OF MSM: BBC and a queen

A Journal of People report

The BBC has disabled comments under a tweet celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s “longstanding relationship” with Africa after the post drew public outrage, with people calling the tribute a “rebranding of colonialism.”
The post in question was published on Twitter by the BBC’s African arm on Thursday in the wake of the long-serving monarch’s death, and featured a four-and-a-half-minute video celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s relations with Africa and its leaders throughout her 70-year reign.
However, a number of people took issue with the post, stating that the BBC was trying to “rebrand colonialism” by sugarcoating Britain’s rule over Africa, which continued into the late 20th century. In 1980, Zimbabwe became the last African nation to gain independence from the UK.

WSJ Sells Lithium Neocolonialism as Climate Necessity

Teddy Ostrow

Fair | August 23, 2022

True to its name, the Wall Street Journal never fails to lay bare its corporate sympathies. In a recent feature headlined “The Place With the Most Lithium is Blowing the Electric-Car Revolution” (8/10/22), the Journal warps anti-neoliberal and Indigenous resistance to ecological destruction and resource plundering into pesky obstacles to green capitalist innovation.

HM Online 2021: States and Geo-Politics

Regimes of Extreme Permission? State-corporate repression and the realization of neocolonial accumulation in SE Asia
Joe Greener and Pablo Ciocchini, University of Liverpool in Singapore

Agency in the Periphery: the controversy between Marini and Cardoso in Geopolitical terms
Rafael Alexandre Mello, University of Brasília
Pedro Salgado, Federal University of Bahia and University of Brasília

Conceptualising institutional disobedience in a context of authoritarian neoliberalism: The Catalan case
Monica Clua-Losada, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA
Clara Camps Calvet, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Shaun McCrory, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA

The recolonisation of Latin America and the war on Venezuela

by James Petras

Pambazuka News | March 12, 2019

Not since the US pronounced the Monroe Doctrine proclaiming its imperial supremacy over Latin America, nearly 200 years ago, has a White House regime so openly affirmed its mission to recolonise Latin America.

Introduction

“The Western Hemisphere is our Region,” Michael Pompeo, US Secretary of State.

The second decade of the 21st century has witnessed, in word and deed, the most thorough and successful US recolonisation of Latin America, and its active and overt role as colonial sepoys of an imperial power.

The U.S. and the wars in the Sahel

by Gary K. Busch

Kemon

Washington has been at war in Africa for years.  But in French-speaking parts of the continent it is Paris that is fully in control. Who becomes president and how national affairs are conducted is a matter determined by the French for their own interest under the colonial-era doctrine of Françafrique. And American tax-payers foot much of the bill for this neo-colonialism.

 

At the end of his first week in office, newly elected President Emmanuel Macron visited French troops in the West African country of Mali. Macron flew into Gao, a city in Mali’s north, where political unrest and ethnic strife have raged for more than five years. He met some of the 1,600 French soldiers stationed there, at the largest French military base outside of France. The French had intervened in its former colony in January 2013 in an effort to drive out al-Qaeda-linked groups which had taken advantage of the unrest and conflict created by a rebellion of the ethnic Tuaregs in 2012 to try to take control of the central government in Bamako, Mali’s capital. This rebellion spread throughout the Sahel; an ecoclimatic and biogeographic zone of transition in Africa between the Sahara to the north and the Sudanian Savanna to the south covering more than 3.053 million km².

The benefits and misfortunes of capitalism and racism: An integral part of the South African history

by Sehlare Makgetlaneng

Pambazuka News | 07 April, 2017

There has been the dialectical and organic relationship between the benefits and misfortunes of capitalism and racism in South Africa since their inception in the country. The capture of the interlinkages between these problems in the South African history for their concrete understanding and resolution is through the theoretical use of the relationship between race and class and the theoretical and practical recognition of the primacy of class over race in South Africa. Capitalism since its inception in South Africa has constituted the primary or irreconcilable contradiction with the masses of its exploited people. This work uses the dialectical relationship between race and class to explain the relationship between the benefits and misfortunes of capitalism and racism in the South African political economy.

Class Struggle under Neocolonial Relations of Production

by T G Jacob

Frontier | Vol. 49, No.28, Jan 15 – 21, 2017

The proliferation and increasing incidence of farmers killing themselves is the most telling illustration of economic non-viability of the current economics of farming. The political leaderships often frivolously approach such a serious malady hitting at the roots of Indian agriculture. The rate of suicide rate is increasing rather than decreasing or remaining stable. The crisis that is structural is sought to be dismissed as non- existent which is nothing but rank irresponsibility and contempt exhibited by the political class of the country. The roots of the crisis are deep with a long history and have become built-in into the socio-economic framework of rural India in its relations to the rest of India and the world. The ongoing crisis in Indian agriculture is in the nature of struggle between producers and their exploiters who are hell bent to extract maximum surplus from crores of the former using the mechanism of the market. This market is not a monolithic one but with different components all of which are unfavorable to the actual producers. The non-viability of agriculture as an economic proposition can hence be rectified only through a restructuring of the market mechanism which in turn necessitates restructuring of the balance of power between classes in society. This is what makes the farmers’ question in India an intrinsic part of the class struggle.