Saturday 24 October 2020

Indigenous Resistance and Victories from Bolivia to Mi'kma'ki

 FULL SHOW HERE



You’re listening to Back in the USSR on CFRU, this is Siegfried.  I just want to say thanks for being patient with me everyone, seeing I just got started up again with the show last week after a long absence.  Talking about the reactionary politics surrounding COVID-19 and this explosion of anti-Asian racism that’s emerged since January was not an easy thing for me.  This new cold war situation has been difficult.  As many of you know, I’ve lived in China and know many people there, and to see this kind of wholesale demonization of a country and its people, not only in corporate media but in certain alternative media outlets too, is not an easy thing to deal with.  I find it offensive, I find it infuriating, I find it sad, and I can only imagine how Asian-Canadians and Asian-Americans feel about it, seeing this propaganda blaming Chinese people and anyone who looks Chinese for the pandemic (and a ton of other things besides) puts them in actual physical danger.  Like I talked about last week, 1/3rd of Chinese-Canadians report being physically assaulted since the pandemic began.  As Fred Hampton said, you can only fight racism with solidarity and it’s really disheartening just how little of that I see with regard to Asian-Americans and Asian-Canadians right now.

But there are a lot of struggles going on in the world.  There are a lot of people standing up against oppression and racist violence.  We saw the explosion of defiance that emerged in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis this past June, the spread of BLM protests across North America and beyond, including what has to be the largest protest march that Guelph has ever seen in living memory – over 5000 people coming out in support of black life this past June.  I was there and it took my breath away.  I never thought I’d see that kind of mobilization in this town around anything, and yet, in the midst of a pandemic, it just exploded.  And that’s inspiring.  We’ve seen the amazing level of resistance from Portland to New York City, with tons of people coming out in defiance of racist police brutality, even in the face of massive state violence and the threat of hard jail time.  The systemic racism of the capitalist system was really in the spotlight this summer, and certain communist organizations, most notably the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), played a remarkable role in these demonstrations, with their members putting their bodies on the line in cities like Denver and risking major prison sentences in order to stand with the people. 

More and more people came to understand this year that the system doesn’t care about them: it’s willing to shoot black and brown people to death in the streets and in their own homes, it’s willing to throw people under the bus during a pandemic, it’s willing to make massive giveaways to Wall Street (and Bay Street) while working class people are stretched to the breaking point, it’s willing to build concentration camps for kids, railroad millions of mostly racialized people into prisons, you name it…all the while claiming to stand for freedom and liberty.  And anyone who can look at the Trump/Biden debates and still think that the USA is a healthy place to live is either safe and secure in their mansion in the hills or is just deluded beyond reason.

But getting back to the situation in Canada and the matter of indigenous resistance to settler-colonialism, something I covered pretty extensively at the beginning of this year.  I think many of you who listen to this show will be familiar with what’s been going on in Nova Scotia and how much the situation has escalated in recent weeks.  Here we have Mi’kmaq fishermen suffering a brutal campaign of racist violence on their own land.  They’ve been physically assaulted, their boats have been sabotaged, their catch has been spoiled, and their buildings have been set on fire.  The perpetrators of this violence are white settler commercial fishermen, the RCMP has done nothing to stop them and has in fact violently arrested Mi’kmaq fishermen instead.  Meanwhile corporate fishing companies are licking their lips at the prospect of taking over what’s left of Mi’kmaq sovereign territory. 

Clearwater Lobster, a major offshore fishing company headed by CEO John Risley has been fishing on unceded, stolen Mi’kmaq lands and waters for decades now, and has enjoyed special treatment from the federal and provincial governments.  Unlike small-scale lobster fishers, the Clearwater is able to fish year-round with its large fleet, has a near monopoly on Lobster-fishing licenses and is able to essentially disregard government regulations at will. 

The monopolization of east coast fisheries under a Neo-liberal economic regime since the 1980s and the subsequent destruction of independent producers has led to the current situation where settler fishermen are attacking indigenous fishermen over control of a shrinking slice of the pie.  This is a classic example of how white supremacy buttresses capitalism.  Instead of attacking Clearwater and these big fishing companies that have been driving them to economic ruin, these fishermen are attacking those they deem as racially inferior.  They don’t blame capitalism for their problems, they blame the Indians next door who they accuse of being “freeloaders” and “sponging off the state” because they have legal rights to their ancestral territory. 

This prejudice is common across Canada, and all it results in is more destroyed communities…like the fishing communities around St Mary’s Bay in N.S. that will go belly-up if Clearwater has its way and is able to drive the last independent operators out of the lobster business.  And what happens then? Do these out-of-work fishermen then go to the man-camps raised on stolen indigenous land in northern B.C. and Alberta to work on the oil-patch and the pipelines that are still being driven across unceded Wet’suwet’en territory without consent? Do they choose to be shock troops for a racist system that will use them and then discard them all over again? How many times does this have to happen before they realize that they’re nothing more than pawns? When are they going to realize that the system doesn’t care about them? When are they going to understand that they’re going to have to fight the real enemy? Maybe then they might stand alongside oppressed people and show some solidarity.

Speaking of solidarity, and this has really brought my spirits up this past week, the people of Bolivia have just elected a new socialist government by a landslide on October 18.  It’s official now and it’s truly inspiring in light of what that country has been through over the past year. 

Some of you might remember the show I did last November when I expressed my solidarity with the Bolivian people as they faced up to a US-backed military coup that toppled President Evo Morales, South America’s first indigenous president, after bogus charges of electoral fraud were leveled against him by his right-wing opponents.  The result was an orgy of fascist violence by right-wing paramilitary groups, the police and the military, including numerous massacres of indigenous people, and the rise of an illegitimate oligarchical regime kept in power by force with the full blessing of Washington, which was eager to privatize Bolivia’s natural gas and lithium reserves.   

You might remember Elon Musk getting all giddy about the coup on Twitter and saying that he’ll “coup” whoever he wants or something to that effect.  Of course, he was only interested in securing cheap lithium batteries for Tesla…conveniently harvested from stolen indigenous land in the Global South.  While Evo Morales had every intention of developing Bolivia’s lithium, he was going to do it via the public sector with assistance from China, thus ensuring that the profits stayed within the country and could be used to raise living standards for ordinary people.  This, of course, was unacceptable to the United States, the Fortune 500, and their local proxies.  Evo Morales, a legitimate elected president, was forced into exile after the coup and is now in Argentina.

But things have changed a lot since last year, and Elon Musk is not a happy camper right now.  You’ve probably seen the memes.  Despite facing major political persecution, attacks on its members, the jailing and exile of its leaders, and the silencing of its media outlets, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), Evo Morales’ political party, kept fighting all throughout the pandemic, mobilizing millions of working class and racialized people who had been kicked to the curb by the coup government, and won a crushing victory against all odds, with Luis Arce winning over 55% of the vote. 

It’s worth noting that the coup government did not even want to hold the election on the 18th, and delayed the vote multiple times over the course of the year, but was forced to give in after a massive general strike shut down the country in September.  Remember, this is after the coup government privatized everything, dismantled large sections of the economy, put thousands of people out of work, and then provided no support to anyone when the country was locked down during the pandemic which drove people to the edge of starvation.  And this was in addition to the racist violence against the indigenous majority and a huge surge in femicide and violence against women.  People had had enough.  They rose up and took the power back, and the results are undeniable.  It's also telling that over 50% of the newly elected lawmakers are women.  MAS has a greater majority than ever and it looks like Evo Morales can finally come home.


The important takeaway from this is that the Bolivian elite and its backers in Washington could not keep the Bolivian people down.  I hope the same can said for Chile, where people are about to vote in a referendum on a new constitution, with an opportunity to reject the undemocratic constitution imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship.  I hope the same can be said for Venezuela, where parliamentary elections will be held in December, and Ecuador where elections will be held early next year.  I hope the left is coming back, because the political situation in South America has been pretty grim for years now, with right-wing pro-American governments doing real damage to people and the environment, but now there’s reason to believe that the tide is turning once again.  Segundina Flores, leader of the Bartolina Sisa National Confederation of Campesino, Indigenous and Native Women of Bolivia had this to say when she spoke to Telesur on October 24: "Today a democracy will return which is egalitarian, a participatory democracy, a democracy for all."

I wish that I could say the same thing about Canada, where corporate developers are still trying to steal Caledonia from Six Nations, right here in Ontario, and where a judge has just filed an injunction against indigenous land defenders who have been facing major police repression.  The protest movement in support of Wet’suwet’en earlier this year was one of the most powerful political movements that I’ve ever been a part of, and it’s painful to see that it wasn’t enough to secure justice for indigenous people living on unceded land in B.C.  They’re still fighting.  They have no choice.  Even though they dropped out of the headlines months ago.  And we can still choose to stand with them.  Solidarity, brothers and sisters.  All power to the people.


 

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