anti-imperialism Archives

April 30, 2024

We Need Mass Organizing to Defeat State Violence

Marx, Lenin, and other theorists of socialism are teaching me how the state and capitalism function, which in turn has helped me to understand imperialism, colonialism, oppression, and my own lived experiences.
Additionally, Marxist history has taught me the power of the working class. When discussing and deciding democratically with clear intention and action, the outcomes have better results—but of course not without repression from the state. The immense and powerful state violence is an essential topic for us to discuss. How do we protect ourselves? How do we hold ground? How do we support, and gain support in numbers?

April 21, 2024

by Puntorojo Editorial Collective

Zionism is Now The Highest Stage of Imperialism

In 1922 the League of Nations issued its Mandate for Palestine which gave the British formal ruling power of the country. The Mandate was part of the carving up of the Middle East territories by western capitalist states after World War I in the so-called Sykes-Picot Agreement. The Mandate was issued at a time when about 78 percent of the indigenous population was Arab or Muslim, and about 9 percent Jewish.
The Mandate also made good on the “Balfour Declaration” of 1917. Lord Balfour, an antisemitic British imperialist, promised the Jewish Zionist movement that Britain would support a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. The Middle East was strategically chosen to further Britain’s dominance in the oil-rich region. As scholar Rashid Khalidi notes, the League of Nations Mandate was an “extraordinary gift to the Zionist movement…the clear implication…is that only one people in Palestine is to be recognized with national rights: the Jewish people.”
These two events effectively made the Jewish Zionist movement a junior partner of Western imperialism. Zionist colonization of historic Palestine was given the full blessing of western capitalist ruling classes who sought to push Jews out on their own nations, while creating a foothold of western power and influence in the Middle East.

March 7, 2020

by Lupita Romero

The continental repression of Central Americans: interview with Víctor Interiano

I feel that within the imagination of most people who are neither Salvadoran, of Salvadoran descent, or Central American, El Salvador as a nation, people, and culture is a blank book with only four bookmarks for reference: the civil war, present-day mass migration, MS-13, and pupusas.

One of the greatest misconceptions and purposeful misrepresentations that has been constructed around El Salvador (and in general, Guatemala and Honduras) is a perpetual and contradictory dichotomy of simultaneous victimhood and criminality.

In the United States we are either pitiable victims of war, political repression, or poverty as long as we remain within our lands. But the moment we migrate, we become MS-13 terrorists and invaders that merit no asylum.

What is known about Salvadoran history and culture, even among progressive or leftist circles in the U.S., is largely informed from solidarity work around the 1980s civil war and interactions (between mostly white college students) and representatives of various liberation fronts.

Today, at times, it feels like many of our friends and allies still don’t know us.

This characteristic of being unknowable is not of our choosing or making. It is an unfortunate side-effect of the willful ignorance that comes with being absorbed into and propagating the hegemonic white supremacist culture of the United States.

Which is unfortunate, because to know us is to understand that Salvadorans are born fighters. Resistance is in our blood, from the anticolonial rebellion led by Anastasio Aquino in the 19th century, to the 1932 Indigenous Uprising, to the 1944 National Strike that brought down a dictatorship; we are a people in continuous mobilization for justice.