Richard Mellor
Francesca Albanese is a remarkable woman. She faces all sorts of accusations and slander from the bullies of the western world. The US, that is behind the genocide in Palestine and that sells the bombs to the Israeli’s that they drop on children in tents, wants her removed from her position. History will remember the role she has played in all of this.
"The settler colonial bloc", the term she uses to describe the western supporters of the mass murder, is a good term. But leaving aside the Zionist journalist in the beginning, the other guy raises the issue of neutrality in Ms Albanese's work. She clarifies and uses the term impartiality. But let's think for a minute. There would be no demands for impartiality if she was investigating China, Russia, Iran or some African country. There would have been no pressure for an investigator even a reporter, to be impartial or neutral reporting about the Nazi's policies in Germany and Jewish organisations criticism of them.
She is right in saying Israel is in this cocoon, protected by western capitalism, and even more correct in describing the support of these genocide partners as the "settler colonial bloc" led by the US. Trump, like Biden is a war criminal, Trump just happens to be an outwardly more offensive character but don’t fool yourself, all US presidents are war criminals.
I think back to my youth and the decline of a couple of centuries of British colonial power in the post WW2 period. The British fought colonial uprisings from various resistance movements in Malaya, Kenya, Yemen and so on. In the mid-19th century at its peak Britain was in constant war mode like the US has been most of its history. It maintained its occupation and plunder of the Indian sub-continent with the age-old divide and rule tactic. This broke down during the Indian wars of the mid 1850’s and the British crushed the revolts and responded with extreme brutality. This is the lesson the occupier teaches the occupied. We see that in the extreme in Gaza and the occupied territories in Palestine but a resistance to oppression cannot be destroyed.
Ask any Indian about Bhagat Singh who is a hero among the Indian people. He was executed by the British in 1931. He was accused of murder shooting a British officer. But regardless of their politics, he’s a hero as he fought against the colonial power. The US bombing of Iran will strengthen, not weaken the Mullahs.
I have no right to judge or condemn the tactics and strategies used in these liberation movements; they were all described as terrorists to me. I can have an opinion of the methods of struggle used by the occupied against the occupier and express it. But I have to be clear that they are resistance movements and the colonial occupier is the terrorist organization. The same with Northern Ireland. I did not fully understand the history of the struggle there as a youth despite going to Catholic schools; but these were English Catholic schools. I opposed the policy of individual terrorism as a strategy for driving the British out, but the primary source of terrorism was and is the British state; it consciously created the problem when it served its interests to do so and cannot now resolve it. The problem in Northern Ireland is not about religion and the resistance to Zionism is not about religion either.
Much of instability in the so-called global south, has its roots in the British. European colonial era, Northern Ireland, Kashmir, Syria, most of the African states and the present genocide in Palestine for example.
The US as leader of the settler colonial bloc is desperately clinging to its only reliable (at this point) ally in the Middle East. In that sense, the “bloc’s” intransigence when it comes to Israel is reflection of the decline, or decay of western capitalism and its global influence as former colonial states look eastward.
Capitalism cannot solve these crises of its own creation. Working class people throughout the world are supporting the Palestinian resistance. The vast majority of people in the world supported Iran responding to the US and Israel’s unprovoked bombing of that country no matter what they thought of the backward religious thugs that govern Iran. Most of the world’s population want to eradicate hunger, war, pestilence and climate disaster yet our desires are never realized. The will of the people is never carried out.
The mass media, owned by the people supplying the bombs that fall on children in Gaza control the narrative and control the means of communication not just in one country but most of the world. You can’t fault countries for keeping the western mass media at bay.
The means for eradicating hunger are here. The means for reversing potential climate catastrophe are present. The oceans can be saved, the air can be cleaned, all that which we desire can be made real. But capitalism cannot realize it; it just can’t.
If so many of us globally, regardless of our language, culture, and other minor differences humans have with one another, want the same things, we can get them. We have to have a global organization of working people, millions of us. We also have to have a plan, an outline of a plan for how society should be organized. We have many examples in history that we can turn to and learn from. We can learn from successes and failures just like any other science.
We can learn from the Russian and other revolutions where workers attempted to take control of the means of producing life’s necessities. We can learn from the successes and its failures of these great social events. We can learn from the indigenous people’s today who remain closer to the land as all our ancestors once did. Humanity possesses immense collective knowledge; we simply need to harness it in our own interests.
Society needs new managers.
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