Christchurch and Colonialist Violence

By Biko Agozino

The massacre in a Christchurch Mosque raises doubt about the applicability of the theory by Martin Luther King Jr. that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. White supremacists have been reported celebrating the shooter as a hero while the shooter hailed Donald Trump as a hero of white nationalism. Perhaps, white supremacist terrorism is an exception to the universalistic Ubuntu thesis of Desmond Tutu which states that I am because we are. Chinua Achebe also saw postcolonial genocide as a contradiction of African traditional preference for tolerance of difference.

On further reflection, however, it is clear that racist-imperialist-patriarchal violence has repercussions that are felt by all across the world, though not in equal proportions. The white supremacist terrorist travelled from Australia to go and commit the massacre in New Zealand and so it may be a good idea to look at conditions in Australia that may have produced that level of hatred and intolerance and how the repercussions are felt by all to different extents.

In June 2018, media reports indicated that Australian troops in Afghanistan displayed a Nazi flag on their tank and collected killings as trophies. The terrorist shooter in Christchurch may be the same age as the Australian troops who identified with Nazism and could admire them. Officials were reported as saying that such white supremacist ideologies were not consistent with Australia. But indigenous peoples in Australia say that they have been at the receiving end of such genocidal white supremacist violence institutionalized by the settler colonial state and supported by individual genocidists for centuries.

Irene Watson applied the indigenous Australian story of the giant frog to legal theory as an explanation of the survival by those who governed the land cooperatively for thousands of years prior to being buried alive by colonizers. Moana Jackson applies Indigenous Maori theory to critique imperialist scientism that attributed to Indigenous peoples, ‘warrior genes’, when they were gardeners without repressive fetishes like the prison for thousands of years before being criminalized. Chris Cunnneen, Juan Tauri, Harry Blagg, and Thalia Anthony, among others, condemn the over-incarceration of Indigenous people and call for the decolonization of the justice system and the entire society. Deathscape focuses on the mapping of Indigenous deaths in custody.

It is a fact that the white male terrorism that claims many lives around the world also claims hundreds of white Christian lives just as ISIS violence also claims Muslim lives. That is right, terrorist white men tend to kill many white men in settler-colonial locations. They also kill white women and rape them in large numbers in militaristic Australia, the US, Russia, etc.

Homicide being intracultural more than intercultural in most cases, Indigenous people also kill fellow indigenous people in large numbers more than they kill people who are not indigenous but they kill fewer indigenous people than white male terrorists kill fellow white men. Often the victims are intimate family members, friends or acquaintances with few being random strangers.

Official reports show that homicide rates in Australia occurred mainly through stabbing (38%), beating with fists (24%), other means such as poisoning claimed 15%, while gunshots claimed 13% and 8% of homicide victims died of unknown causes from 2012 to 2014.

This indicates that the banning of assault weapons by the government may not be enough to address the threat of white supremacist violence that has a long history of being institutionalized. Mass violence is not mainly a problem of individual attitudes or choice of weapons but also a problem of institutionalized ways of doing violence that brutalize the conscience of white supremacists who may seek to strike again even against fellow white men. With 64% of homicide victims in Australia being men who are also six times more likely to commit homicide compared to women and with 45% of the killings taking place at home, racist-imperialist-patriarchal violence is a systemic threat to all.

There were 91 deaths in custody in Australia from 2016 to 2017 with men making up over 90% of the victims and non-indigenous people making up 60-78% of the deaths in police and prison custody. Indigenous Australians are over-represented in prison custody at 27% of all prisoners but non-indigenous Australians make up over 70% of the prisoners.

If angry poor white male Australians knew this, they would join the struggles to end the colonial system of mass incarceration and oppose imperialist militarism, racism and sexism which are articulated to escalate intolerance at the expense of all. Part of the solution may be the establishment of Love Studies to replace military academies, to study the decolonization paradigm, and to support reparative justice for Indigenous peoples in the interest of all.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA. 

Michael Jackson Remains Innocent

By Biko Agozino

"In the history of the United States, the fraudulent rape charge stands out as one of the most formidable artifices invented by racism. The myth of the Black rapist has been methodically conjured up whenever recurrent waves of violence and terror against the Black community have required convincing justifications." Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class

Sexual abuse is a vile crime and especially so when the victims are children. That was why Barrack Obama once wrote that he would support the death penalty for child sexual abusers but Michelle Alexander corrected him by writing that rape is no longer a capital offense for the good reason that it was enforced in a racist manner.

When two adult white men sue the estate of a dead black man for $1.5 billion for alleged sexual abuse when they were children, even after the black man had been tried and found not guilty of any wrong-doing, the benefit of the doubt goes to the black man. 

Michael Jackson remains innocent, according to the rule of law. He was taken to court and dragged through the mud of gutter media for two months with 85 witnesses and 500 pieces of evidence mostly gathered by the FBI for the prosecution. Michael was found not guilty on all nine counts. He was also found not guilty of giving children alcohol for the purpose of abusing them. #MJInnocent.

The prosecution even called Michael's baby mama who was going through a custody battle with him, hoping that she would point a finger and win custody. But she turned against the accusers and told the court that she had warned Michael against them but that he was too kind to beware. Michael would never hurt a child, she said.

A civil suit has a lower burden of proof and the two white men who filed the law suit in 2013 may be hoping to cash in but their story was not credible, though the law suit is still pending. Michael had settled a similar civil suit before with a huge sum of money though the father of the child was recorded on the phone saying that he had something to gain from the allegation rather than focus on getting the person who allegedly hurt his child punished for the crime.

'Lies of Leaving Neverland'

One of the present accusers wanted to work for Michael Jackson's estate after the singer died but he was not hired by the estate. Oparah asked why he would want to work for someone who abused him as a child and he claimed that he did not know that it was abuse even after he was grown up. 

They went into therapy after they had sons of their own and fantasized about sexually abusing their own sons. That was when they said that they realized that they were abused by Jackson when they were children even though they testified when they were teenagers that Michael was innocent and continued to deny the allegations as adults. 

They tried to get a book deal but no publishers would touch a libelous manuscript. They sued for a billion dollars and the documentary film makers got in touch with them to sensationalize their allegations for the HBO broadcasters of the Oprah interview with them. Lots of conflict of interest there. 

The Michael Jackson estate refused the attempted extortion and sued the broadcasters of the documentary for $100 million. Maybe they should have sued for a billion dollars given the way that the music of Michael was allegedly pulled off the air by broadcasters following the airing of the documentary.

Oprah Winfrey, a child sex abuse survivor, got a room full of male child sexual abuse survivors and asked some leading questions that indirectly exposed some of the lies of the two white men who now claimed that they did not know that Michael was abusing them as children. 

Oprah still managed to expose them as liars because they now claimed that they did not tell the truth during the trial, they lied during therapy, and now they want to be believed that they have no financial motivation in their false allegations even while suing for more than a billion bucks. In the documentary, they alleged that Michael Jackson raped them on top of a train station in Neverland whereas the said train station was not yet built when they were in Neverland. As a result, HBO is forced to deny cancelling the promised run of the documentary until September after it was suddenly shortened to April and Oprah Winfrey appears to have deleted all her tweets about Leaving Neverland.

Michael never abused them sexually but maybe members of their own families did abuse them (the way they imagined abusing their own sons) and they may have been prompted by hypnosis to transfer the blame to a dead black man for monetary gains. On a balance of probabilities, the accusers are not credible witnesses against Michael. #MJisInnocent.

Read chapter 11 of Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis to see how allegations of rape were used by white men to terrorizer the black community and to justify lynching of black men at a time that white men felt entitled to rape black women and white women with impunity. 

Ida B. Wells documented evidence that allegations of rape were the 'bare-faced lies' with which lynching was justified because the vast majority of lynching did not include rape as an allegation. Moreover, about a third of the victims of lynching within the 30 years documented by Ida B Wells were white men, especially those who supported equal rights for African Americans. The Michael Jackson Estate alleged that the media reports and post-humous allegations amount to attempts to lynch the legacy of Michael.

According to Angela Davis, early white feminists easily embraced the image of the black man as a rapist who should never be trusted by white women. The white feminists failed to realize that such a propaganda resulted in white men feeling also that they were entitled to the bodies of white women. Therefore, white men raped white women and black women in large numbers but blamed it on black men and 90% of those executed for rape from 1932-1972 were black men. This persuaded the Supreme Court to abolish the death penalty for rape in the case of Furman v. Georgia in 1976.

Davis concluded that the problem of rape and racism was that the intersectionality of poverty, racism and sexism flourishes under capitalism to the extent that poor parents would allow their children to have slumber parties with rich men but would not think of allowing a poor man to sleep in the same room with their children even if the poor man means no harm. 

The lesson for parents and children is to stop worshipping wealth and stop hoping that they could swindle or defraud the rich of some of their wealth by using their poor children as baits. Instead, they should borrow a leaf from the parents of the Jacksons and the Williams sisters: 

Invest some time and resources to train the natural talents of your children instead of trying to pimp them and hope that you could then sue an innocent black man for money to satisfy your greed for fame or to be paid what Du Bois called the psychological wages of whiteness. 

As Michael Jackson told the Oxford University Union in 2001, there is a lot of violence and neglect against children around the world even in the richest country on earth. Children deserve to be loved and protected from harm unconditionally, he said. The mistake he made was to allow white children to sleep over in his bedroom even though he knew that the racist system was stacked against him. He was found not guilty of all charges because he had the means to hire top lawyers to defend him and the current accusers testified that he never hurt them.

Crisis in Christian Theodicy

By Biko Agozino

Two years ago, a childhood friend sent me a copy of his manuscript on 'Christian Marriage' for comments. In the light of current controversies in the Catholic Church and Baptist Churches, I have decided to share my comments without naming the author of the manuscript:

Dear Brother,

Your book manuscript shows that you did a lot of research and it must have taken you a long time to draft but I have questions about the extent of the right-wing ideology you seem to share. My first question is whether you are trying to write one book or two different books? It seems to me that your focus on Christian marriage is a separate book from your critique of same-sex marriage. Writing both books at once may have introduced some contradictions in your reasoning. Concentrating on Christian marriage could have allowed you to critique the arbitrary rule imposing celibacy on Catholic priests and on women religious whether they like it or not (Pope Francis recently conceded that some priests and nuns from cultures that value familyhood can be allowed to marry). The Catechism book also stipulates that a girl of 14 years is old enough to get married in Igboland because their culture allows that but in the modern world, that is pedophilia. That section of the teachings about the sacrament of matrimony is in urgent need of revision.

Why focus on same-sex marriage as a part of a book on Christian marriage? Is Christian marriage being threatened by same-sex marriage in Africa or is sex abuse a greater threat? The fear of same-sex marriage comes across as homophobia in your book because the fear seems irrational. When Nzeogwu broadcast the first coup in Nigeria in 1966 by stating that homosexuals will be shot, people wondered why that was a priority for him; did the European officers rape the cadets to humiliate them in the military schools? 

But seriously, those of us who have chosen heterosexuality should not be like the Pharisee who prayed to thank God that he was not as sinful as the tax-collector who was on his knees showing repentance. We should pray for the forgiveness of our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Boko Haram terrorists are also homophobic but have no qualms about kidnapping children for sex slavery.

Another question for you is why Africans never made any laws against same-sex relations until foreigners invaded Africa and imposed such laws? In other words, there was no homophobia in Africa until Arabs and Europeans introduced such irrational fear. For instance, Joe Nwa Nlecha (nick name for Joe the proud child) dressed like a woman in our village but nobody was afraid of him. Also in our village, there is a woman who is married to another woman and yet nobody is offended by that. If your book had focused on that woman who is married to another woman, if you had interviewed her and her female husband, you may have had something original to contribute to the same-sex marriage debate by emphasizing that the Igbo are more tolerant of different family orientations than Europeans and Arabs (see Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters: Female Husbands). 

Since Igbo men dress like women to bring out the Agbomma masquerades and Yoruba men do the same to bring out Gelede masquerades, it is obvious that our people had no homophobia as part of our traditions. When Gideon Orkar tried to justify his abortive regional coup in 1992 with allegations of a homosexuality-centered military administration, Nigerian masses wondered what he was banging on about. The law signed by President Jonathan outlawing same-sex marriage raises questions as to why this was a priority of the most corrupt and incompetent government in Nigeria where individuals stole billions of public funds with impunity and Boko Haram kidnapped 300 school girls to be raped without any outrage from Jonathan. In the Northern part of the country under Sharia law, men could be stoned to death for dressing like women. 

Criminologists suggest that such repressive laws tend to increase violence in the society by encouraging men to attack other men on the suspicion that they love other men. During the genocide against the Igbo in Biafra following the homophobic coup announcement of Nzeogu, 3.1 million people died but none of them was suspected of being gay. The ISIS terrorists were also mobilized with homophobia but hardly any of the hundreds of thousands killed was accused of being homosexual. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, said Martin Luther King Jr whose march on Washington was organized by an openly gay black man. Hitler started his campaign of intolerance by focusing on homosexuals but in the end, 60 million people died in the second imperialist world war over which European nation would have more colonies in Africa.

Our people had more important struggles to worry about than who people chose to fall in love with or how they loved others – we faced the genocidal slave raids for 400 years and we resisted by recruiting every able-bodied man and woman to help us to survive. During the Biafra war, we did not ask soldiers whether they were gay or straight because the only important thing was whether they were ready to defend our people. Bill Clinton was the one who tried to compromise the exclusion of gay people from the military by changing the law to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell but service men and women continued to be discharged if suspected of same-sex relations. President Obama ended that discrimination because what matters is whether troops were able to defend their country and not who they choose to love but President Trump reimposed the ban on transgender officers in the military. The US Supreme Court also ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act signed by Bush was unconstitutional for trying to prevent same-sex marriage because it deprived two consenting adults who love each other from being admitted to hospital as a family member to care for their sick loved one or from inheriting property or from filing tax returns as a married couple – not much to do with sex. If the Europeans who imposed homophobic laws on Africans have since abolished such laws in Europe, why are Africans who have bigger fishes of poverty, violence and corruption to fry so obsessed about retaining the homophobic laws of imperialism? Colonial Mentality!

You claim that Trump is on your side simply because he ended the order by Obama that schools should allow children to use the bathroom of their choice. But how is Trump going to enforce this policy change? Will there be an official in front of bathrooms checking the gender on the birth certificates of children before they are allowed to go to the bathrooms? Do you remember why Trump attacked the Pope on Twitter during his campaign for president? Pope Francis suggested that no one can be on the side of Christians if he hates immigrants, minorities, women and people with disability, is opposed to providing affordable healthcare to the poor, wants to grab women by their private parts, seeks to increase defense budgets and go to war to kill God’s children and is surrounded by arch racists. The man you claim to be on your side changed an Obama restriction on gun sales to people with mental illness to make it easier for gun makers to make a bigger profit at the expense of public safety. 

You rail against drug abuse while Trump has vowed to crack down on 10 states that have legalized marijuana for recreational use based on voter ballots even though 26 other states have decriminalized it for medical use; Uruguay in South America has legalized it for recreational use; The Netherlands has decriminalized it since 1976 and Portugal since 1992; Italian Army grows medical marijuana and South Africa will be the first African country to legalize it for recreational use since, it is much safer than tobacco and alcohol. What do you think?

Finally, I was expecting your manuscript to show some Christian virtues by avoiding harsh judgment against your fellow men and women just because of who they love. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. I expect you to be more humble, to be more merciful, and to be more charitable as a Christian. God is infinitely merciful and if he uses his grace to show charity to people in same-sex marriage, no Christian should take it upon himself to play god and call them ‘filth’ or call for them to be murdered. If God forgave Lot for committing incest with his daughters to have children after the destruction of Sodom, if Joseph could forgive his brothers for selling him into slavery, if Christ could forgive those who crucified him, if the igbo could forgive those who killed 3.1 million of our people in Biafra, if people of African descent could forgive those who enslaved millions of our people for hundreds of years, if Mandela could forgive apartheid officials; Archbishop Desmond Tutu concluded that God will not punish a Bishop or laity who is in a same-sex marriage if the person serves God to the best of his ability by loving all of God’s children without exception. According to Tutu, everyone deserves forgiveness and there is nothing that is unforgivable. Pope Francis is being attacked for publishing Amoris Laeticia or the joy of love in which he said that everyone deserves to be loved and that divorcees should not be excommunicated. The sun shines on all and not only on one sect, class, gender, or race.

Although I do not want to judge others, I believe that men who claim to love God but go about raping men, women, little girls and boys are much worse than adult men and women who agree to love each other. Feminists are not women who hate men, rather they include women who love men but believe that women are oppressed in patriarchal societies due to their gender. Surely, it will be better to end all systems of oppression instead of preaching hate against people who are in love with each other. Do you disagree or agree; why or why not?

BUHARI ON EXISTENTIALISM

By Biko Agozino

In rationalizing his suspension of the Chief Justice of the Nigerian Supreme Court, President Muhammadu Buhari stated without explanation, ‘This is an existential policy’. What is the ‘this’ referring to? Within the context of the speech, he could be referring to the fight against corruption as a fight that must be won if the country must continue to exist. However, since corruption is found in every existing country, it is doubtful that fighting corruption alone could be ‘an existential policy’. Perhaps, Buhari’s speech writers were giving us a hint of his ideological or philosophical orientation by invoking existentialism to define the man and his policies as guided by the fear of the end of existence. What is existentialism?

Existentialism is the European belief that existence comes before essence. A country exists before the essential policies of the country can be shaped and implemented by individual social agents. An individual exists before the subjective opinions of the individual can be interpreted by other individuals. Existentialists, therefore, see the world as absurd in the sense that the actions of individuals or the policies of nations do not always make rational sense especially when such actions and policies go against the interests of the actors or policy-makers. Existentialists wonder why some policy-makers pursue goals that may threaten the existence of the nation state or why some individuals indulge in actions that would harm them personally even while experiencing thrill, angst and dread about the consequences?

It is probably flattering to suggest that Buhari is philosophical in any sense of the term but his speech-writers may be individuals who strongly believe that what matters is the existence of political power and not the essence of good and evil policies. The speech-writers are indicating the obvious existentialist dogma that what makes a person like Buhari is the past existence of the individual and Buhari, having been a dictator in the past, is bound to continue existing as a dictator; irrespective of the essence of the present presidential constitution. It is possible that if Buhari understood this self-mocking implication of the concept of existential policy, he would fire the speech writers with what he called ‘alacrity’ in his judge-jury-executioner speech.

Buhari wants us to believe that he was only obeying the order of the Code of Conduct Tribunals by suspending Chief Justice Walter Nkanu Onnoghen and replacing him with an interim Justice. Critics shout that coming only weeks before a presidential election, Buhari is trying to hedge his bets that the election results may be determined by the Supreme Court. Thus, appointing an interim Chief Justice who happens to share his own religious affiliation, ethnicity, and regional origin on the existential ground of being the next most senior Justice of the supreme Court, is just what it is, neither good nor evil, according to existentialism. Being, perhaps, the only Supreme Court Justice with a doctoral degree and having been a Justice of the Sharia Court of Appeal in the past are just existential facts that should not be confused with the essence.

The essence of the policy of rule of law is that the suspended Chief Justice remains innocent before the law until proven guilty. The allegations against him are heavy and if found guilty following a proper investigation and fair trial, Buhari is right that he should not return as the Chief Justice because no one is above the law. However, if the Chief Justice is proven to have been corrupt, it is likely that the Associate Justices of the supreme court share in his guilt. 

Unknown to Buhari’s speech-writers, it is not the Chief Justice alone who determines cases that come before the court and so if people suspected of corruption have been freed by the Supreme Court on ‘mere technicalities’ as alleged, is there evidence of dissenting opinions and concurring opinions to show how the Chief Justice could over-rule the jury of his peers? 

By the way, the Supreme Court usually considers ‘mere technicalities’ or points of law and not the facticity or substantive evidence that may have been examined by the court of first instance. The rule of law uses such ‘mere technicalities’ to ensure that it is better for ten guilty persons to escape punishment than for one innocent person to be punished. Nigerian courts may be corrupt but they are clearly more accountable than the legislative and executive arms of government perhaps because of the relative security of tenure that should not be undermined.

If all judges are tainted in Nigeria, as many suspect, then where would the country find the angels to preside over court cases under a corrupt neocolonial regime? Kwame Nkrumah also removed the Chief Justice of Ghana from office after people suspected of plotting to kill Nkrumah were acquitted by the apex court. Buhari points to undeclared assets worth millions of dollars that the Chief Justice himself admitted that he mistakenly did not declare or failed to declare correctly and the postponement of the National Judicial Council that could vote to suspend the Chief Justice. Critics say that if the same existential policy is applied to Buhari himself and to his nepotistic appointees, there would be a government shutdown in Nigeria.

One of the greatest weaknesses of existentialism as a Eurocentric philosophy is the over-emphasis on the individual who interacts with other individuals in arts and philosophy. Greater attention to the structure of an unjust society would need to go beyond existentialism and individualism to address the on-going generational ethnic-religious-gender-class struggles. 

Buhari must be commended for fighting corruption but he must be reminded that he cannot fight corruption by targeting individuals who may not be loyal to him while turning a blind eye to his cronies. His existential policy of giving more to areas that gave him 95% of their votes and less to those who wisely gave him 5% of their votes with knowledge of his unrepentant chauvinism may not be challengeable in corrupt courtrooms but voters still have the limited power to hold the politicians accountable to some extent if they bother to vote.

In the final analysis, it is not the law that will determine the nature of the society; it is the society that will determine the nature of the law in Nigeria. So long as Nigerian politicians and the masses refuse to address historic wrongs done with the support of the law against millions of the people in the past and the present, for so long will the existential policy of fighting corruption remain a smoke-screen. Buhari does not need the Supreme Court or the Code of Conduct Tribunal to order him to apologize to the survivors of the genocide that he helped to lead against the Igbo in Biafra, of which he was reported as saying that he had no regrets and that he was ready to do it again. 

Nigeria should offer reparations to the survivors as recommended by the Justice Oputa Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights Abuses in the country. Many survivors of other tragic wrongs in the country have been offered some atonement but not the Igbo who still feel unwanted by a country that dreads letting them go to build their own nation. There is no need for a court order before the politicians wage a war against intolerance, illiteracy, disease, and poverty in the country in concert with other African states towards the Peoples Republic of Africa in which no existential individual will be able to impose his free will on the masses ever again.