JORGE MAJFUDGood, damned Hispanics: who are we?

 Jorge Majfud, 14/9/2021
Translated by Andy Barton, Tlaxcala

The term “Hispanic” is an invention of the United States government. Nothing new, considering the country’s obsession with race since before it was founded. 

Mural entitled "Mexican-American History & Culture in 20th Century Houston" by artists Jesse Sifuentes and  Laura López Cano in Sam Houston Park, Houston, Texas (2018)

This article was directly and insistently requested to the author by a media outlet to celebrate the "Hispanic Heritage Month in the United States", but then rejected for "reasons of appropriateness". The author summarized the ideas of a virtual meeting, which took place exactly one year ago and was promoted by the Spanish Cervantes Institute of the United States; despite the author's claim, the video of the conversation with other prominent writers and academics was never made public. Due to discrepancies with the publication's criteria, colleagues in the academy organized a day of redress for the author. The Hispanic Heritage Month was created by President Ronald Reagan as a way to expand the same idea of President Lyndon Johnson from a week to a month (Sept. 15-Oct. 15) and marketed by the U.S. mainstream media. 

The first time I visited the United States, I had to fill out a form before arrival. In the “race” section, I wrote “no race.” It was the first time in my life that I had read such a classification. A decade later, I returned to set up in a classroom. Over time, I understood that you had to ‘play the game’: the more “Hispanics” mark “Hispanic” instead of “White,” the more political power the government affords them. The logic is well travelled: Minority groups accept being confined to a box with a label conferred by the dominant group.

The term “Hispanic” is an invention of the United States government. Nothing new, considering the country’s obsession with race since before it was founded. As an invention, we are a reality, and as a reality, many wish to escape from the box, not in rebellion but rather in submission. A “z” that needs to be accepted by the “A” group must be at least 200 percent “A” to be accepted as an “almost-A.”

JORGE MAJFUDBy sea and by air, and nothing more20 years since the only 9/11 that matters

Jorge Majfud, 6/9/2021
Translated by Andy Barton, Tlaxcala

Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister, has gone and done it again. In a conference commemorating the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001, he insisted that “we need some ‘boots on the ground’” to fight against terrorism. Of course, this terrorism did not come out of nowhere; rather, it emerged from the historic interventions of the UK and USAmerica, and more recently, from the CIA’s funding of the Mujahadeen (which gave rise to Osama bin Laden and the founding members of the Taliban).

We will not go over those details now. However, this would be a good opportunity to remind the famous former prime minister of a few lessons from history. The same warning goes for Blair and all the other leaders who would qualify as war criminals were they not in charge of the world’s leading powers. London and Washington have only ever had a chance at success when unloading tonnes of bombs over “islands of Blacks” (as the beginning of the 20th century taught us); over “yellow villages” in the mid-20th century; over “communist hotbeds” decades after, and finally, over “caves of terrorists” at the beginning of the 21st century.

Eray Özbek, Turkey

When the British put boots on the ground in Argentina and Uruguay, things did not go well. They had better luck with their banks (generating internal conflicts with their fake news) than with their soldiers. Whenever they put boots on the ground, it did not at all go well. Neither did it go well for their proverbial sons and daughters, the protestant fanatics in Washington, although the latter always knew how to market themselves well, which is one thing they most certainly are: good salespeople.

JORGE MAJFUDT-Rex intelligence: the myopic logic of business

Jorge Majfud, 13/8/2021
Translated by Andy Barton, Tlaxcala

On 25th February 2021, USAmerican President Joe Biden ordered a military strike along the border between Syria and Iraq (on the Syrian side, of course, to not anger the authorities or media from the Iraqi protectorate) in retaliation to the attacks by a pro-Irani militia in the Iraqi city of Erbil. As expected, this action did not make the front pages of any big Western media outlet, all under the 19th-century slogan of “we were attacked for no reason, and we had to defend ourselves”.

 A story as old as time itself. Now is not the time to review the indigenous genocide on this continent, a genocide never called by its name. We will just pick out a recent incident from 22nd August 2008, during the Barack Obama presidency. After the bombing of Azizabad in Afghanistan, USAmerican military officials (including Oliver North, convicted and pardoned for lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair in the ‘80s) reported that everything had gone according to plan, that the village had greeted them with applause, that a Taliban leader had been killed and that the collateral damage was minimal. Minimal. This is the sense of value of other’s lives. What they did not report at the time is that tens of people had died, including 60 children.

In a less-publicised article for future historians, on 25th February, the New York Times reported the words of the USAmerican government regarding its latest bombing campaign, according to whom “this proportionate military response was conducted together with diplomatic measures, including consultation with coalition partners”. Just like since the 19th century, the Anglo-Saxon government assumes, now without mentioning it, special global intervention rights to re-establish God’s order and profitable business. As the United States Democratic Review from New York published in 1858, in its article “Mexico’s destiny”, “this type of people does not know how to be free, and they will never know under they are educated by American democracy. For this reason, the master will govern them until, one day, they learn how to govern themselves… Providence obliges us to take control of that country… We are not going to take control of Mexico out of our own self-interest; this would be a joke that would be impossible to believe. No, we are going to take control Mexico for its own benefit, to help the eight million poor Mexicans who suffer due to despotism, anarchy and barbarism”.

Nine years earlier, Chicago’s Springfield diary analysed the offence committed by Mexicans of having gifted tax-free land to USAmerican citizens in Texas while ordering them, through ‘barbaric’ laws, to free their slaves: “our compatriots had the right to visit Mexico under the sacred right to trade”. The freedom of the masters of the land to the freedom of the market and the sacred right to private property. Nothing has changed, only the settings and the technological landscape due to the simple and inevitable progression of humanity since the turn of the millennium.

Achille Lollo: farewell to a fighter

Fausto Giudice, Basta Yekfi!, 4/8/2021
Translated by Andy Barton

I have just learned, via common Brazilian comrades, of the passing of Achille Lollo, yesterday in Trevignano Romano, to whom I wish to pay tribute.

 

Achille was born in Rome on 8th May 1951. Salvatore, his father, had been a resistance fighter, a deported communist and an anti-fascist guerrilla fighter in Italy and Yugoslavia. Should Achille have been born just 30 years earlier, he too would have taken up arms against fascism. And yet more, should he have been born 130 years earlier, he would doubtless have been an Italian Redshirt, among the Garibaldini defenders of Montevideo besieged by the cruel Argentinian general Juan Manuel de Rosas.

Yet his actual biography has little to envy of the adventures of the heroes of Alexandre Dumas or Victor Hugo. He belongs to a long Italian tradition of causing trouble in every corner of the world. His 50 years of adult life played out on three stages: the suburbs of Rome, Angola and Brazil.

It all began in 1973 in Primavalle, a volatile suburb in Rome. Achille, together with some of his comrades from the operaista movement Potere Operaio, was accused of having started a fire in the apartment belonging to the local head of the fascist party, the Italian Social Movement, in which two of the fascist leader’s sons died. Achille was arrested. He denied having wanted to kill anybody; rather, his aim was to intimidate the local fascists with whom leftists were locked in an endless conflict. After two years of preventative prison, he was paroled, going on to seek refuge in Angola in 1975. Achille participated in the anti-colonial struggles together with the MPLA, the SWAPO and the ANC. In 1986, with his Angolan wife and their four children, he emigrated to Brazil. There, he was an active member of the PT (Brazilian Worker’s Party) as part of the Força Socialista tendency. Later, he would participate in the founding of the PSOL (Socialism and Liberty Party) in 2004. A few years prior, in 1994, he was arrested after an extradition request from Italy, being freed after one year in prison.

In 2005, the 18-year prison term he had been sentenced to in Italy expired, but the damages and losses he had been sentenced to pay (1 million euros) had not. This prevented Achille from owning anything (which perhaps is not such a bad thing).

In 2010, now with health problems, he returned to Italy, where he devoted himself to ecological agriculture. The irruption of COVID-19 would seriously compromise this activity. However, it was not the virus that eventually killed him: as a diabetic with cardiac problems, he was struck by pancreatic cancer, known for its aggressive development.

Achille leaves behind him an immense body of work, both written and audio-visual, primarily about Latin America, and scattered across many different media platforms. Hopefully, one day, someone will be able to draw it all together. 

 One of Achille’s last photos, with his son Achillinho

King Juan Carlos I offered Spain’s support to the Clinton administration for the US military intervention in Colombia

 Danilo Albin @Danialri, Bilbao, Público, 06/06/2021

Translated by Andy Barton

A recently declassified document shows how Spain’s former monarch told the U.S. government that it would seek funding to help support 'Plan Colombia' in 2000. The initiative took the form of a military assistance agreement set in motion under the excuse of the 'War on Drugs'. It was one that would result in thousands of deaths and serious violations of human rights. After the Spanish king’s promise, the Spanish government at the time, headed up by José María Aznar, contributed $100 million.

 

Plan Colombia was operational between 2000 and 2016. From the very beginning, it counted on the full support of King Juan Carlos I and José María Aznar, the Spanish president at the time. Under the pretext of the ‘fight against drug trafficking’, the allied Colombian and U.S. governments drew up the controversial plan. At first glance, it was responsible for a sustained military strategy that allowed U.S. soldiers to participate in Colombian military operations. More important was the economic aid that came with it, coming to a total of around $10 billion, for an endless war against guerrilla forces that took a heavy toll on the Colombian people. In Spain, the Partido Popular (Popular Party) government, under the auspices of the Casa Real (Royal House), helped to finance the operation.

According to the declassified document obtained by Público, the Spanish newspaper, Plan Colombia was one of the topics of conversation during an official meeting between Juan Carlos I and Clinton on 23rd February 2000 during the former’s visit to the White House. The Spanish King left no room for ambiguity, stating that Spain was already searching for funding that could be used to support the U.S. intervention on Colombian soil.

February 2000: the presidential couple receiving the royal couple at the White House. Queen Sofia stumbles, Bill helps her up

Business as usual : The Western Sahara conundrum

Sebastián Ruiz-Cabrera, El Salto, april 2021

Translated by Andy Barton

An investigative series exploring the different aspects that contribute to maintaining the state of emergency in the occupied territories of Western Sahara. This series was made possible by the Basque NGO MUNDUBAT and funding from the Madrid City Council.

1-Destroying life
2-Gone with the wind
3-The desert scrub
4-The indomitable sea

 

Open PDF

 

Consumerism, another inheritance from the slavery system

 Jorge Majfud

HowTheLightGetsIn Conference, Institute of Art and Ideas, London, September 2021

Translated by Andy Barton, Tlaxcala

 

 I
Strategy and dogma

To declare the abolition of traditional slavery for their possessions in the Caribbean, the British envisioned a new type of enslavement that the new slaves would themselves desire. On 10th June 1833, Rigby Watson, a member of parliament, clearly summarised this idea: “To make them labour, and give them a taste for luxuries and comforts, they must be gradually taught to desire those objects which could be attained by human labour. There was a regular progress from the possession of necessaries to the desire of luxuries; and what once were luxuries, gradually came, among all classes and conditions of men, to be necessaries. This was the sort of progress the Negroes had to go through, and this was the sort of education to which they ought to be subject in their period of probation”.

In 1885, Henry Dawes, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts recognised as an expert in indigenous matters, gave a report on his most recent visit to the Cherokee territories that still remained. According to this report, “there was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not own a dollar. It built its own capitol, and it built its schools and its hospitals. Yet the defect of the system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go because they own their land in common … There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilisation. Til this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress…”. Naturally, the opinions of people like Dawes would prevail, in other words, those who manage others’ success, and the Cherokee territories would be divided up and generously offered back to their inhabitants as private property. The Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz would impose the same exact privatisation programme on the communal production system as a way to emulate the success of the United States, achieving the feat of leaving 80% of the rural population without any land of their own, something which would culminate in the Mexican Revolution many years later.

In 1929, Samuel Crowther, the journalist and prized asset of the United Fruit Company (and Henry Ford’s friend), reported that in Central America “people only work when they are forced to. They are not used to it because the land gives them what little they need… However, the desire for material things is something that must be cultivated… Our advertising is slowly having the same effect as in the United States —and it is reaching the mozos. For when a periodical is discarded, it is grabbed up, and its advertising pages turn up as wallpaper in the thatched huts. I have seen the insides of huts completely covered with American magazine pages and with the timetables and folders issued by our railroads… All of this is having its effect in awakening desires”. Samuel Crowther viewed the Caribbean as the lake of the U.S. empire, which protected and guided the destiny of its constituent countries towards glory and universal development.

The political defeat of the pro-slavery Confederacy around this time was avenged by various cultural and ideological victories. All passed by unnoticed. In record timing, hundreds of monuments to the defeated ‘heroes’ were erected, films were made idealising the proponents of slavery and the theories about a superior race in danger of extinction flooded the desks of politicians and army generals.

One of these secret victories consisted in idealising the masters and demonising the slaves. In modern terms: the owners and the salaried workers. For that reason, in the many generations that were to follow, the United States would celebrate “Memorial Day” (in memory of the casualties of war) and “Veterans Day” (in honour of the former soldiers in these imperialist wars), all in the name of defence and of freedom, a carbon copy of the rhetoric of the Southern slaveowners who forayed into indigenous, Mexican and overseas territories and created the new American empire.

The imperialist expansion of the United States at the expense of the Hispanic world

Eduardo Madroñal Pedraza, Diario16, 30/10/2020

Translated by Andy Barton

Eduardo Madroñal Pedraza (Madrid, 1951) is a pedagogical advisor, author of poetry, writer of articles, member of the National Platform for the Constitutional Protection of Pensions (Mesa Estatal por el Blindaje de las Pensiones-MERP), member of Zero Budget Cuts (Recortes Cero) and activist of Unificación Comunista de España (UCE) Author of : Prosas y otros versos (2012), Versos y otras prosas (ed. Contrabando, 2014) and Anomalías (ed. Contrabando, 2018).

“From the deepest basements to the highest attics, it was possible to admire different regions and traditions superposed over one other, societies in various states of existence that slotted in and out of each other like a global chest of drawers” (Benito Pérez Galdós in Los ayacuchos)

A spectre haunts the consciousness of world’s Hispanic communities. It is the spectre of their own identity. Meanwhile, united in holy alliance, the world’s imperialist powers crow out in unison: “the blame for your underdevelopment lies with Felipe II.” From Wall Street to the French intellectual left-wing, stopping by the German radicals along the way, all tirelessly repeat that “Spanish colonisation, with the repercussions of its fanatism and intransigence, its greed and its sheer idleness, its arbitrariness and its despotism, is the root of all your current ills”.

Which city in the Spanish-speaking world with a sense of self worth does not have its own museum dedicated to the Spanish Inquisition to demonstrate the supposedly undeniable truth that it is all Felipe II’s fault? How many seemingly lucid minds in the Hispanic world are not plagued by the plaintive “if only we were Anglo-Saxons”?

After nearly two centuries of Anglophone-led division and exploitation of Ibero-American nations, including wars, annexations, interventions, invasions, “Panamization” and “Pinochetization”, an unbelievable, incredibly ambitious exercise in subverting the collective memory and alienating individual consciousnesses is currently underway. Its goal is to ensure that Hispanic nations renounce their shared history, their common cultural universe, their blood, family and ancestral ties, in a word, their own existence, to become mere spectres in search of a fate of exploitation, looting and destruction, a fate which the indigenous people of North America know better than anyone.

This reality has two consequences: firstly, the identity and unity of Hispanic nations is highlighted by the great imperialist powers as a force to be controlled and neutralised; secondly, as a reaction to the first consequence, it is now time for Hispanic nations to reconstruct and expose, both to the light of day and to the entire world, their own history, a history read from objective facts and data, grounded in reality. In short, a rigorous and accurate reading of our history, not the version of history that suits General Motors.

We need an objective, materialist vision of what we are and how we arrived at this point, starting with the social classes and their struggles. May this exercise reveal and shine a light on the enormous potential of what we could be. The task of writing the history of Hispanic nations is a prerequisite for us to freely decide our destiny.

This revolutionary undertaking is as relevant today as over. The sharp edges of an externally imposed imperial past, paid in fire and blood just like all others, are used to generate divisions and confrontations between Hispanic nations, something that always benefits the powers that have dominated these nations from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean for centuries. We must forge a unified, revolutionary mass that uses individual differences and plurality to reposition each member of the Hispanic world so that, in the face of the USAmerican hegemon that causes so much suffering for Ibero-America, as well as Spain and Portugal, we may defend our own interests and freely decide our destiny.

The shaping of today’s USA