Our challenge, now as always, is to organize: to turn these spontaneous expressions of solidarity into an enduring international movement to dismantle the institutions of racist state violence and investigate the human rights abuses by US police departments, its prison system, and its military, in particular.
That is why we founded the Progressive International: to make solidarity more than a slogan. Marches in cities like Auckland and Amsterdam have sent an important signal to the US government that the world is watching. But bearing witness is not enough. Our task is to demonstrate the ways in which our solidarities can overcome borders to give meaningful support to people fighting unequal battles in thousands of places across the world.
That means learning from each other’s struggles against state violence, as in the case of the Lebanese activists who compiled a toolkit for protestors across the US. That means providing resources, where possible, to support the victims of police violence and their families. And it means identifying our own respective roles in this planetary system —wherever we may live — and delivering justice in our own communities.
Not all solidarities are the same. Far too often, expressions of outrage at what is happening ‘over there’ act as cover to ignore, dismiss, or otherwise minimize the ritual violence that happens right here. Europeans marching to defund the Minneapolis police might demand that their own governments defund Frontex, the EU border authority responsible for illegal pushbacks and deportations across the Mediterranean.
The same holds true in the opposite direction. The expansion of US empire through the unlimited funding of its military-industrial complex has boomeranged back home, arming local police forces with the same equipment that the US has deployed in its endless wars overseas. If the protests in the United States are to give rise to a new sense of solidarity among its citizens, then it must extend to all populations that have suffered US imperial aggression and sustained occupation — especially those native populations on whose dispossession the nation itself was founded.
The infrastructure of racist policing is already international. US law enforcement agencies are trained by the Israeli military. US arms producers supply police forces across Brazil. US corporations equip the Indian government with surveillance technology. And US methods of stop-and-frisk in minority neighbourhoods have been exported around the world.
The task of our Progressive International is take stock of this international infrastructure — to listen to activists and organizers who have dedicated their lives to this fight — and to work with them to dismantle it: brick by brick, dollar by dollar, police department by police department.
Full list of co-authors:
Noam Chomsky
Hilda Heine
Ece Temelkuran
Gael García Bernal
Áurea Carolina
Celso Amorim
Renata Avila
Srecko Horvat
Carola Rackete
Yanis Varoufakis
John McDonnell
Andres Arauz
Alicia Castro
David Adler
Aruna Roy
Nikhil Dey
Ertuğrul Kürkçü
Nick Estes
Paola Vega
Scott Ludlam
Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta
Radio Free | Radio Free (2020-06-04T14:49:53+00:00) Solidarity means dismantling the system everywhere. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/04/solidarity-means-dismantling-the-system-everywhere/
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