The US Use Fascist Ukraines to Get Their Imperial Way

February 24, 2014-- counterpunch.org

 

The Spectacle in Kiev

The Brown Revolution in Ukraine

Ukrainian Fascists Today.

by ISRAEL SHAMIR

I am a great fan of Kiev, an affable city of pleasing bourgeois character, with its plentiful small restaurants, clean tree-lined streets, and bonhomie of its beer gardens. A hundred years ago Kiev was predominantly a Russian resort, and some central areas have retained this flavour. Now Kiev is patrolled by armed thugs from the Western Ukraine, by fighters from the neo-Nazi -Right Sector, descendants of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian Quisling’s troopers, and by their local comrades-in-arms of nationalist persuasion.

After a month of confrontation, President Viktor Yanukovych gave in, signed the EC-prepared surrender and escaped their rough revolutionary justice by the skin of his teeth. The ruling party MPs were beaten and dispersed, the communists almost lynched, the opposition have the parliament all to themselves, and they’ve  appointed new ministers and taken over the Ukraine. The Brown Revolution has won in the Ukraine. This big East European country of fifty million inhabitants has gone the way of Libya. The US and the EU won this round, and pushed Russia back eastwards, just as they intended.

It remains to be seen whether the neo-Nazi thugs who won the battle will agree to surrender the sweet fruits of victory to politicians, who are, God knows, nasty enough. And more importantly, it remains to be seen whether the Russian-speaking East and South East of the country will accept the Brown rule of Kiev, or  split off and go their own way, as the people of Israel (so relates the Bible) after King Solomon’s death rebelled against his heir saying “To your tents, o Israel!” and proclaimed independence of their fief (I Kings 12:16). Meanwhile it seems that the Easterners’ desire to preserve Ukrainian state integrity is stronger than their dislike for the victorious Browns. Though they assembled their representatives for what could be a declaration of independence, they did not dare to claim power. These peaceful people have little stamina for strife.

Their great neighbour, Russia, does not appear overtly concerned with this ominous development. Both Russian news agencies, TASS and RIA, didn’t even place the dire Ukrainian news at the top, as Reuters and BBC did: for them, the Olympics and the biathlon were of greater importance, as you can see on these print screens:



This “ostrich” attitude is quite typical of the Russian media: whenever they find themselves in an embarrassing position, they escape into showing the Swan Lake ballet on TV. That’s what they did when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. This time it was the Olympics instead of the ballet.

Anti-Putin opposition in Russia heartily approved of the Ukrainian coup. Yesterday Kiev, tomorrow Moscow, they chanted. Maidan (the main square of Kiev, the site of anti-government demos) equals Bolotnaya (a square in Moscow, the site of anti-government protests in December 2012) is another popular slogan.

The majority of Russians were upset but not surprised. Russia decided to minimise its involvement in the Ukraine some weeks ago as if they wished to demonstrate to the world their non-interference. Their behaviour bordered on recklessness. While foreign ministers of EC countries and their allies crowded Kiev, Putin sent Vladimir Lukin, a human rights emissary, an elder low-level politician of very little clout, to deal with the Ukrainian crisis. The Russian Ambassador Mr Zurabov, another non-entity, completely disappeared from public view. (Now he was recalled to Moscow). Putin  made not a single public statement on the Ukraine, treating it as though it were Libya or Mali, not a neighbouring country quite close to the Russian hinterland.

This hands-off approach could have been expected: Russia did not interfere in the disastrous Ukrainian elections 2004, or in the Georgian elections that produced extremely anti-Russian governments. Russia gets involved only if there is a real battle on the ground, and a legitimate government asks for help, as in Ossetia in 2008 or in Syria in 2011. Russia supports those who fight for their cause, otherwise Russia, somewhat disappointingly, stands aside.

The West has no such inhibitions and its representatives were extremely active: the US State Department representative Victoria “Fuck EC’’ Nuland had spent days and weeks in Kiev, feeding the insurgents with cookies, delivering millions of smuggled greenbacks to them, meeting with their leaders, planning and plotting the coup. Kiev is awash with the newest US dollars fresh from its mint (of a kind yet unseen in Moscow, I’ve been told by Russian friends). The US embassy spread money around like a tipsy Texan in a night club. Every able-bodied young man willing to fight received five hundred dollar a week, a qualified fighter – up to a thousand, a platoon commander had two thousand dollars – good money by Ukrainian standards.

Money is not all. People are also needed for a successful coup. There was an opposition to Yanukovych who won democratic elections, and accordingly, three parties lost elections. Supporters of the three parties could field a lot of people for a peaceful demonstration, or for a sit-in. But would they fight when push comes to shove? Probably not. 

Ditto the recipients of generous US and EC grants (Nuland estimated the total sum of American investment in “democracy building” at five billion dollars). They could be called to come to the main square for a demo. However, the NGO beneficiaries are timid folk, not likely to risk their well-being. And the US needed a better fighting stock to remove the democratically elected president from power.

Serpent Eggs

In the Western Ukraine, the serpent eggs hatched: children of Nazi collaborators who had imbibed hatred towards the Russians with their mothers’ milk. Their fathers had formed a network under Reinhard Gehlen, the German spymaster. In 1945, as Germany was defeated, Gehlen swore allegiance to the US and delivered his networks to the CIA. They continued their guerrilla war against the Soviets until 1956. Their cruelty was legendary, for they aimed to terrify the population into full compliance to their command. Notoriously, they strangulated the Ukrainians suspected of being friendly to Russians with their bare hands.

A horrifying confession of a participant tells of their activities in Volyn: “One night, we strangulated 84 men. We strangulated adults, as for little kids, we held their legs, swung and broke their heads at a doorpost. …Two nice kids, Stepa and Olya, 12 and 14 years old… we tore the younger one into two parts, and there was no need to strangulate her mother Julia, she died of a heart attack” and so on and so on. They slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews; even the dreadful Baby Yar massacre was done by them, with German connivance, somewhat similar to Israeli connivance in the Sabra and Chatila massacres of Palestinians by the Lebanese fascists of the Phalange.

The children of these Bandera murderers were brought up to hate Communism,  Soviets and Russians, and in adoration of their fathers’ deeds. They formed the spearhead of the pro-US anti-government rebels in the Ukraine, the Right Sector led by out-and-out fascist Dmytro Yarosh. They were ready to fight, to die and kill. Such units attract potential rebels of differing backgrounds: their spokesman is young Russian -turned -Ukrainian -nationalist Artem Skoropadsky, a journalist with the mainstream oligarch-owned Kommersant-UA daily. There are similar young Russians who join Salafi networks and become suicide-bombers in the Caucasus mountains – young people whose desire for action and sacrifice could not be satisfied in the consumer society. This is a Slav al-Qaeda — real neo-Nazi storm troopers, a natural ally of the US.

The Ukraine Protest on Sunday 23 February 2014.

And they did not fight only for association with EC and against joining a Russia-led TC. Their enemies were also the Russians in the Ukraine, and Russian-speaking ethnic Ukrainians. The difference between the twain is moot. Before independence in 1991, some three quarters of the population preferred to speak Russian. Since then, successive governments have tried to force people to use Ukrainian. For the Ukrainian neo-Nazis, anyone who speaks Russian is an enemy. You can compare this with Scotland, where people speak English, and nationalists would like to force them to speak the language of Burns.

Behind the spearhead of the Right Sector, with its fervent anti-communist and anti-Russian fighters, a larger organisation could be counted on: the neo-Nazi Freedom (Svoboda), of Tyagnibok. Some years ago Tyagnibok called for a fight against Russians and Jews, now he has become more cautious regarding the Jews. He is still as anti-Russian as John Foster Dulles. Tyagnibok was tolerated or even encouraged by Yanukovych, who wanted to take a leaf from the French president Jacques Chirac’s book. Chirac won the second round of elections against nationalist Le Pen, while probably he would have lost against any other opponent. In the same wise, Yanukovych wished Tyagnibok to become his defeatable opponent at the second round of presidential elections.

The parliamentary parties (the biggest one is the party of Julia Timoshenko with 25% of seats, the smaller one was the party of Klitschko the boxer with 15%) would support the turmoil as a way to gain power they lost at the elections.

Union of nationalists and liberals

John McCain at a Ukrainian Fascist Rally.

Thus, a union of nationalists and liberals was formed. This union is the trademark of a new US policy in the Eastern Europe. It was tried in Russia two years ago, where enemies of Putin comprise of these two forces, of pro-Western liberals and of their new allies, Russian ethnic nationalists, soft and hard neo-Nazis. The liberals won’t fight, they are unpopular with the masses; they include an above-average percentage of Jews, gays, millionaires and liberal columnists; the nationalists can incite the great unwashed masses almost as well as the Bolsheviks, and will fight. 

This is the anti-Putin cocktail preferred by the US. This alliance actually took over 20% of vote in Moscow city elections, after their attempt to seize power by coup was beaten off by Putin. The Ukraine is their second, successful joint action.

Bear in mind: liberals do not have to support democracy. They do so only if they are certain democracy will deliver what they want. Otherwise, they can join forces with al Qaeda as now in Syria, with Islamic extremists as in Libya, with the Army as in Egypt, or with neo-Nazis, as now in Russia and the Ukraine. Historically, the liberal–Nazi alliance did not work because the old Nazis were enemies of bankers and financial capital, and therefore anti-Jewish. This hitch could be avoided: Mussolini was friendly to Jews and had a few Jewish ministers in his government; he objected to Hitler’s anti-Jewish attitude saying that “Jews are useful and friendly”. Hitler replied that if he were to allow that, thousands of Jews would join his party. Nowadays, this problem has vanished: modern neo-Nazis are friendly towards Jews, bankers and gays. The Norwegian killer Breivik is an exemplary sample of a Jew-friendly neo-Nazi. So are the Ukrainian and Russian neo-Nazis.

While the original Bandera thugs killed every Jew (and Pole) that came their way, their modern heirs receive some valuable Jewish support. The oligarchs of Jewish origin (Kolomoysky, Pinchuk and Poroshenko) financed them, while a prominent Jewish leader, Chairman of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of the Ukraine, Josef Zissels, supported them and justified them. There are many supporters of Bandera in Israel; they usually claim that Bandera was not an anti-Semite, as he had a Jewish doctor. (So did Hitler.) Jews do not mind Nazis who do not target them. The Russian neo-Nazis target Tajik gastarbeiters, and the Ukrainian neo-Nazis target Russian-speakers.

Revolution: the Outline

Fascists set fire to the Ukraine Trade Union's building.

The revolution deserves to be described in a few lines: Yanukovych was not too bad a president, prudent though weak. Still the Ukraine came to the edge of financial abyss. (You can read more about it in my previous piece) He tried to save the situation by allying with the EC, but the EC had no money to spare. Then he tried to make a deal with Russia, and Putin offered him a way out, without even demanding from him that the Ukraine join the Russian-led TC. This triggered the violent response of the EC and the US, as they were worried it would strengthen Russia.

Yanuk, as people call him for short, had few friends. Powerful Ukrainian oligarchs weren’t enamoured with him. Besides the usual reasons, they did not like the raider habits of Yanuk’s son, who would steal other men’s businesses. Here they may have had a point, for the leader of Belarus, the doughty Lukashenko, said that Yanuk’s son’s unorthodox ways of acquiring businesses brought disaster.

Yanuk’s electorate, the Russian-speaking people of the Ukraine (and they are a majority in the land, like English-speaking Scots are majority in Scotland) were disappointed with him because he did not give them the right to speak Russian and teach their children in Russian. The followers of Julia Timoshenko disliked him for jailing their leader. (She richly deserved it: she hired assassins, stole billions of Ukrainian state money in cahoots with a former prime minister, made a crooked deal with Gazprom at the expense of Ukrainian consumers, and what not.) Extreme nationalists hated him for not eradicating the Russian language.

The US-orchestrated attack on the elected President followed Gene Sharp’s instructions to a tee, namely: (1) seize a central square and organise a mass peaceful sit-in, (2) speak endlessly of danger of violent dispersal, (3) if the authorities do nothing, provoke bloodshed, (4) yell bloody murder, (5) the authority is horrified and stupefied and (6) removed and (7) new powers take over.

The most important element of the scheme has never been voiced by the cunning Sharp, and that is why the Occupy Wall Street movement (who thumbed through the book) failed to achieve the desired result. You have to have the Masters of Discourse™ i.e., Western mainstream media, on your side. Otherwise, the government will squash you as they did with the Occupy and many other similar movements. But here, the Western media was fully on the rebels’ side, for the events were organised by the US embassy.

At first, they gathered for a sit-in on the Independence Square (aka “Maidan Square”) some people they knew: recipients of USAID grants via the NGO network, wrote a Ukrainian expert Andrey Vajra, networks of fugitive oligarch Khoroshkovski, neo-Nazis of the Right Sector and radicals of the Common Cause. The peaceful assembly was lavishly entertained by artists; food and drink were served for free, free sex was encouraged – it was a carnival in the centre of the capital, and it began to attract the masses, as would happen in every city in the known universe. This carnival was paid for by the oligarchs and by the US embassy.
 

OUN-B Emblem, Popular with Ukraine's modern fascists.

But the carnival could not last forever. As per (2), rumours of violent dispersal were spread. People became scared and drifted away. Only a small crowd of activists remained on the square. Provocation as per (3) was supplied by a Western agent within the administration, Mr Sergey Levochkin. He wrote his resignation letter, posted it and ordered police to violently disperse the sit-in. Police moved in and dispersed the activists. Nobody was killed, nobody was seriously wounded, – today, after a hundredfold dead, it is ridiculous even to mention this thrashing, – but the opposition yelled bloody murder at the time. The world media, this powerful tool in the hands of Masters of Discourse, decried “Yanukovych massacred children”. The EC and the US slapped on sanctions, foreign diplomats moved in, all claiming they want to protect peaceful demonstrators, while at the same time beefing up the Maidan crowd with armed gunmen and Right Sector fighters.

We referred to Gene Sharp, but the Maidan had an additional influence, that of Guy Debord and his concept of Society of Spectacle. It was not a real thing, but a well-done make-believe, as was its predecessor, the August 1991 Moscow “coup”. Yanukovych did everything to build up the Maidan resistance: he would send his riot police to disperse the crowd, and after they did only half of the job, he would call them back, and he did this every day. After such  treatment, even a very placid dog would bite.

The Spectacle-like unreal quality of Kiev events was emphasized by arrival of the imperial warmonger, the neocon philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy. He came to Maidan like he came to Libya and Bosnia, claiming human rights and threatening sanctions and bombing. Whenever he comes, war is following. I hope I shall be away from every country he plans to visit.

First victims of the Brown Revolution were the monuments – those of Lenin, for they do hate communism in every form, and those of the world war, because the revolutionaries solidarise with the lost side, with the German Nazis.

 OUN-M Emblem, Popular with Ukraine's modern fascists.

History will tell us to what extent Yanuk and his advisors understood what they were doing. Anyway, he encouraged the fire of Maidan by his inefficient raids by a weaponless police force. The neo-Nazis of Maidan used snipers against the police force, dozens of people were killed, but President Obama called upon Yanuk to desist, and he desisted. After renewed shooting, he would send the police in again. An EC diplomat would threaten him with the Hague tribunal dock, and he would call his police back. No government could function in such circumstances.

Eventually he collapsed, signed on the dotted line and departed for unknown destination. The rebels seized power, forbade the Russian language and began sacking Kiev and Lvov. Now the life of the placid people of Kiev has been turned into a living hell: daily robberies, beating, murder abound. The victors are preparing a military operation against the Russian-speaking areas in the South East of Ukraine. The spectacle of the revolution can yet turn really bloody.
Some Ukrainians hope that Julia Timoshenko, freshly released from jail, will be able to rein the rebels in. Others hope that President Putin will pay heed to the Ukrainian events, now that his Olympic games are, mercifully, finished. The spectacle is not over until the fat lady sings, but sing she will – her song still remains to be seen and heard.

English language editing by Ken Freeland
Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net

It’s the Economy--

‘A Dreadful Deceit,’ by Jacqueline Jones

Jacqueline Jones celebrates working-class interracial solidarity: A Ford auto plant in Detroit, 1963. Bettmann/Corbis

By TOMMIE SHELBY 

FEB. 14, 2014- nytimes.com

Americans have struggled mightily since the nation’s birth to overcome racial prejudice. Recently, as symbolized by President Obama’s ascendancy and his message of racial reconciliation, we have basically succeeded and are now healing from our racial wounds. Or so the story goes. In “A Dreadful Deceit,” the distinguished historian Jacqueline Jones vehemently rejects this redemptive and self-congratulatory narrative. She believes that the country’s racial problems have little to do with racism and everything to do with economic exploitation. And, she claims, we have not even begun to come to terms with this.

Jones is the author of numerous books, including “Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow,” which won the Bancroft Prize in 1986. This new book, a sweeping account of the role of race in American history, is structured around the stories of six extraordinary but largely unknown individuals, each of African descent. 

•  There’s Antonio, murdered in colonial Maryland for refusing to submit to enslavement; 

•  Boston King, a former slave from South Carolina turned loyalist during the American Revolution; 

•  the Afro-Indian Elleanor Eldridge, who started several successful businesses in Providence, R.I., in the early 19th century; 

•  the Reconstruction-era Georgia politician Richard W. White;

  •  the early-20th-century educator William H. Holtzclaw, who founded a Tuskegee-like school in Mississippi;

•  and finally the radical labor activist Simon P. Owens in mid-20th-century Detroit.

 

The six stories, told in vivid detail, are fascinating and a pleasure to read, particularly the one about Owens, whom Jones sometimes uses as a mouthpiece. Yet the life Jones is most interested in is the life of the concept of “race,” which, following the radical abolitionist David Walker, she terms a “dreadful deceit.” Her book is a call to renounce the very idea of race as a dangerous misconception. This argument will be familiar to scholars, but Jones seeks to bring it to a broader audience.

To explain how racial conflict has masked power struggles for control over others’ labor, Jones surveys compelled work in its many varieties, from slave labor under the lash on tobacco plantations in Maryland to mandatory overtime in unsafe and sweltering auto plants in Detroit. Racial ideologies, she argues, are like mob violence, disenfranchisement and discriminatory laws — merely tactics used to secure material advantages in social contexts perceived as zero-sum.

So the refusal of white colonists to recognize black claims to equal liberty was not premised on racial considerations, Jones argues, but on naked self-interest. She acknowledges that intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson were moved to reconcile Enlightenment values with slavery. But most propertied white men didn’t see a need to justify their dominance apart from citing their economic interests, the same interests that led them to exploit Indians, poor whites and women. A racial justification for slavery emerged only in the 19th century, in response to the Northern abolitionist movement.

Similarly, Jones describes early-19th-century white working-class hostility to blacks as springing from economic competition. “By keeping blacks in menial jobs permanently,” she writes, “whites might reserve new and better opportunities for themselves and ensure that someone else did the ill-paying, disagreeable work.” Throughout the period from colonial settlement to the Civil War, she says, racial ideologies played only a minor role in sustaining white dominance.

Jones acknowledges that “whiteness” functioned as a powerful idea during Reconstruction, uniting whites of opposing political views and conflicting class interests. But racial ideologies were “remade” at the turn of the 20th century, when blacks were imprisoned or killed as sexual and criminal deviants in order to prevent them from joining forces with poor whites against white elites. Moving into the present, she attributes contemporary ghetto poverty and its associated ills to a lack of jobs for low-skilled workers. Black subordination no longer requires racial myths to perpetuate it. Vulnerable blacks can be defrauded, imprisoned, disenfranchised and left to die in floodwaters without appeals to race.

A core theme in “A Dreadful Deceit” is the contradictory depictions of blacks. They are at once lazy, childlike, stupid and submissive, but also murderous, calculating and subversive, intent on stealing white men’s jobs. Jones regards this lack of coherence as evidence that a conception of inherent racial difference has not been a driving factor in the way whites have treated blacks. And she laments the preoccupation with battling these myths, which she believes too often obscure the pressing need to address material inequality.

Yet isn’t it obvious that whites sometimes hate blacks simply because they are black? No, Jones says. When whites express contempt or hatred for blacks it is because of the stigma attached to servitude, or because blacks have refused to submit quietly to economic marginalization.

Jones celebrates interracial working-class solidarity (though she recognizes that white workers have generally resisted uniting with black workers). At the same time, she is ambivalent about whether “blackness” itself can ever be a basis for identity or solidarity. She says of Owens, “Because generations of white people had defined him and all other blacks first and foremost as ‘Negroes,’ he had no alternative but to acknowledge — or rather, react to — that spurious identity.” Even if what blacks have in common is not their race but “an overarching political vulnerability traced back to enslaved forebears, a political and historical status,” there might be times, she admits, when it would be legitimate to describe this commonality using the language of race. However, she also believes that doing so keeps a “destructive” idea alive.

Jones’s argument shares features with W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory in his 1940 book, “Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept.” But the differences make a difference. Du Bois too welcomed multiracial working-class solidarity, yet he thought that many oppressed whites were strongly attached to their “whiteness” as a marker of status, despite the fact that it brought them few or no material advantages. While Jones contends that racial justifications for unequal treatment are tactical and self-serving lies, Du Bois emphasized that those who accept racist thinking are generally self-deceived, entranced by mystifying fictions. And although he is no less concerned about black economic disadvantage than Jones, Du Bois worried as well about the self-contempt that racial defamation causes. Material well-being without self-respect, he insisted, is an undignified existence.

Precisely because race is, as Jones says, a “strange and shifting idea,” both malleable and capacious, Du Bois believed it could be remade and used for good. Over the years, those who have had the label “black” imposed on them have revised its meaning to better reflect their experiences and collective memory, and employed it as a means of overcoming their oppression. Thus, “black is beautiful,” “black pride,” even “black power.” When Du Bois called on the “darker races” to stand together against imperialism, economic exploitation and white supremacy, he was invoking race, but not in a morally troubling way.

Engagement with Du Boisian ideas might have made “A Dreadful Deceit” more convincing (and its practical implications less ambiguous). Still, if contemporary discussions of race could be focused on the interconnections between racial ideologies, political power and economic vulnerability, as Jones would like, that would be a dramatic improvement over the “postracial” narratives that currently reign.

A DREADFUL DECEIT

The Myth of Race From the Colonial Era to Obama’s America 

By Jacqueline Jones

Illustrated. 381 pp. Basic Books. $29.99.

Tommie Shelby, a professor of philosophy and of African and African-American studies at Harvard, is the author of “We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity.”

PostRacial Car Break-In is the Same Today As In 1990 or 1970 or... 1940

Two friends decide to perform a prank highlighting what happens when a white man and a black man break into a car.

The police forced them to NOT video any more of the arrest which lasted 40 minutes because the police were doing a thoro background check on the Brother even tho they proved that they owned the car and that it was a social experiment about race (maybe that's why they held the Brother for so long!!).

The Absurdity of Reverse Racism As Told By a South Asian-Australian Comedian

Aamer Rahman (Fear of a Brown Planet) - Reverse Racism
By Zak Cheney-Rice
February 14, 2014-- policymic.com

This Comedian Brilliantly Destroys the Myth of "Reverse Racism" in Less Than 3 Minutes

Aamer Rahman feels your pain.

The Australian comic knows that "reverse racism" is making life really hard for a lot of folks. Think about it: People of color shouldn't be allowed to make jokes about white people, then turn around and call white people racist. That's hypocrisy! That's racist… but in reverse!

Lucky for you, Rahman has a solution. (Hint: It involves "reverse racism" not actually being a thing.)

Rahman hits the nail on the head. Without getting too sociological, people who cry "reverse racism" need to realize that racism – as in, actual racism – requires a power dynamic in order to work. According to Tim Wise, racial jokes and slurs toward white folks are less potent because whites hold institutional power over everyone else. This is true throughout history. And since people of color hold little sway in defining the terms of white existence, it's abundantly clear that racial slurs and jokes directed at whites are no more than that: slurs and jokes. They carry little weight, because there's no actual power behind them.

So the next time you're tempted to call someone a "reverse racist," do the world a favor: don't. Like Rahman makes clear, there's only one kind of racism that exists. And its name, appropriately, is "racism."

Map of human genetic history: 
An ancient mystery answered, maybe

By Pearl Duncan
Tech Times
February 17, 2014

Geneticists at Oxford University, University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany had published a report, "A Genetic Atlas of Human Admixture History,", which is an analysis of the blending of people in human populations around the world. They noted historical events in our own and our ancestors' DNA. They used DNA to characterize significant historical blending events, and identified 100 historical events of human contact over the last 4,000 years. (Photo : Randy OHC)
I was intrigued by a report by geneticists at Oxford University, University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. Their report, "A Genetic Atlas of Human Admixture History," is an analysis of the blending of people in human populations around the world. They noted historical events in our own and our ancestors' DNA. They used DNA to characterize significant historical blending events, and identified 100 historical events of human contact over the last 4,000 years.

In the first paragraph of their report, they said, among the events encrypted in our genetic mutations are the "genetic impacts of the Mongol empire, Arab slave trade, Bantu expansion, first millennium CE migrations in Eastern Europe, and European colonialism, as well as unrecorded events." Interestingly, four of the six events identified in these introductory sentences of their report have a direct bearing on my ancestors. They say historians can now research ancestral mixtures using the genetic information about how different people interblended with each other.

I wish they had also said genealogists can also use this DNA information and the interactive chart in the report, because genealogists have been using it. I used this research to identify the various groups, large and small, powerful and powerless, aggressors and defenders, on my ancestral tree.

As an amateur genealogist, I researched and wrote about the ancestral historical events and blending of my African and European ancestors, revealing the specific story of the colonizing of my African ancestors in medieval Africa, in colonial America and in the Caribbean in trans-Atlantic slavery Trade. I found records of the nobles related to the kings and queens of Scotland and England who participated in the trade and had children with the people they enslaved. I knew the stories of the European nobles on my tree, and the African farmers in villages in Akuapem, Ghana. In mountain villages, on the coasts and on slave ships, the farmers and village soldiers in Akan Fante asafo military groups rebelled and resisted. They were rebels. I researched the origin and the thousands of years of migration of the African ancestors revealed in my DNA. I researched the contact of my African and Middle Eastern ancestors during the Arab slave trade, and other historical events the geneticists term, "unrecorded events."

My historical research uncovered hidden details because my African American ancestors were Maroons who organized and rebelled against slavery in Jamaica in the Caribbean. They left records of their African names, folklore and cultural artifacts. I traced them to a Stone Age ancestor in Africa by following the trails of a nickname that survived in my ancient West African ancestors' language and culture. The name pointed to places and historical events from thousands of years ago.

Because my ancestors blended on three continents, and because my DNA map revealed numerous groups and genetic mutations over a 60,000-year period, there are several other previously unknown historical events I cover in researching the blending of my ancestors. But one event was so mysterious, I had to ask the geneticists for more research.

In 1999, when I traced my family's Caribbean nicknames to African surnames in Ghana, population research geneticists Dr. Michael Hammer and Elizabeth Wood in the Division of Biotechnology and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Anthropology at the University of Arizona compared my father's DNA to Ghanaians and identified the matches. In 2000, when I traced my maternal DNA with Roots for Real, a London DNA company that uses Cambridge University's database, I found my main ancestors, Ghana's Akan's Ashanti and Fante in Akuapem villages, and dozens of additional matches: one in Europe, dozens in Africa and one in the Middle East. My Middle Eastern ancestors were the most mysterious, so I asked the geneticists if they can pinpoint the timeline of the contact between the Middle Eastern Mozabite in my DNA with my various African ancestors from West, East, Central and Southern Africa.

My maternal DNA showed Mozabite matches. The Mozabites trace their ancestry to the Moabites, descendants of one of Lot's daughters, and to Lot on the ancestral tree of Lot's uncle, Abram. They are relatives of Abrams' descendants' Ruth, David, Moses, Solomon and Jesus. In my previous research, I used nicknames, history, genealogy and folklore to trace the contact between my European and African ancestors in Africa, in the Caribbean and in America, so I had dates and timelines, but I did not have a date for the contact of my African ancestors with slave traders in the Middle East.

Were they ancient from Biblical days, and are my genetic markers from the days of the black people noted in the Old Testament? Were they from a later ancient period, thousands of years ago in Africa, or from medieval times, a millennium ago? Were they ancient like my Akan ancestors I traced to the hills and villages of Ghana? I asked my father, a Baptist minister and he started naming the Biblical people who begat whom, and the black people who were at the cross, so I asked him to send me the information. He sent a list of the ancestral tree from the Old Testament's Abraham (Abram) to his nephew Lot to Ruth to David, Solomon and on to the New Testament to Mary, Joseph and Jesus.

I wrote and asked the geneticists, when did the Mozabite in Damascus, Syria, Israeli Palestine and Algeria, a reclusive group of Middle Eastern traders who show in my DNA, blend with my other ancestors? I knew who the other Africans were; they were noted in my DNA as the West African Akans of Ghana; Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba of Nigeria; Cabinda of Angola; Papel, Manjaco, Djola, Felupes of Guniea-Bisseau; Wolof of Senegal, or the East African Kikuyu of Kenya; Yao, Chopi, Shangaan of Mozambique, or the Central African Bamileke, Ewondo, Chadic-speaking Masa of Cameroon, or the Southern African Khoi, Vasikela !Kung San people of Botswana-Namibia, all of whom show in my maternal DNA.

The recent research that geneticist revealed in the interactive map, "A Genetic Atlas of Human Admixture History," gave me an answer. When I clicked on the interactive map, I saw that a small percentage of Yorubans (7.3) blended with Morocans (86.2) and Tunisians (5.5) around 1334, between 1250 to 1418. This is a timeline for contact between my ancient African mothers and Middle Eastern traders. Tunisians have a percentage of Africans, Yoruba (5.3), Mandenka (1.0) and Mbuti Pygmy (0.6) in their DNA.

We know from geneticists, anthropologists and historians that the Yoruba on my ancestral tree is ancient as is Mandenka (Mandingo), and Mbuti Pygmy is most ancient, the second most ancient human group behind the 60,000 to 100,000 year-old southern African Khoi and San people. So when did they blend with the Middle Easterners whose DNA trace to a few thousand years ago? The Yorubas of Nigeria are in my maternal DNA, but they did not appear in my father's DNA, so it is the women, my ancient mothers who were traded in the Arab slave trade, according to these findings. Dr. Hammer has done research, which shows that the earliest ancient slaves were women of all backgrounds.

In their report, the geneticists float a theory that because the two groups, the Morocan and the Tunisian traders, who created the Mozabites had settled in North Africa more than 1,000 years before the Mozabite group was formed, the group's DNA marker, showing black African women, is from the Arab slave trade. They said seventeen Mediterranean groups show African mixtures, and the mixtures are from the Arab slave trade, which started in the seventh century. But they said their results also imply an "earlier sub-Saharan gene flow" and mixing of these groups. I like the story of Abraham (Abram) and the lady of color, Hagar, and their black child Ishmael. I like the story of how Abraham's various descendants separated, blended, fought, reconciled, but knew they were related. I continue to ask the geneticist to check the timeline on my Mozabite DNA matches, which show Yorubans of Nigeria, Mandenka of West Africa and Mbuti Pgymy of Central Africa mixing with Middle Eastern traders in my DNA. This is a mystery I hope geneticists can solve.

Another mystery in my DNA is, my most ancient ancestral group, my haplogroup, traces not to the traditional maternal haplogroups of the majority of Africans, L1 and L2, but to a small group of humans, L3, who migrated in-and-out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago.

About the author - Pearl Duncan

Pearl Duncan is completing a book about her African American DNA, ancestry and genealogy from three continents from modern times to the Stone Age. She traced an ancient name which survived.