A Brutal Colonial Legacy Is Tinder for the Fires That Are SweepingAcross France By: Vijay Prashad

7/17/2023 A Brutal Colonial Legacy Is Tinder for the Fires That Are SweepingAcross France By: Vijay Prashad   On Saturday, July 1, 2023, a large crowd gathered inside and around the Ibn Badis Mosque in Nanterre, France, where a seventeen-year-old boy, Nahel M, was mourned and then later buried. Nahel M, of Algerian and Tunisian heritage, was shot dead by a police officer during a traffic stop. It was clear that the police officer had not acted in self-defense but had shot the young man in cold blood. A wave of outrage swept through the country, with protests and riots breaking out across France. French President Emmanuel Macron sent out security forces to stem the protests, which inflamed the protestors whose anger at the police is at very high levels. Antipathy toward the police was confirmed by the language of the police unions (Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA), who called the protestors “vermin” and “savage hordes” and said that “it’s no longer enough to call for calm; it must be imposed.” This is an act of war by the French police against the French population who come from France’s former colonies. President Macron called the killing of Nahel M “inexplicable,” but this is hardly a credible response. Racism against people of Arab and African descent in France has become almost banal, something that takes place and no longer raises an eyebrow. When France’s Ministry of the Interior released the numbers of racist attacks and killings from 2021, the French National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH) said that the situation was “alarming.” Sophie Elizéon, chief of the inter-ministerial delegation for the fight against racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-LGBT hate (DILCRAH) said, “What is being reported from the ground is the exacerbation of unabashed [behavior.]” The killing of Nahel M, in this context, was absolutely explicable—it was the result of a general social toxicity towards minorities and one that is given expression through the police force. No wonder the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said, “This is a moment for the country to seriously address the deep issues of racism and discrimination in law enforcement.” Deep Issues of Colonialism France never really came to terms with its colonial heritage or its colonial mindset. French colonizers went to the Americas in the 16th century, and a hundred years later set up a number of plantations in the Caribbean that operated a slave-based economy. At the heart of the French colonial enterprise was the island of Hispaniola, half of which is today’s Haiti, and from where the French Empire derived an enormous volume of its considerable wealth. France’s attitude to its colonies and to their urge for freedom is encapsulated in the story of Haiti. When the Afro-descendent population of Haiti rose up in a major rebellion in 1791, France—bubbling with its own Revolution of 1789—nonetheless denied the Haitians of their freedom and fought till 1804 to deprive Haiti of its independence. Even after Haiti defeated the French planters, the French state—with the full backing of the United States—forced the Haitian government in 1825 to pay an enormous indemnity of 150 million French francs, which Haiti only paid off in 1947 to Citibank (which bought the debt after 1888). The reticence of France to allow its own universal pretensions (Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité—the phrase from the revolution that was the center of the 1958 Constitution of the Third Republic) to be heard in the colonies ran from 1804 in Haiti to the wars against national liberation by the French from Algeria to Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s. So ugly is that history that French students are not taught it in an unvarnished manner. If a French student is asked how many Algerians died due to the brutality of the French regime during the liberation war (1954-1962), they would be hard-pressed to come up with the real number, which is over a million; nor would those students know that when thirty thousand Algerians marched in Paris on October 17, 1961, the French police killed at least a hundred of them and threw their bodies into the River Seine, while arresting at least fourteen thousand people. This is an unacknowledged history, and an unacknowledged colonial history confounds the French public who are therefore unprepared for the colonial structures that assert themselves through the police force and through France’s continued colonial adventures. Over the course of the past six months, the governments of Burkina Faso and Mali have ejected French troops. They have argued that the 2013 French intervention, purportedly against al-Qaeda, in fact intensified the instability in the region and that France actually consorted with secessionist groups against the national states. A growing feeling of anti-French and anti-Western sentiment runs from these countries in Africa’s Sahel northwards to Algeria and Morocco, where President Macron has been heckled during recent visits. Confidence is growing in the northern Africa region, where people are now quite clear that the French interventions are not for the sake of the African people but are for the narrow interests of France. For instance, the French continue to garrison the town of Arlit, Niger,  not for reasons of Mission civilisatrice, but to power the French nuclear reactors; a third of all lightbulbs in France are powered by the uranium from Arlit. There is a general swell of anti-French feeling in the country’s former colonies, now inflamed by the murder of a boy of Tunisian and Algerian heritage. Debt and the French Burden Just a few days before the murder of Nahel M, President Macron hosted the Paris Summit for a New Global Financial Pact. The idea for this summit originated with Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who suggested that countries that were especially climate-vulnerable—mainly low-lying island states—needed to get easier access to financing to offset the dangers of rising sea waters. Mottley had argued that the cost of mitigation—building sea walls—and the costs of disasters as well as the high cost of borrowing for green energy, made it impossible for countries such as Barbados to protect themselves or to undertake the kind of transition necessary as climate disasters increased. “What is required of us,” Mottley said, “is absolute transformation, and not reform, of our institutions.” Macron’s summit on the Financial Pact was as hollow as the promises to reform the French police or France’s colonial attitudes to the African states. Akinwumi Adesina, the head of the African Development Bank, said that “Africa alone loses $7 to $15 billion a year because of climate change, and that’s going to rise to…  almost $50 billion a year by 2040. So, the world has to meet its commitment, the developed countries, of the $100 billion” pledge that they have made. Treaty obligations and promises made since at least 2009, Adesina said, have been broken. “I mean, it’s a very small amount of money compared to the scale of the problem, but by not meeting it, it has created a crisis of trust in the developing countries.” Macron and the incoming World Bank president Ajay Banga gave speeches that sounded as if they could have been given over a decade ago. Same language, same tired promises. “Hope and optimism,” said Banga, to an audience that was not feeling hopeful or optimistic. At least Macron put some tangible suggestions on the table such as a global tax on shipping, on aviation, and on the wealthy to raise $5 billion for a loss and damage fund. It is unlikely that the corporate sector, which has influence in the International Maritime Organization (who will see about the shipping taxes), will allow increased taxation in this sector. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pointed his finger at the residue of the colonial mindset and the neo-colonial structure when it comes to financing. The International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) are available to ameliorate the negative impact of the permanent debt crisis and to bring much-needed emergency finances to poorer countries. But even here, Guterres said, the European Union—with a total population of 447 million people—received $160 billion in SDRs, while the continent of Africa—with a total population of 1.2 billion people—received only $34 billion in SDRs. “A European citizen received on average almost 13 times more than an African citizen,” Guterres pointed out. “All this was done according to the rules. But let’s face it: these rules have become profoundly immoral.” He could have been speaking about the French police code. 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Author Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

The Pankhursts: Politics, protest and passion

The History Press The destination for history The Pankhursts: Politics, protest and passion More than any other name, Pankhurst is associated with the struggle for women’s right to vote. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the leading militant organisation campaigning for Women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom, was founded at the Pankhurst family home in Manchester on 10 October 1903 by six women, including Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, who soon emerged as the group’s leaders. Sylvia and Adela, Christabel’s sisters, were also committed members of the women-only group initially, but this later gave way to family rifts and discord. Here we take a closer look at these two generations of Pankhurst women. emmeline_pankhurst_seated_1913 Emmeline Pankhurst in 1913 emmeline_pankhurst_addresses_a_crowd Emmeline Pankhurst addresses a crowd in New York City in 1913 emmeline_pankhurst_is_arrested_outside_buckingham_palace_while_trying_to_present_a_petition Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested after protesting near Buckingham Palace in London on 22 May 22 1914 Emmeline Pankhurst Emmeline was born in 1858 in Manchester, which, in the nineteenth century, was a hot-bed of radical and liberal thinking, to a politically active family, The Gouldens. Her father, Robert, was keenly interested in reform, her grandfather had been present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 and her grandmother had worked with the Anti-Corn League. Her parents were supporters of movement for women’s suffrage and in her early teens her mother took her along to her first women’s suffrage meeting, where Emmeline was enthralled by the speaker, suffragist Lydia Becker. In 1879, at the age of 21, Emmeline married the older Dr Richard Pankhurst, a barrister who advocated women’s suffrage, educational reform and freedom of speech. She served with her husband on the committee which promoted the Married Women’s Property Act and at the same time was a member of the Manchester Suffrage Committee. Between 1880 and 1889 the Pankhursts had five children; three girls - Christabel, Estelle Sylvia and Adela – and two boys – Francis Henry who died in 1888 from diphtheria and Henry Francis, named in honour of his deceased brother, who also later died. In 1889, by now living in the more affluent Russell Square, London, Emmeline helped in forming the radical Women’s Franchise League. In addition to women’s suffrage it supported equal rights for women in the areas of divorce and inheritance. It also advocated trade unionism and sought alliances with socialist organisations. Although the league was discontinued after a few years, Emmeline remained a liberal until 1892 when she joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP). In 1893 the Pankhursts returned to Manchester and Emmeline began to work with several political organisations, distinguishing herself for the first time as an activist in her own right and gaining respect in the community. As a Poor Law Guardian she was appalled by the conditions she witnessed first-hand in the Manchester workhouse and immediately set about improving them. When her husband died in 1898, Emmeline was left with a significant amount of debt, but in 1903 her interest in women’s suffrage was reawakened by the enthusiasm of her daughter, Christabel. Frustrated by the lack of progress from other organisations, Emmeline decided more direct action was required and held the first meeting of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), an organisation dedicated to ‘deeds, not words’ at her house at 62 Nelson Street, Manchester. By 1906 Emmeline and her union were turning to increasingly militant tactics in order to raise awareness. Acts of disobedience continued and more arrests followed, including Emmeline who was imprisoned several times. The Suffragettes, as they had now become known, were becoming increasingly extreme and their campaigning more widespread. Churches and MPs’ homes were burnt down, windows were smashed in Oxford Street and Oxted Station was even bombed. Many of those arrested began going on hunger strike to protest at not being given political prisoner status and faced the indignity of being force-fed. With the outbreak of the First World War Emmeline and Christabel called a halt to all WSPU militant suffrage activities and a truce with the government was established, with all WSPU prisoners being released. Emmeline put the same energy and determination she had previously applied to women’s suffrage into patriotic advocacy of the war effort. She organised rallies, toured constantly delivering speeches, and lobbied the government to help women enter the work force while men were overseas fighting, even organising a parade of 30,000 women to encourage employers to take them on in industry. A supporter of conscription, she also became a prominent figure in the white feather movement (which handed white feathers, a sign of cowardice, to men in civilian dress to shame them into enlisting). Another issue which concerned her greatly at the time was the plight of so-called war babies, children born to single mothers whose fathers were on the front lines. Emmeline established an adoption home at Campden Hill designed to employ the Montessori method of childhood education. Although this was turned over to Princess Alice due to lack of funds, Emmeline adopted four children herself. Pankhurst transformed the structure of the WSPU into the Women’s Party, which was dedicated to promoting women’s equality in public life. In her later years, she became concerned with what she perceived as the menace posed by Bolshevism and joined the Conservative Party In 1918, the Representation of the People Act gave voting rights to women over 30. Emmeline died on 14 June 1928, just weeks before women were granted equal voting rights with men (at 21). christabel_pankhurst Christabel Pankhurst emmeline_christabel_and_sylvia_pankhurst Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst a_wspu_meeting_circa_1908 A WSPU meeting in 1908 Christabel Pankhurst Christabel was the oldest child of Emmeline and Richard and from an early age was absorbed in politics. Educated at home until the age of 13, she was sent to complete her education in Switzerland following a spell at Manchester High School for Girls. When her father died in 1898 she returned home to assist her mother with looking after her brothers and sisters and help with work. In 1903 Christabel co-founded the WSPU with her mother, Emmeline, with whom she enjoyed a special relationship. She obtained a law degree from the University of Manchester, but as a woman was unable to practise as a lawyer, an issue against which she entered an impassioned protest. She very effectively applied her legal knowledge in speeches and pamphlets to highlight inequality and injustice experienced by women and she also organised large-scale processions and demonstrations in favour of ‘Votes for Women’, attracting thousands of supporters to the cause. The Suffragettes were established in 1905 when the WSPU’s militant movement was formally inaugurated when Christabel and Annie Kenney achieved widespread publicity and were imprisoned following their disruption of speeches being made by Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Grey at a political meeting in Manchester. From this point on Christabel advocated a campaign of civil disobedience which, by the outbreak of the First World War had escalated to include arson, bombing and attacks on works of art in public galleries. In 1906 Christabel moved to the London headquarters of the WSPU, where she was appointed its organising secretary and from 1912 to 1914 she directed the union’s militant actions from exile in Paris, where she was living to escape imprisonment under the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. Compelled to return to England with the outbreak of World War One, Christabel was again arrested and engaged in a hunger strike, ultimately serving only 30 days of a three-year sentence. Like her mother, Christabel supported the war effort against Germany, particularly advocating the military conscription of men and the industrial conscription of women into national service, and was a prominent figure in the white feather movement. She also wrote a book called The Great Scourge and How to End It arguing that sexually transmitted diseases could be combated by equality between the sexes. In 1918 Christabel was narrowly defeated in the general election when she stood as a candidate for the Women’s Party in alliance with David Lloyd George’s Conservation Party coalition. She moved to the United States in 1921 where she worked as an evangelist for the Second Adventist movement, before returning to the UK in the 1930s. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1936 before leaving for the United States again at the start of the Second World War. She died in 1958 at the age of 77. sylvia_pankhurst_1909 Sylvia Pankhurst in 1909 suffragette_sylvia_pankhurst Sylvia Pankhurst protesting the English policy in India Sylvia Pankhurst The second eldest daughter of Emmeline and Richard, Sylvia (born Estelle Sylvia), like her sisters, attended Manchester High School for Girls and was active within the WSPU. She trained at the Manchester School of Art, before winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in South Kensington in 1900. In 1906 she began working full-time for the WSPU, eventually becoming honorary secretary and channelling her gift for art into designing posters, banners and badges. In the years before the break out of war, Sylvia was one of the chief figures among the militant suffragettes and was imprisoned numerous times, but ended up following a different trajectory which eventually caused a deep rift with her mother and Christabel. Moved by the plight of the poverty-stricken women she encountered in Bow when she moved there in 1912 to lead the WSPU’s East London campaign, she came to see the struggle for women to have the vote as just one strand in a larger struggle for equality. When she began to connect women’s suffrage to other issues, the WSPU refused to tolerate it. In contrast to Emmeline and Christabel, Sylvia had also retained an affiliation with the labour movement, so in 1914, she broke away from the WSPU to set up the socialist East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS). Over the years the organisation evolved politically and changed its name accordingly, first to Women’s Suffrage Federation and then to the Workers’ Socialist Federation (WSF). Unlike the WSPU, the ELFS was built on Sylvia's own principles and, believing in universal suffrage, men were allowed to join. In direct contrast to her mother and sister, Sylvia was a pacifist and opposed to the war and she was horrified to see her family members actively support compulsory conscription. She was, however, extremely active during the war, opening mother and baby clinics and organising practical assistance and education in the East End. She established a milk distribution centre for babies, many of whom were too ill to digest their food and opened a clinic, staffed by a doctor, who treated patients without charge. As wartime food shortages took hold the ELFS also opened a chain of cost-price restaurants - in 1915 they were serving about 400 meals daily - and a toy factory was established as an alternative to tiny failing workshops where women were paid a pittance. Toys were no longer being imported from Germany, so Sylvia’s factory employed 59 women to fill the gap. She also worked to defend soldiers’ wives rights to decent allowances while their husbands were away, both practically by setting up legal advice centres and politically by running campaigns to oblige the government to take into account the poverty of soldiers’ wives. Attaching herself to the extreme left, she continued to find herself in trouble with the police upon occasion, and hosted the inaugural meeting of the Communist Party. However, she was later expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) when she revolted after being asked to hand over the Workers Dreadnought, the newspaper she had founded, to the party. In later years Sylvia drifted away from communist politics, but remained involved in movements connected with anti-fascism and anti-colonialism. In 1936 she became involved in the fight against the Italian evasion of Ethiopia, and moved there in 1956 on the invitation of its Emperor, Haile Selassie. She died in Addis Ababa in 1960 at the age of 78 and was given a full state funeral as an ‘honorary Ethiopian’. adela_pankhurst Adela Pankhurst Adela Pankhurst The youngest of the Pankhurst daughters, Adela also threw herself into the suffragette cause. As a militant suffragette and an organiser for the WSPU, Adela was imprisoned several times and went on hunger strike, but eventually withdrew from the campaign exhausted. Like Sylvia, she made no secret of her socialist views and, as a pacifist, was not keen on the WSPU's militant strategies. After becoming estranged from her mother and Christabel, Adela left the WSPU but Emmeline was concerned that she might publicly criticise the organisation, so she bought her daughter a one-way ticket to Australia. Adela was given £20, some warm clothes, a letter of introduction to Melbourne feminist Vida Goldstein and a one-way boat ticket. She never saw her mother or sisters again. Having settled in Australia in 1920 she founded the Australian Communist Party with her husband, trade unionist Tom Walsh. Later, however, she became disillusioned with communism and abandoned left-wing politics altogether – even expressing some sympathy for the fascist movements in Nazi Germany and Italy. She founded the Women’s Guild of Empire, a Christian organisation against Communism and in favour of preserving Australia’s place in the British Empire. Continuing to drift more to the political right, on the outbreak of the Second World War she was asked to resign from the Women’s Guild. The following month she caused a stir when she and her husband went on a goodwill mission to Japan and in March 1942 she was interned for her pro-Japanese views. She was released after more than a year in custody, just before her husband’s death in April 1943. After the war Adela did not play an active role in politics. She died in Australia in 1961. You might also be interested in: East End suffragettes in the First World War Non-militant suffragettes and their peaceful march for votes Researching the suffragette movement Share this page Learn more 9780750960939 Voices from History: East London Suffragettes BUY 9780752457963 The Suffragettes In Pictures BUY show more books Follow Us @ 2023 The History Press

Since ReaganISM

Colorblindness is Racism blindness

http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2023/05/racism-killed-new-deal.html

Long live Nicaraguan Revolution! Long live the Sandinistas !

Detroit’s Great Progressive Leader, Councilwoman JOANN WATSON Lives !

This is the motorcade route for Friday this morning for the Honorable Rev. Dr. JoAnn Watson: 1 - Russell Woods ETA 9AM (intersection of Buena Vista & Linwood) 2 - Westside Unity Church ETA 9:10AM 3 - Central High School ETA 9:30AM 4 - City County Bldg., Joe Louis Fist, Hart Plaza, Spirit of Detroit ETA 10AM 5 - Belle Isle ETA 10:30AM 6 - C. Wright Museum of African American History ETA 10:45AM Note: the times of arrival are estimates and may vary depending on the length of time we pause at each location.

Campaign for Democratic votes everyday some kinda way like your life depends on it

“There is nothing but matter and its mode of existence is motion “ - Fred Engels