Okinawa

On June 25th, Marine Lance Corporal Jamel Clayton was convicted to seven years in prison by a Japanese court for raping a Japanese woman in the Okinawan village of Yomitan. Crimes committed by US servicemen are an endemic problem on Okinawa. According to the Okinawa Prefectural Police Department, US military personnel have been involved in 6,163 criminal cases since the repatriation of Okinawa to Japan in 1972.

The majority of these are petty larceny and robberies, but there are also 134 cases of rape, and 27 cases of murder. The most infamous of these is the gang rape of a 12-year-old girl by three US servicemen in 1995.

Okinawa has been under US military occupation since 1945; the military directly governed the island until 1950, when the US government took over administration of the island. Even after the formal repatriation of the island to Japan, 31 US military facilities remain, staffed by around 26,000 personnel – this accounts for 70% of US forces stationed in Japan, on an island that accounts for only 1% of the Japanese landmass.

The imperial logic of this state of affairs is quite clear; Okinawa is 500 kilometers north of Taiwan, both part of the ‘First Island Chain’ which serves as the primary bastion of US imperialism against its chief rival – China. Were an inter-imperialist conflict to break out between the world’s leading hegemons, most of the fighting would take place in and around the First Island Chain, with Okinawa serving as a crucial staging ground for the US Navy in particular.

The people of Okinawa have no voice in these affairs. Since 1945, they have cried out for the eviction of US forces and the true independence of Okinawa. They have suffered massacres and countless rapes, and myriad petty crimes that are part-and-parcel with sharing your home with 26,000 poorly supervised and heavily armed young men. If war between the United States and China were to break out, the Okinawan people would be among the first to be immolated in the conflagration.

Gaza

In the wake of the Israeli-Iranian 12-day war, the world has forgotten what is unfolding in Gaza – the brutal and intensifying extermination of an entire people. The latest US-Israeli innovation in death-dealing is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The GHF supposedly exists to ameliorate the worsening famine in the Gaza Strip, but its true purpose has been clear from the start – to lure starving Gazans to centralized locations around Gaza where they can be systematically murdered.

But we no longer are restrained by what we can merely see with our own eyes, what lies clearly before us. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has provided us with the anonymous confessions of the butchers themselves. We mourn our inability to expose these murderers, their words do not abrogate their guilt; but they do reveal the depravity of the Israeli war machine.

Through these jackboots we have learned that the aid centers only open for one hour a day, in the early morning, and getting in line before opening or after closing is punishable by death; it is routine to fire upon any Palestinian who approaches outside hours, who steps out of line, who makes a sudden move, who looks “suspicious”, with rifles, machine guns, mortars, artillery, tanks. 549 Palestinians have been killed, and over 4,000 wounded in this manner.

Per one genocidaire:

“It’s a killing field … where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable … once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”

The outermost “security” layer, beyond the IDF pickets, is provided by the Abu Shabab militia, an anti-Hamas gang allied with and funded by the IDF. The Abu Shabab militia is one of the most prominent criminal organizations accused of stealing aid supplies from UN relief efforts – the theft of humanitarian aid being the primary justification for the establishment of the GHF by Israel and the concomitant IDF presence at aid depots. According to eyewitnesses, the Abu Shabab militia routinely conducts arbitrary summary executions of aid seekers.

Amidst this horror, Egypt is spearheading negotiations for a sixty-day ceasefire, a collaborative effort between the aforementioned, Qatar and the United States; two subalterns and the blooded empire itself. We’ve seen temporary ceasefires before – no more than a brief respite from the hell of the United States and Israel’s creation, and there is zero reason to trust a cessation of hostilities dictated by the very demiurge of death. The genocide of the Palestinian people commenced nearly eighty years ago, and, unless people of conscience take action, it has only just begun.

Panama

A mass layoff of workers by Chiquita Banana and a neoliberal pension “reform” scheme triggered mass protests in Panama, especially in the Bocas del Toro province. For more than two months, the banana workers and their supporters have been on strike, blockading roads and clashing with the police. In response, the government arrested the strike leader, Francisco Smith, head of the Agricultural Banana Industry Workers and Related Companies Union (SITRAIBANA), and suspended the constitution in the northwest of the country.

Workers initially went on strike to protest the reactionary government’s new retirement scheme, which would force them to either endure backbreaking agricultural labor well into old age or retire into forced poverty.

Confronted with mass militancy, Chiquita responded with mass layoffs of the striking workers, while the Panamanian government launched a campaign of repression that included hundreds of arrests and at least one protester killed.

Chiquita is the direct descendant of the notorious United Fruit Company, a U.S. company whose exploitation of Latin American people and resources was at the forefront of U.S. colonialism and imperialism for decades. While multinational corporations, imperialist powers, and compliant governments continue to exploit and oppress the people of Latin America, the masses of Panama are delivering their own blows to the imperialist system!