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| A home outside of Farmington, New Mexico, where a lack of decent roads,
safe homes and drinking water pose daily challenges for the inhabitants
of Navajo Nation. (Photo by Don Usner/Searchlight New Mexico) Source |
Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO
7-13-22
From January 24 to July 1, 2022, the United States provided nearly 43 billion euros, a little over $43 billion in bilateral financial, humanitarian, and military aid to Ukraine according to statista.com
US President, “Worker Joe” Biden, once the Senator from Du Pont, has become a champion of democracy and freedom and has pledged that the US taxpayer will support Ukraine to the end. He has been emotionally stunned by the suffering of the Ukrainian people in this war, no electricity, houses destroyed, no running water and, of course, the death and brutality that war always brings. Speaking in Poland back in march 2022 Biden shared his thoughts on the suffering:
“I didn’t have to speak the language or understand the language to feel the emotion in their eyes, the way they gripped my hand, and little kids hung on to my leg, praying with a desperate hope that all this is temporary; apprehension that they may be perhaps forever away from their homes, almost with debilitating sadness that this is happening all over again.” He was emotionally struck by the suffering in Ukraine. What a human being.
More recently, he was at the Holocaust Museum in Israel in honor of victims of Nazi murder. It appears human suffering is number one for Biden, but not so. While in Israel, he also had a chance to inspect the Israeli weaponry and military power supplied by the US taxpayer; weapons systems to ensure Palestinians are kept forever stateless and eventually driven from the region entirely. "You do not need to be a Jew to be a Zionist," Biden said, proudly identifying with a racist form of Jewish extremism. Biden assured Prime Minister Yair Lapid of his loyalty to the cause as they bumped fists. The rogue regime in Washington and its Pentagon allies are fond of former TV personalities and comedians as political leaders, both Ukraine’s Zelensky and Israel’s Lapid have bright futures in Hollywood if things go to plan.
As anyone with any sense realizes, Biden’s emotional reaction and shock at the situation Ukrainian’s are facing is phony. The US/NATO war machine is intent on prolonging this conflict until the last Ukrainian standing. The US knows Ukraine cannot win this conflict and doesn’t care. And Biden, like Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton and every US president before them pursue the same imperial foreign policy. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made the US position very clear when he stated that the goal was to see Russia, “weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine” and US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken agrees. Sometimes, the degeneration of the ruling class and its political representatives is often accompanied by overconfidence that leads them to say more than they should.
The Navajo Nation
Ukraine is not the only place in the world where such suffering is rampant. Yemen, Afghanistan, most of the weaker former colonial countries whose governments are forced to impose horrible life threatening austerity measures on their populations, live this nightmare constantly. It is exacerbated by the Russia Ukraine conflict and the US/NATO sanctions.
But Biden, heartbroken at the conditions in Ukraine, conditions he managed to dodge in the Middle East by-passing Gaza and the occupied West Bank, could visit a little closer to home to witness such terrible conditions. He might take Air Force 1 over to the Navajo Reservation in the US Southwest. The reservation, one of many that were the product of ethnic cleansing in the US, comprises 27,000 square miles of mountains and desert in New Mexico, southern Utah and Arizona. There are some 250,000 Native Americans living there.
The Navajo are also known as the DinĂ© people and have been resilient in maintaining their culture and language despite a centuries old genocidal war to eliminate the Native Population entirely; “Over 97% of adults still speak the Navajo language, and many tribe members continue to practice the ancient religious and ceremonial ways.”, writes Amy Linn, a writer on social issues and a Reporter for Searchlight New Mexico Much of the information that follows is from her reports.
Close to one third of the Navajo people, the original Americans one might say, have no heating or plumbing. Lynn points out that as far back as 2007, Sen Byron Dorgan of North Dakota described at a Senate hearing the very same conditions that are present today or worse. “One in five reservation homes lacks complete plumbing, and 90,000 Indian families are homeless or under-housed. It is not uncommon in Indian communities for 25 to 30 people to share a single home.”
Some Navajo families live on 10 gallons of water a day. Linn adds: “Up to 40 percent of households in some areas don’t have clean running water at home, a problem so acute that the Navajo often compare the region to sub-Saharan Africa. These families don’t have tap water to wash their hands, cook a healthy meal or bathe…….people haul water home in plastic containers, driving as much as 20 miles each way to fetch it from unimproved wells or livestock tanks, where water is potentially contaminated with fecal waste, E coli, viruses, parasites, arsenic or uranium.”
The roads on the Navajo reservation are often impossible to navigate and school buses in particular cannot get children to school. There are so many obstacles that are rampant in the community in general that education results are grim as children get left behind.
I am not trying here to place the suffering of one group to undermine that of others. Capitalism does not discriminate when it comes to placing profit over human needs and what is driving the US support for Ukraine is profits and global plunder. But it has to be said without doubt that the treatment of the original people that occupied what is the United States of America is the greatest tragedy of all in US history. The longest and most violent war the US ever fought is the genocidal one against the Native People that inhabited the land prior to the European invasions. The tactics US Imperialism used in Vietnam and Iraq, were used against the Native population; including chemical warfare and the destruction of their food supplies in order to starve them to death.
If Biden wanted to see
poverty and depravation we have plenty of it here in the US. The reservations
and the conditions that exist there are perhaps the worst, but throughout the
country, from the Appalachian regions to the urban ghetto’s, the continued
attacks on the working poor and the US working class in general, people are
suffering. Above all, the dominance of bourgeois ideology, the capitalist culture of individualism, selfishness, constant competition and fear of others and the
idea that you are where you are through your own decisions is so destructive. If you are poor,
unemployed, can’t get ahead, it’s a result of your own personal failure, these
factors strengthen the feeling of self-hatred, self-blame for conditions not of
our own making and that we can’t control as individuals. It makes us sick.
Refusing to reject this false ideology is at the root of the staggering statistics on health, suicide, mass killings and violence we deal with in the US every day. The anger is internalized.
Biden (and Boris Johnson’s) close friend and ally, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky suggested to them that the cost of rebuilding Ukraine, providing drinking water, plumbing, housing, health care and all the needs of a modern society, should be paid for by seizing the assets or wealth of the Russian Oligarchs. This is not a bad suggestion as we have many more oligarchs in the US, but we call them billionaires or entrepreneurs, or self-made men and women. Seizing the ill-gotten gains of people like Trump, Onan Musk, Bezos, Buffet to name a few, would surely transform the crisis the Navajo find themselves in and aid many other communities too.
I am being facetious here as that will not happen. But there is the potential to seize the wealth in society, the wealth that workers create and distribute it in a rational planned way based on social need. There is plenty of money in society as Mike Lynch, the leader of the striking rail workers in the UK said at a rally recently.
The problem is that US working class consciousness has been weakened and there is the absence of leadership of our class. We do not even refer to ourselves as working class and use the term middle class instead. This is no accident. We are not yet conscious enough of ourselves as a class with our own interest independent of Capital and in hostility to it. The powerful mass media has contributed to this weakness as has racism, sexism, all forms of social division. Identity politics has also played a huge role substituting itself for class analysis and class struggle. And the class collaboration of the leaders of the organized workers movement are criminally complicit in this class war.
The Black Lives Matter slogan was an appropriate slogan, but it had to broaden out; it has had its day. It has by many accounts become a brand and the money that has flowed in to its coffers will not change the very conditions among the Black population it claims to challenge, any more than reparations will. The US ruling class will pay a fine…..no problem. But what is important is changing our social conditions.
It is inconceivable that the crisis effecting the Native American communities or the other marginalized sectors of the working class can be overcome in isolation, by these communities alone as if their condition is “their” problem. Identity politics strengthens this disastrous approach.
Black political scientist Cedric Johnson stresses that if the struggle against racism is to be successful it has to be interracial not sectional and they must be led by poor and working class people.
As Vivek Chibber points out in the introduction to Johnson’s latest book:
“…..a nationalist mobilization by small minorities whether brown or black, will never gather the leverage to make a real dent on economic demands against the most powerful capitalist class in the world. It will have to be a movement that elicits the support from and participation by, the working class as a whole.” *
This is class struggle 101 for socialists and Marxists, those who see a genuine democratic socialist world, a global community of democratic socialist states through which the needs of human society can be met in a collective way and in harmony with nature. It was obviously so for Malcom X also who said emphatically that “you can’t have capitalism without racism”.
The potential catastrophe that could result from the proxy war being fought in the Ukraine between Russian and US imperial power, and the conditions outlined here that exist on Biden’s doorstep among the most victimized sector of US society, the Native Americans, have the same rotten source, the capitalist mode of production and we are in its late stage. It cannot alter course, be made nice. It is driven to war by the laws of the system, it can only head toward disaster if we do not stop it.
The working class internationally has the power to stop this madness, but we have to be united as a distinct class and reject all the false divisions that are injected in to society to divide and undermine our power. We have to be internationalists. It’s as simple as that.
*The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now: Debating Left Politics and Black Lives Matter by Cedric Johnson. Order here.
Also for further reading along these lines.
Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism by Touré Reed Order here
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