Screw the Black Alliance for Peace and its hypocritical stands

Hey, Black Alliance for Peace, before you lecture anyone on global struggles, I’d like to ask: Where the hell have you been for persecuted Ethiopians? Let’s talk about your appalling nonsense over Ukraine and failure to step up for persecuted Amhara.

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For three years, I mostly kept my mouth shut over Ukraine. As I pointed out in a recent article here, there was no getting through to certain folks back then that they shared any commonalities with a people relentlessly shelled and shot by Putin’s soldiers.

I could do little to persuade my allies in what was already an urgent fight for me, trying to help the Amhara, Gurage, Afar and other peoples persecuted by the Abiy Ahmed regime. I thought my stand would only alienate folks I should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with as we tried to lift Ethiopia out of its pit of ethno-nationalist terror and despair.

But while the guerrilla resistance armies known as Fano have chalked up remarkable victories against Abiy, the diaspora community leadership has dismally failed to break through the monolithic wall of Western media, which cast the Amhara as villains while it portrayed the Tigray People’s Liberation Front as heroes in 2021.

I ranted, I raved, I urged, I begged these leaders to adopt new tactics, to try new things. They haven’t listened. While ordinary Ethiopians told me online and in private that I was right, the complacent leadership has done nothing to change. And as I’ve written before, the diaspora movement, except in certain pockets in Europe, is virtually flat-line.

Accordingly, if you can applaud my candor over calling out the head-in-the-sand attitudes and refusal to change within the ranks of diaspora leadership, I see no reason anymore why I should hold my tongue over others’ struggles.

And I have nothing but fury and contempt for counterfeit “anti-imperialism” that seeks to hide behind people’s skin color and cheers on the bully.

Looking at you, Black Alliance for Peace. What a pathetic show you’ve just put on with your ridiculous “response to the Ukraine Solidarity Network.”

Let me save you the time before you break out the predictable slurs. I have been speaking out for the Amhara and other persecuted peoples in Ethiopia since 2020. I’ve written and publicly commented on the oppression of citizens of Myanmar and the Rohingya in particular since the early 2000s. I’ve written about the warped journalistic coverage of Palestine that quite literally goes back a full century.

So calling me a “colonizer,” another white Eurocentric leftist ain’t going to cut it, especially since the asshole in the White House whom you are now indirectly supporting has threatened my country, Canada.

I once followed your account on X because you had interesting posts, and I thought our politics over the struggle were aligned. I support getting the U.S. out of Africa. I want to see France out of Africa. I want to see Canadian mining vampires out of Africa. But now I see that you’re full of it.

Worse than being a sellout is being so stupid that your “radical” posture helps the oligarch and billionaire creeps like South African Elon Musk even as you couch your “anti-capitalist” doctrine in turgid prose.

Your reply to the Ukraine Solidarity Network makes one single useful point. Yes—yes—there are many leftwing idiots who do not support the global south struggles. I have pointed out myself how there were ordinary Ukrainians who put on an appalling show when they first fled the Russian invasion and were racist towards people of color, naturally alienating many who could have lent sympathy and support.

But the stupid bigotry of a few should not mean you abandon an entire people, nor should you tar them with farcical labels because of any blindness or oversights of its various leaders. And your reply to the Ukraine Solidarity Network presumes a moral decision on support should just be based on one organization’s perceived doctrinal failures.

Well, I don't go around asking Amhara or Afar refugees what their views on the EU are—it’s enough that their homes are getting blown to bits by drones.

What I find disgustingly hypocritical about your decision is that you can invoke the Palestinian struggle in the same statement where you use Israeli Defense Forces logic.

Here is you:

Let us presume for a moment that your historical analysis has some value—you’re still playing the Netanyahu blame game: “Palestinians deserve to die because we insist every one of them, even children, support Hamas.” Congratulations! You’ve managed to bring a Zionist argument to Ukrainians! Well done.

But then your historical analysis is still bullshit, and it’s been debunked by everyone from Mehdi Hasan to a group of economists who called out Jeffrey Sachs, the guy you seem to think helps your case but really doesn’t.

There is a lot that the “left” as you define it have to answer for (and they are so insufferable that I may do an article on them soon). The irony is that you—you sanctimonious opportunists—have twisted yourselves into a cliché of history, and you would know it if you took the trouble to read more widely.

History, as some say, doesn’t repeat itself but it can rhyme. Back in the 1930s, we had Italian Fascists invade Ethiopia, and despite global protests among both Black and white people, among both ordinary centrists and hardcore leftists, the great powers of Britain, France, and the United States made excuses and completely screwed over an innocent people, who fought an insurgency for years without even the benefit of shipped weapons from dubious allies after 1936. Then we had the Spanish Civil War, in which leftists tied themselves into knots as they tried to parrot the inanities of the Comintern and the bullshit from Stalin’s regime in Moscow.

So now we come to you, who wrote, “At this moment in history, there are no competing imperialisms that can remotely compare to the U.S.-led imperialism’s global impact and its delusional quest for continued planetary dominance. U.S.-led imperialism represents the primary contradiction and primary enemy.”

I see. So, your way of fighting that looming Darth Vaderish-power is to give the evil empire what it wants…?

“I’ll show them! I’ll let them bomb those people!”

And why do you even have a “hierarchy” of “imperialisms?”

You put out this statement only yesterday, and it’s already out-of-date and doesn’t reflect the reality of the unfolding situation.

You wrote: “By siding with NATO and the U.S. State Department, these leftists have effectively aligned themselves with the forces that are waging war against colonized Black and Brown people worldwide, not understanding, or caring, that a victory for NATO and the West would be a disaster for the Global South.”

Except that the State Department now reflects Trump’s perverted world view, something you could have easily recognized since his inauguration, and his regime has paused all military aid to Ukraine.

You’re lazy, both intellectually and in attention to details.

Oh, and this is my favorite howler in your copy, the suggestion that the United States must “recommit to the principles of anti-imperialism.” Are you guys fucking kidding? When was the United States ever anti-imperialist? Does someone need to donate copies for all of you of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States?

What I find most contemptible is your narrow-minded delusion that individuals of conscience must choose their fights, with the implication of picking a region, and that standing with one people must mean abandoning another. Fuck you. And fuck your warped attempts at political bullying.

You are a disgrace to your cause. I don’t give a damn who’s a big deal on your Advisory Committee or on your Coordinating Committee. You should be collectively ashamed of yourselves for having anything to do with this statement or for being associated with it.

Almost a century ago, many courageous Black activists who could not get to Ethiopia to help the resistance and the Patriots, Arbegnoch, chose to go fight in Spain. As one African-American writer put it, “This ain’t Ethiopia, but it’ll do!”

They didn’t nitpick over the fact that it was a white people who were getting bombed by Nazi planes. And most didn’t give a damn about Stalin or Communism, just as C.L.R. James and George Padmore, both firm leftists, were able to look past Ethiopia’s imperial system to see that an African people needed help.

The world could use a little of that international spirit today.

I have been virtually alone, with one or two exceptions, as a white, leftwing advocate for a forgotten people, the Amhara. It is an honor to help their cause but I don’t relish the novelty of being one of a handful.

My own rage against the U.S. imperialist machine is boundless, and I might ask, Where the hell have you been while my friends need you?

Because I sure as hell don’t hear your organization’s name at planning meetings. I don’t see your top names make appearances and speeches at our rallies. I don’t see you at the Zoom meetings. And I know practically every leader and organizer in this fight on a first-name basis.

Amhara are dying. Gurage are persecuted. Afar are mistreated and their concerns ignored. Those are Africans. Those are the victims of the global south. So I repeat:

Where the hell are you?

So, before you lecture anyone—even idiotic, selective memory leftists—on global struggles, I’d like to see you step up and help Ethiopians, the people I love and care about. And I’d like you to get your heads out of your asses over Ukraine.

But I won’t hold my breath.