‘The war and its results have turned
Yemen back a hundred years, due to the destruction of infrastructure . .
. especially in the provinces of Oden, Dhalea and Taiz.’
Izzedine al-Asbali
Yemeni Human Rights Minister
‘Yemen is devastated. There are no roads, water or electricity. Nobody’s left but thieves.’
A resident of Sana (Yemen)
Introduction
The Euro-American and Japanese ruling classes, as well as their
collaborators in the Afro-Asian and Latin American countries, have
accumulated vast profit. This has occurred through a complex stratified
system re-concentrating the world’s wealth through:
- 1. The exploitation of labor in the First World (North America and Western Europe)
- 2. super-exploitation of labor in the Second World (China, ex-USSR)
- 3. dispossession of peasants, native communities and urban dwellers to grab resources, land and real estate in the Third World
- 4. wars of genocide against the poorest of the poor in the ‘Fourth World’
Besides all the forms of brutal exploitation and dispossession, which
enrich the Euro-US ruling classes, by far the most sinister and
threatening to humanity is the concerted worldwide effort to literally
exterminate the poorest-of-the poor, the hundreds of millions of people
no longer essential for the accumulation and concentration of imperial
capital today.
This essay will begin by mapping the genocidal wars against ‘the
wretched of the earth’, identifying the geography of genocide, the
countries and subjects under attack, and the trajectory, which has been
chosen and executed by the leaders of the Euro-American regimes.
Then we will examine the reason for genocide within the dynamics and
forms of contemporary capitalism. In particular, we will develop the
genocide hypothesis: that imperial genocide of the poorest of the poor
is a deliberate policy to reduce the growing surplus labor, which is no
longer needed or wanted for wealth accumulation but is increasingly
feared as a potential political threat.
In the last section, we will discuss how the ‘wretched of the earth’
are responding to this policy of imperial genocide and what is to be
done.
Mapping Genocide Against the Poorest of the Poor
It is no coincidence that the most violent assaults and invasions by
the Euro-American powers have taken place against the poorest countries
in each region of the world. In the Western hemisphere, the Euro-US
regimes have repeatedly invaded the absolutely poorest country, Haiti,
overthrowing the popularly elected Aristide government, decimating the
population via a cholera epidemic spread by UN mercenary
‘peace-keepers’, killing tens of thousands of poor Haitians and rounding
up thousands of protestors. The occupation continues. Honduras, the
second poorest country in the region, experienced a US-backed coup
d’état deposed their recently elected president and imposed a terrorist
puppet regime, which regularly assassinates dissidents and landless
rural workers. Peasants are dispossessed; the economy and society are in
shambles with tens of thousands of Hondurans (especially children)
fleeing the violence.
Today, the Euro-American powers actively support the absolutist
regime of Saudi Arabia as it bombs and slaughters thousands of Yemeni
civilians and resistance fighters. Yemen is the poorest country in the
Gulf region.
Video Link
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3012403/Saudi-airstrikes-targeting-rebel-military-bases-Yemen.html#v-4135339495001
In South Asia, the US invaded and occupied Afghanistan; its coalition
of puppets and NATO allies have massacred and displaced millions of
poor farmers and civilians. Afghanistan is the poorest of the poor
countries in the region.
In Africa, the Euro-American powers and their local collaborators
have invaded, bombed and occupied Somalia, Chad and Mali – among the
poorest of sub-Sahara countries.
After the US-NATO campaign of destruction against Libya, 1.5 million
sub-Saharan Africans and black citizens of Libya lost their stable
employment and became the victims of ethnic slaughter. Their attempts to
escape the violence and starvation by fleeing to Europe are blocked by
the leading powers (the same powers that destroyed the Libyan economy
and society). Those, who do not drown in their flight, are detained and
returned to their devastated countries and early deaths.
In Western Europe, millions of Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese,
inhabiting the poorest countries in the region, have faced massive job
losses, widespread impoverishment and spiraling suicides – all induced
by austerity programs designed to pillage their economies and enrich
their Euro-US creditors.
In the United States, 1.5 million black (mostly male) Americans, are
‘missing’ – products of early death, industrial-scale incarceration and
police assassinations. American Indian communities are subject to
depredations and early death from the policies of the Federal and State
governments. Their lands have been handed over to mining (and now
fracking) to serve the interests of the mining and agro-business elite.
Throughout the US Latino agricultural workers are increasingly viewed as
‘expendable’ with technology and the effects of global climate change
(such as the severe drought in California) depriving them of livelihood.
In the Levant, Palestinians, now the poorest of the poor and the most
disenfranchised, face continued Israeli land grabs, pillage and
violence in the West Bank and genocidal attacks in Gaza. Iraq and Syria
have experienced millions of deaths and displacements, reducing
previously prosperous, educated and sophisticated multi-ethnic
populations into impoverished, uprooted and desperate people
deliberately driven backwards to tribal loyalties.
Why Imperialism ‘Genocides the Poorest of the Poor’
With the exception of Iraq and Syria, all of the violated countries
have been poor in resources and markets, and possess large unskilled
labor. The people are targeted and savaged because they no longer serve
as ‘labor reserves’ – they are now excess-surplus labor – in Nazi racial
hygiene terminology, they have become ‘useless mouths to feed’. This
has intensified as crisis engulfs the West and the least productive
sectors of capitalism, finance, real estate and insurance (FIRE), have
become the leading sectors of capital. ‘Cheap labor’ is less needed,
least of all overseas labor from conflictual regions.
The ‘poorest of the poor’ countries under attack lack rich resources
ripe for plunder; their populations do not exist among the priorities of
the multi-national bankers – except when seen as ‘obstacles’. In the
colonial past, sectors of these populations would have been recruited by
imperial countries to submit, obey and serve as imperial mercenaries or
coolie labor. They would have been transported and employed by empire
for ‘dirty’, dangerous and poorly paid jobs in other colonized countries
– like the millions of Indians scattered throughout the former British
Empire. Today, such coolies have no value.
 |
The IMF’s stated mission is to “foster global monetary cooperation,
secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high
employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around
the world.” However, there are those who assert that the IMF is actually
a destabilizing force within the global economy, while others believe
that the countries themselves are to blame for poor economic choices.
Africa Action, TransAfrica Forum, and IPS’ Foreign Policy In Focus will
host this provocative contest of perspectives and analysis between Rick Rowden, a long-time critic of IMF policy, and Eugene Nyambal, former senior advisor to executive directors at the Board of Directors of the IMF.
|
The genocidal nature of the wars against the ‘poorest of the poor’ is
best demonstrated by the actual targets and primary victims of these
wars: Millions of civilians, families, women, children and heads of
households have suffered the worst. These ‘targets’ represent the most
stable and essential elements responsible for family reproduction and
security. The ‘poorest of the poor’ communities are being destroyed.
Genocidal bombing has overwhelmingly targeted the essential factors for
survival: cohesive households, communal settings, subsistence food
growing regions and access to clean water.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that marriage ceremonies and
traditional social gatherings have been ‘mistaken targets’ of missiles
and drone strikes. Despite the denials from the White House, the
geographic extent and nauseating number of such attacks demonstrate that
according to the ‘genocide hypothesis’ there is ‘nowhere to hide’: The
targeted populations will have no marriage celebrations, no social life,
no increase in children among the poorest of the poor, no protection
for the elders, no social fabric and no communal organizations – there
will be no survival networks left for the superfluous of empire.
The ‘genocide hypothesis’ underlies the practice of ‘total war’. The
practice includes massive attacks on non-military targets (‘Shock and
Awe’) and the use of high tech weaponry to target collectives of the
poorest of the poor – repeatedly, over long periods of time and wide
geographic regions.
If, as the apologists of genocidal wars claim, the bombings of
weddings and slaughter of school children are ‘collateral’ in the
‘Global War on Terror’ why are they happening everywhere in the fourth
world and virtually everyday?
The genocide hypothesis best explains the data. Even the terminology
and claims made by imperialist experts regarding their weapons systems
support the genocide hypothesis. These weapons, we are told, are
‘intelligent, precise and highly accurate’ in targeting and destroying
‘the enemy’. By their own admission, then, the poorest of the poor have
become ‘the enemy’, as imperial weapons makers support ‘intelligent’
genocide with ‘precision’.
 |
| Georgia Guide Stones |
When liberals and leftists criticize how imperial drone strikes kill
civilians, instead of ‘armed terrorists’, they are missing the essential
point of the policy. The prime purpose of the wars and the imperial
weapons of mass destruction is to kill the largest number of the very
poorest in the shortest time.
No member of the financial-high tech capitalist class has ever
complained about the mass killing of the ‘poorest of the poor’ anywhere
or at any time because the victims are, for the purpose of accumulating
imperial profit and concentrating wealth superfluous. The poorest don’t
figure into the formulae of profit and productivity; they don’t ‘make or
take’ markets. On the other hand, their continued existence is a
potential liability. They are aesthetically unappealing on the outskirts
of luxury resorts.
To the rich, they represent a desperate criminal element and they may
pose a real or imagined ‘terrorist’ threat. For these reasons, the rich
would ‘prefer’ that they would quietly cease to exist, or if the
warlords have to dispose of them, the world will be a safer and more
attractive place to accumulate wealth. ‘Let them kill each other, as
they have done for millennia’, the empire piously opines and the bankers
and their high tech allies can use their military and mercenaries
without soiling their own hands. The elite ignore the mass emiseration
while the militarists bomb ‘the problem’ out of existence.
Today genocide occurs in once vibrant living and working communities,
not hidden in ‘concentration camps’. The secret ovens and gas chambers
have been replaced by an ‘open range’ of incendiary weapons that end
lives, burn neighborhoods and workshops, devastate livestock and crops.
Those who survive the bombing are starved, enclosed, malnourished and
inflicted with disease. Eminent doctors tell us that the misery is
‘self-inflicted’ and that the poorest of the poor are ignorant and lack
healthy habits. Recurrent epidemics from HIV to cholera to Ebola are
quintessential ‘4th world diseases’. Even though the Caribbean had not
seen cholera for over a century, its introduction into Haiti via the
bowels of imperial mercenary troops (UN peacekeepers from Nepal) was
blamed on the Haitians’ lack of access to clean water! Not since the
small pox blankets passed out by the US Army to freezing Native
Americans in their concentration camps of the 19th century have we heard
such apologists for genocide!
The truth about genocide is that all this is known, repeatedly
documented and forgotten. White workers in the First World cannot even
register these ‘facts’ under their own noses, let alone express any form
of solidarity. Imperial genocide, committed by proactive militarists
and ‘passive’ rich elites, are no secret even if they deny their
complicity. The key word here is ‘mission’. ‘Mission Accomplished’ was
the celebratory banner over the total destruction of Iraq. The warlords
claim rewards for successfully completing ‘the mission’. Yemenis are
dying under US-supplied Saudi bombs; Somalis are scattered in tens of
thousands of tents to the four corners of the earth; Haitians continue
to enjoy the ‘gift of cholera’ from UN ‘peacekeepers’ and rot in massive
open air prison-slums – their leaders imprisoned or assassinated.
The Poorest of the Poor Respond
"One Friday, 28 people were rescued by the Italian coastguard when the
boat on which they were fleeing Libya capsized in the
Mediterranean. Arriving homeless and without prospects in a strange
land, these were — relatively speaking — the lucky ones. As many as 700
are thought to have drowned. Add them to the tally. On Monday, another
boat capsized with 400 souls feared lost. Last year more than 3,000 died
in the Mediterranean trying to get to the West. It has become a
phenomenon of our times."
In the face of genocide and their irrelevance to the profit motive of
modern high tech and finance capital, the poorest of the poor have
chosen multiple responses:
(1) Mass out-migration, preferable to the
First World, where they won’t be bombed, raped or starved as they had
been at ‘home’;
(2) Internal migration to the cities, under the illusion
of an ‘urban safe haven’ when in fact their concentration in slums
makes it easier for the bombers;
(3) return to the countryside and
subsistence farming or the mountains and subsistence herding, but the
missiles and drones relentlessly follow them;
(4) mass flight to a
neighboring country where the local gendarmes will ‘herd’ them into
camps to rot and
(5) finally resistance. Resistance takes various forms:
There are spontaneous upheavals when the scope of abuse exceeds all
endurance. This form involves attacking the local collaborators and
gendarmes and authorities and sacking food warehouses. Such action burns
briefly and dies (many times literally). Some choose to join armed
resistance bands, including gangs of brigands, political ethno-religious
rivals and terrorists who retaliate against authors of their genocide
and its collaborators with their own version of justice and material and
celestial rewards.
Total war from above and the outside breeds total war from the inside
and below. The rebellion of the ‘wretched of the earth’ in the 21st
century is far different from that portrayed by Franz Fanon in the
middle of the last century. Fanon described a revolt against colonialism
and neo-colonialism.
Today the revolt is against deracination and genocide. During
colonialism, the ‘wretched’ needed to be subdued to better exploit their
labor and resources. Today, the ‘poorest of the poor’ are superfluous
to empire and thus the policy of genocide. The current world war between
the classes has become a war between exterminators and those who would
fight to survive!
Source:
By James Petras
Libya 360°
