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<H1>Ukraine and the Pathology of the Liberal Worldview: An African American
Perspective</H1></DIV>
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<DIV class=cat-date-line>Reading the March 2 editorial in the <EM>New York
Times</EM> on the so-called revolution in Ukraine, I couldn’t help but
marvel at how easily elite opinion makers in the U.S. can call for the use of
public resources to bail out the people and government of Ukraine without
significant opposition or even serious questions.
The <EM>Times</EM> editorial forcefully argued that in response to the
“revolution” in Ukraine, Western powers must “provide prompt and substantial
assistance to the Kiev government.” This sentiment was also voiced by a number
of conservative Republicans who normally pretend to be fiscal conservatives, at
least when it comes to state expenditures for working class and poor people in
the U.S.</DIV></DIV>
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<P>In response, the Obama administration is calling on Congress to agree to a
long-term aid package for Ukraine and announced on Tuesday a short-term billion
dollar aid package.</P>
<P>Yet, when it comes to crisis situations like extending unemployment benefits
to the 1.3 million people who lost them in December or the forced bankruptcy of
Detroit, a major city that happens to have an African American majority, or
maintaining food assistance for the working class and poor in the form of the
food stamp program, elite opinion in both parties has embraced the “common
sense” position that significant reductions in public expenditures and services
at every level of government are a reasonable and unavoidable necessity.</P>
<P>The <EM>Times</EM> editorial further argued that since President
Yanukovych left the Ukrainian treasury bare, the West should provide immediate
assistance. But what about the people in Detroit, whose government coffers were
left bare as result of the predatory looting by big banks that targeted African
American families with sub-prime loans and floating interests rates that
resulted in them losing their homes? Where is their relief?</P>
<P>And when those same banks seized the properties of more than 100,000 families
through foreclosure and then refused to pay property taxes to the city of
Detroit—helping to create a fiscal crisis for the city—where was the Federal
assistance to replenish the city’s coffers?</P>
<P>They call Pres. Yanukovych a dictator, but curiously, there was no outcry
against the governor of Michigan when he engineered the passage of an
anti-democratic piece of legislation that allowed him to impose a one-person
dictatorial regime over the people of Detroit. Referred to as an “emergency
manager,” he was granted the power to nullify decisions of the elected city
council and mayor and seize control over all institutions of local government.
The main objective of the “emergency manager” is to ensure that the banks that
looted the city will get a return on the 22 billion dollar debt that the city
accrued.</P>
<P>But the elite do not call that process anti-democratic or dictatorial. Why?
The explanation for this myopia an apparent inability to see a double standard
is not just capitalist avarice and cynical ruling-class self-interest. It is
rooted in the pathology generated by the disease of white supremacy.</P>
<P>Let me elaborate. What many conclude is hypocrisy—a gap between high-sounding
rhetoric and actual behavior—is not hypocrisy at all, but rather a cognitive
deficiency.</P>
<P>It is the same cognitive deficiency that allows Secretary of State John Kerry
to state without any sense of irony, in response to reports that Russia might be
moving troops into Crimea, that “You just don’t, in the 21st century, behave in
a 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up
pretexts.” If someone had reminded Kerry that it was the “trumped-up pretext” of
weapons of mass destruction that was the basis for the illegal invasion and
destruction of Iraq by the U.S., he probably would not have been able to
cognitively process the contradiction.</P>
<P>Kerry’s comments are representative of a liberal, Eurocentric consciousness
in which the same standards of measurement don’t apply to Westerners because
they are the standard. It is not just arrogance but an inculcated sense of
omnipotence in which the Western worldview, values and interpretations don’t
just reflect universal reality, they are the only reality that counts.</P>
<P>When President Obama and members of the corporate elite condemn the Russians
for violating international law, the contradictory nature of that position is
clear to those of us who are the ongoing victims of Western oppression and whose
lives depend on seeing reality as it is.</P>
<P>From our point of view, it is absolutely bizarre that the same country that
violates the sovereignty of other states worldwide with drone strikes, military
interventions and political subversion can actually suggest to the Russians that
it runs the risk of being a “pariah” state.</P>
<P>The U.S. is playing a very dangerous game by attempting to implement its
strategy of encircling the Russian Federation. But the Russians also played a
very dangerous game when they decided not to veto U.N. Security Council
resolution 1973, which gave NATO colonial gangsters the green light to destroy
the Libyan state, and then pretended to be surprised when NATO did just that.
The aggressive encirclement of Russia by NATO is now a case of the chickens
coming home to roost.</P>
<P>Perhaps the Russians did not fully understand what those of us from the
African American community have always understood—that U.S. geostrategic
decision-makers will ally themselves with right-wing forces if it will help them
maintain the hegemony of their empire, from racist nationalists in Ukraine to
rightist Islamic fundamentalists in Syria.</P>
<P>The rise of right-wing racist political movements is not seen as a real
threat for decision-makers in the capitals of Paris, Washington and London. But
when the right-wing forces that they support in the Ukraine start to pass laws
that strip away the rights of people to practice their culture and use their
language, the character of that revolution becomes clear for those of us who
experienced the underbelly of the great “American” revolution.</P>
<P>The frantic mobilization of public funds to assist the “revolution,” the
unrestrained political support for an illegitimate government, and the easy
dismissal of racist and anti-Semitic extremism coming from significant elements
in that “revolution” all suggest that this is a bogus process that has nothing
to do with justice, human progress and certainly not liberatory revolutionary
change for the majority of the people in Ukraine.</P>
<P>A cardinal principle of the African American revolutionary tradition is to be
in solidarity with people(s) engaged in struggles against oppression anywhere in
the world. However, we are also always aware of the international balance of
forces and the efforts by Western imperialism, our principle enemy, to confuse
and ideologically disarm normally anti-imperialist forces with the appropriation
of the vocabulary of social change and mass struggle. In that regard the enemy
has succeeded: Employing the language of humanitarian concern and subtle appeals
to a defense of the liberal state and the Western civilizational project, the
ideological confusion among the left in the U.S. is total.</P>
<P>When U.S. radicals and progressives are unable to make a distinction between
the right and the left and align themselves with a movement in Ukraine that has
as its main objective to become more European and capitalist, and at the same
time amplify the critiques of the rightist forces in Venezuela who want to
murder the embryonic revolution in that country, the backwardness of radical
thought in the U.S. is on full display.</P>
<P>In the U.S. where an African American is being murdered by police forces and
vigilantes at a pace of one every 28 hours, where a million of our folks are
entombed in the dungeons of this nation’s prisons, where state laws are being
employed to deny us our democratic rights, where ex-panther Eddie Conroy is
finally released from prison after 44 years, still leaving dozens of our
political prisoners who are going into their fourth and fifth decades in prison,
African American radicals must be clear on the principle enemy and the principle
contradiction. And for us, the enemy and the principle contradiction is not on
the other side of the world in Russia.</P>
<P><EM>~ </EM><A
href="http://greenshadowcabinet.us/member-profile/7568"><EM>Ajamu
Baraka</EM></A><EM> serves as Public Intervenor for Human Rights on the
Democracy Branch of the Green Shadow
Cabinet.</EM></P></DIV></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>