Naomi Klein on Conspiracy Culture and “the Mirror World”: Let's Go Back to that "Collective Unsettling" and Make the World Anew

Check out this excellent interview of journalist Naomi Klein on her new book, Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. I like how she unpacks what I am sure so many—if not most of us—felt throughout the pandemic that continues into the present. Specifically, this consisted of a "collective unsettling," experienced by the "lockdown class" to not just see, but to be so perceivably impacted by the consequential societal inequities that had been unmasked. I appreciate Klein's analysis herein on how the pandemic resulted in 

"an absolute frontal confrontation with the logic at the heart of capitalism that tells you you’re on your own. You are an island. All of your successes are yours alone, and people who don’t have them, it’s their fault. " 

All of a sudden, a largely racialized workforce of frontline workers, such as those working in meat packing plants and Amazon warehouses, forced all to consider that they breathe the same air as the rest of us, too. Many wondered and grew concerned that they, too, have rights and that these workers' needs, rights, and risks are not only borne unevenly, but affect the whole. 

This was a hard pill to swallow under neoliberal, individualist capitalist thought that nevertheless appreciated in that moment government "largess" of eviction control and flexible working arrangements.

Citing Arundhati Roy's eloquent 2020 Financial Times piece on how the pandemic held promise as a portal to a new and better world, what started out as a fresh kind of hopefulness for societal change for some, myself included, got taken up and distorted by extremists.

After all, with what seemed to be a racial reckoning in 2021, many of us were hopeful that this heralded a new multiethnic, multiracial democracy where greater justice lives.

Klein's research illuminates a core strategy by the likes of Steve Bannon in taking up the rightful anger against big pharma and the elite and artfully flipping these sentiments to manufacture—via social media—xenophobia, racism, transphobia, and the like. She cautions against the online cruelty and de-platforming of her Doppelganger, former feminist, "Naomi Wolf"—with whom Klein is often confused—hence, the title of her book. De-platforming extremists, she cautions, hardly means that they're no longer a threat to democracy when people like her are able to balloon their following, for example, by turning coats and becoming regular spokespersons on the Steve Bannon Show.

I recently listened to this excellent interview of author Naomi Klein Youtube interview on Democracy Now! and encourage you to do the same if you prefer to listen to her talk about her doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, and how this led her into the mirror world of the far right.

I understand this "mirror world" of which she writes as largely a bait and switch strategy. First, your against big pharma. Next your against immigrants crossing the border. First it's about "ending all wars;" next, it's about starting a war with China. I look forward to reading this text. In the meantime, let's pause and consider Klein's thesis and analysis of the far-right's manufactured, dangerous, and conspiratorial “mirror world.” It should concern us all that Steve Bannon is forging, in Klein's words, an "international nationalist alliance, authoritarian alliance," with Wolf allowing herself to be a tool for that agenda while enriching herself.

A good, immediate first step for all of us is to listen for the authenticity of the specific policies that any pundit, politician, or marketer like Steve Bannon professes since the mirror world is about sowing confusion and capitalizing on issues that used to be important to the left. Geez, they are wide open in their intentions that it's about taking power. The world is so fearful and boy, can they sell you a dream they'll never deliver on. They haven't yet. They're happy to take your money though.

Let me read your policy proposal and strategy on China, Steve Bannon. How will you accomplish your expressed ends? 

In short, there is a vacuum that right-wing media is exploiting primarily to take power in the service of this unholy, "international nationalist alliance." For the record, China is a market-capitalist country, sometimes described as "socialism with Chinese" characteristics. My husband and I have been to China. They are beautiful people. Very kind and respectful. Incredible history and very ancient. Impressive and magisterial in so many ways. It saddens me that there are not better relations between our countries.

I think we should all go back to that space of a "collective unsettling," that hopeful portal, and make the world anew. THAT's the conversation we should be having and that gets structured out with these intentionally diversionary politics. Weapons of mass distraction, I call them. 

Let's unite and do this by getting involved at the grassroots level. Join or re-commit to a coalition, a civil rights organization, a nonprofit, and any organization doing important work and premised on the humanization of all. It's going to take a lot of work, so the effort itself must rejuvenate. 

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela

#JoinTheMovement

References

Klein, N. (2023). Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. MacMillan books.

Klein, N. (2023, Sept. 13).  To Know Yourself, Consider Your Doppelgänger, New YorkTimes. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/opinion/naomi-klein-wolf-doppelganger.html

Lewis, H. (2023, Sept. 12). From Feminist to Right-Wing Conspiracist: What Naomi Wolf's Odyssey can teach us about seeing patters where they don't exist, The Atlantic. Retrieved: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/10/naomi-wolf-klein-doppelganger-book/675120/

Naomi Klein on Conspiracy Culture and

 “the Mirror World”

Sep 15, 2023 | 2:00 AM

View on the original site.

Naomi Klein, author, professor, journalist, and contributing editor at The Intercept, has ventured into the far-right “mirror world,” exploring the movements and figures promoting conspiracy theories, misinformation, and its hold on large segments of society. This week on Deconstructed, we bring you a live conversation between Ryan Grim and Klein at the George Washington University Amphitheater, organized by Politics and Prose. Klein and Grim discuss Klein’s newest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.” They discuss the labyrinthine world of conspiracy theories and how the right has effectively sowed confusion and capitalized on issues abandoned by the left.

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim.

On Wednesday of this week, I interviewed Naomi Klein about her new book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” which begins with Naomi following her doppelganger, other Naomi — that’s the feminist-turned-Steve-Bannon-ally, Naomi Wolf — down a series of rabbit holes.

Describing her journey to these shadowlands, she also looks into the mirror, and asks all of us to look in the mirror as well, and ask what role we’ve played in ceding turf to the right, or abandoning principles — like skepticism of corporate greed and big pharma, opposition to censorship and mass surveillance, and so on — that have long been the domain of the left. By abandoning that territory, did we play a part in clearing the ground for the mirror world? And how can we reclaim our confidence and our voices in such disorienting times?

We spoke at George Washington University at an event hosted by Politics and Prose. That independent bookstore, by the way, will also be hosting a reading for my own forthcoming book, “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.” I’ll be in conversation there with my Breaking Points colleague Krystal Ball on November 27th.

Now, here’s Naomi Klein with a brief reading from her new book, followed by our conversation.

[Deconstructed intro theme, continued.]

Presenter: Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in giving a warm and enthusiastic welcome to Naomi Klein and Ryan Grim.

Naomi Klein (Reading from “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World”): In my defense, it was never my intent to write this book. I did not have time, no one asked me to, and several people cautioned against it. Not now, not with the literal and figurative fires roiling our planet, and certainly not about this.

“Other Naomi,” that is how I refer to her now; this person with whom I have been chronically confused for over a decade. My big-haired doppelganger. A person whom so many others appear to find indistinguishable from me. A person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me, or thank me, or express their pity for me. The very fact that I referred to her with any kind of code speaks to the absurdity of my situation.

For a quarter of a century, I have been a person who writes about corporate power and its ravages. I sneak into abusive factories in faraway countries and across borders to military occupations. I report in the aftermath of oil spills and Category 5 hurricanes. I write books of big ideas about serious subjects.

And yet, in the months and years during which this text came into being, a time when cemeteries ran out of space and billionaires blasted themselves into outer space, everything else that I might have written appeared only as an unwanted intrusion, a rude interruption. In June 2021, as this project began to truly spiral out of my control, a strange new weather event, dubbed a “heat dome,” descended on the southern coast of British Columbia, the part of Canada where I now live with my family.

The thick air felt like a snarling, invasive entity with malevolent intent. More than 600 people died, most of them elderly. An estimated 10 billion marine creatures were cooked alive on our shores. An entire town went up in flames. It’s rare for this out-of-the-way sparsely populated spot to make international headlines, but the heat dome made us briefly famous.

An editor asked if I, as someone engaged in the climate fight for 15 years, would file a report about what it was like to live through this unprecedented climate event.

“I’m working on something else,” I told him, the stench of death filling my nostrils.

“Can I ask what?”

“You cannot.”

There were plenty of other important things I neglected during this time of feverish subterfuge. That summer, I allowed my nine-year-old to spend so many hours watching a gory nature series called Animal Fight Club that he began to ram me at my desk like a great white shark. I engaged in all of this neglect so that I could, what? Check her serially suspended Twitter account? Study her appearances on Steve Bannon’s live streams for insights into their electric chemistry? Read or listen to yet another of her warnings that basic health measures were actually a covert plot orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, and the World Economic Forum, to sow mass death on such a scale, it could only be the work of the devil himself?

My deepest shame rests with the unspeakable number of podcasts I mainlined, the sheer volume of hours lost that I will never get back. A master’s degree worth of hours. I told myself it was research. That, if I was going to understand her and her fellow travelers who are now in open warfare against objective reality, I had to immerse myself in the archive of several extremely prolific and editing-averse weekly and twice-weekly shows, with names like “Q Anon Anonymous” and “Conspirituality,” that unpack and deconstruct the co-mingling worlds of conspiracy theories. wellness hucksters, and their various intersections with COVID 19 denial, anti-vaccine hysteria, and rising fascism.

This, on top of keeping up with the daily output from Bannon and Tucker Carlson, on whose shows Other Naomi had become a regular guest. “I feel closer to the hosts of Conspirituality than to you,” I whimpered one night into my best friend’s voicemail.

I told myself I had no choice. That this was not, in fact, an epically frivolous and narcissistic waste of my compressed writing time, or of the compressed writing time on the clock of our fast-warming planet. I rationalized that Other Naomi, as one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many of our most urgent crises — and as someone who has seemingly helped inspire large numbers of people to take to the streets in rebellion against an almost wholly hallucinated tyranny — is at the nexus of several forces that, while ridiculous in the extreme, are nonetheless important, since the confusion they sow and the oxygen they absorb increasingly stand in the way of pretty much anything helpful or healthful that we humans might at some point decide to do together.

Thank you.

[Audience clapping.]

Scapegoating Democracy at a Point in U.S. History Where We Need MORE Democracy, Not Less

After being of the opinion that Trumpists had already taken off their masks of white supremacy and racial hatred, Umair Haque makes an excellent point of how their new terrain is the scapegoating "democracy" itself. The problem never has been democracy at all. I quote the famous and beloved educator and author, Deborah Meier, who once said 

"If there is a problem with democracy, we don't need less democracy. We need more democracy."

To make democracy the culprit is to indeed invite fascist neoliberalism that is the economic system that is already tearing into the heart of our country given the widening inequality. What we are seeing happening right now on the extreme right of a quintessential power grab where republicans are fully about preserving rights for themselves to exploit others and robbing the rest of us any right, including to existence, that these folks see as threatening of their power.

Do read this great analysis and critique of neoliberal, capitalist patriarchy by Umair Haque that I mostly think signify the dying breaths of white supremacy. We always knew it would be violent and reactionary. 

We could not be treading as a polity more dangerous waters. The immediate solution is to get out and vote.

Oct 5 is the deadline to register to vote for November Elections

Sept. 20 is National Voter Registration Day. #Vote2022

-Angela Valenzuela

#SayNoToFascism #Vote2022 #DemocracyNotAutocracy #RacialCapitalism

The Trumpists Are Taking Their Masks Off — Guess What’s Underneath?

When a Political Side Explicitly Rejects Democracy and Embraces Violence, Can a Society Survive?

by Umair Haque August 15, 2022

Credit: Olivier Douliery

They’re getting crazier, more spiteful, bolder, and more violent by the day. The GOP, of course, the Trumpists. It’s worth taking a moment to pause and ask: what do they even want at this point?

They keep outdoing themselves in terms of ignorance, hostility, and sheer idiocy. Every time you think “they can’t possibly get any worse”…they do. Now, they’re explicitly against…democracy. As in, overtly.

Lately, if you’re keeping watch, a new form of ignorance has arisen. It’s not totally new — like so many of the beliefs radicalizing this social group and political wing, it’s a fringe belief making its way into the mainstream. Now you can hear it out in the open, amongst those aspiring to office — or worse, holding it.

“We’re not a democracy — we’re a republic!” Whew. Take a second to parse the irony of office-holders in a democracy saying…it’s not one. Then take a moment to chew on the fact that apparently, Trumpists have all become Plato’s progeny, and are now deep thinkers on matters of the body politic. I kid. The Republic, this isn’t.

“I want to address something that’s bugging me for a long time,” Bliss said. “And that’s the history and the sacredness of our Constitution and what our founding fathers meant.… We are a constitutional republic. We are not a democracy. Nowhere in the Constitution does it use the word ‘democracy.’ When I hear the word ‘democracy,’ I think of the democracy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That’s not us.”

“Sperry, the activist sitting in the audience, had posted on Facebook a few months before: “Please strike the word democracy from your vocabulary! WE ARE A REPUBLIC!!!”

What do these ninnies mean by this line that once used to be a fringe belief but is now going full-on mainstream — “We’re not a democracy, we’re a republic!” How do you even begin to square that with, well, the Constitution, which, as flawed as it is, at least aspires to democratic ideals of truth, justice, equality, freedom for all?

It all goes back to the fundamental question: what do these lunatics even want?

The best explanation of this line comes from one of them themselves: “Well to me, what a democracy is, is like 51 percent of the people can decide that they want my property, and they can take it. Where a constitutional republic is: No, you can’t do that.”

Like I said, Plato and Thomas Paine are rolling over in their graves, clutching their tummies with morbid laughter. A constitutional republic is…”no, you can’t do that”?

And yet here’s the explanation not even hidden in plain sight, but loudly proclaimed. The reason that these fanatics don’t want a democracy — explicitly — is to protect private property rights. In other words, they want a kind of libertarian utopia, where there are no public goods — no public schools, systems, water mains, anything. “Freedom” is being able to choose your own — even if it means, of course, not having any. Democracy, because it insists on public goods — after all, that’s what education, health, longevity, really are — is anathema to this conception of what a society should be.

This has deep and sinister roots in America, the choice of a fanatical focus on private property, at the expense of public goods. Where does it come from? Sadly, slavery, of course. The Souths’ justification for slavery was bound up in “property rights,” only over people. The problem was that since people were property — the most valuable form of it, free labour that made the economy go — the central focus of society had to become protecting those “private property rights.” Hence, the Fugitive Slave Act empowered anyone to become a deputy chasing down a runaway slave, since they were just “property.”

If all that sounds, well, proto-fascist to you, it should. The Nazis were fascinated by America, and studied it intently, modeling their odious laws to repress and then annihilate Jews and all other kinds of minorities, on Southern ones. And it doesn’t take a genius to think too hard about just why some people would be able to become other people’s property — they must be subhumans, only good for menial labour, disposable commodities, only fit to be traded. How horrific.

This history poisons America to this very day. When Trumpists cry “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic,” it’s not because they’ve suddenly become political science scholars. It’s because they mean “the protection of private property rights,” which in America has long been code for proto-fascism. We’ll send our kids to our schools, we’ll shop at our stores, we’ll sit on our buses — and you don’t belong here, except as property. In other words, “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic” is thinly veiled code for supremacy.

And yet though all this has deep roots in American history, it’s still a quantum leap into the abyss. How so?

Trumpism, like so many demagogic movements, works by scapegoating. And scapegoating evolves. First it was “just” Muslims, then it was Mexicans, then it was Mexican babies, then it was all Latino families, who had to be “separated,” then it was everyday “real” American kids, even white ones, who might say the word “gay,” and then it was women, all of them, from whom rights of privacy, expression, and association were taken by a rogue Supreme Court. Scapegoating evolves and grows as demagogic movements do — and it’s a key mechanism of social collapse, because the bigger the scapegoats get, the bigger the Big Lies do, and the more damage has to be done to society, the more overt and explicit and intense and far-reaching the violence, brutality, and hate.

Now. What’s really going on when Trumpists cry “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic!” They are reaching the outer limits of scapegoating. The scapegoat? This time, it’s democracy itself.

Who’s responsible for the woes of the “real” American? Why did their lives fall apart, generations plunging into downward mobility and penury, the elderly never retiring? Who ripped the heart out of all those Rust Belt towns? Who kicked the legs out from under the working class? Think of that sequence of scapegoats above — they’ve all been blamed for it, in sequential order, Muslims, Mexicans, Jews, gay people, their kids, their families, then everyone’s kids, and finally now women. Where do you go from there?

You see, you have to go somewhere, and always find a new scapegoat, in a demagogic movement and politics. Because of course just finding targets to pick on doesn’t solve the actual problem. You could “separate” literally every single Latino family in existence — and it wouldn’t do a thing to solve the problem of the white American working class falling apart, or Americans not having much of a future. The same was true, of course, of Nazis, Jews, and Germans. Scapegoating is so poisonous because it’s a vicious cycle: since it doesn’t work, a bigger scapegoat always has to be found.

Until, at least, you reach the end. And there’s nowhere left to go.

What’s happening now is that Trumpists are being offered a new scapegoat for their woes. Hey, old lady, why didn’t you ever retire? Hey, kid, why can’t you get a job? Hey, middle-aged guy, why is your life worse than your parents? Scapegoating is like a spell — it wears off. The old scapegoats don’t work that much anymore. Say Muslims, Mexicans, to the fanatics in America — and they’ll shrug. They need fresh meat, to really whet their appetities. The new scapegoat being offered to America’s fanatics is democracy itself.

You didn’t get the life you expected, wanted, felt entitled to…because democracy. Democracy’s the problem. Sure, “democracy” here is a code-word — rights for anyone else but us. Us — the pure of faith and true of blood. We’re the only people in society who deserve rights like speech, expression, association, privacy. The rest? They’re subhumans. Because they’re not pious enough of faith, or they’re not pure enough of blood. They don’t deserve power.

And that is what all this is really about. Power. When Trumpists cry “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic,” it’s not because they’re debating the ghost of Winston Churchill, and winning — it’s because for them, it’s a way to claim absolute power. It means: nobody else is to have any real rights, which amount to powers. Powers of self-determination, sovereignty, even existence.

Let me make that crystal clear, in case it’s not. In a “republic,” the Trumpists believe that what the minority says can and should go. And because the minority wants it badly enough, hard enough, is willing to be more brutal and violent than the majority, that bestows a kind of moral right to power, alongside the natural, divine right that comes from purity of faith and blood. So in said “republic,” gay people aren’t to exist, women aren’t to have rights, kids are to be taught what fundamentalists want, church is to supersede state, even if not everyone’s church, since it’s not everyone’s state anymore. The minority is now to have absolute power, and define society’s hierarchies their way.

You get this much respect, money, property, power — because this is where you fit in the hierarchy now. Pure of faith, true of blood, a man? Great, you’re at the top, where you belong. A woman, but willing to submit? OK, we’ll let you have a place, a rung. Minority? Woman not willing to submit? Hmm, sounds like trouble — you’re below the dividing line between “person” and “property,” you’re not to have the same rights as people.

All this is about power. Absolute power. To define other people’s lives. You see, in a democracy — and this is what makes democracy so, so different from all the other political-social forms which preceded it — we don’t do that. Each person gets to decide their own life, fate, existence. At least that’s the ideal, even if progress towards it has been slow, especially for women, gays, minorities. Still, the ideal remains: in a democracy, freedom is two things — self-determination, at the individual level, supported by self-governance, at the group level, nurtured by shared investment, at the collective level. We all need things like schools and hospitals and roads and books, in order to fulfill our own potential, and in a democracy, we support each other with those, and then let everyone decide their lives on their own.

It’s a good thing.

The Trumpists are saying no to all of that in their new insane form of ignorance — “this is a republic, not a democracy!” They’re saying that people shouldn’t have the right of self-determination. The minority will decide how everyone will live — and they’re already doing it to women, and next up gay people. They’re saying that because people don’t have the right of self-determination, self-governance, as in, we all consent to govern ourselves, doesn’t matter, either. If you don’t consent to being governed by the minority, too bad, shrug. They’ll do it with guns, anyways — why do you think they brandish them so openly now? And they’re saying that because self-determination and self-governance shouldn’t exist, there’s no need for shared systems of public goods that nurture everyone. What’s there to nurture, in all those hated subhumans, Mexicans, Muslims, Jews, gays, women, anyways? Maybe women can be made to forcibly give birth — but that’s about it. Everyone has their place in this hierarchy — and yours is below ours.

That is how all this is a quantum leap into the abyss. It’s a very, very dangerous step for a society to take when one major political bloc begins to explicitly demonize democracy. To scapegoat it as the Big Scapegoat for the pure of blood’s and true of faith’s woes. Because of course the answer is then clear: tear down this Great Wicker Man called democracy. Burn him!! And set yourselves free! Even if it means burning the village down right alongside it.

This is how scapegoating plays out, in collapsing societies. First the scapegoats are ethnic groups, already low on the hierarchy of power, long hated. Then they expand to include those further up it. Then scapegoating expands further, to include even the faithless and heretical and impure among even the “real” people — women with the wrong attitudes, kids who display the wrong tendencies, teachers, doctors, journalists, intellectuals, anyone who doesn’t fit into the by-now fascist project of total conformity to a homogenized, cleansed ideal of purity and blood and virtue. And finally, when even all this doesn’t work to solve the problem of the declining living standards of the “real” people — a last scapegoat must be found. Democracy itself.

Where else have we seen exactly this process? In nearly every society which has completed the process of social collapse is the grim answer. This is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany. Germans — at least enough of them — accepted Hitler as their glorious, all-powerful thousand-year Fuhrer precisely because democracy itself was scapegoated for their woes. We’ve seen this play out in the Muslim world, too, and in Africa, time after time, democracy itself blamed for people’s misfortunes and struggles, as religious zealots and warlords took power. And of course this, too, was the central rationale of the terrible disaster communism ended in — democracy itself was scapegoated as being critical of the Party, hence, dictators like Stalin emerged, rose, and were glorified.

The Trumpists are finally taking their masks off. And what’s underneath is the face of a monster, rotting, squirming, snarling, sneering, baying. It’s the face of all the lunacy and idiocy and monstrosity in history, from fascism to theocracy to supremacy, through the dark ages, through war, hate, brutality, atrocity, right back to the Stone Age, where power is violence, and violence is the way of the tribe.

Imagine accepting someone as your Fuhrer. Really imagine it. Think about what it takes to go there, because that’s what Trumpists are basically saying now. Right out in the open. And that’s not all. In the last few weeks, they’ve proclaimed they were willing to die for Trump — remember their insane, violent reaction to the FBI raid on Trump’s tacky, lurid mansion?

When a political bloc and social group reaches this point — demagogues are scapegoating democracy itself, their masses are thrilled by that, slavering over it, calling for its end, willing to die for their demagogues, accepting them as their Fuhrer…it’s in an incredibly bad place. It is reaching terminal velocity of collapse, and is mere inches away from the hard, cold ground. Yes, the fall can still be broken. But first, a society has to figure out just how hard and fast it’s really falling. And that, too often, is the hardest part.

Umair
August 2022

"Migrant Justice Means Facing Root Causes," by David Bacon in Truthout

I so respect and admire photojournalist David Bacon who has been following the plight of impoverished, vulnerable migrants and how their experiences are implicated in the deep injustices associated with international and domestic capitalism that exploits their labor for profits as the cost of doing business.

Like my friend, feminist scholar Martha Cotera said the other day, "We should stop calling poor people poor and start naming this situation and context as "wage theft." She is absolutely right. And David Bacon's cutting analysis of U.S.-Mexico-Latin American relations maps on well to Martha's comments.

Bacon is very clear that bandaids like aid and loans are not anywhere near sufficient in stopping the flow of migrants as structural change in the relationship between the U.S. and Latin America. Addressing root causes anchored in the brutal excesses of capitalism, is what's needed.

Do read all of this. It offers an enhanced understanding of the larger forces that cause migration and how folks here in the U.S. are impacted. In an ideal world, folks from Mexico, Central, South America and the Caribbean, wouldn't have to migrate to make ends meet. It's not that they want to; it's that they have to. Understanding this fosters empathy and awareness of how our country negatively impacts lives and well-being in places far beyond our borders.

-Angela Valenzuela

#RacialCapitalism

Factory workers halt their work to protest against the lack of safety measures against COVID-19, outside Electrocomponentes of Mexico, a company in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua, Mexico, on April 20, 2020.

HERIKA MARTINEZ / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

MIGRANT JUSTICE MEANS FACING ROOT CAUSES

By David Bacon, Truthout, 6/23/22

MEXICO CITY - 10/2/14 - Students  and workers march from the Plaza of Three Cultures (Tlatelolco) to commemorate the massacre of hundreds of students by the army in 1968.  Some marchers also were farmers who held corn and machetes to protest the impact of free trade agreements.

At the end of the just-concluded Summit of (some of) the Americas, President Joe Biden announced a “Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection,” claiming that participant countries are “transforming our approach to managing migration in the Americas … [recognizing] the responsibility that impacts on all of our nations.”

Recognizing that the U.S. has some responsibility for addressing the causes of migration is important. But President Biden stopped well short of acknowledging the U.S.’s two centuries of intervention in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, which lies at the root.

Biden pledged $300 million to help U.S. “partners in the region continue to welcome refugees and migrants” augmented by further World Bank loans. World Bank loans are often tied to demands for austerity and reforms to attract corporate investment, and therefore themselves are a cause of poverty and displacement. Aid and loans will not stop the flow of migrants because dealing with the root causes of migration requires fundamental, structural change in the relationship between the U.S. and Latin America.

When we go to the border and listen to people in the migrant camps, or talk with the families here who have members in immigration detention centers, we hear the living experiences of people who have had no alternative to leaving home. Escaping violence, war and poverty, they now find themselves imprisoned, and we have to ask, who is responsible? Where did the violence and poverty come from that forced people to leave home, to cross our border with Mexico, and then to be picked up and incarcerated here?

Overwhelmingly, it has come from the actions of the government of this country, and the wealthy elites it has defended.

It came from two centuries of colonialism, from the announcement of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, when this government said that it had the right to do as it wanted in all of the countries of Latin America. It came from the wars that turned Puerto Rico and the Philippines into direct colonies over a century ago.

It came from more wars and interventions fought to keep in power those who would willingly ensure the wealth and profits of U.S. corporations, and the misery and poverty of the vast majority of their own countries.

Smedley Butler, a decorated Marine Corp general, told the truth about what he did a century ago, writing, “I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism…. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”

When people in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Haiti tried to change this injustice, the U.S. armed right-wing governments that made war on their own people. Sergio Sosa, a social activist during Guatemala’s civil war who now heads a workers’ center in Omaha, Nebraska, told me simply, “You sent the guns, and we buried the dead.”

Over 1 million people left El Salvador in the 1980s and an estimated half million crossed the border to the U.S. at that time. How many more hundreds of thousands crossed from Guatemala? How many more after the U.S. helped overthrow Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti? How many from Honduras after Manuel Zelaya was forced from office in 2009, and U.S. officials said nothing while sending arms to the army that used them against Honduran people?

Since 1994, 8 million Mexicans have come as migrants to work in the U.S. In 1990, 4.5 million Mexican migrants lived in the U.S. In 2008, the number peaked at 12.67 million. About 5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa; another 7 million couldn’t but came nevertheless. Almost 10 percent of the people of Mexico live in the U.S.

The poverty that forced 3 million corn farmers, many of them Indigenous, from Mexico to come here was a product of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), making it impossible for them to grow the maize they domesticated and gave to the world. Archer-Daniels-Midland and Continental Grain Company used NAFTA’s stolen inheritance from Indigenous Oaxacans to take over the Mexican corn market. One of the most important movements in Mexico today is for the right to stay home, the right to an alternative.

What has produced migration from rural parts of Mexico is the same thing that closed factories in the U.S: Green Giant closed its broccoli freezer in Watsonville, California, and 1,000 immigrant Mexican workers lost their jobs when it moved to Irapuato in central Mexico, where the company could pay lower wages.

In a Tijuana factory assembling flat panel televisions for export to the U.S., a woman on the line has to labor for half a day to buy a gallon of milk for her children. Maquiladora workers live in homes made from pallets and other materials cast off by the factories, in barrios with no sewers, running water or electrical lines.

Because our two economies are linked, Mexico suffers when the U.S. economy takes a dive. When recessions hit the U.S., customers stop buying the products made in the maquiladoras, and hundreds of thousands of workers lose their jobs. Where do they go?

When the U.S. sought to impose the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) on El Salvador in 2004, then-U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Otto Reich told Salvadorans that if they elected a government that wouldn’t go along with CAFTA, the U.S. would cut off the remittances sent by Salvadorans in the U.S. back to their families at home.

Young people, brought from El Salvador as children, joined gangs in Los Angeles so they could survive in the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Then they were arrested and deported back to El Salvador, and the gang culture of L.A. took root there, with the drug trade sending cocaine and heroin back to the U.S. barrios and working-class neighborhoods here.

When people arrive at the U.S. border, they are treated as criminals. John Kelly, the dishonest general who advised Donald Trump in the White House, called migration “a crime-terror convergence.”

Yet people coming to the U.S. are part of the labor force that puts vegetables and fruit on the table, cleans the office buildings, and empties the bedpans and takes care of people here when they get old and sick. Turning people into criminals and passing laws saying people can’t work legally makes people vulnerable and forces them into the lowest wages in our economy.

To employers, migration is a labor supply system, and for them it works well because they don’t have to pay for what the system really costs, either in Mexico or in the U.S. Trade policy and immigration policy are inextricably bound up with each other. They’re part of the same system.

NAFTA didn’t just displace Mexicans. It displaced people in the U.S., too. In the last few decades Detroit lost 40 percent of its population as the auto industry left. Today many Ford parts come from Mexico. But the working families who lost those outsourced jobs didn’t disappear. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people began an internal migration within the U.S. larger than the dustbowl displacement of the 1930s.

Knowing where the violence and poverty are coming from, and who is benefitting from this system, is one step toward ending it. But we also have to know what we want in its place. What is our alternative to detention centers and imprisonment? To the hundreds of people who still die at the border every year?

The migrant justice movement has had alternative proposals for many years. One was called the Dignity Campaign. The American Friends Service Committee proposed A New Path. What we want isn’t hard to imagine.

We want an end to mass detention and deportations, and the closing of the detention centers. The militarization of the border has to be reversed, so that it becomes a region of solidarity and friendship between people on both sides. Working should not be a crime for those without papers. Instead, people need real visas that allow them to travel and work, and the right to claim Social Security benefits for the contributions they’ve made over years of labor.

But we also want to deal with the root causes of migration.

U.S. auto companies employ more workers in Mexico now than in the U.S. Every flat-panel TV sold here is made in Mexico or another country. While the workers at General Motors’ Silao factory in Guanajuato, Mexico, recently voted courageously for an independent union and negotiated a new contract with important wage gains, a worker in that factory still earns less in a whole day than a U.S. autoworker earns in an hour.

Decades of trade agreements and economic reforms have created that difference and forced people into poverty. For many, that makes migration involuntary, the only means to survive. We need hearings in Congress that face that history squarely — its impact on both sides of the border.

We have a long history of solidarity with progressive Mexican unions in our own labor movement. That’s a big part of the answer to the problems of NAFTA and free trade that we’ve always advocated. Our unions on each side need to support each other, so that we can lift up workers regardless of the location of their factories.

We also want an end to military intervention, to military aid to right-wing governments, and to U.S. support for the repression of the movements fighting for change.

U.S. companies have been investing in Mexico since the late 1800s. They are not simply going to abandon their investment in Mexico, and the U.S. government is not going to abandon its effort to control the Mexican economy because wages rise. The key elements in how we fight against what this means for workers on both sides of the border is unity and coordinated action.

In both countries copper miners have been on strike against the Mexican conglomerate Grupo Mexico in the last decade. Their unions see solidarity as the answer. So do the United Electrical Workers and the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo, and my union, Communications Workers of America, with the Sindicato de Telefonistas de la República Mexicana, and others.

If you think this isn’t possible or just a dream, remember that a decade after Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. (That same year, Congress put the family preference immigration system into law — the only pro-immigrant legislation we’ve had for 100 years.)

That was no gift. A civil rights movement made Congress pass that law. When that law was passed we had no detention centers like the ones that imprison migrants today. There were no walls on our border with Mexico, and no one died crossing it. There is nothing permanent or unchangeable about these institutions of oppression. We have changed our world before, and a people’s movement can do it again.

MORE THAN A WALL / MAS QUE UN MURO

More Than a Wall / Mas que Un Muro explores the many aspects of the border region through photographs taken by David Bacon over a period of 30 years. These photographs trace the changes in the border wall itself, and the social movements in border communities, factories and fields. This bilingual book provides a reality check, to allow us to see the border region as its people, with their own history of movements for rights and equality, and develop an alternative vision in which the border can be a region where people can live and work in solidarity with each other. - Gaspar Rivera-Salgado

David Bacon has given us, through his beautiful portraits, the plight of the American migrant worker, and the fierce spirit of those who provide and bring to us comfort and sustenance. -- Lila Downs

MORE THAN A WALL / MAS QUE UN MURO

- a book of photographs by David Bacon and oral histories created during 30 years of covering the people and social movements of the Mexico/U.S. border

- a complex, richly textured documentation of a world in newspaper headlines daily, but whose reality, as it's lived by border residents, is virtually invisible.

- 440 pages

- 354 duotone black-and-white photographs

- a dozen oral histories

-  incisive journalism and analysis by David Bacon, Don Bartletti, Luis Escala, Guillermo Alonso and Alberto del Castillo.

- completely bilingual in English and Spanish

- published by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte with support from the UCLA Institute for Labor Research and Education and the Center for Mexican Studies, the Werner Kohlstamm Family Fund, and the Green Library at Stanford University

Price:  $35 plus postage and handling

To order, click here:  

https://david-bacon-photography.square.site/product/more-than-a-wall-mas-que-un-muro/1?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false

"The "border" is just a line. It's the people who matter - their relationships with or without or across that line. The book helps us feel the impact of the border on people living there, and helps us figure out how we talk to each other about it. The germ of the discussion are these wonderful and eye-opening pictures, and the voices that help us understand what these pictures mean." - JoAnn Intili, director, The Werner-Kohnstamm Family Fund