[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 20 March 2018 06:03.
Anna died fighting for left nationalism as it is the natural form of ethnonationalism - representing the full class of a nation’s people; including women as represented by the YPJ division in which she fought. The YPJ/G share our fight for ethnonational sovereignty against imperial supremacism and exploitation.
Guardian, “British woman killed fighting Turkish forces in Afrin”, 19 Mar 2018:
Anna Campbell believed to be the first British woman to die alongside Kurdish forces in Syria
British woman fighting alongside Kurdish forces in Afrin, northern Syria, has been killed, Kurdish commanders said
Anna Campbell, from Lewes, East Sussex, was volunteering with the US-backed Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) – the all-female affiliate army of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – in the besieged city of Afrin when the convoy she was travelling in was struck by a Turkish missile on 16 March.
Sources say the 26-year-old initially travelled to Syria to join the Kurdish struggle against Islamic State, but begged her Kurdish commanders to send her to the Afrin front after Turkey launched a ground and air offensive to oust Kurdish forces from its borderlands in January.
“They refused at first, but she was adamant, and even dyed her blonde hair black so as to appear less conspicuous as a westerner,” a YPJ source told the Guardian.
“Finally they gave in and let her go.”
She is not only the first British woman killed fighting alongside Kurdish forces in Syria, but also the first Briton to die there since Turkey launched its incursion into Kurdish-held territory on 20 January.
In a statement to the Guardian on Sunday, YPJ commander and spokesperson Nesrin Abdullah said: “[Campbell’s] martyrdom is a great loss to us because with her international soul, her revolutionary spirit, which demonstrated the power of women, she expressed her will in all her actions … On behalf of the Women’s Defence Units YPJ, we express our deepest condolences to [her] family and we promise to follow the path she took up. We will represent her in the entirety of our struggles.”
Her father, Dirk Campbell, described her as a “beautiful and loving daughter” who “would go to any lengths to create the world that she believed in”.
“Anna was very idealistic, very serious, very wholehearted and wanted to create a better world. She wasn’t fighting when she died, she was engaged in a defensive action against the Turkish incursion.”
In recent months Turkey has shifted its focus from fighting Isis in Syria to preventing the YPG from establishing a foothold along its border, arguing that the YPG is linked to its own insurgent group, the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK). The US, EU and Britain, however, do not consider the YPG a terrorist group, which it has supported in its fight against Isis since 2014.
Dirk Campbell said his daughter had dedicated her life to the fight against “unjust power and privilege”.
He said she was a committed human rights and environmental campaigner who would “put herself on the line for what she believed in”.
“It seems a small thing, but I remember when she was 11, she protected a bumblebee from being tormented by other kids at school,” he recalled. “She did it with such strength of will that they ridiculed her. But she didn’t care. She was absolutely single-minded when it came to what she believed in, and she believed what Turkey is doing is wrong.”
He said his daughter’s passion for campaigning was inspired by her mother, Adrienne, who was well-known on the south of England’s activism scene and died of breast cancer five years ago. “Anna was a credit to her mum, my wife, and was carrying on a lot of the kind of work that she was doing,” he added.
Campbell told her father of her plans to travel to northern Syria last May after she heard about the grassroots feminist and socialist revolution that has swept Rojava (the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Syria and heartland of the YPG/J) and inspired the Kurds’ fight against Isis.
“I didn’t try to stop her,” Mr Campbell said. “Because I knew, once she had decided to do something, she was unstoppable. That’s why she went to Rojava: to help build a world of equality and democracy where everyone has a right to representation. When she told me she was going I joked: ‘It’s been nice knowing you.’ I just knew it might be the last time I’d see her.”
Upon arrival in Rojava, Campbell completed the YPJ’s mandatory month-long military training course, in which new recruits learn basic Kurdish, weaponry and battlefield tactics on top of a crash course in the egalitarian and feminist ideology of the YPG/J, and was assigned to an infantry division, comprising a mix of Kurdish and international fighters. There she was given the nom-de-guerre Helîn Qerecox and sent to the front.
YPJ sources said she spent her first months in the country fighting in Deir ez-Zor, Isis’s last major stronghold and scene of the jihadist group’s bitter last stand. But with Isis now on the brink of defeat, foreign fighters within Kurdish ranks have faced a choice: return home or remain in Syria to help the YPG repel Turkey’s attack.
“After the initial attacks on Afrin, comrade Helîn insisted on joining the operation to defend Afrin,” said Abdullah. “Before leaving, she had already received her military training, and, although we wanted to protect her and did not agree with her decision … she incessantly insisted on her wish to leave for Afrin. She even gave us a condition: ‘Either I will go home and abandon the life as a revolutionary or you send me to Afrin. But I would never leave the revolution, so I will go to Afrin’.”
She added: “For us, as the YPJ, comrade Helîn will always be a symbol as a pioneering internationalist woman. We will live up to her hope and beliefs. We will forever pursue her aim to struggle for women, for oppressed communities.”
Mark Campbell, activist and co-chair of the Kurdistan Solidarity Campaign, added: “Anna, by all accounts, was taken deep into the heart of the Kurdish people as she stood side by side with them in their darkest hour. Our thoughts and condolences are with Anna’s family and friends as this time.”
Campbell is believed to be the eighth British citizen killed while serving with Kurdish forces in Syria.
BBC, “White working class girls traded for sex, says MP”, 13 Mar 2018:
Vulnerable white working class girls are being traded for sex in a “routine way”, an MP has told ministers.
Conservative politician Lucy Allan addressed fellow politicians in the wake of reports claiming up to 1,000 children could have been targeted in her Telford constituency.
Ms Allan said the cases would not have happened had the victims been from different backgrounds.
Calls are growing for a fresh inquiry into sex abuse in the Shropshire town.
BBC knew about Telford 8 years before it was reported.
BMan: We know he isn’t on “our” side because if he isn’t outright jewish, he serves them. Putin is the foil in the Kabuki. One side says he never stops his evil attacks on American values, while the other side worships him as if he is George Washington. Syria is just the latest act. Ukraine was first when the “other side” was represented by a Mulatto.
For most of a century, the partisans of the Soviet Union would make great bales of propaganda hay out of the treatment of blacks in the USA and other capitalist countries. Communism, contrarily, favored the black man’s liberation from his white colonialist oppressors – or so the story went. Many blacks around the world would find themselves seduced by various Marxist philosophies. W.E.B. DuBois, while wary of perceived racism within the Communist Party USA, looked to Russia as “the most promising modern country”1. Paul Robeson, too, professed “warm feelings of friendship for the peoples of that land”2. The Soviet Union provided military aid to multiple African nationalist movements during the Cold War, seeming to bolster its image as the ideological alternative to American racism – but had prejudice really been eradicated from the heart of the New Soviet Man of the Bright, Shining Socialist Future? Andrew Young, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under President Carter, averred, “The worst racists in the world are the Russians.”3 Soviet support of black nationalists fighting the Apartheid government of South Africa, for example, would seem to support the sincerity of the Communist Party’s public abhorrence for racism – but how did the Russians react when Africans were actually in their midst?
In 1959, at the urging of DuBois, Khrushchev established the Soviet Union’s Africa Institute to promote academic fellowship, and during the 1960s the number of Africans studying in the U.S.S.R. would swell. “As these institutional initiatives were being finalized African students began to trickle into the U.S.S.R.,” writes Maxim Matusevich:
As of January 1, 1959, there were only seven students from sub-Saharan Africa officially enrolled in Soviet institutions of higher learning. However, between 1960 and 61 the number of African students in the USSR increased almost ten-fold, from 72 to over 500, eventually reaching some 5,000 by the end of the decade. […]
Despite the prevailing climate of complacency and the general timidity of their Soviet peers, Africans protested vociferously against poor living conditions, racist incidents, restrictions on travel within the U.S.S.R., restrictions on dating Russian girls, and restrictions on forming national and ethnic student associations. As early as March 1960, African students in Moscow petitioned the Soviet government to curb the expressions of crude racism by Soviet citizens. On another occasion, two African students refused to be part of a long established Soviet practice – an annual dispatch of thousands of Soviet students to work in the countryside during the harvest. The objectors from Chad and Morocco argued (unconvincingly and probably mockingly) that in their cultures men under 25 years old were not allowed to work in the fields but rather had a special obligation “to engage in leisure activities.” At about the same time four African students […] were expelled from Moscow State University for defying an administrative ban on the Black African Students’ Union. Their expulsion and subsequent departure from the country received wide coverage in the Western press. The students publicly accused university officials of suppressing the union as well as of imposing severe restrictions on the circulation of “books and jazz records.” […]
Darned if the Russian in the lower right corner doesn’t look like a young Putin.
The death of a Ghanaian student in Moscow, in December 1963, which his friends suspected to have been a homicide, occasioned an exceptionally angry reaction among African students in the U.S.S.R. They staged a protest march on the Kremlin [and appear to have set fire to at least one car in the process, judging by Associated Press archival footage] demanding a Bill of Rights for African students in the country […] More trouble brewed in 1964 and 1965, with African students in the U.S.S.R. frequently reporting racist attacks, fights with Soviet youngsters, and even feeling compelled to carry knives for protection. Komsomol officials at Moscow State University (MGU) grudgingly acknowledged several instances of scandalous behavior exhibited by Soviet students but also argued that Africans and other foreigners at MGU had a limited understanding of the selfless and romantic nature of Soviet young men, many of whom preferred the hardship of toil in remote Siberia to the pleasures of Moscow high life. One wonders if it was the “romantic nature of Soviet young men” that fueled the passions of one youthful geography major who threatened to “lynch” an African student married to his Russian fellow student. Or was it a disagreement over their respective work ethics that led another MGU freshman to call upon his African roommate to “pack up his stuff and go back to Mali”?
In May 1965, the Soviet authorities tacitly linked the African student community in the country with the idea of political subversion when they expelled a black American diplomat, Norris Garnett, for “conducting anti-Soviet work among students from African countries.” Garnett’s departure from the scene hardly had the desired long-term effect. Just a few years later, 800 African students went on a week-long strike, this time – in Kiev, in protest against the expulsion of a 23-year-old Czechoslovakian woman for marrying a Nigerian fellow-student. That same year a Nigerian student sleeping in his dorm room in the city of Lvov (L’viv) was attacked by “a drunken Russian with a chisel.” The attacker was reportedly incensed by the Nigerian’s successes with Russian and Ukrainian girls. The incident quickly turned into a major fight involving other Nigerian students who had come to the rescue of their compatriot, and as a result three of them were expelled “for attacking and beating up a Soviet citizen.” Discrimination or alleged discrimination aside, the students’ resentment, it was noted, stemmed from “the sole fact of their living in a communist country.” Once in the Soviet Union, Africans, “even self-proclaimed leftists,” had to reconcile “the obvious discrepancies between what is said and what actually exists.” And what “actually existed” in the Moscow of 1960s and 70s were “the crowded living conditions, lack of privacy, monotonous diet, inadequate sanitary facilities, and the overall drabness of life.” A former African student at Moscow State University, writing about his experiences there, maintained that of all foreign students in the Soviet Union, Africans were most upset by Russia’s depressed style of living […]
There was “no splash of color to relieve Moscow’s damp gray”4, and the Russian cultural diet of the time was famously lacking in the urban flava to which blacks are known to be partial. Kidding aside, Soviets’ blacks appear to have quickly fallen into a pattern of obnoxious behavior that will be immediately familiar to American readers: lazing, complaining, chasing white girls, getting into fights – constituting a demographic liability and a constant threat to public order – all while blaming crazed, irrationally hateful whites for their problems.
This story, which appeared in The Milwaukee Sentinel on Feb 19 1963, indicates that anti-black sentiment in the communist bloc was not limited to Russia.
“What I learned in six months in the Soviet Union is what some Africans will never learn,” Kenyan bellyacher Nicholas Nyangira moaned in an article syndicated by the Associated Press in 1965. “They are taken to Russia’s showplaces and never experience the race hatred that I experienced at the University of Baku.” Nyangira claims, furthermore, to have always gone in fear for his life. “We were referred to scathingly as ‘the blacks’,” he continues, his tears positively seeping through the newsprint. “Many local people had never seen an African before and because we were black they hated us.”
Several Kenya students got beaten up. Usually it would begin with abuse, then lead to violence. It was advisable to walk in pairs because if there was trouble you could expect no help from police. I don’t remember a week that went by without an African student being robbed or attacked.5
DinduNuffin? Check. Racist police? Check. Chimpout? Check. Sympathetic US press coverage? Check. Tracking the entitled black through the ages, can any of the preceding – or any of the following – possibly come as any surprise? Matusevich picks up with Russian attitudes toward Africans at the close of the Soviet era:
Glasnost lifted the floodgates to prejudice and crude racism and let loose the virtual anti-black hysteria. And many Africans blamed Gorbachev’s “revolution” for not feeling safe in the streets and public places of the Soviet cities. A Nigerian journalism student at Kazan University wrote to a Moscow newspaper: “One day I decided to have my lunch in nearby café. As soon as I opened the door, I was met with jeers and cat-calls by young girls sitting around a table, laughing and cracking unfriendly jokes about me…” The enterprising Nigerians soon learned to play curious mind games to save their skin during the growing number of unfriendly encounters. One of them, for example, when approached by a group of hoodlums, pretended to be an American black. The trick worked as the toughs abandoned their original belligerent intentions and “immediately simulated keen interest and began to ask questions about Steve Wonder, Michael Jackson, etc.” The ploy, however, was not 100% fail proof and between May and August of 1990 at least four Nigerian students were severely beaten up and one allegedly killed in Moscow on grounds raging from “being a monkey” to dating Russian girls. Considering the growing public paranoia about HIV-AIDS, for any African to approach a Russian girl was increasingly becoming a risky proposition. […]
USSR April 6 1990: the Deep State calls in its premier spook for a briefing.
“As a result of a deliberate racist campaign, we are now being called SPID (SPID is a Russian abbreviation for AIDS) on the streets by Soviet youngsters.” Soviet street folklore, with its characteristic sexual undertone, tied together the much professed (and mocked) “love” of the Soviet officialdom for the developing world and the appearance of the disease in Russia. A popular joke provided “alternative” transliterations for the original Russian SPID (AIDS) wherein the term was variously interpreted either as Sotsialnoe Posledstvie Internatsionalnoj Druzby (Social Consequence of International Friendship) or Spetsialny Podarok Inostrannyh Druzej (Special Gift from Foreign Friends). Africans residing in the Soviet Union were far from amused though; the joke encapsulated growing popular dissatisfaction with the regime, which “wasted precious resources” on people who (in the words of one populist politician) “have just descended from the palm tree.”
[…]
While the Soviet-style paternalism, that permeated the pre-perestroika publications on Africa, was being gradually toned down, so was the concern for the continent. Africans residing in Russia on the eve of the Soviet collapse noted on many occasions that coverage of Africa was reduced to simplistic and highly stereotypical catalogues of its bane and woes. In the media, the very word “Africa” was often supplanted by cherny kontinent (black continent), the place of danger and wasted opportunities, and a proverbial black hole devouring scant Soviet resources. The stage was being set for the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Africa as it was for the debilitating wave of racism and xenophobia soon to sweep across the post-Soviet spaces.6
But, seriously, Russia – why import blacks in the first place? Everybody knows the Russians invented breakdancing:
Not sure that these dancers doing an early form of break-dancing, viz., “the labor wave”, are exactly Russian and can therefore be attributed as the inventors; however, it is Soviet era and they are wearing Russian style hats.
Endnotes:
Carew, Joy Gleason. Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010, p. 52.
Robeson, Paul. Here I Stand. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1988, p. 38.
Mitchell, Nancy. Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2016, p. 243.
Matusevich, Maxim. “Probing the Limits of Internationalism: African Students Confront Soviet Ritual”. Anthropology of East Europe Review (Fall 2009), pp. 21-24.
Nyangira, Nicholas. “Student: Russians Hate Negroes”. Sumter Daily Item (April 16, 1965), p. 3.
Matusevich, Maxim. “Probing the Limits of Internationalism: African Students Confront Soviet Ritual”. Anthropology of East Europe Review (Fall 2009), pp. 30-31.
Comments:
icareviews, March 8, 2018:
I’ve read that Russia hosts a lot of North Korean guest workers, as well.
I’ve also heard before that Russian nationalists anti-immigration activists hate Putin. Who is the alternative in Russia for voters of populist-nativist inclination? The Communist Party? One sometimes hears of stirring “red-brown” tendencies in Russian politics – commies allying with hardline nationalists – and I think that was a particular fear of the internationalists during Yeltsin’s early years in office – but they just don’t seem to have any opposition parties with sufficient support to dislodge the Putin machine. For decades now, their most famous nationalist politician has been a Jewish clown named Vladimir Zhirinovsky. His whole shtick seems to be to make nationalism into an Archie Bunker type side show.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 10 March 2018 08:11.
In West Virginia, teachers ended their historic strike after state officials agreed to raise the pay of all state workers 5%.
“Who made history? We made history! Who made history? We made history!”...a group of West Virginia teachers chanted.
The strike began on February 22nd and shut-down every public school in the state. It was the longest teachers strike in West Virginia history.
Majorityrights readers should observe that this is a group of White people, albeit implicit, unionized against the state/ goverment. The implications of the model demonstrate possibilities for “White community” organizing against state and other elite position oppression of group interest.
Apologies again for the anti-White source. Note that I will use them when I see news sources that are both pro-White and are not duped into being “anti-left”, against its concepts such as unionization to fight oppressive government policies and other elite position exploitation; when I see them, I will use those other sources. Until then, we have to make use of feedback from sources like Democracy Now, picking out the bits and pieces that we need - note that you can scarcely see a non-White teacher in this story, and that West Virginia is one of the Whitest states in America.
Anna died fighting for left nationalism as it is the natural form of ethnonationalism - representing the full class of a nation’s people; including women as represented by the YPJ division in which she fought. The YPJ/G share our fight for ethnonational sovereignty against imperial supremacism and exploitation.
