Zionism vs. Black Nationalism

James Heartfield Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Fri Aug 3 01:42:02 PDT 2001


In message <p05001906b78f4432bc31@[140.254.114.101]>, Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes
>Economy of scale, for instance. The bigger the better, as long as
>the territory is solidly unified & well governed. The logic of
>capitalist development gave an impetus toward the European Union.
>Why not the African Union?
>
>If left up to me, there would be the Arab-African Union, the Gran
>Columbia (aka the United States of Latin America), etc. :-> If such
>unions could be brought about on a socialist basis, it would be
>great, but even bourgeois unions would be far more preferable to what
>they got now. Combination good, competition bad.

I can see this, but it depends on the empirically-given possibilities for a pan-African or pan-Arab consciousness. Between the first pan- African conference (held in Manchester, England) and the 1970s the possibilities of an African Union were deep. The accumulated defeats of the African nationalist movements have tended to accelerate the fragmentary tendencies in that continent - divisions that the West set out to foster. The current division between the Uganda-Rwanda alliance and the more traditional nationalists like Mugabe is a case in point.

Pan-Arabism suffered an even more destructive defeat. European states aggravated intra-Arab conflict especially in the French/British promotion of Syria and Egypt as rivals. But at the high point of Arab nationalism in the 1950s, movements like Nasserism, or Michel Aflaq's Ba'athist's attempted to transcend those divisions. Subsequent national elites have tended to divert pan-Arab sentiment into rhetorical opposition to Israel, while making a separate peace with the West (a strategy that has proved pretty destabilising, as can be seen in Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt).

In these conditions, pan-African and pan-Arab sentiments are at too great a distance from experience to have much more than a rhetorical meaning. And that is the depth of the defeat of third world nationalist movements - that the educated elites generally would rather see alliance with the West than against it.

Incidentally, there is no popular pan-European movement, either. Only the Euro-elites have a sense of a common bond, and the only basis for that is their mutual contempt for their own electorates. -- James Heartfield



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