imperialism
Q and A with Nick Couldry and Ulises A Mejias on Data Grab
In this interview with Anna D’Alton (LSE Review of Books), Nick Couldry and Ulises A Mejias discuss their new book, Data Grab which explores how Big Tech ushered in an exploitative system of “data colonialism” and presents strategies on how we can resist it.
Nick Couldry and Ulises A Mejias will speak at a public LSE event to launch the book on Tuesday 14 May at 6.30pm. Find out more and Register.
Q: What is data colonialism and how does it relate to historical colonialism?
Data colonialism, as we define it, is an emerging social order based on a new attempt to seize the world’s resources for the benefit of elites. Like historical colonialism, it is based on the extraction and appropriation of a valuable resource. The old colonialism grabbed land, resources and human labour. The new one grabs us, the daily flow of our lives, in the abstract form of digital data. And, crucially, this new colonialism does not replace the old colonialism, which very much still continues in its effects. Instead, it adds to the historically enduring process of colonialism a new toolkit, a toolkit that involves collecting, processing, and applying data.
The old colonialism grabbed land, resources and human labour. The new one grabs us, the daily flow of our lives, in the abstract form of digital data.
We are not saying there is a one-to-one correspondence between the old colonialism and the new, expanded one. The contexts, the intensities, the modalities or colonialism have always varied, even though the function has remained the same: to extract, to dispossess. And violence continues to reverberate along the same inequalities created by colonialism. We personally may even benefit from the system. We might not mind giving up our data, because we are the ones using gig workers; we are not the gig workers themselves. We are the ones who don’t get to see violent videos on YouTube, because someone in the Philippines has done the traumatising work of flagging and getting those videos removed (while working for very low wages). These are not the same kinds of colonial brutalities of yesterday, but there is still a lot of violence in these new forms of exploitation and the whole emerging social order of data colonialism is being built on force, rather than choice.
Q: Why is it important to frame Big Tech’s extraction of data to form “data territories” as a colonial enterprise? How is data territorialised and extracted?
Something central to colonialism (and capitalism) is the drive to continue accumulating more territories. Colonisers are always looking for new “territories” or “frontiers” from which to extract value. Lenin once said something to the effect that imperialism is the most advanced form of capitalism: once you run out of people to exploit at home, you must colonise new zones of extraction that also become new markets for what you are selling. That is the strategy behind data colonialism, seen as the latest landgrab in a very long series of resource appropriation.
Once you run out of people to exploit at home, you must colonise new zones of extraction that also become new markets for what you are selling. That is the strategy behind data colonialism
Data colonialism is a system for making people easier to use by machines. Corporations have, in many cases, managed to monetise that data by using it to influence our commercial and political decisions, and by selling our lives back to us (the platform can “organise” your life for you and even track and predict your health and emotions). And even where data cannot be directly monetised, accumulated or anticipated data still generates value in terms of speculative investments that build stock market value.
We are not saying that all extracted data necessarily becomes a valuable commodity. Data markets are complex and still developing: much data retains greater value when kept and used inside corporations, rather than being sold between corporations. But value has been extracted all the same through the process of abstracting human life in the form of data.
Q: Data extractivism or “social quantification” is being embedded into our lives in sectors from health and education to farming and labour. How is it reshaping society?
When the internet was not yet controlled by a handful of corporations, we were told that it could be the ultimate tool for democratisation, because it allowed the sharing of information from many to many. Today, what we have is a monopsony, a market structure characterised by a handful of “buyers” (the platforms that “buy” our data or rather acquire it for free). So many-to-many communication cannot happen without first going through a many-to-one filter, concentrating power in a few hands.
In addition to this, the people who manage this system have become quite adept at fragmenting the public into communities that mistrust and hate each other (often called filter bubbles, or echo chambers, though some prefer to think in terms of wider forces of polarisation). The original intent was to make it easier to market to these individual communities, and to do so by targeting ever more personalised content which, because it is more personalised, is more likely to generate the response that advertisers desire. But the system has spiralled out of control because it rewards the circulation of sensationalist misinformation that appeals to base emotions and promotes an us-vs-them parochialism, all while also encouraging addiction and increasing time spent on the platforms.
Q: Have there been any meaningful attempts to regulate the extraction and commodification of data? What are the dangers in it going unchecked?
In terms of regulation, governments have until recently done very little to prevent or even regulate this. Partly because it took them a long time to understand what was going on, but also because most governments have actually pursued policies of media deregulation, interfering less and less in the “free market” and giving corporations more power to act unhindered. Let’s not forget that governments are often very happy to get access to the vast datasets that commercial corporations are amassing, as for example Edward Snowden revealed a decade ago. Many think that recent EU legislation (the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), new legislation such as the Digital Services Act and the recently approved AI Act) provides counter-examples, but we have some doubts. The GDPR depends on the mechanism of consent, and our consent is often obtained through market pressures. Meanwhile the newer EU legislation, when it comes fully into force, while it will impose significant inconveniences for Big Tech companies, especially the largest, is not designed to challenge in a fundamental way the trend towards ever more data extraction and the expanding use of AI. Its goal rather is to help data and AI markets work more fairly, which is very different.
Unless we do something to stop its advances, the emerging social order will ensure that there is no living space which has not already been configured so as to optimise data extraction and the wider operation of business logics.
There is no doubt a role for regulation, but it is unlikely ever to be enough, because it does not think in terms of changing how we live, of reimagining a whole interlocking social and economic order that favours corporate over human interests. Unless we do something to stop its advances, the emerging social order will ensure that there is no living space which has not already been configured so as to optimise data extraction and the wider operation of business logics. As such, it will be just the latest stage in the ever-closer relations between colonialism and capitalism.
Q: What are the inequalities or power asymmetries that data exploitation introduces, and how do they connect to or reinforce existing inequalities?
Data colonialism entails a form of data extractivism that has one main purpose: the generation of value in a profoundly unequal and asymmetrical way whose negative impacts are more acutely felt by the traditional victims of colonialism, whether we define them in terms of race, class and gender, or the intersectional of those categories.
In traditional Marxist terms, we think of exploitation and expropriation as something happening to workers in the workplace. In data colonialism, exploitation happens everywhere and all the time
If we think in traditional Marxist terms, we think of exploitation and expropriation as something happening to workers in the workplace. In data colonialism, exploitation happens everywhere and all the time, because we don’t need to be working in order to contribute to this system. We can in fact be doing the opposite of working: relaxing and interacting with friends and family. But the extraction and the tracking are happening nonetheless.
The reason why increasingly fewer areas of life are outside the reach of this kind of exploitation is because the colonial mindset tells us that data, like nature and labour before it, are a cheap resource. Data is said to be abundant, just there for the taking, and without a real owner. In order for it to be processed, it needs to be refined with advanced technologies, just like previous colonial resources. So, our role is merely to produce it and surrender it to corporations, whom we are told are the only ones who can transform it into something useful and productive. The more data we surrender, for instance, the smarter AI can become, and the more capable of solving our problems. This premise is of course deeply flawed, because it is based on an extractivism model, and because it results in an unequal order where a few gain, and most of us lose. But it is a premise that is being installed increasingly into how the spaces of everyday life (from the home to the workplace, from education to agriculture) are being organised.
Q: Taking inspiration from existing movements, what strategies of resistance can citizens mobilise against Big Tech’s commercialised datafication?
In the final chapter of Data Grab, we discuss many examples of these kinds of movements. One such example is Los Deliveristas Unidos, a group of gig food delivery workers, mostly immigrants, who work in New York City. They successfully organised to demand better working conditions and a minimum wage. Not all their demands have been put into action, but their example demonstrates that people can confront platforms and push for reform.
The project of decolonising data must be able to formulate solutions that are not only technological but social, political, regulatory, cultural, scientific and educational.
Examples like this suggest that a decolonial vision of data is already being mobilised, and it requires encompassing not one mode of resistance, but many. The project of decolonising data must be able to formulate solutions that are not only technological but social, political, regulatory, cultural, scientific and educational. And it must be able to connect itself to struggles that seemingly have nothing to do with data, but that in reality are part of the same struggles for justice and dignity. That is why many creative responses to data colonialism are coming from feminist groups, from anti-racist groups, from indigenous groups: we can and must learn from these rich responses. And with the Mexican feminist scholar Paola Ricaurte we have set up a network, the Tierra Común network that aims to do just that.
We are hopeful, that decolonising data can become not a movement that is co-opted by certain parties and individuals for political gain, but a larger, pluriversal, global movement of solidarity where regular human beings can reclaim our digital data and transform it into a tool to act on the world, instead of a tool for corporations to act on us.
Note: This interview gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Read an interview with Nick Couldry about the book, “Are we giving away too much online?” from March 2024 for LSE Research for the World.
Watch a short video, What is data colonialism? with Nick Couldry on LSE’s YouTube channel.
Main image credit: Andrey_Popov on Shutterstock.
It Is Everyone’s Responsibility To Help Save Gaza
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/dadba7b91b1c008bac17c57d52d22093/href
I think one of the reasons it took so long for student protests against the Gaza genocide to kick into high gear in the US might be because it took some time for the collective realization to dawn that nobody in charge is interested in ending this nightmare.
If Trump had won in 2020, it may not have taken so long for this to occur. Progressive-minded students would have understood from the beginning that the president is an immoral Israel-coddling imperialist, and we may have been seeing these campus protests that are freaking out the empire managers today a lot sooner.
But because it was Biden and not Trump, there was this background assumption that surely the grownups in charge would take care of this thing. Surely they won’t let this go on for very long. Surely they’re just walking a careful diplomatic line while negotiating a ceasefire in the near term, as any government that cares one iota about human rights would be doing.
It took half a year for that illusion to be dispelled. Half a year for people to really start going, “Oh shit. They’re really just going to keep these atrocities going. Nobody in charge cares about stopping this.”
Half a year to see that nobody in the White House is going to save Gaza, none of their elected lawmakers on Capitol Hill are going to save Gaza, nobody anywhere in their government is going to save Gaza — not even the ordinary members of the public in the older generations are going to save Gaza.
Half a year to see that the responsibility for ending an active genocide had been passed all the way down to a bunch of wide-eyed college kids.
Which would of course be a horrifying thing to realize, and would in fact be a profoundly jarring indictment of our entire civilization. But that is indeed what has happened. And you can see how it would take some time for young people to come to understand and process such a thing.
And to be clear, no part of this should be accepted by anyone. The fact that nobody in the world’s most powerful government is taking any responsibility for ending the continual mass atrocity in Gaza proves that government does not deserve to exist, and that it needs to be completely dismantled from top to bottom — including and especially the unelected aspects of that government which are not officially acknowledged. The fact that it has fallen to a bunch of university students to begin causing any meaningful problems for this genocidal regime is obscene, and should never have happened.
Those university students should not be responsible for standing against this genocide, and in truth the responsibility is NOT all theirs — it is ours as well. Each and every one of us are responsible for doing everything we can to end this horror.
None of us can end it single-handedly, but we can all do something every day to help end it collectively. The machine is far too big and powerful for any one person to deal it a fatal blow, but we can all throw sand in its gears to make it harder and harder for it to continue.
We can do this by making our opposition known in every way possible, and by drawing public awareness to the sadistic savagery that’s being perpetrated in Israel with the help of its western allies we live under. Using any medium and platform we can make use of, we can help people understand the ways the imperial media have been manipulating public understanding of this genocide and minimizing their own government’s responsibility for it so that they can really understand the severity and urgency of this issue.
The US-centralized empire is heavily dependent on soft power, which means it needs to maintain a good public image in order to continue functioning — that’s what all the mass media propaganda, Silicon Valley information control, and mainstream culture manufacturing in New York and Hollywood is all about. If enough people start working to destroy the empire’s public image by spreading awareness of its depravity in Gaza, it will be forced to retreat or risk losing the credibility of the soft power manipulation systems it has put so much energy into maintaining over the years.
All positive changes in human behavior of any scale are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. By spreading consciousness throughout our society about what’s happening in Gaza, we throw sand in the gears of the imperial murder machine and make it harder and harder for it to keep rolling forward. And it is our responsibility to do exactly that, in every way we can.
This world is so sick because nobody takes responsibility for the things that are happening in it. The rich and powerful shore up more and more wealth and power while offloading the responsibility for it onto others. They destroy the biosphere while offloading the consequences onto ordinary people, while telling us we just need to ride our bikes more and consume less in order to fix the problem. They start wars and back genocides abroad while refusing to provide for the needful at home, and if you complain they tell you you just need to vote harder next election. They take all of the power and none of the responsibility.
We can’t have a healthy world until we reverse this dynamic, and like all matters concerning responsibility that means it begins with the face in the mirror. We all need to step up to the plate and take responsibility for turning this catastrophe around, and in 2024 that means starting with the genocide our own governments are actively facilitating.
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No path to peace in Ukraine through this fantasy world
A critique of recent campist discussions of the Ukraine war.
The post No path to peace in Ukraine through this fantasy world appeared first on New Politics.
How Indonesia’s people fought colonial rule
A new book by author David Van Reybrouck reveals a fascinating history of resistance to colonialism in Indonesia, writes Simon Basketter
Revolusi is the epic story of Indonesia’s independence struggle, in particular the four-year fight from 1945-49 that took on British and Dutch troops. The bravery of the freedom fighters enthused anti-colonial movements around the world.
David Van Reybrouck has produced an ode to revolution. He argues the declaration of independence in 1945 stirred and divided a world debilitated by war.
The revolution was no bolt from the blue. Its events were direct consequences of the racism and brutality that characterised Dutch-occupied Indonesia.
The Dutch East Indies were initially conquered by the Dutch East India Company (known by its Dutch initials VOC), which sailed to the archipelago in the early 1600s to hunt for natural resources such as spices that would make it a corporate giant.
For three centuries the VOC—and then the Netherlands—fed off Indonesia with ruthless exploitation, massacre and genocide. The mercantile project became territorial as the VOC took possession of swathes of spice-growing terrain.
It took territory by force, meting out genocidal “punishments” to people who got in the way. Van Reybrouck captures the hypocrisy of the venture when assessing the directors of the 17th century VOC.
He writes that these, “seventeen pipe-puffing white-collared worthies who expressed themselves in baroque sentences would have preferred the monopolies to be acquired with a little less bloodshed”.
But it backed slaughter because it, “was good for the bottom line”.
When the company went bankrupt, the islands fell prey to state colonialism of the British, French and Dutch. The Java War of 1825-1830 saw 200,000 killed and devastated the land. As they did later in the Middle East, imperialists drew lines on maps to divide up the spoils.
For the next half-century, with over another 100,000 killed, the Dutch seized the rest of the archipelago.
By 1914, a nation of less than six million controlled more than 40 million people. But it could not hold onto it.
For Van Reybrouck the sinking of a passenger ship in 1936 was symbolic. The passengers were a microcosm of the stifling race and class divides in the colony.
On the lowest deck were the masses—a dehumanised and brutalised workforce.
One deck higher, barred from rising but looking up, were those categorised as “higher” classes and races. On the first deck, languorously soaking up the sun, those who ruled were waited upon by virtue of being European.
Nationalist struggle
It was emigre intellectuals that founded the first nationalist organisation in 1908.
The socialist Indies Social Democratic Organisation (ISDV) was formed in 1914. Sarekat Islam (SI) was founded in 1911 to protect merchants but soon became more militant.
By 1916 SI had hundreds of thousands of members, was raising self-government, and the socialists joined it. This transformed it into an Indonesian organisation that could lead struggles.
Rail worker and Marxist Semaun led the Semarang branch of the SI, which in 1916-17 grew from 1700 members to 20,000.
There were a series of strikes and protests. But after a soldiers’ and sailors’ revolt, the Dutch expelled ISDV leaders and gave soldiers’ leaders 40 years imprisonment.
Membership of SI peaked at over two million in 1919. At the same time a union federation consisting of 22 unions and 70,000 workers was formed.
In 1920 the Communist Party of the Indies (Perserikatan Kommunist di India, PKI) was launched. But in the unions and in the SI tension between right and left came to the fore as several strikes were defeated. Conservative religious forces withdrew from militant politics.
By 1925 Dutch repression reduced the communists’ legal role to vanishing point. So communists launched an insurrection without much backing. Over 13,000 people were arrested, though it took the Dutch 18 months to quell the risings.
Eventually some 3000 communists were banished to the malaria-infested Boven Digul penal colony. The nationalists filled the vacuum somewhat ineffectually.
World War
It took the Second World War to transform the situation again.
The colony had become an even more treasured part of the Netherlands’ economy, not least given the discovery of rich deposits of oil.
The Japanese were welcomed at first as the occupation supported the nationalists. But during Japan’s four-year rule, four million civilians died mainly from starvation and disease.
During the war the most popular of the nationalists, Sukarno, headed a Japanese-imposed puppet regime.
In August 1945, following the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the Japanese surrendered and no allied “liberator” had yet arrived, Sukarno proclaimed independence.
So the British occupied Indonesia. In Semarang, this was met with fierce resistance that only ended after six days of street fighting.
In the port of Surabaya British troops threw grenades into a crowd of Indonesians and a full scale revolt broke out.
The British sent 20,000 troops to Surabaya and began a three-day bombardment of the city. It was only retaken after bloody street fighting that saw 900 British soldiers dead. In Indonesia it is known as Heroes Day to this day.
The ferocity of the resistance convinced the British military that effective reconquest and occupation was not viable.
So the British gave Indonesia back to the Dutch—it didn’t cross their mind to give it to the Indonesians. Armed by the British Labour Party the Dutch tried to hold on to Indonesia over the next four-and-a-half years. Some 200,000 Indonesians and 50,000 Dutch were killed.
The Australian government fully supported their effort at re-occupation, with the Dutch government-in-exile based in Australia during the Second World War.
But trade unions here imposed a ban on all Dutch shipping, paralysing the effort to reimpose colonial rule on Indonesia in the crucial early period after the war.
Indonesian, Indian, Chinese, Malay and Australian seafarers all united in an effort to support Indonesian independence.
Dutch soldiers committed appalling war crimes, repeatedly massacring civilians. The British-trained Captain Westerling would herd people into a village square. He’d force people to squat before they were shot in the head. The village would then be burnt to the ground.
But the Dutch colonial troops’ violence, summary executions, systematic rape and torture could not stop the revolt. The reason was the young fighters who made up militias.
One said, “We were starving a lot of the time. When we came to a village, we’d ask for food. If there were no villages, we’d look at what the monkeys were eating. If there were no monkeys, we’d fast.
“We couldn’t quench our thirst with coconuts, because if we’d climbed up into the trees, the Dutch would have seen us and shot us. We just drank water from the river.
“I didn’t have a uniform. Just a red-and-white headband. They patrolled on foot and were better armed than we were—automatic rifles, whereas we could only fire one shot at a time! But we had scouts everywhere.”
Suradi Surokusumo, who was 22, said, “I would have been ashamed not to fight the Dutch. I was proud of being a nationalist, proud of being Indonesian, proud of our national anthem ‘Indonesia Raya’.”
Toernowo Hadiwidjojo was 24 and worked as a telegraph operator for the railways. “I already had a two-year-old son but took part without a second thought… Independence was a must! I had no fear. I preferred war to colonialism!” he said.
According to Van Reybrouck, “The three-way split between Islamists, nationalists and communists was of lesser importance—the Revolusi had brought them all together.
“Some recited verses of the Koran during their improvised training exercises, others sang Indonesia Raya, yet others whistled The Internationale.”
Nationalist leader Sukarno was released from prison, and on 27 December 1949 he flew to Jakarta to deliver a triumphant speech on the steps of the governor-general’s palace.
Communists
Independence did not mean an end to protest and revolt. Despite having launched another disastrous coup attempt in 1948, the communists were on the rise again.
So when Sukarno replaced elections by “guided democracy” the communists accepted seats in the appointed parliament. Sukarno saw them as a counterweight to the military.
He rightly argued that the PKI “would be more controllable inside the government than outside”. By 1965, the PKI had a membership of three million.
At the same time Sukarno became a leader of the international Non-Aligned Movement of nationalists. In the eyes of the US government, nonalignment meant support for the “communist camp”.
So when a group of army officers attempted a coup in October 1965, Indonesian military leaders—under General Suharto with US backing—embarked on a bloody civil war against the PKI and the left.
As many as one million Indonesians were slaughtered. The army set out to destroy the base of the communists in the villages, and again, there were villages burned.
Francisca Pattipilohy was born in 1926. She lived through four different eras—the colonial era, the Japanese occupation, the independence struggle and the 1960s.
She ended up exiled to the Netherlands when her husband, a journalist, was arrested by the Suharto regime and disappeared.
She recalled, “No matter how well you spoke Dutch, how educated you were, how hard you tried, you were always a native. In court, a native always had to sit on the ground. That was a way of drumming that humiliation into you.”
She concludes, “We never actually became independent. We thought we could make things fairer, but we were three centuries behind. That makes it a difficult struggle.
“The other side was stronger, the capitalist system has established itself everywhere. But as long as this system carries on, the whole world will be wrecked and the environment devastated.”
Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by David Van Reybrouck, translated by David Colmer and David McKay Bodley Head, $36.99
Republished from Socialist Worker UK
The post How Indonesia’s people fought colonial rule first appeared on Solidarity Online.
Fallujah—how the US murdered a city
The US assault on Fallujah in 2004 was one of the US’s worst war crimes in Iraq. Angus Dermody explains how the US set out to crush resistance to foreign occupation
Twenty years ago US troops in Iraq launched the first of two bloody assaults on the city of Fallujah.
While the entirety of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was criminal, the desolation of Fallujah in 2004 should stand as a reminder of the bloody nature of US power.
Fallujah, a city with a population of 300,000 sixty kilometres west of Iraq’s capital Baghdad, had become a symbol of the Sunni insurgency that took root in Iraq after the US invasion in March 2003.
On the evening of 28 April 2003 hundreds of Iraqi civilians assembled at a school housing US troops in Fallujah to demand that the troops withdraw.
The soldiers opened fire on the crowd, killing 17 civilians and wounding more than 70.
Despite US Vice-President Dick Cheney’s belief that coalition forces would be “greeted as liberators” by the people of Iraq, the summer that followed saw a significant increase in attacks on Western troops.
The motivations of the Iraqi insurgents were varied, but they were united in their opposition to the US. Many would have remembered the horrors of the US’s earlier war on Iraq in 1990-91.
Fallujah had been bombed in 1991 by coalition forces who struck its largest market, killing up to 150 civilians. Over the next decade the US bombed Iraq hundreds of times, imposing brutal sanctions that caused malnutrition and denied the population basic medicines.
Many more would have been compelled to resist by the immediate reality of the invasion and occupation.
The US occupiers allowed Iraq to descend into lawlessness, with widespread looting of government ministries, schools and hospitals.
They did little to reconstruct basic infrastructure, with the country left in ruins and unemployment rampant.
The revelation in April 2004 of the US’s horrific abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison discredited the occupation and radicalised a generation.
Iraq also had a proud tradition of nationalist revolts against British rule. Sunni and Shia Muslims united in revolt in 1920 against the plan to establish direct British control over Iraq.
This was followed by further revolts against the British-installed King that led to his toppling in 1958.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq was never about getting rid of Saddam Hussein and introducing democracy to Iraq, it was about US control of oil.
Iraqis were opposed to the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, but also to the US occupation that followed. As is the case in Palestine right now, Iraqis had a right to resist the invasion and occupation of their country.
Battle of Fallujah
A turning point came on 31 March 2004 when insurgents in Fallujah ambushed and killed four private military contractors from the American mercenary company Blackwater. Images of the mutilated bodies of the Blackwater contractors were broadcast around the world.
The response from the US was immediate. The next day the US’s deputy director of operations in Iraq, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, promised to “pacify that city”.
Operation Vigilant Resolve, as the assault on Fallujah was officially referred to, began on 4 April, when 2000 American troops surrounded and cordoned off the city.
Civilians were prevented from leaving, airstrikes levelled homes and mosques, and the two main hospitals were closed. Hundreds of civilians would be killed within the first week. One woman told the media that, “we knew we would be wiped off the Earth”.
As the Marines advanced further into Fallujah they were met with fierce resistance.
The horrific scenes rallied both the Sunni and Shia resistance throughout Iraq. Politicians including British PM Tony Blair, facing pressure at home, expressed their concern about the radicalising potential of the assault.
Sunni leaders on the occupation’s Iraqi Governing Council threatened to resign in protest.
Just six days into the offensive, on 9 April, US Central Command ordered the Marines to suspend all offensive operations in Fallujah. The fighting continued until 30 April, with the city still under the control of the insurgency.
At least 800 Iraqis were killed during the First Battle of Fallujah, approximately 600 of them civilians. Hundreds had to be buried in the former football field of the Fallujah Sports Club because Marines had occupied the main cemetery.
The assault lasted less than a month and ended in embarrassment for the US forces.
When they attempted to send the 2nd Battalion of the newly-formed Iraqi Civil Defence Corps to Fallujah they refused to go, saying that they had not signed up to kill other Iraqis. Part of the 36th Battalion mutinied after fighting in Fallujah for 11 days.
On 1 May the Marines withdrew from Fallujah and turned over operations to the Fallujah Brigade, a newly created unit made up of former Iraqi military personnel. They would eventually disband and surrender the weapons the US had provided them to the insurgency.
Bloodiest battle
The Second Battle of Fallujah, Operation Phantom Fury, was the single bloodiest battle of the Iraq War. After the withdrawal of the Marines in May, Fallujah was continuously bombed by the US and the number of insurgents there doubled.
On 7 November 2004, 10,500 US troops, 850 British troops, and 2000 Iraqi national guards launched a ground invasion of Fallujah in an attempt to drive out the insurgency and establish the Iraqi Interim Government’s control of the city following the Coalition’s transfer of power in June.
Before the assault was launched many civilians fled the city, but 30-50,000 civilians still remained. Men aged 15 to 50 were prevented from entering or leaving, warned by US forces that “if they do, they will become a target”.
US forces went from house to house killing Iraqis in their own homes where their bodies were left to rot. US snipers positioned on roofs gunned down anyone who wandered into the street. Troops were caught on camera executing wounded and unarmed insurgents.
One of the first targets of the assault was the Fallujah General Hospital, believed by occupation forces to be a propaganda centre due to the high number of reports of civilian casualties coming from the hospital.
The hospital was seized and health workers were prevented from leaving to tend to the wounded in other areas of the city, where the few remaining medical clinics had been bombed.
An aid convoy from the Iraqi Red Crescent was denied entry into Fallujah because the US military deemed that there was no need for it. The UN special rapporteur declared that the occupation forces were using “hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population”.
The US launched white phosphorus munitions into the city during the assault; a chemical weapon which melts the flesh down to the bone.
Despite clear evidence of its use, military officials denied it until 2005 when an official military publication described how it proved in Fallujah to be “an effective and versatile munition” and a “potent psychological weapon”.
Depleted uranium munitions were used in an attempt to clear bunkers, contaminating drinking water, food and soil. In total 1200 tonnes of depleted uranium were used on Iraq by the US following their invasion in 2003.
One eyewitness described a sickening incident where the Iraqi National Guard directed families to leave their homes bearing white flags and gather at a mosque, only for US troops to open fire from the nearby rooftops, killing many of them.
At least 800 civilians and up to 2000 insurgents were killed by the time the occupation forces withdrew from Fallujah on 23 December 2004.
When Doctor Salam Ismael visited the city the following month, he reported that, “A wave of hate had wiped out two-thirds of the town… in most of the houses, the bodies were of civilians.
“It became clear to us that we were witnessing the aftermath of a massacre, the cold-blooded butchery of helpless and defenceless civilians.”
City of ghosts
Fallujah had been referred to as the city of mosques. After 2004 it became a city of ghosts. Two thirds of Fallujah was made uninhabitable; as many as 36,000 of the city’s 50,000 homes were destroyed.
Entire neighbourhoods were bulldozed to cover up the crimes committed by the occupation forces. In some areas US forces were reported to be removing the soil and hosing down the streets to hide the use of chemical weapons.
While the US and British governments denied that they used depleted uranium, or that it could cause long-term health risks, its impact was clear.
In the years that followed, 14.7 per cent of all babies born in Fallujah had birth defects and the rate of leukaemia increased by 2200 per cent, significantly higher than the worst of the lasting effects in Hiroshima.
Babies were born with missing limbs, multiple heads and heart defects.
Nobody responsible for the crimes committed in Fallujah has been brought to justice.
Australia was directly implicated, with Australian general Jim Molan serving as Chief of Operations for the coalition forces in Iraq, and responsible for planning the Second Battle of Fallujah and the war crimes that resulted.
As a reward for his role in the butchery of Fallujah, he received the Distinguished Service Cross and was hand-picked by former PM Scott Morrison to serve as a Liberal senator in 2017.
The armed resistance movement that grew out of the despair of the occupation and the assaults on Fallujah humiliated the West.
But it was unable to grow into a unified national movement, and the West responded by creating divisions between Sunni and Shia Muslims to stoke sectarianism.
A unified movement from below could have driven the US out of Iraq and put a stop to the horrors of the occupation.
The horrific scenes that played out in Fallujah in 2004 are being repeated right now in Gaza, with the same forces backing it. Stopping the slaughter for good means building the sort of fight that can smash the imperialist system.
The post Fallujah—how the US murdered a city first appeared on Solidarity Online.
Ireland and Ukraine’s Struggle for Independence, 1916–23
Ireland and Ukraine have some important parallels during the years 1916-1923
The post Ireland and Ukraine’s Struggle for Independence, 1916–23 appeared first on New Politics.
Video: Merseyside Metro Mayor Rotheram refuses to say Israel is committing genocide
Rotheram says he’s come to ‘speak to the community’ – but apparently not to the member of the community asking him to give a simple yes or no answer
Merseyside ‘metro mayor’ Steve Rotheram has been confronted by a local woman who asked for a yes or no answer whether Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians is genocide.
Rotheram squirmed, he obfuscated – but he wouldn’t even give a multi-worded answer, let alone a yes or no one. Nor would he ask the local woman whether she thought it’s genocide, so she can show how simple it is to say.
Instead, he wittered about ‘part of the problem’ and wanting to ‘speak to the community’ while having ‘a private conversation’ (which is it, Steve?):
Video used by courtesy of The Art of Resistance
Keir Starmer’s corrupting influence on the Labour party is seen all too clearly in the actions of many local ‘Labour’ politicians – and Starmer’s war on anyone within the party who dares speak out against the actions of Israel has many party representatives too terrified to do so, in spite of the overwhelming moral need for solidarity with Palestinians and condemnation of Israel’s genocide – yes, genocide. Sadly, it seems like Mayor Rotheram is one of them, despite the massive solidarity among the people of Merseyside with the oppressed and murdered in Gaza and the West Bank.
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150 British Jews tell Met top cop: you’re racist assuming we all support Israel
Letter from anti-racist Jews denounces Establishment’s treatment of anti-genocide marches as antisemitic
One hundred and fifty British Jews have written to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley denouncing the police (and government) treatment of marches against Israel’s genocide in Gaza as if they are antisemitic. The letter reads:
We Reject Your Insinuation That The Marches Against Genocide in Gaza Represent a Threat to Jews or the Jewish Community and Suggest that It Is Not the Business of the Police to Intervene in Ongoing Political Debates
We the undersigned, being Jewish, wish to support and join a complaint against the Metropolitan Police, for their racist and anti-Semitic assumption that all Britain’s Jews support Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza.
We further believe that the decision of the Metropolitan, Police to delay the starting time of the March Against Genocide in Gaza on 17 Feb. 24 from 12.00 to 1.30 pm ‘to accommodate an event at a synagogue along the route’ is lslamophobic, based as it is on the assumption that the large numbers of Muslims taking part pose a threat to Jews worshipping in congregations nearby.
Your decision to delay the start of the march rested u~on the assumption that there is something inherently anti-Semitic about supporting the Palestinians and that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism.
The Met’s decision ignores the fact that many thousands of British Jews have already taken part in such marches without feeling threatened in any way. Indeed the march has started from Marble Arch on at least two previous occasions recently without any anti-Semitic incidents.
We are tired of the Police’s racist and anti-Semitic assumption that to be Jewish is to support Zionism and Israel’s racist and genocidal treatment of the Palestinians. There are many thousands of Jews who are active in the Palestine solidarity movement and we resent your assumptions to the contrary.
The letter is signed by:
The letter’s publication comes amid a flurry of racist and Islamophobic comments by government and opposition politicians, with the help of their media allies, aimed at smearing those who object to mass murder as racist – and the arrest of three left-wing protesters in Newham on the nonsensical basis that booing and hissing a supporter of Israel is antisemitic.
The Establishment is determined to suppress free speech against Israel and its war crimes, and to ignore the blatant racism involved in the assumptions it uses to try to justify those attacks. Anti-racist Jews in the UK and the US know better.
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Just Keep Bringing Awareness To The Depravity Of The Empire In As Many Ways As Possible
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/5e56a8a3884c483c55ba00d440539623/href
At this point in history the most effective way for westerners to fight the empire and build support for revolutionary change is to undermine public support for western status quo systems and institutions. One does this by using every means at their disposal to help people see that the power structures which rule over us don’t serve our interests, and that they are in fact profoundly evil and destructive.
It takes a flash of insight for a westerner to be able to really see the perniciousness of the US-centralized empire in all its blood-soaked glory. This is because westerners spend their entire lives marinating in empire propaganda from childhood, which has normalized and manufactured their consent for the murderous, exploitative and oppressive power structure we live under. The current status quo is all they’ve ever known, and the idea that something better might be possible is alien to them.
Teachers of spiritual enlightenment point students to the truth of their being in as many ways as possible in an effort to facilitate a flash of insight into reality. The reason they do that rather than saying the same words over and over again from day to day is because everyone’s mind is unique and ever-changing, and what knocks things home for one student one day will just be useless noise to another student who will later pop open at something completely different. The receptivity to insight varies from person to person.
Similarly, a westerner who’s been swimming in empire propaganda their whole life won’t have their moment of insight into the depraved nature of the empire until something lands for them that they are personally receptive to. Someone who isn’t receptive to words about the exploitative and ecocidal nature of global capitalism may be receptive to the threat of rapidly expanding censorship, surveillance, police militarization and other authoritarian measures. Someone who is unbothered by the empire’s nuclear brinkmanship with Russia and looming war with China may have their heart broken and their worldview changed when shown what is happening in Gaza.
What triggers the opening of one pair of eyes may not be what triggers another. A kickboxer doesn’t throw only overhand rights because that happened to be what scored a knockout in his last bout, he throws a diverse array of strikes in varied combinations at all levels to overwhelm the defenses of his opponent and land a fight-ending blow. When fighting the empire, one needs to bring the same approach.
Look for fresh opportunities to show westerners that the mass media are deceiving and propagandizing them to get them questioning their assumptions about what they’ve been told about the world. Look for fresh opportunities to show them evidence that the US war machine is the most murderous and destructive force on this planet. Look for fresh opportunities to show them how status quo systems create a far less beneficial society and a far less healthy world than what we could have under different systems. You never know what could be the one thing that snaps somebody’s eyes open.
Nothing you do on this front is wasted effort. All positive changes in human behavior at any level are always preceded by an expansion of awareness, so anything you can do to help bring awareness to the reality of our situation is energy well spent. Any effort you make to shove human consciousness toward the light of truth in even the tiniest way has a beneficial effect on our species.
So use whatever tools you can to make that happen. Have conversations, attend demonstrations, put up signs and stickers, write, tweet, make podcasts, make videos — whatever you find effective for you. Just make sure you’re coming at this thing from as many angles as possible, because diversifying your attacks on the mind control machine is the best way to get through its defenses.
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On the Second Anniversary of Russia’s Invasion: Stand with Ukraine
Supporting the Palestinian cause, however, should not take away from the need to stand with Ukraine. In both cases, a stronger military power is attempting to occupy and deny self-determination to oppressed people.
The post On the Second Anniversary of Russia’s Invasion: Stand with Ukraine appeared first on New Politics.