus that defends it. The battle against social control takes place on these fronts.

On the one hand we must attack the culture that insists that the state has benign intentions. So often are we told that ‘they’ only want to root out the anti-social elements and the terrorists, that many of us have started to believe it. The truth is that the state wants to smash or discipline all of its enemies. The first response of many people to arguments against social control is that “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.” The attitude seems to be that the state is inherently incorruptible and has our best interests at heart so shouldn’t
we just let them get on with it? This conditioned reflex is a very dangerous one that needs to be overturned before we find ourselves at the gas chamber door, still convinced that it is all for the greater good. The culture of our society is one that is saturated with the ideas of those who run it. These ideas must be debunked and subverted in order to liberate ourselves from their yoke.

On the other hand, we will have to disarm the state’s policing of our actions. Whether it be through deactivating security cameras and stealthily sabotaging police operations, or resisting our arrest and suppression through more confrontational means, we won’t change society until we can shake off the repression of our movements. We will have to engage in subversive activity, whether it is squatting to create autonomous spaces, rioting to keep the police out, or hiding our friends from the authorities. Anyone who claims to be able to change society without
confrontation is kidding themselves. To survive, radical social movements have to vigorously defend their oxygen supply of free space. Otherwise they get snuffed out.

The most successful autonomous cultures have been those who have most successfully resisted their repression. This has not come about through people sitting back and pretending that they can just carry on doing what they’ve always done, a mindset that seems prevalent in the UK activist scene, but in constantly adapting to and responding to their movements’ ideological and physical enemies. Whether it is the Zapatistas creating autonomous communities outside the state in rural Mexico, the squatters movements liberating urban spaces, or Greek anarchists trashing CCTV cameras, there are many movements that are making serious attempts to live outside social control that we can learn from. Let’s not wait a moment longer before resisting.