The world, so far away

People like to suggest that there is a separation between US foreign and domestic policy, but this cannot be true, especially in relation to the Black struggle and its interconnections with the struggles of other oppressed peoples. US opposition to the Soviet Union resulted in the suppression of alleged communists, writers, and Black activists including Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois here.

US support for colonial regimes abroad was intimately connected to the surveillance of leaders such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. It is no wonder why the former was targeted for elimination by both the CIA and FBI, and the latter was the subject of a sustained effort to prompt his suicide by the FBI. Further, the violent suppression of Black Power formations such as the Black Panther Party, the Us Organization, the Republic of New Africa and others was linked to a desire—not only to negate Black self-determination, but to also nullify the emergence of a domestic armed struggle analogous to the many that were being waged in both Africa and Asia.

In the 1980s, the murder of leaders like Maurice Bishop, Thomas Sankara, and support for South Africa’s apartheid regime ran parallel to campaigns of destabilization within domestic Black communities, in some cases utilizing similar tactics of repression as in the case of the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia and the toppling of Bishop’s government in Grenada, or South Africa’s arrest and detainment of anti-apartheid leaders and the US’s continued containment of Black political prisoners.

Finally, the continued imposition of neo-colonialism on the people of Haiti (under every president since Clinton), the destabilization of countries in the Americas like Honduras (under Obama) and Bolivia (under Trump), the resource exploitation of Congo, and complicity in proxy wars and mass-killings are all reminders of the depravity of the state, but also actions which have profound consequences for the lives of Africans and other racialized and oppressed groups in the US as the ideological and political aftershocks of these events will result in continued surges in refugees who have been displaced by war, an intensification of resource extraction in vulnerable communities (i.e., oil), the enlargement of the poor due to economic dislocation, continued disinvestment in domestic infrastructure aid institutions in order to support the war industries, the on-going militarization of American policing, the expansion of the surveillance state, the suppression of civil liberties, and the exponential growth of insecurity in the world. Whats more, these things are not simply artifacts of a reality yet to come into being, they are with us at this very moment.

The world is not “out there” in some far flung place. The world is here with us, where our lives will, to greater or lesser degrees parallel what is happening within it. We ignore this to our peril.