What is the Future of the US Army as Racism In Its Ranks Increase?

September 28, 2021

By Charles Abi Nader

A recent study by the Pentagon showed a decrease in the rate of Americans enlisting in the armed forces – only 2% of all Americas in the past two years. The study further revealed that the percentage of US troops of color or coming from minorities is remarkably declining, as the interest of black people in joining declined from 20% in 2019 to 11% the next year, to reach 8% in the fall of 2020. The study attributed the results to the rise of racism and the use of violence by security forces against the protesters, in addition to the murder of George Floyd – an African-American – which had repercussions on the entire American society.

First and foremost, the US Air Force acknowledged the reluctance of troops in joining its ranks, especially among minorities. There is concern regarding the decrease of a younger generation of troops in enlisting not only in the Air Force but also at other military arms. This, in addition to the risk of the long-term retention in the posts of others in the armed forces, especially those “in the ranks of the black males, Hispanics, and women, too”.

In fact, such a study conducted by the Pentagon can’t be considered as normal or be taken for granted since as per US laws and regulations, the results of any study on an important and sensitive sector, such as the army should be published. But the repercussions of this study suppose that the results should be somehow confidential, for this topic has considerable effects on the cohesiveness of the US army, and thus on the society and the state in general.

The cohesiveness of the US army – as the case of armies in most countries – reflects the cohesiveness and situation of the state as a whole. Even more, the US army might be the first internationally within this equation, since it is assigned big missions, most of which are overseas [with more than 800 military sea, land, and air bases outside the country]. Such missions are spread and located all over the world and sometimes relocated, for the so-called purpose of protecting US interests and allies as well as maintaining American national security. Therefore, to face such a big problem in the US army [the increase of racism, for example] has tremendous effects on both, the American national security and on the status of the US in the world.

What does it mean when racism increases in any army? How does it affect the efficacy of this army, and thus its capability of carrying out its missions and properly playing its role?

Talking about racism in a certain army means that there is an outcast, unwelcomed category or group in this army, with which the other group cannot get along. It also means that trust is lacking between the two groups or among the members of each group. With this in mind, how would it be possible to appropriately lead such a military unit in order to accomplish a common mission? How would this leadership be achieved, as it requires a concerted effort and focus of all its elements to attain the bottom-line effectiveness needed to successfully fulfill the goal?

Of course, with the spread of racism that implies a superior view, disgust and mutual hatred, it is normal to have trust issues between the officers and the employees, on all the ordinal levels, if they are of different colors or ethnicities or cultural and religious beliefs, and the like of the racism-inciting points. Accordingly, where there is racism, there will be an abnormality in the cohesiveness of any military unit, especially when this unit is assigned an extraordinary or dangerous mission. This being said, distrust among its members will grow, along with the possibility of treachery and evasion of responsibility, in addition to allocating the risk to a certain party by the operational and administrative heads.

That’s in general. As for the US army, with its transcontinental nature and sensitive missions that are usually assaults and invasions [we have previously shed light on this situation in most of the wars involving the US, where its troops are fiercely confronted by the troops of the targeted or assaulted countries and by resistance movements, as in Vietnam and Lebanon, and recently in Iraq and Afghanistan], the casualties have significantly surpassed the reasonable or the average extent due to the shaken trust between the members and officers, especially when carrying out overseas operations and missions.

Consequently, we can say that a great deal of the US army’s overseas failures can be attributed to this abnormal, unhealthy phenomenon. Apparently, it has always existed historically in this army, but it wasn’t exposed to the extent it’s been recently, in the aftermath of the murder of the African-American George Floyd and its disastrous repercussions on the US society. The danger of this phenomenon entails the close bond between the US community and army, as the latter is considered the first worldwide with respect to capabilities, and the second after the Chinese army with respect to personnel [more than one million members and officers]. The reciprocal influences between this army and the community are huge and tremendous, which will certainly have a direct effect on the coherence of the state and the system.

Is Afghanistan the First Domino to Fall?

August 22, 2021

Tim Kirby

It certainly looks like a domino that has been put in position poised to fall waiting for others to take their places in the line.

With America withdrawing from Afghanistan abruptly after some 20 years, one big question is being discussed throughout the strategic sphere by those both in big institutions and laying on their couches – is the American loss in Afghanistan the first domino to fall in the eventual collapse of the Global Hegemon? After all, Afghanistan is the “graveyard of empires” probably because it is an expression that sounds nice and because the Soviets fell apart a few years after losing to the locals. So this must be the “beginning of the end” right?

Well, we should never be so quick as to jump onto narrow narratives without looking at the big picture. Side-by-side images of the Americans and their allies fleeing Vietnam and Afghanistan by helicopter are flooding Facebook, posted by those in the Alternative Media who take great joy in any loss by the 21st century’s “Evil Empire” but they seem to forget that just a few decades after losing in Vietnam the United States won the Cold War and took dominance over the planet.

Image: Strategic meme-of-the-year material for 2021.

No single event no matter how photogenic it is, is not going to be a sign of the grand demise of the “Sole Hyperpower”. It really took from the beginning of WWI till the end of WWII for the British to truly fall apart as a geopolitical force. The Soviet Union fell much quicker, but it is very widely believed that Perestroika (or the The Reykjavik Summit) was the real first white flag that devolved into the breakup of the union years later. The Roman Empire was a vastly slower burn than either of these two modern behemoths.

This means we should not be debating if Afghanistan is the first “domino” to fall, but instead we should really take a look at what the rest of the dominos falling would look like. At this point we can surely put together a rough picture of what the next tiles to fall would look like, i.e. what other major failures/events would really be signs of the Monopolar World meeting its demise? The following are a few humble offerings as to what these dominos could be…

Abandoning the Maidan Regime in the Ukraine

The unexpected surrender and soon to be total fall of Kabul has certainly resonated in another city that starts with the letter K. If Washington is finding it necessary to abandon a twenty-year Nation-Building project that they have invested vast sums of money and manpower into, that means that back-burner Kiev could be cut loose in the near future, putting the fate of the region in the hands of the Russians.

Image: We all know who secures Ukrainian “independence”.

The Maidan has been a major roadblock for Russia. As Brzeziński wrote, “It cannot be stressed enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire” and Washington has done an absolutely fantastic job of turning the region into an “anti-Russia” as Putin recently called it.

If the Maidan project were to be abandoned, it would become another quite massive domino. Washington giving up on Kiev, resulting in that current political entity probably being divided up, mostly going to Moscow, would symbolize either the USA’s inability to stop the rise of the Russians or their begrudging acceptance of it.

Taiwan, Hong Kong and/or South Korea

The Trump-era State Department Democracy storm that was inflicted on Hong Kong has seemed to fade away, but a total abandonment of the thorns in the side of the Chinese Dragon would also result in another domino being placed into position.

Image: Not State Department = No Professional Protest Organizers in China.

Bailing on Hong Kong activists or failing to maintain Taiwan’s independence would certainly present a strong sign of weakness and inability from the standpoint of Washington. Furthermore, although China has never had a passionate love for the North Koreans, having South Korea as essentially an American beachhead right next door has been a cause of concern for decades for Beijing. The South Korean economy on paper looks amazing and their cities dazzle with progress but what would be the effects of Ameria giving up on them? Is South Korea able to stand as a great nation, or is it really only successful thanks to the American umbrella? The answer to that would reveal itself within two weeks of an America-free Korean Peninsula.

Simply put, if Washington gives up on Hong Kong, Taiwan and/or South Korea it is another sign of the end for sure as China would be more or less rid of these weak points that have been exploited against it for decades.

A Loss of Control Over the “Bigs”

Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Agro and so on, have dutifully served Washington’s interests despite their theoretically international nature. But we should never forget that large for-profit entities are quite “whoreish” and will serve whichever master they need to. If Washington cannot control the Bigs as it used to, this would be another domino.

To a small extent this is happening in Hollywood where the Chinese market’s (and its official and unofficial) demands are having a major impact. But if it comes to a point that Hollywood is only making a chunk of the world’s blockbusters rather than nearly all of them it would be the end of the total unobstructed Soft Power dominance of this American institution. Or even worse, if Hollywood can be bought out from under America then a new global narrative could be spun quite quickly.

If the Hegemon fades, the leadership of the Bigs will feel increasing pressure from the Russians, Chinese and Arabs to give up the whole “gay thing” and portray these societies in a positive light whether through bribery or threats of force. Apple may be “designed in California” but if need be they would surely bail for greener pastures rather than living a life of poverty loyal to a failed America.

Mexico, Lakotastan and African-America

The United States has done a fantastic job of fostering independence movements within its rivals while making diverse masses “American” at home. However, as with the Soviets and the British, waves of breakaway republics and successful secessionist movements would be a very big domino indeed.

The Soviets tried to create an African workers uprising in America in the 60’s and failed miserably, but BLM could get out of control, or in the case of a dying USA, could become used by foreign powers. An Afro-American Maidan would certainly be another sign of doom.

The rise of an independent Native-American state like the Lakota Indians’ lands would be yet another tile being stood into place, opening the door for further break-away attempts.

When the Mexicans lost the Mexican-American war they lost the chance to become the dominant power on the continent. Few remember, but the destiny of this New World was not just given to the Americans wrapped in a box. If the Mexicans had won the war they would be the ones with access to the Atlantic (via the Gulf of Mexico) and the Pacific simultaneously, not Washington. It would have been very possible for them to secure the entire West Coast. A Mexico that would begin to take action as an independent actor would certainly be another sign of serious trouble for Washington. Thus far, on the North American continent “there can be only one” but perhaps that isn’t necessarily going to always remain the same “one”.

The death of the Dollar or collapse of the Federal Reserve

If the dollar were to collapse, or there were serious problems at the Federal Reserve, as have been predicted for many years due to insane national debt, this would of course be the biggest domino of all. The West has been able to accumulate bafflingly massive debt with no consequences because of the dominance of Washington. It is very hard to call in a debt from the toughest kid school surrounded by his henchmen. But when the big bully stops growing, and loses his buddies, all of a sudden getting your $5 back with a few whacks from a baseball bat becomes viable.

Image: If you are powerful enough no one can call in your debts.

No one can call in the debt of a Global Hegemon, but Regional Powers have to balance their checkbook. A decrease in power could lead to the national debt prophecy coming true in our lifetimes which would be probably the largest domino of all.

In conclusion

Is Afghanistan “the first domino to fall” in the death of the American Empire? This cannot be proven, but it certainly looks like a domino that has been put in position poised to fall waiting for others to take their places in the line. Other major defeats would be required to say for sure that this “New American Century” is over, not even making it to the one-fourth mark. It is really the other potential signs of the end that are of most concern not squabbling over Afghanistan’s domino status. So the big question is, if Washington is losing its Monopolar World Order, then where will be the next grand retreats?

Critical Race Theory and the Jewish Project

AUGUST 20, 2021 BY GILAD ATZMON

by Gilad Atzmon

There is a growing debate in the USA about Critical Race Theory (CRT). Peculiarly enough, CRT’s opponents insist that the ‘Marxist’ discourse must be uprooted from American culture and the education system. I am puzzled by it, as I cannot think of anything more removed from Marx’s thinking than CRT.

Marx offered an economic analysis based on class division. For Marx, those at the bottom of the class stratum were destined to unite regardless of their race, gender, or sexual orientation. Marx as such was race-blind. However, his vision was unifying as far as at least the working class are concerned. But Critical Race Theory aims in the complete opposite direction. CRT’s advocates believe that people are and should be defined politically by their biology: by their skin colour, often by their gender and/or sexual orientation. CRT attempts to fight racism, not by eliminating it but actually elevating biological determinism into a constant battleground.

Critical race theorists aren’t too original on that biological determinist front. Already in the late 19th century, Zionism called the Jews to identify politically with their biology. Hitler’s call for the Aryan people to do the same happened about two decades later. Ironically, even the so-called Jewish ‘anti’ racists within the ‘Jews only’ anti-Zionist political cells (such as JVP, JVL, IJAN) follow the exact Zionist and Hitlerian agenda. They also insist on identifying politically and ideologically as ‘a race.’*

One may wonder at this stage why people within the conservative right refer to CRT as ‘Marxist’ despite it having nothing to do with Marx and having much to do (ideologically) with Zionism and Hitlerian biologism. One option is that people within the American Right believe that the reference to Marx communicates well with their supporting crowd. Another slightly less genuine option is that Marx is a code name for a ‘subversive Jew-related discourse.’ The American conservative universe is largely inspired by Israeli nationalism, however it is disgusted by Soros-type cosmopolitan interventionism. The American Right may be using codified language to tackle its own paralysis. It clearly struggles to call a spade a spade.

Considering the above it is fascinating to examine the Jewish American take on the CRT debate.

Last month Jewish Historian Henry Abramson used the Jewish Telegraphic Agency platform to inform us that “anyone teaching the past by skipping over the unpleasant parts isn’t teaching history. They are engaged in propaganda.” This firm statement took me by surprise. Like Abramson I oppose all forms of memory laws that restrict the free historical discussion. Yet, Jewish institutions are invested heavily in policing the historical debate. They often castigate as Holocaust Deniers everyone who dares to question the primacy of Jewish suffering or even offer a slightly unorthodox vision of WWII. The Jewish intellectual tradition isn’t famous for its list of historical texts either, quite the opposite. There is a complete lack of Judaic historical texts in between Flavius Josephus (AD37-AD100) and Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891). The rabbinical universe has tended to skip the historical tradition because the Talmud and Torah are there to determine the manner in which Jews react to the universe around them. Israeli historian Shlomo Sand has pointed out that the Jews and Zionists in particular largely invent their past to fit with their political, existential, and spiritual interests. Maybe it shouldn’t be down to Jewish institutions to preach how to discuss the past.

Abramson is upset by the fact that in “nearly two dozen states, the movement to impose restrictions on the teaching of history is gaining momentum.” Abramson is also upset by the new Polish memory law and Putin dictating a vision of the Holodomor. Maybe before I delve into Abramson’s concern, I should mention that using Google search, I didn’t manage to find any opposition made by Abramson to the Israeli Nakba Law that similarly restricts the discussion on the Israeli 1948 ethnic cleansing crime.

Abramson claims that opponents of CRT attempt to avoid the discussion over the “controversial and painful moments in America’s history.” I am not sure that this is the case. I am not sure that America can or even intends to deny its problematic abusive past, but I do know that every black academic who attempted to discuss the role of Jews in the African slave trade has witnessed hell breaking loose. I highly recommend Abramson and everyone else read Prof. Tony Martin’s spectacular The Jewish Onslaught , a reportage of an orchestrated and abusive Jewish institutional campaign against a Black scholar who didn’t follow the script and tried to examine what was the role of some Jews in the African Slave Trade.

Watch Prof. Tony Martin:

 For Abramson and others, CRT is a study of the impact of systemic racism. It is the adherence to the belief “that the legacy of slavery is baked into American society and culture to such a degree that African-Americans continue to suffer long-term, systemic economic harm.” It suggests that discussing reparations should be on the national agenda.

The truth of the matter is that many of those who oppose CRT would agree with Abramson that racism is alive and kicking in the USA. A few may even suggest using America’s aid to Israel as reparation for the black slavery’s offspring. Would the JTA, AIPAC or Abramson join such a call for overdue justice? I doubt it.

The JTA insists to give the impression that Jews and Blacks are both share a similar marginalized past. Abramson writes: “Blacks were, like Jews, forbidden to buy homes in newly developed suburbs, while white Americans received help from the government to purchase homes in these leafy neighborhoods and to build generational wealth.” Yet, there is one difference our Jewish ‘historian’ forgets to mention: Jews immigrated to America voluntarily. For them, America was a ‘Golden Medina’ (Golden Land), the true promised land of free opportunities and ultimate capitalism. Blacks, on the other hand, made their way to the ‘land of the free’ chained in salve ships. Jews came to America in their search for better life, they faced obstacles but prevailed, and are now amongst the most privileged ethnic groups in the USA, if not the most privileged. Blacks were brought over to be exploited as slave labour. They had a very different beginning in the USA. The attempt to compare between the two is intellectually dishonest to say the least, but it may come to serve a purpose.

A decade ago in a rare moment of honesty, Philip Weiss, the dominant contributor to the Jewish pro-Palestinian outlet Mondoweiss, admitted to me in an interview that it wasn’t altruism that motivated his pro-Palestinian stand. It was “Jewish self-interest.” I learned a lot from this encounter with the Jewish activist and since then I have been very suspicious of Jewish solidarity projects. I somehow always see the self-interest popping out at one stage or another.

Jewish institutions and individuals have been involved in most solidarity projects in the last century. They insist to save the working class, to universalize civil rights, to liberate women and gays, and of course the transsexual. The outcome has never been too good. Instead of marching society forward as a whole, we ended up with an amalgam of conflicts that practically resembles the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

If you ask yourself why the Taliban managed to take over Afghanistan in 72 hours, one possible answer is that Jews for Taliban is yet to be formed. The same applies to the Hezbollah and Iran. If you ask yourself why it is taking so long for Palestine to emancipate itself, it is partially because its discourse of solidarity is defined (literally) by the oppressor.

If America or anyone else wants to fight racism for real, the way forward is to seek human brotherhood as opposed to inducing victimhood. If the JTA or any other Jewish institution cares for blacks for real, then embrace the Nation of Islam today before sunset. Encourage Black critics and intellectuals to look fearlessly at Jews and at the African slave trade. Show us an example of great transparency. Lead the way and be light unto the nations for the first time in history instead of expecting the rest of humanity to zigzag endlessly around your sensitivities.

* Yours truly believes that Jews are not a race, however, not being a race doesn’t stop people identifying ‘as a’ race.

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“Teacher d’assumption’s statement – Reframing the racism debate”

November 11, 2020

By Leo Abina – A concerned World Citizen – for the Saker Blog

Going back as far as I can remember, the story of what my dad’s 1930s primary school teacher would say at the start of every school day has been ingrained in my family’s narrative for half a century. “Whites build locomotives. Negroes can’t produce a needle. Whites are civilized. Negroes are savages.” As he would recount this story, my dad would always add, with a mischievous chuckle, “my few other African classmates in that class would be outraged by this statement; but not me. For me, d’Assumption’s ‘greeting to the class’ became a source of motivation to excel, especially in mathematics and science, just to prove him wrong.” Over the years, teacher d’Assumption’s^[1] statement would never fail to ignite passionate debates, emotions, and reactions among family members; me included.

During my childhood, in the 60s and 70s, I lived the life of a privileged West-African boy from a well-to-do family, growing up in multi-racial social networks, attending private schools in Africa and Europe, oblivious to the vicissitudes of both subtle and raw racism. During these early years, teacher d’Assumption’s statement felt like a distant, no longer relevant, piece of nasty colonial history that I did not fully understand but felt needed to just be forgotten.

As a youngster coming of age and completing tertiary education in the 80s and 90s, I lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union, the uninhibited advent of market-driven globalization, and the shift towards finance, rather than ‘goods and services’ -dominated economies. My thoughts about teacher d’Assumption’s statement during those years were that “aspiring to build African locomotives out of pride was wasteful and misguided development strategy.” What would be smarter, I argued, was “investing African capital to own shares in railway manufacturing companies, so as to better facilitate the deployment of railway infrastructure in Africa; while at the same time, striving to build competence in railway technology.’

Then came the beginning of my expat years. My first forays into the ‘real world’ of business, outside the manicured lawns and precious wood paneled walls of US Ivy League campuses. Those years brought my first encounters with the realities of ‘subtle,’ though at times not so ‘subtle,’ corporate double standards. I had up to then bought into the neo-liberal ethos about free and fair markets; only to discover that in reality, most markets, even within the western sphere of influence, were neither free nor fair. Corporate battles within the western world are testimony that strategic technologies are protected; Boeing vs Airbus, Apple vs Microsoft, Siemens vs GE, are but a few legendary examples of this reality. These examples helped me realize that my earlier thoughts about how Africans should use capital in order to play the economic game to their advantage might have been overly naive – state interventions do play a major role in today’s so called ‘free markets’, and the bigger the state, the stronger the interventions. Even in the apparently ‘leveled playing field’ of our modern world, teacher d’Assumption’s worldview seemed as entrenched and relevant as it ever was.

As I look back through the eyes and battle scars of a 50-something, I get an uneasy sense that humanity has remained stuck on this all-important racism issue. On one side of the issue, white folks are conditioned to inherently hold a sense of superiority, backed by centuries of modern western world dominance. While on the other side of the issue, brown folks, no matter where they live in the world, their place in society, or their achievements, feel a sense of injustice, inadequacy, and alienation, in a historical period dominated by the modern western construct; a construct in which they can at best live as ‘acceptable strangers,’ or at worst as victims or rebels.

Taking a closer look at these perspectives on racism might provide a better premise to bring the two main conflicting parties – the white, western European dominant side, and the non-white (brown) global-south side, nearer each other.

Let us begin with the white perspective. Looking at the advent of modern western civilization over the past 300 years, as well as today’s global power dynamics, one can easily understand why a 21st-Century white person might have an innate sense of superiority. Why in our times, even an unaccomplished, hopeless, inept white person of European descent would still feel superior to an accomplished, gifted, and successful brown person.

In a nutshell, this frame of mind stems from the observation that for the past few centuries, the modern western civilization managed to subjugate much of the rest of our world. Through naval supremacy and superior weaponry resulting in tremendous military might, small European nations with tiny territories and lesser populations were able to project power globally and overwhelm much larger, usually brown, peoples. These past conquests still resonate in the psyche of many modern Europeans, and in the view of many, bear witness to the greater ingenuity of the white race. Once the lands of the brown people were subdued and a colonial order was established to channel vast amounts of natural resources from the colonies to the colonial capitals, in the eyes of many Europeans, this exploitative world order was, and is to this day, justified.

For in their narrative, it is Europeans, in the first place, who knew and understood the value of these natural resources. Whereas the brown natives, who might have been sitting on these natural resources for centuries, a. did not have an industrial base to know the value of what was under their feet b. did not have the technology and means to access and exploit these natural resources, and c. did not have the capacity and strength to protect them. Therefore, it is only natural that those who have the knowledge, technology, and power to access natural resources should also have the nature-given right to exploit them.

Then comes the moral aspect, especially as it relates to one of the most gruesome episodes in the long racism saga: the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In public and in the name of political correctness, most white people who only have a passing acquaintance with slavery do feel a sense of guilt about it. However, upon greater scrutiny through which they come to understand the historical context of slavery, and in view of recent south-to-north emigration dynamics, in private, many other white people do not share that sense of guilt.

The rationale here is twofold. First, there is the very controversial observation that during the slave trade, Africa was not occupied; therefore and by-enlarge, it was mostly African chieftains who sold other Africans into slavery. If brown people were ready to sell their own kind into slavery while Europeans needed labor to build ‘the new world in the Americas,’ why should only one of the two parties lose the moral high ground? Second, decades after slavery and colonization, we live in a time of massive south-north migration where millions of brown people are ready to leave their own independent countries and risk their lives across deserts and seas in search of a better life in the white man’s ‘land of milk and honey.’ Isn’t that further testimony of the white man’s more aspirational, and therefore superior, way of life?

This old, profound inter-racial legacy explains why an unaccomplished white person would still feel superior to a gifted brown person. The white indigent person sees brown people parading in fancy clothes, fancy cars, fancy homes, and thinks, “this high life these brown people aspire to and are so fond of, was brought about by us.”

Let us now turn to the brown perspective. The brown person’s experience in today’s modern western civilization is an experience filled with contradictions. On one hand there is an attraction to the outward semblance of freedom, equality and fraternity professed by the West. On the other hand there is a rejection of the inward reality of coercion, double standards, and racism perpetrated by that very same West. In this context, the brown person’s best option often consists in navigating these contradictions as deftly and quietly as possible, with no overt defiance to the established order. I once attended an event where the condition of black Brazilians came up in the discussion; a white Brazilian businessman who was present casually responded; “we do not have a racial problem in Brazil because in Brazil, brown people know their place!”

Besides the cruelty, hurtful meaning, and Brazilian frame of reference of this remark, it basically captured the essence of brown peoples’ lives everywhere in the modern world. No matter where they live, what their personal circumstances are, whether they are conscious of it or not, racism is an integral part of brown peoples’ day-to-day reality. Of course, in the modern era the crude state-sanctioned form of racism that prevailed up to the 1960s has rescinded, but nonetheless racism is still alive and well in today’s world context, albeit in different forms according to different environments.

The western-dominated world order dates back to at least three centuries. Its latest, modern iteration was established at the end of World War II by the victorious powers. On the economic front, western dominance happened de facto through the establishment of the Bretton Woods institutions in 1944 – the World Bank and the IMF. On the political front, the United Nations was founded with the noble mandate to prevent future wars, and a 5-nations Security Council made up of the most powerful nations was formed to protect this mandate, as well as approve or veto United Nations resolutions. In reality, this system and the highly biased, misrepresentative nature of its governing body, the Security Council, has been used outwardly for the benefit of the ‘international community,’ but inwardly for the interests of a tiny, West-led, part of the world. On the cultural front, dominance pretty much occurred by default through the ubiquitous reach of western media, western movies, and western broadcasting power.

In a second phase spanning through the 70s, 80s and 90s, the post-war world order was further reshaped with the formation of a new, dollar-based monetary system (no longer backed by gold), a massive shift in geo-politics with the fall of the USSR, a series of international trade agreements, and the advent of satellite-based communications and information technologies. Last but not least, the West’s military dominance was further strengthened by the eastern expansion of NATO, and the broad deployment of military bases around the world – nearly a thousand for the US alone, with a $900b yearly military budget that is larger than all European countries’ military budgets put together, and 10x Russia’s.

In recent years this unipolar, US-dominated world order is being challenged by a re-emerging modern Russia, and by regional powers such as China, India and Brazil. Nonetheless, western power remains formidable and remains overwhelmingly white. As a result of this reality, for most brown people around the world the real question has not so much been about whether the modern western ethos harbors racism or not. It has been about the extent to which racism affects them directly and experientially, and the extent to which racism limits their opportunity to strive.

Some people in the West find it difficult to conceive of this, but the reality is that even brown people who live in their own countries, under their own government, are affected by racism. Such assertions, as is now the case for any dissenting assertions even backed by forensic evidence, are often dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories.’ Nonetheless, in order to understand how this is possible, it is important to understand that in today’s world order, years after colonization, most brown countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, are still not free. Sure, these countries are recognized as independent administrative entities, with their own flags, national anthems, and emblems, but in reality, western powers still exercise a tremendous amount of hegemonic political, economic, and cultural power on them.

Recent history around the world has shown that brown leaders who try to defy the status quo and defend the interest of their own people at the expense of western hegemony, do not last long. In order to survive in their positions, most brown leaders have to make political and economic choices that are not favorable to their nation. Although most of the time, leaders in brown countries are quite happy to become stooges of the West, pledge allegiance to their western overlords, and enjoy the monetary benefits that come with that allegiance – often at the expense of their own nation, just like the African chieftains who used to sell fellow Africans into slavery.

In such subservient brown countries, discord often grows between the state and the citizens, repression intensifies, and the leaders find themselves increasingly isolated and paranoid of their own people. The leaders then start trusting and favoring only people from their closest circle, as well as foreigners, more than all other locals. Soon in this process, all significant opportunities in business, in government, and especially the security and intelligence branches of government, become the preserve of a small, predatory clique with foreign and carefully selected local elements. Of course, the various aspects of this scenario play out differently from brown country to brown country, but the general outcome is usually the same; frustration, limited opportunities, and second-class citizenship for the local brown people, in their own country.

For brown people living in the West, the situation is also not ideal, albeit for different reasons. The list of day-to-day racism related life challenges brown people face in western countries is just too long to enumerate here. The worst such challenges such as police brutality, discrimination in the workplace, and the ghettoization of brown communities have been rampant in the West, and have once again become prominent through the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the same vein as the civil rights movement of the 1960s, these recent developments have the merit of exposing the pain and hardships brown people in the West have been experiencing for decades. Huge protests are erupting to demand the downing of statues depicting historical ‘white racist’ figures, to demand that people kneel as a sign of outrage to the George Floyd killing, to demand reparations for the ill treatment brown peoples have endured in the past. Brown peoples’ tempers and frustrations are once again reaching boiling point in front of western oppression and injustice. However, to many well-intended observers, the types of demands brown people in the West are making to correct the situation and hopefully crush the scourge of racism seem superficial, ineffective, and perhaps even naive.

In order to defeat something as entrenched and deep as racism, a different premise might be needed. Perhaps each side of the racism issue, the western, white dominant side, and the global south, brown subjugated side, needs to re-examine its own frame of reference?

Today, as in teacher d’Assumption’s time in the 1930s, modern western civilization remains dominant and continues to exercise disproportionate power on the world; with each of the leading western countries exercising strong influence on specific ‘brown’ regions – the US in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and parts of the Middle East, the UK in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the Middle East, France mainly in its former African territories. That power is still derived from the West’s advances in technology, applied in various, more sophisticated fields of control; be it in surveillance and intelligence (via military satellites and cyber-tracking technology), subversive regime change methods (via color revolutions, co-opted local protests, or mainstream media ‘manufactured consent’ and leader-demonization campaigns), or good old, albeit more targeted, military operations (via drones, bombing campaigns, inter-ballistic missiles, or special ops interventions). On the economic front, the enactment of sanctions on brown countries that do not ‘toe the line’ has been a widely-used tool in recent years; with a flip side to this approach being the granting of western currency-denominated loans, with monies ‘created-out-of-thin-air’ and lent by western Treasury Ministries (or DFIs) to brown countries to ensure debt-driven ‘loyalty.’ On the political side, in a context of outward democracy since the 1980s, the use of data analytics and social media has been used to foster favorable, or at least non western-interest-threatening, electoral outcomes.

In light of all this, a modern-day teacher d’Assumption would say, “whites send satellites into space, blacks can’t make a bicycle. Whites are civilized. Blacks are savages.” The ‘satellites’ versus ‘bicycle’ part of that statement may be partly true, but it also infers important presumptions and omissions that should be brought to light and honored. As for the ‘civilized’ versus ‘savages’ part, it is a plain fallacy that should be exposed as such.

The presumption many westerners have about their technological superiority is that it came about exclusively from the brilliance and higher intellectual order of the white race. In reality, technological advancements truly surfaced in the 1500s in the European West, a period many would consider quite late in the historical process.

Ancient Greece, from which the modern western European civilization is thought to have emerged, learned extensively from ancient Egypt. Ancient Greece scholars in the fields of mathematics, philosophy, and medicine, learned from the ancient Egyptians. In other words, the way today’s scientists and technologists travel to Europe and the US to gain knowledge, is the same way ancient Greeks would travel to Egypt to gain knowledge. The great ’embarrassment’ western tradition has tried to keep under wraps for centuries, has tried to ‘deflate’ through Hollywood misrepresentation, has fought in bad faith in the academic arena, is that the ancient Egyptians were black, and were the real ancestors of modern day Africans, from across the continent and in the diaspora. Today’s core Egyptian population comes from a mix between different successions of historically newcomers to Egypt; notably Turks and Arabs. In the ancient world, black people from Egypt, who became ‘browner’ during the later Pharaonic dynasties after centuries of conquests and ‘métissage/mixing’ with lighter conquered people (we’re seeing the reverse today), dominated the world. This question should be finally settled and taught. Not out of pride to claim some ancient glory, but for humanity to learn and reflect on the lessons of the past, without falsifying the past.

‘Western’ mathematics and in particular algebra, without which modern technology would not have come about, were initiated by the Persians and later developed by the Arabs. To understand the importance of just this contribution, one should just try and write, never mind calculate, 10,354 x 726 in Roman numbers! This fact although it is more widely known and better accepted than the ‘ancient Egypt was black’ cover up, has also been largely ignored and set aside by the modern West. Once again, perpetuating the idea that white western ingenuity solely deserves the credit for the technical advances humanity now enjoys in the modern world, is a criminal cover-up that impairs progress in the racism discussion.

In any case, and perhaps from a more philosophical perspective, scientific and technological advancement should not be boasted over for as long as it hasn’t resolved the ultimate human aspiration, which is the avoidance of death. In our modern times, the dominant West should reflect upon the true extent of its power. As a spiritual leader once declared in the course of an argument with a western materialist, during which the latter was marveling at the supremacy of rationale epistemology, technology and science, “if you’re so smart, don’t die!” It might thus be helpful for today’s dominant group who prides itself for the preeminence of its technology, and thus for the preeminence of its power, to reflect on the reality that despite these advances, despite a particular group living in better material conditions than others, the finality of all humans on this earth has remained the same. It is also perhaps the reason why the ancient Egyptians were so obsessed with immortality; the ultimate frontier of their power. To this day, that frontier has not been reached.

When it comes to the notion that having greater mastery of technology makes a particular group more ‘civilized’ than another, despite the many lessons we have from History on this assertion, most of today’s dominant West appears to not have taken heed. Just looking at recent history, one could reflect on how in the first few months of WW2, the Wehrmacht conquered Europe through its ‘blitzkrieg/lightning war’ and superior military technology. Did those accomplishments make the Third Reich more ‘civilized’ than the rest of Europe? Why then carry this contention that dominance over brown people all over the world by means of higher technology, and thus power, makes one more ‘civilized?’ On the moral and civilizational spectrum, justice administered with crude weaponry will forever remain higher than injustice committed with ballistic missiles and drones.

After all, power, then and now, whatever its source and whatever its form, when it is exercised unjustly for the sake of a few, rather than justly for the sake of many, has a name: it is called tyranny.

On the brown side of the discussion, the re-framing might begin with a sharper sense of reality.

Despite proclamations to the contrary and an urge to lecture the world about freedom, democracy, equality for all, modern western civilization does not practice what it preaches. It likes to act as the victim when it is the aggressor. It co-opts a mainstream press compromised by special corporate and ideological interests. It supports brutal regimes that do its bidding and decries legitimate other regimes that defy the current order. It establishes states through genocide of indigenous populations, tolerates discrimination against second-class minority groups, talks about liberty but expects everyone to conform to western cultural norms. Yet, many brown people the world over, perhaps as a coping mechanism, pretend not to see the huge gap between the outward western assertions on freedom, liberty, and justice, and the inward reality of western power.

Once brown people realize that the modern western world order does function on the basis of quasi- imperial power dynamics with a dominant group and a subjugated group, they might also realize that progress will not happen on the racism question for as long as the technological gap between the parties does not subside. The reason for that comes from the other reality that the opposite of racism is mutual respect. If the West sees itself better than others because of its technological advances and the power that derives from it, while others seem incapable of matching western technology but aspire to the same living standards that this technology provides, there can be no mutual respect. The process of acquiring one’s own technology is essential not just to earn respect, but also to earn one’s real freedom. It is also an endeavor that is hard, complicated, onerous, and at times extremely dangerous. Brown people, just like other non-western Europeans have done, should consider this reality in their re-framing of the racism issue.

Between 1941 and 1945, the Allies, despite adhering to different political ideologies, worked together in order to defeat Nazism and had to catch up with German military technology as a matter of survival; it was an extremely arduous process. In the post-war era, being prevented from political and military autonomy, a humiliated and damaged Japan decided to catch up with western consumer technologies; it was also an extremely arduous process. Today, China is following and perhaps surpassing Japan’s footsteps on not just consumer, but on all commercial technologies. While post-Soviet/post-1990s Russia is doing the same on the military front. None of these countries were given a free pass to ‘catch up’! Nor did they waste time adding insult to injury by turning to others in plea for help and apologies. Brown people then, must learn those lessons and take heed.

A journalist once asked an African father-of-independence leader “what was,” in his view “the worst thing that can happen to a human being?” The old man paused for a short while, and then replied, “losing one’s dignity!”

Being poor and over-powered is not a degrading state to be in and of itself; most peoples at some point in their history have experienced that. However, looking for sympathy and apologies for one’s misfortune, expecting others to relinquish power and provide for one, being unwilling to make sacrifices in order to uplift oneself, is degrading and makes one the laughing stock of the world. In order to regain some respect that will help close the gap in the racism discussion, brown people and leaders in brown countries must make all necessary efforts to ‘catch up’ and regain some dignity. Brown people who pretend not to care for the benefits of modern life tend not to be very genuine and thus not deserving of respect. Brown people who are not prepared to make the efforts and sacrifices needed to ‘catch up,’ but are so keen to flock in and emulate institutions built by others instead of building their own, are also not deserving of respect. Then brown people who do manage to regain some level of power, and who in turn, for the sake of correcting past injustices, themselves become unjust, perpetrate the downward cycle of racism.

Perhaps, through this reframing of the racism issue, primary schoolteachers the world over will one day begin the day with a different statement?

“Satellites, locomotives and bicycles are the result of human ingenuity over the ages. They make our daily lives better and they can be a source of great power. However, these technological and material achievements, however great they maybe, should not make us arrogant or make us think ourselves better than those who have not reached them. They should become a means to bring justice and peace to the entire world.”

1. Note: my father’s primary school teacher at the Lycée Faidherbe in 1930s St Louis, Senegal. ↑

Do Black people get shot by police just to win elections for Democrats?

September 05, 2020

By Ramin Mazaheri – crossposted with PressTV

That headline asks a surprising question, yet it’s one which was repeatedly expressed by African-Americans in Kenosha when I asked them for their evaluation regarding how all levels of government had responded to the profoundly shocking series of recent shootings there.

Boarded-up Kenosha looks like a community under siege, and they naturally wonder who is coming to help them. Kenoshans would assume that a visit by the occupant of the White House would be a positive thing and a sign that, yes, help is indeed coming.

So it was rather staggering how many Democratic leaders, their supporters and the mainstream media actually demanded that the President of the United States not visit somewhere inside the United States. I can’t imagine such a thing occurring almost anywhere else, yet for several days the national discussion was steered in this absurd and pointless direction.

The average American knew better: spinning the president’s visit as some sort of controversial, inflammatory and potentially dangerous act allowed for distraction from actual issues, such as constant brutality from the security apparatus, massive political apathy, disinvestment in Black areas, etc.

Crucially, “disinvestment” is the wrong word because it implies there was some historical era when the government or private banks actually invested in African-American communities. “Non-investment” is a far more accurate term.

However, Americans are infamous for their very short memories, combined with a penchant for rewriting history. This cultural trait may explain why their political classes could so easily keep pushing the impression that police brutality is something which was wholly created by Donald Trump.

What is interesting about today’s America is that one can finally hear voices in public which tell the truth about American racism, classism and imperialism, but these voices are overwhelmingly outnumbered by those afflicted by another cultural flaw: a constant desire to have an enemy to attack, to evangelize against and to feel superior to – the US used to have American Indians for that, but now many settle for Trump.

US police kill black man in Washington amid nationwide rage over cop violence US police kill a black man in the capital Washington DC in the latest of a sting of police killings of black men and women that have sparked nationwide anger.

If over the last several days Democrats and the mainstream media had spent 1% of the time they spent on Trump talking instead about police brutality, non-investment and justice for Jacob Blake, then progress on these issues might have actually inched forward. However, these issues – and poor, paralysed Jacob Blake – are clearly all subverted to the short-term cause of winning November’s election.

That is something incredibly galling to the Blake family, of course.

I asked them and other African-Americans in their neighbourhood about how Jacob Blake was being manipulated to score political points, and they pointed out that tragedy is not if your candidate doesn’t win this November – tragedy is being shot in the back seven times in front of your three sons. Tragedy is living under the cloud of that possibly happening to you, your sons, daughters, friends, etc.

And so, in covering the brutal shooting of Jacob Blake it was hard not to see the enormous gap between the average concerns of the average American in an average American town and their political & media classes.

It was very easy to see why alienation and cynicism towards politics among the US lower classes are so rampant: after an appalling police shooting, subsequent rebellions and the astounding scene of a teenager shooting protesters with a semi-automatic rifle, many in the US chattering classes stunningly insisted that the nation’s own president should not visit Kenosha and act like a public servant.

It was a totally self-interested stance, and not one which many in Kenosha supported – people in Kenosha want governmental action, not governmental inaction. They probably wish the Secretary General of the United Nations would visit, too.

In fact, whatever his unknowable motives, Trump was a rare civil servant who mostly fulfilled his duty to Kenoshans. Contrarily, the governor of Wisconsin took four days to visit Kenosha – I guess other areas of Wisconsin were burning down or making international news? Wisconsin’s governor is a Democrat, to relay a detail of absolutely no importance to the Blake family.

Joe Biden rushed out of his basement to Kenosha, but only after Trump did – Biden had initially said he would not visit Wisconsin. He blamed Trump for Kenosha’s ills, as if Americans are as deplorably historically ignorant as Biden appears to think. However, we should remember that Biden is one of the 60 million unemployed Americans – he, too, is desperately trying to win a job and pay back his creditors, and is not currently a civil servant.

Kenosha police have been woefully nontransparent and silent, seeking only to protect their little cop aristocracy, which undoubtedly inflamed tensions further.

So if any public servant was there to listen to the citizens of Kenosha, to provide a safety valve, to actually earn their taxpayer salary, it may have been Trump. But when Trump can make a fair claim to be the most conscientious civil servant on the job, how well-functioning can your country be?

There is a widespread perception in the U.S. that an American maintains his or her security only as long as the government remains uninvolved.

What is certain is that what I was told by African-Americans in Kenosha were things like, “Barack Obama did nothing for Black people,” and that they expect nothing to change whether Biden or Trump is elected. This dissatisfaction, frustration and political cynicism is a huge problem, but Democratic supporters would probably try to blame that on Trump too.

There is a widespread perception in the U.S. that an American maintains his or her security only as long as the government remains uninvolved.

African-American men and women should not get shot by police in order to score political points, but it’s easy to see why so many of them feel that they are repeatedly used in that way by a Democratic Party which tries to fool all Americans into believing that they had no part in devising political and socioeconomic policies which devastate entire neighborhoods of all colors.

The neighborhood of Jacob Blake, which held a healing block party after a family press conference calling for justice and peace, was obviously tight-knit. It is also obvious that this is partially imposed on them by the fact that so many African-American citizens expect no help from those who control their taxes, who decide on which areas should be safely protected, and who decide if issues of importance remain on the public agenda or if nonsense, bile and the blame game (which fools no one who is not hysterically partisan) predominate.

It must be noted: Trump’s visit to Kenosha did not produce more nighttime violence – just a minor protest of a few hundred people. Thus, the number of actual protesters was certainly dwarfed by those in the chattering classes who spread fear about Trump’s visit. In fact, Kenosha’s nightly calm returned immediately after the “only in America” shootings by 17-year old Kyle Rittenhouse, but that’s another story.

It’s clear that Democratic leaders endlessly fabricate phony issues in order to avoid genuine discussion on real issues. What’s worse, they then expect everyone to quietly forget that they were duped, as evidenced by the fact that the recent Democratic National Convention did not utter the word “impeachment” nor mention Russiagate, even though one would assume these would be held up as their two major achievements since 2016 given how much time they spent on them.

Justice for Jacob Blake, and the massive investment and political changes required to prevent more Jacob Blakes, are not phony issues. It’s clear that Democrats, and Republicans as well, are not interested in discussing them.

---

Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

America’s Race Reality: Inhuman, Insane, Incoherent

August 14, 2020

by Ilana Mercer, published with the authorization of the author

Racism is a lot of things. One thing it is not:

A white child, aged five,  executed by a black man with a shot to the head, as the tyke rode his bike. Ask the cultural cognoscenti. They’ll tell you: That’s never racism.

Otherwise, almost anything involving the perpetually aggrieved black community counts as racism.

Students hoist a “thin blue line” flag in solidarity with police: racism.

A black male is asked for his driver’s license: racism. Of course it’s systemic. Are you stupid, or something?

A white politician proclaims that “all lives matter”: Come again? Are you kidding me?!

A museum curator fails to commit to the exclusion of the art of white men, including, presumably, the Old Masters: not racism; white supremacism. Be gone with you, Rembrandt and Vermeer.

A black student struggles with English grammar. English grammar is ruled racist. Take that, Dr. Johnson!

This, even though, logically, it is more likely that our student is not up to the task or hasn’t tried hard enough; that his tutor is not up to the task and hasn’t tried hard enough—or all of those things combined.

As you can see, accusations of racism are seldom grounded in reason or reality.

Racism, then, is just about anything other than the point-blank execution of little Cannon Hinnant (white), on August 9, by Darius Sessoms (black), and the rape, the other day, by Dejon Dejor Lynn, 25, of an old lady: his 96-year-old neighbor.

From the media industry’s modus operandi, we may comfortably deduce that the raped lady is almost certainly white.

How so?

Fully 73 percent of the residents of Ann Arbor, Michigan, are white. If the race of an unnamed victim of black crime is withheld, she’s most likely white. Were the victim Hispanic, the media industry would say so, and would forthwith withhold the picture and race of the “suspect,” so that the crime became an attack against a “minority.”

Similar black-on-white atrocities are a daily occurrence, documented, “in moving images,” by “the fearless and indefatigable journalist Colin Flaherty.” They are either ignored by the media industry or described as racially neutral.

In a powerful responsorial that is almost religious in cadence, Jack Kerwick, a Frontpage.com columnist, commands us to “say their names”:

David Dorn was a 77-year-old retired African-American police captain and family man. Say his name.

Paul and Lidia Marino, a couple in their mid-80s. Say their names!

Wendy Martinez: Say her name.

Jourdan Bobbish and Jacob Kudla: Teenagers tortured and murdered. Say their names.

Karina Vetrano: Attacked, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death while jogging. Say her name.

Phil Trenary: Treasury of the Chamber of Commerce in Memphis who was trying to rejuvenate the city’s economic life. Say his name.

Scott Brooks; Sebastian Dvorak; Serge Fournier; Tessa Majors; Dorothy Dow; Lorne Ahrens; Brent Thompson; Michael Krol; Patrick Zamarripa.

Say their names. (“Remembering the Victims of Black Violence – Black and White,” By Jack Kerwick)

The prototypical American victims of racial hatred were 21-year-old Channon Christian and 23-year-old Hugh Christopher Newsom, of Knoxville, Tennessee.

Their slaughter, in 2007, was dismissed as a garden-variety murder and rape. But there is no finessing the white-hot racial hatred seared into their mangled, white bodies.

Read the description of the crime in Into the Cannibal’s Pot, and pray tell how white America can thus forsake its children by accepting the racial innocence of their defilers:

Five blacks—four men and a woman—anally raped Hugh, then shot him to death, wrapped his body in bedding, soaked it in gasoline and set it alight. He was the lucky one. Channon, his fair and fragile-looking friend, was repeatedly gang raped by the four men—vaginally, anally and orally. Before she died, her murderers poured a household cleaner down her throat, in an effort to cleanse away DNA. She was left to die, either from the bleeding caused “by the tearing,” or from asphyxiation. Knoxville officials would not say. She was then stuffed in a garbage can like trash. White trash. (pp. 35-36)

The object of hate is so often a remarkably beautiful woman or man. It is as if the aim is to forever obliterate beauty unattainable.

On the Dark Continent, the same dynamic was in play when “Hutus picked up machetes to slash to bits nearly a million of their Tutsi neighbors in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.” There,

… tribal allegiance trumps political persuasion and envy carries the day. The Tutsi—an alien, Nilotic African people, who formed a minority in Rwanda and Burundi—had always been resented by the Hutus. The tall, imposing Tutsis, whose facial features the lovely supermodel Iman instantiates, had dominated them on-and-off since the 15th Century. On a deeper level, contends Keith Richburg, an African-American journalist, the Hutus were “slashing at their own perceived ugliness, as if destroying this thing of beauty, this thing they could never really attain, removing it from the earth forever.” (Into the Cannibal’s Pot, p. 43)

Such was the murder of Tyler Wingate, “a 24-year-old man from Berkley [who] was brutally beaten to death after a seemingly minor car crash on Detroit’s west side [in July of 2019]. The crash and beating were caught on surveillance video from a nearby gas station.” (The Unz Review)

Undeniably, it is a kind of race-based annihilation of beauty unattainable, for that is certainly what poor Tyler Wingate was blessed with.

For America to have incorporated and assimilated the unreason of “racism” on such a self-immolating scale, as American society has done, is to be mired in self-contradiction. To the Greek philosophers, to be mired in self-contradiction was to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.

This is where American society finds itself: less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.

Patriots, please quit the “rest in peace” platitudes. Tyler Wingate and all the rest rage, rage from the grave.

***

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s currently on Gab, YouTube, Twitter & LinkedIn, but has been banned by Facebook.

Systemic racism or systemic rubbish

ٍSource

August 09, 2020

By Ilana Mercer, posted with permission of the author

The “systemic racism” refrain is a meaningless abstraction.

Operationalize the nebulous abstraction that is “systemic racism,” or get out of my face!

To concretize a variable, it must be cast in empirical, measurable terms, the opaque “racism” abstraction being one variable (to use statistical nomenclature).

Until you have meticulously applied research methodology to statistically operationalize this inchoate thing called “racism”—systemic or other—it remains nothing but a thought “crime”:

Impolite and impolitic thoughts, spoken, written or preached.

Thought crimes are nobody’s business in a free society. (By logical extension, America is not a free society.)

The law already mandates that people of all races be treated equally under its protection. The law, then, is not the problem, logic is. In particular, the logical error of reasoning backward.

“Backward reasoning, expounded by mystery author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through his famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes,” writes Dr. Thomas Young, “applies with reasonable certainty when only one plausible explanation for the … evidence exists.”

Systemic racism is most certainly not “the only plausible explanation” for the lag in the fortunes of African-Americans, although, as it stands, systemic racism is inferred solely from one single fact: In aggregate, African-Americans trail behind whites in assorted academic and socio-economic indices and achievements.

This logical error is the central tenet of preferential treatment—affirmative action, and assorted quotas and set-aside edicts and policies.

According to diversity doxology, justice is achieved only when racial and ethnic groups are reflected in academia and in the professions in proportion to their presence in the larger population. On indices of economic well-being, the same egalitarian outcomes are expected.

Equalizing individual and inter-group outcomes, however, is an impossibility, considering that it is axiomatically and self-evidently true to say that such differences have existed since the dawn of time.

Nevertheless, absent such wealth egalitarianism and proportional representation in the professions, the walking wounded who control America’s cultural discourse have concluded that racism, systemic or other, reigns.

The systemic racism non sequitur is even harder to sustain when considering the Asian minority, a minority that has had its own historical hardships. In professions and academic pursuits where mathematical precocity is a factor, Asians are overrepresented, consistently outperforming whites. If proportional underrepresentation signals oppression, then overrepresentation, likewise, must reflect an unfair advantage.

And if social justice requires that the State and corporate America act as social and economic levelers—then surely fairness demands that all minority groups that are overrepresented in assorted endeavors be similarly kneecapped in the name of equality? Should not such leveling policies be deployed to make the NBA or the 100-meter dash more “representative” of America?

High among Corporate America’s priorities is acting as a race leveler—voluntarily sniffing out deviationists and generally proceeding against and “reeducating” pay-dependent prey. Corporate America’s human resource departments are in the habit of deluging employees with the piss-poor racial agitprop of illiterate, if degreed, pamphleteers. The woman who wrote White Fragility comes to mind.

In a workplace so shot through with hatred of whites, quite foreseeable is a form of intellectual reparations, where the designated white “oppressors” labor behind the scenes, while the officially “oppressed” manage them and take credit for their intellectual output.

As recounted in Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for American From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011, p. 103), the African National Congress has pioneered “the creation of a unique cognitive caste system.”

Throughout the South African work force, white subordinates with graduate and postgraduate degrees are doing the hard-core intellectual and technical work for their black bosses. The latter often have no more than a 10th-grade diploma but are paid a great deal more than their intellectual skivvies. A black matriculant (possessor of a high-school diploma) is perfectly poised to climb the South African corporate structure; yet, in order to have a ghost of a chance at remaining employed, a white had better possess the Masters or the Ph.D. degree. Given their pallor, promotion for whites is less and less likely.

Unlike systemic racism, intellectual indentureship could quickly become a reality in America.

**

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s currently on Gab, YouTube, Twitter & LinkedIn, but has been banned by Facebook.

Seeing the Tree But Not the Forest: Systemic Racism in American and Israeli Policing

July 31, 2020

By Benay Blend

Since the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, his name has (or should have) become a household word. When Mawusi Ture, an activist with the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), asked if I would write about a similar incident, I was embarrassed that I had to look up the particulars of the case. John Neville also died in police custody, his last words were those of Floyd:   “Let me go.” “Help me up.” “Mama.” “I can’t breathe.”

Neville’s death, and others like it both in America and Occupied Palestine, bears mention beyond the tragedy of this man. The circumstances of his final moments are indicative of the systemic racism embedded in America’s policing and in Israel where many of our police are trained

On December 1, 2019, guards booked John Neville into the Forsyth County jail in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Reporting for the New York Times, Michael Levenson summed up the subsequent events. About 24 hours after his arrest, Neville fell from his top bunk onto the concrete floor. After what appeared to be a seizure, detention officers and a nurse moved him to another cell for observation.

In reality, he was left restrained on his stomach, calling out for help, much like George Floyd. Two days later he died from a brain injury due to cardiac arrest, which in turn was caused by asphyxia during a prone restraint.

In early July, five former detention officers and the attending nurse were charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of John Neville, yet another Black man who called out “I can’t breathe.”

“Good men and women made bad decisions that day and, as a result, a good man died,” the Forsyth County sheriff, Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr., whose office runs the county jail, said at the news conference.

However, this case was not about good cops who make bad decisions, but rather systemic racism that has long been embedded in America’s policing. As Levenson observes, the charges were the newest in a long string of similar incidents that have inspired global protests against police brutality due to systemic racism in the force.

Over the past ten years, The New York Times found at least 70 people have died at the hands of the police after reiterating Floyd’s words: “I can’t breathe.” On an interactive page, the Times recorded all the words, that of the victim but also the victimizer’s failure to respond, that were said at the time of death.

After the death of George Floyd, videos surfaced of Israeli police performing the same knee-on-the- neck procedure with Palestinians that was responsible for Floyd’s demise. According to Sheren Khalel, the images have renewed concerns about programs that send American police to train under Israeli military forces.

Neighboring Durham, North Carolina’s City Council voted two years ago to bar its police department from engaging in “military-style training” programs abroad. While there seems to be no documentation specific to Winston-Salem, Khalel notes that North Carolina remains one of many states that participates in what Jewish Voice for Peace has labeled Deadly Exchange.

Palestinian Americans had long drawn comparisons between the US and Israeli use of tactics. Palestinians, too, quickly showed support after the murder of George Floyd, partly because of their own long history of oppression at the hands of Israeli cops.

Indeed, on July 8, Middle East Monitor (MEMO) reported that a Palestinian prisoner detained in Israeli jails had died of “medical negligence,” in much the say way as John Neville. In Saadi Al-Gharably’s case, a local NGO conveyed that Al-Gharably had suffered from prostate cancer, diabetes and blood pressure, none of which received medical attention during his time in prison.

Referring to a report from the Media Office of the Palestinian Prisoners, MEMO related that around 222 Palestinian detainees are said to have died in Israeli prisons, while over 5,500 Palestinians are currently held in Israeli jails where they are now even more at risk from the Covid-19 virus.

Shortly after Floyd’s death, Mohammad al-Qadi, a Palestinian marathon runner from the Occupied West Bank tweeted several pictures showing Israeli police using the same chokehold on Palestinians that had been employed on Floyd. “Crazy how the same thing happens in Palestine but the world chooses to ignore it,” al-Qadi captioned, describing with some anger the world’s indifference to suffering in his country.

What does it take to ignite an uprising that draws awareness to injustice? In occupied Palestine, it was the burning alive of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, by three young Israeli settlers that called attention to the 2014 war on Gaza. In America, the murder of George Floyd sparked protests that continue on today.

Both events were watersheds, a spark after decades of Occupation in Palestine and centuries of the same in the United States. Such tragedies need to be put into historical context. Without that kind of grounding, movements that are organized around one event, like for example the anti-war campaign during Vietnam, run the risk of losing momentum when the original galvanizing force is gone.

Other pitfalls, too, could be avoided by placing each victim of police brutality within a timeline. For example, there have recently been important analyses on the tendency of brands and corporations to commodify Black lives. “As brands all over the world are taking a stand,” writes Leonie Annor-Owiredu, the questions should be: “where were you then, why now, and for how long will you take a stand?”

“Brands must be willing to take on struggles,” she continues, “instead of simply supposing/announcing themselves to be allies to the cause.” Context also plays a part in highlighting the Wall of Moms, a group that Dani Blum observes first started at the Portland protests but more recently have mobilized collectives across the country. Arm-in-arm, they have formed human shields between protestors and federal agents.

While admirable, McKensie Mack noted in a Facebook post that Black mothers in Englewood have been protesting violence in their community for years by creating a wall of justice around it in the same way as the Wall of Moms, by using their bodies as a shield. “We have a history,” Mack reminds her readers. “Let’s honor it. Let’s tell it right.”

By placing targeted groups—whether Palestinians or African Americans—at the center of their struggles, by placing those movements within historical contexts, there is a continuity that is less likely to be commodified by opportunists who soon move on to the next thing when they get tired.

It also makes clear that certain communities have entire systems and structures set against them. George Floyd and Mohammed Abu Khdeir were not one-time tragedies, but rather the latest in an entire history of atrocities meted out by settler-colonial states.

“The revolution won’t be sustained in diversity schemes,” Annor-Owiredu warns. It requires structural changes to bring about real justice.

Palestinians and people of color understand the importance of narration from below. In the words of journalist Ramzy Baroud, such history must rely on “the collective memory of the Palestinian people,” an accounting that defines “what it means to be Palestinian…what they stand for as a nation, and why they have resisted for years..”

– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

Racism, inequality, and conflict: an interview with Prof. Robert Sapolsky

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Earlier this month, I conducted an interview with Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University, to discuss different issues such as racism, economic inequality, and partisan polarization. He was very generous with his time and provided us with in-depth analyses of such fundamental issues.

Dr. Robert Sapolsky is John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery at Stanford’s School of Medicine, and a research associate at the Institute of Primate Research of the National Museums of Kenya. He is a recipient of a MacArthur genius fellowship and the author of several books, including Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: A Guide to Stress-Related Diseases and Coping (1995) and Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017).

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Question: Thank you very much for being with me, Dr. Sapolsky. Now, let’s start with the recent events in the United States, especially the police killing of George Floyd and the protests that broke out afterward. When something like that happens, what’s the first thing that comes into your mind?

Answer: I think basically racism is the single biggest historical problem in the United States. To use a religious word that I use as someone who is not religious, I think it is the “original sin” of the United States. And it did not end with slavery ending in 1865. It did not end with racial segregation ending in the 1960s. It remains just as much of a problem.

The only difference between the George Floyd case and so many others is that somebody videotaped it this time, not that the police actions are new. This has been happening for more than a hundred years or so. All that is happening is people are being able to document it to prove what is actually occurring. All of that said, we’ve now had videotapes of numerous African-American men being killed by the police in the last few years, and each time it causes some protests. This is the first time it has caused protests this big, and maybe this is going to cause meaningful changes, but I’m not optimistic about that. People have short memories in this country.

Q: So, do you regard racism as a cultural issue, or is it an innate characteristic of human beings?

A: Well, in so far as I think the science shows, race is not a particularly strong innate category in our heads, and racism can be changed as an unconscious category surprisingly easily. We are not looking at biology here. It’s cultural, but it is very deeply cultural.

“I think basically racism is the single biggest historical problem in the United States,” says Dr. Robert Sapolsky.

In some ways, the most depressing version of it was a study in the 1950s by a husband-and-wife pair of psychologists that horrified anyone who thought about it. It was this famous first study where they took black kids and gave them a choice of playing with a white doll or a black doll and asked them which one they wanted to play with and why. It showed that black kids in America, even at age seven, were already saying the white doll “is prettier”, the white doll “is nicer”, and the white doll “isn’t scary”. Seven-year-old black kids have already been taught to think about themselves that way!

When there was this famous case in the 1950s in the Supreme Court, where they finally ruled that you cannot have racial segregation, that you cannot be like South Africa, and that you cannot have separate schools for black kids and schools for white kids, that study was one of the most cited reasons behind the court’s decision.

Researchers are STILL finding the exact same thing. Your average black kid today still prefers to play with white dolls, because they’re “nicer” and they’re “less likely to hurt you”. So, racism is such a deep, deep phenomenon here, and few things say that more clearly than when people have been conditioned to have negative, racist feelings about themselves.

Q: As a neurobiologist, what do you regard as viable solutions to the issue of racism?

A: Well, there are slight hints of things to be optimistic about from the standpoint of neurobiology. For instance, if you put a white American in a brain scanner, and you quickly flash up a series of pictures of faces on a screen, and you flash up the face of an African-American person, in approximately seventy-five percent of white people, there’s an activation of the amygdala, which is a part of the brain that has to do with fear and anxiety and aggression. Oh, my god! This is fascinating and so depressing at the same time.

Also, the part of the brain that processes “faces” (called the fusiform cortex) does not activate as much in those seventy-five percent of white people looking at a black face, because it doesn’t count as “a face” as much. It’s not as much of a person. So, oh my God, this is so depressing and so horrible!

But wait a second, what about the twenty-five percent of the people where that does not happen? The answer is those are white people who grew up with close friends who are African-American. Those are people who had a romantic relationship with an African-American somewhere along the way. In another word, it is not inevitable but some of the best solutions for that start when you’re two years old.

Current racial segregation in schools in the U.S. is not because of laws, but because of economic inequality and cultural factors, the professor remarks.

However, in many parts of the United States in the big cities, the level of racial segregation – the extent to which if you’re black you are likely to be going to a public school, where 95 percent of the other kids are black, and if you’re white, the same thing in that direction – is as bad as it was in the 1950s. It’s not because of laws, but because of economics and cultural factors.

So, it is the massive issues that need to be changed starting early in life. Although it is possible to take an adult who was a racist – even on the most implicit, unconscious level – and change him or her, but it’s hard work and it’s a lot harder than preventing a three-year-old from becoming a racist in the first place. But the other issue is just such enormous economic inequality in this country by race. It’s so deeply structured in the economic and educational system here that all it does is find ways to become stronger each generation.

Q: You mentioned economic inequality and how being poor or rich leads to some kind of economic segregation. Now, I want to know what the findings show about being poor, especially with regard to children who are born into poverty.

A: I spent years studying what stress and stress hormones and poverty can do to the hippocampus – the part of the brain relevant to memory and learning. That’s so important and so interesting. However, I now think I spent thirty years of my life wasted because I was studying the wrong part of the brain. Much more interesting is studying that a stressor such as poverty not only makes you have less of a memory, but it also makes you more prone to depression. Even more importantly, it makes you more prone to fear and anxiety. Even more importantly, it makes you prone to making bad decisions when you have to make them quickly. And what I’m now starting to think is the most important one, it makes you less empathic toward other people.

Everyone focused on how poverty makes people less healthy. Poverty also makes for a more violent world, and it makes for a less kind and less humane world. That last part I think is the most important one. Even today, we know a little bit about what’s going on in the brain, in a world in which people are stressed and their brains have changed in response to stress from the time they were a fetus because stress hormone levels in pregnant women vary as a function of poverty levels. In other words, higher stress hormone levels in pregnant women are already affecting the brain of the fetus. Even at that stage, you are already changing aspects of the brain that could be for your entire life, that are going to make for people who make a society that is less kind and less safe and less healthy and less intelligent in every possible way that could go wrong. That’s just enormously depressing.

Q: You have spoken and written extensively about how economic inequality affects an individual and a society. Could you explain how that works?

A: When you look at poverty, you see that it is a predictor of poor health, more violence, less kindness, and all of those things. But even more important than poverty is inequality, which is not so much about being poor, rather, it’s about being reminded every day of what you don’t have and what others have. It’s the comparison.

Researchers have spent a lot of time showing that when inequality increases, the health of the poor gets worse, their crime rates go up and all of those bad things happen. But something that is even more interesting in some ways is that when inequality goes up, the health of the WEALTHY gets worse too. Of course, not as much as the poor, but it gets worse for them as well.

It’s not that if you are in the right part of society you can selfishly say that it’s their problem, because even if you’re wealthy and you don’t care about anyone else, living in an unequal society is even bad for your health, because it stresses you. For example, you have to spend more of your income on your house alarm system. You have to spend more of your income sending your children to private schools because the public schools are “too dangerous”.

It’s very stressful to try to construct a world in which nothing stressful can happen to you. In other words, it’s every level of society that pays for it and I think we see that in the United States. That’s why most of the wealthy vote for Donald Trump. Because they suffer too.

The voting patterns show that the wealthy in the cities are more in the direction of supporting the Democrats and are a little more liberal, in contrast to the wealthy in the suburbs and in rural areas. If you’re wealthy in a city, for example, if you’re going to the opera and you’re paying a crazy amount of money for it and you’re wearing a tuxedo and your life is wonderful, even just getting out of your limousine and going to the opera, you’re gonna have to step over somebody who is sleeping on the sidewalk because he is homeless. Even on the level of selfishness, you would say, “We have to do something about the homeless because it’s really very uncomfortable to go to the opera and have to see homeless people.”

But if you live in the rural areas and you’re a billionaire and you go to a rodeo of cowboys steer roping, if that’s your idea of fun, you’re not gonna have to step over homeless people – it’s a different world than that. But even the wealthy here pay a price for inequality.

Q: So, inequality is generally another category to divide the world into Us-es and Thems, which in turn would lead to more public anxiety.

A: Absolutely. And as a measure of how fast that could happen, you do studies where university students play an economic game, and then you introduce inequality to the game. For instance, half of the subjects start the game with ten units of money, and the other half start with a hundred units. Two minutes ago, the students were economically roughly equal and they were from the same dormitory. But now, even within minutes of artificially introducing inequality to the game, you already begin to see some of those behaviors.

According to Dr. Sapolsky, when there’s rampant economic inequality in a society, even the wealthy are negatively impacted by it.

It is so fast and it is so strong. To see one of the reasons why kindness and empathy go down, suppose you have a world where everybody gets one of two different incomes: Fifty percent of people get ten units of money a year, and fifty percent get a hundred units a year. That’s so unequal! But even with that, at any given point, half of the people in your world at least have the same income that you do. At least economically they are somewhat equal to you.

But if instead, only one percent of people in the country are getting the same income you’re getting, the inequality spreads out enormously. There will be fewer people who are your peers. A greater percentage of the people around you are either poorer or richer than you. If they’re poorer than you, you are afraid of them, or you want to keep them away, or you’re disgusted by them. And if they’re richer than you, you resent them and you envy them. So, you don’t have equals. The more inequality there is, the more of a hierarchy there is, and the more of a hierarchy, the fewer peers you have whom you are more likely to be kind to, and who are more likely to be kind to you. It makes for a more awful world by definition.

Q: Like the U.S., my own country, Iran, has turned into a very divided nation in recent years. However, when I follow the U.S. news, I feel that the level of polarization in the United States is perhaps much worse than that of Iran. What are the roots of such polarization? And what do you think is the solution?

A: Well, to begin with, Donald Trump is not the cause of it. Donald Trump is a symptom of it. He is the complete logical outcome of what the issues are here. I think basically what has happened is inequality has gone up, employment has gotten worse, and poverty levels have gotten worse, because so many jobs have been sent to poorer countries by the corporations here that don’t care or because so many more jobs are being automated.

And what happens as people get more stressed and more angry and more worried is, whether you are a rat or a baboon or a human, the basic neurobiology is to turn on somebody else and to have a very hard time realizing that it’s the fault of the people up on top, instead of the person who’s standing right next to you hoping for the same job.

The people in power are brilliant at making you turn on the person standing next to you instead of on them. And all it does is make things worse. If you are in the most dangerous part of the population in the United States, which is if you are an older white guy who never got much education and has now spent thirty years getting less proportionate income each year, and thirty years watching more and more people competing for your job, especially people who do not look like you, and seeing more and more of the teachers at your children’s schools not looking like you, and the people on television not looking like you, and the people getting elected not looking like you, and all of that is unconsciously telling you over and over that it is not your culture anymore, that you do not rule this place anymore.

Q: So, in this context, the idea of bringing people of different backgrounds together doesn’t resolve that issue, right?

A: No, because you have to do it the right way. People used to say “Ooh, if you could take people from two different groups who don’t like each other, if you could bring individuals together and let them spend time together, they will learn to see each other as individuals and they will learn that there are more similarities than differences and it would be wonderful, etc.” However, sixty years’ worth of research on contact theory has shown that most of the time it does not work, because it has not been done in the correct way. And if you do it the really wrong way, you will make things worse.

It takes a lot for it to work correctly. You can’t do it for a weekend or even a week. It takes contact lasting for months. It has to be on equal grounds. It has to be in settings where you are not seeing the other group’s symbols, which are a constant reminder to you.

“What happens as people get more stressed and more angry and more worried is … they turn on somebody else and have a very hard time realizing that it’s the fault of the people up on top, instead of the person who’s standing right next to you hoping for the same job,” says the professor.

This past summer, my family and I went to Northern Ireland, where Catholics and Protestants have been killing each other forever, and in the 1990s, they amazingly worked out a treaty and it has become much more peaceful. Nevertheless, the capital, Belfast, is still a completely divided city. There’s a Catholic half and a Protestant half, and there’s a wall in-between. We took a tour where, for the first half of the day a seventy-five-year-old man who used to be a fighter for the Catholic groups takes you on a tour through the Catholic area, and then around twelve o’clock, you go to the gate and he hands you off to a protestant guy, who was a gunman for the Protestant group for years when he was a young man but now runs the tour of his side. Both of those men had been in jail. Both of those men killed people.

Now, you go to one side, and it has nothing but Irish flags on every single house, and the other side has nothing but British flags on every house and pictures of Queen Elizabeth, and how wonderful she is, and so on. The point is, you know, you can’t do it where you are being reminded every minute what they [pointing to the right] did to your ancestors 200 years ago, or what they [pointing to the left] did to your ancestors in the seventh century.

So, it takes a lot of work to do it right. One of the areas where it has been most studied is in summer camp programs for Palestinian and Israeli teenagers, where you bring them together and you try to do it right. You get them in a neutral setting, and you give them something they all have as a shared goal. For instance, they’re brought to a place where they have no symbols – they cannot have flags or anything like that – then you show them this field full of boulders and rocks and weeds, and you say, “Okay, if you guys wanna work together like crazy for the next week to turn this into a football field, go for it. There you go. That’s the only way you’re gonna have a football field.” And then they work like crazy, and they work in teams together, which is the sort of thing that actually helps, and you show that when they leave at the end of these two weeks, some of them have had a change in their attitudes.

They’ve been doing that for twenty years, and despite that occasional good news, what the studies have also shown is that no person who ever went to one of those groups on either side has become a leader of a peace group; next to no person on either side has stayed in touch with the person they became friends with; no person has caused other people to change their opinions. What you get instead is that the researchers come back to them one year later to ask them about the other side, and they say, “Oh, those people? They’re terrible! They’ve stolen our land,” or “They’re terrorists. They’re terrible, rotten people.” But then they say, “Oh, I knew this one guy though… He was a good guy. You know, they’re not all that way. You know, but there was this guy… I should email him to see how he’s doing,” and then they never do that. But the overall prejudice does not go away, and whatever changes there have been in your attitudes, you do not spread them to anybody else. So, it takes so much work. It takes years.

Q: And goodwill on both sides.

A: And goodwill! You have to want the change to occur. You have to actually accept that the current situation is not good. People here often say, “Oh, what’s the cause of Islamic rage against the West? It’s history. They used to be the Ottoman Empire. They used to be the Moorish Empire. They used to be amazing and now look at them. They’re just upset at what they lost in history.” So, what’s Donald Trump about? “Make America great AGAIN!” AGAIN! And what does that mean? As a secret sign to the people who support him, make it a country again where, if you are a man, you rule your home. If you are white, you rule your country. If you are Christian, you are in charge of the religious culture in your country. It’s “Make America great AGAIN!” And you are saying, “I am part of the people who feel like history has left me behind, and this used to be my place to rule, and it’s no longer like that, and we need to go back.” It’s the same historicism.

Q: Now, I also want to talk about your book, “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst”. In your book, you argue that “knowing a judge’s opinions about Plato, Nietzsche, Rawls,” and other philosophers “gives you less predictive power about her judicial decisions than knowing if she’s hungry.” Could you elaborate what that means?

A: Yeah, it’s wonderful! I love that finding – that finding and the finding that if you put someone in a room that smells bad, people become more politically conservative about social issues. I tell those findings to an audience and you could hear people say, “Whoa!” Or whenever I’m speaking to law students and I tell that one about judges, you can just hear people laughing a little bit in the audience and saying, “Oh, my God! What is wrong with us?”

Q: So, would you explain what happens in the study?

A: Okay. In this study, the researchers looked at parole boards. A parole board is a panel of people who decide whether a prisoner has behaved well enough that they should be released early. So, it was a study looking at parole board judges’ decisions, and it showed that the single biggest predictor of whether a prisoner was paroled or sent back to jail was how many hours it has been since the parole board judges had a MEAL. If you appeared before a judge right after they had a meal, you had a sixty-percent chance of being paroled. By three hours later, it was down to a zero-percent chance.

And then you ask the judge afterward, “Wow! That’s interesting! You let this guy [pointing to the right] free two hours ago, but now you sent this guy [pointing to the left] back to jail. How come?” And they will talk to you about Aristotle and Plato. They’re not gonna say because I’m hungry. But the biology of it shows that that’s the case. When their blood sugar levels are low, people become less generous, they become less empathic, and they become likely to cheat when they’re playing an economic game. And why is this? Because the parts of your brain that have to make you do the harder thing when it is the right thing to do have a higher metabolic rate than other parts of your brain. In other words, they demand more energy.

It takes energy to think twice about someone instead of just saying, “They’re rotten! Throw them back to jail.” Stopping and saying, “Well, let’s see. They grew up in a world that I never experienced. What was the world like for them? What is…” That takes more work! And that takes more brainpower in a very literal way. The frontal cortex, which is central for making you do the harder thing when the harder thing is the more difficult thing, needs more energy. Literally, your brain needs more energy to think about somebody else’s perspective on the world than thinking about your own.

After the study was published, everybody came up with what they thought was a confound, saying, “Here’s why they did the statistics wrong.” However, it has completely held up as a finding.

Q: That’s really interesting. You said that the finding has held up against criticisms. So, has it been replicated?

A: I do not know if it’s been replicated. But there were a number of responses to it. For instance, the critics said those who conducted the study had brought the prisoners from the less dangerous prisons early in the day and brought the more dangerous prisoners later in the day, and that’s why later in the day you’re more likely to send them back to jail. However, they controlled for that, and they showed a whole bunch of possible controls that ruled that out. Basically, all of the confounds that people have pointed out were found not to be real problems.

Also, another version of this same idea is one I just mentioned, which is you put someone in an economic game, and if they’re hungry, they cheat more, they’re less generous, and they’re less kind to other players. Now, showing what it’s all about, you either give them a drink of fruit juice that is full of sugar, or as an experimental control, a drink which is full of artificial sugar, which does not do anything to brain metabolism. So, give somebody actual sugar afterward and they will now become more generous. It’s the biology [laughing]. It’s not because of having a great meal. It’s literally the biology of it. And we’re biological machines. Big surprise!

Q: Let’s also talk about the roots of conservatism and liberalism and the studies with regard to this subject, which I believe are crucial in understanding the roots of conservatism and liberalism.

A: Sure. If you’re trying to understand why someone becomes a liberal or a conservative, or what their attitudes are about economic systems, causes of poverty, causes of violence, etc., I think there are two critical factors that no political scientist thinks of. The first thing is to find out how easily disgusted someone is. Because if they have a low threshold for feeling disgusted, they’re going to more easily be disgusted by people who need their help, instead of feeling empathy for them. The second thing is do they feel excited or scared by something that is new or uncertain to them? If it’s exciting, you’re likely to be a liberal. New people, new ideas, new facial appearances, new foods, new beliefs, etc. are exciting to liberals. But if those things are scary to you and cause you to have an anxiety response, you’re gonna be a conservative. Because it’s always gonna be the case that the past is more comfortable for you than the future.

Look at somebody’s heart rate in a circumstance like that and that is a predictor of what their attitudes are going to be about issues that split conservatives and liberals. Show people pictures of something like a wound that is infected and full of flies, and see how much their stomach lurches – and people whose stomachs lurch a lot are more likely to be social conservatives.

Take a five-year-old child and their mother in a room where there are some new toys to play with. The kid is excited to be playing with them, but after a certain amount of time the mother leaves the room and you measure how much time it takes for the kid to look around and see that mom is not there anymore and to begin to cry, versus continuing to play with the toys. How easily five-year-olds have an anxiety response to novelty is predictive of their voting patterns twenty years later.

This has been shown in different studies by now. Five-year-olds do not sit there and think, “Well, is a Marxist model or a free market model better for solving inequality?” Five-year-olds sit there and feel whether the world is a scary place or is it an exciting place. And that’s the most fundamental difference in terms of the novelty-anxiety connection.

Back to the finding about conservatives and liberals tending to differ on their thresholds for disgust – on average, conservatives have more different kinds of soap in their bathrooms. They have more cleaning products! If you are a conservative, the world is a place where you need to spend more time and money on cleaning than if you are a liberal. These findings tell you that political differences are about unconscious emotional issues, rather than you thinking about whether you can trust Vladimir Putin or not.

Q: I suppose people also move to the extremes on both sides based on the circumstances. What do you think about that?

A: Well, that’s certainly the polarization that has gone on in the United States. Traditionally, liberals and progressives are more tolerant of other opinions than conservatives are. They are more in favor of the freedom of the press. They’re more in favor of pluralistic societies. So, by definition, they are more open to other viewpoints. That’s always been the case. But even liberals have become less open over the last four years. Now, they’re now spending more time attacking other liberals for not being quite as perfect of liberals as they are. When the left – at least in a place like the United States – turns ugly, what they do is they write terrible, mean essays about other people on the left. When the right turns ugly, they kill black people, or gay people, or Jews, or immigrants. But when liberals become really scared, what they’re mostly good at is deciding that other liberals are not as good of liberals as they are!

As another example, when somebody asks people, “Would you be upset if your child married someone from the opposite end of the political spectrum?” even liberals are now more upset than they were four years ago at the prospects of that. Of course, they’re less upset than a conservative would be. But even they have become less tolerant. So, yeah, people move to the extremes.

Q: Dr. Sapolsky, this was such a fascinating conversation, and it was great to hear your thoughts on these issues. Thank you very much for your time.

A: Well, thanks. It was good to talk to you.

Photo: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service

Woodrow Wilson’s Racism And His Support For Zionism

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by Lawrence Davidson 

Lawrence Davidson is professor of history emeritus at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.

He has been publishing his analyses of topics in U.S. domestic and foreign policy, international and humanitarian law and Israel/Zionist practices and policies since 2010.

Part I— Woodrow Wilson’s Racism

Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) was born in Staunton, Virginia, to Christian fundamentalist parents—his father was a Presbyterian minister—who supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. Thus, Wilson grew up and was educated in the segregated American South. This upbringing imbued him with both a literal interpretation of the Bible and a lifelong racist outlook which he brought with him to every position, every office he ever held. For instance, while he served as president of Princeton University (1902-1908), he refused to allow the university to admit African Americans. Despite his racist orientation, Princeton subsequently named a School of Public Policy and International Affairs, sub-colleges and buildings for Wilson. Today, in the wake of uprisings against not only police brutality toward African Americans and other minorities, but also America’s racist legacy, Princeton has removed Wilson’s name from these institutions and buildings. 

Wilson went on to become the 28th president of the United States (1913-1921). He led the United States into World War I, was instrumental in the founding of the League of Nations, appointed the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court and, notably, facilitated the eventual establishment of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine through his support for the Balfour Declaration (1917). At the time he remarked, “To think that I, son of the manse [minister’s house], should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.” Subsequently, this decision made him as much a hero to Zionists, and American Zionists in particular, as he was a villain to African Americans. 

Part II—The Zionist Dilemma

Given today’s reaction against the country’s historical racism, American Jews’ understanding of Wilson’s legacy is being debated. The challenge for Zionists is to save Wilson’s heroic image without totally disregarding his racist record. An attempt to do just that came in an essay, recently published on 2 July 2020, in the American Jewish newspaper the Forward. The essay is entitled “Woodrow Wilson was a hero to Jews. What should we do with his racism?” and was written by Jonathan D. Sarna, a Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history.

Sarna notes both facets of Wilson’s career. On the one hand “The Jews of his day considered Wilson a hero and a savior, a man of principle and ethical uprightness.” On the other, African Americans “learn a totally different narrative” wherein “Wilson … staunchly defended segregation and characterized Blacks as an ‘ignorant and inferior race.’” 

Sarna seeks to square this circle by retreating to a frankly banal apologia: ”Many a flawed hero accomplished great deeds and changed the institutions and nations they led for the better. … They remind us that good people can do very bad things — and vice versa.” This is poor consolation for African Americans. It also turns out to be a shaky basis for Jewish admiration of Wilson. This is so because the alleged good Woodrow Wilson did for the Jews—his support for the Balfour Declaration—was based on the same racist foundation shaping his behavior toward African Americans.  

Part III—Wilson Supports the Balfour Declaration

What is the connection between Wilson’s racism and his support for the Balfour Declaration? The president was a European race supremacist, or what today would be called a “white supremacist.” As he saw it, African Americans were not the only “ignorant and inferior race” out there. All the non-European peoples, such as those of the Ottoman Empire, including Palestinians, qualified for this designation.

On 8 January 1918, in the run-up to America’s entrance into World War I, President Wilson announced his “Fourteen Points.” These were the nation’s war aims—notions around which to rally the American people. A major theme that runs throughout these “points” is the promise of self-determination for peoples then under the rule of the enemy Central Powers: Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire. Referring specifically to the last-mentioned, point twelve reads, “The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.”

Such a promise, of course, included the Arabs of the Ottoman province of Greater Syria, which in turn included Palestine and its indigenous population. This pledge might seem to conflict with Wilson’s racist outlook, but one has to keep in mind that point twelve was meant as a propaganda piece in support of the broader claim that America was joining a war to make the world safe for democracy. As a vehicle for arousing the enthusiasm of the American people, it was effective. However, it transformed itself into something problematic as soon as Wilson got to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. U.S. allies Britain and France wanted to incorporate most of the Ottoman lands, which they considered the spoils of war, into their own existing empires, and so objected to point twelve. 

Because of his European supremacist point of view, Wilson really had no deep objections to this expansion. The question was how to go along with his allies’ wishes while still appearing to honor the Fourteen Points. He achieved this goal in a way that also meshed with his racist worldview. He and his allies established the Mandate System. Real self-determination was now to be reserved for the European peoples previously belonging to the German, Austrian and Russian empires. For instance, Poland and Serbia, among others, were to be “accorded the freest opportunity for autonomous development.” Non-European peoples were  viewed as unprepared for this reward. They were to be placed under the tutelage of a “mandatory power,” which in the case of most of the Arab lands meant either Britain or France. Such imperial powers, in turn, were to instruct these inferior peoples in the art of self-government. It should come as no surprise that Palestine was given over to the British as a “mandate territory.” Indeed, the Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the preamble and second article of the mandate document for Palestine.  

Part IV—Back to Sarna’s Suggestion

Woodrow Wilson supported the Balfour Declaration because he was a Christian fundamentalist who believed that God desired the Jews, whom Wilson understood to have been civilized through long residence in the West, to “return to their ancient home.” The instruments for that return were the Balfour Declaration and the British mandate. The Palestinians were not even relevant to the issue for Wilson.

Given this history, what do we learn when, as Sarna suggests, we “probe more deeply into [our hero’s] flaws”?

—It is now recognized that Wilson’s major flaw was his racist worldview and the behavior that flowed from it.

—This racism was the basis of his mistreatment of African Americans.

—As it turns out, that same racist outlook was part of the basis for his support of the Balfour Declaration—the very act that makes Wilson a hero for both past and present Zionists. 

Now we come to the second part of Sarna’s suggestion, that an examination of the hero’s flaws “invites us to think harder about our own flaws.” What are the resulting implications of such a self-examination for today’s Zionists?

—What sort of flaw in ourselves should an examination of Woodrow Wilson bring Zionist Jews to consider?

—The fact is that contemporary Israeli Jewish and Zionist attitudes toward the Palestinians in many ways mimic those of Woodrow Wilson toward African Americans. 

—If we are to consider Wilson’s racism a flaw from which Jews too can learn, the consequence must be a reconsideration of the inherently racist Zionist attitudes and policies toward the Palestinians.

I do not know if Jonathan Sarna really meant to inspire a serious assessment of Israel’s and Zionism’s flaws through the reexamination of those of their champion, Woodrow Wilson. However, such an assessment would certainly reveal a shared racism. Wilson never ceased to be a racist and, at least since 1917, the Zionists have been following his “heroic” model. How many of them can be counted upon to take up Sarna’s suggestion and look into this shared historical mirror in any honest way?

Black Voices also Matter

Source

By Gilad Atzmon 

That we are proceeding rapidly into an authoritarian reality is hardly a news item: it is impossible not to identify the institutions at the centre of this unfortunate transition.  Every day one Jewish organization or another brags about its success in defeating our most precious Western values: political freedom and intellectual tolerance.

At the moment it seems as if silencing authentic Black voices is the Zionists’ prime objective. This morning we learned that Black Voices do not matter at all: in a total capitulation to the French Zionist Lobby group CRIF,  the great Black French comedian Dieudonné’s  YouTube channel was deleted by Google.  CRIF tweeted:

 “A month ago, the CRIF filed a complaint against Dieudonné after the broadcasting of anti-Semitic videos. Yesterday, his chain

‪@YouTube has been deleted.  CRIF welcomes this decision and encourages other platforms to take responsibility and close all of its accounts.”

In the late 18th century the Anglo Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke realised that “all that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.” I guess that in 2020 for evil to prevail all that is needed is for an internet company to become an extension of Zion.

Neither Dieudonne nor anyone else needs my  ‘kosher’ certificate, although I have no doubt that the French artist is an exemplary anti racist. What I will say is that if Zion doesn’t  want you to listen to someone, there is nothing better you could do for yourself  than defy their wishes. Dieudonne, France’s most popular comedian, is a brilliant Black man. He was brave enough to stand up and declare that he had enough of the holocaust indoctrination, what he wants to discuss is the holocaust of his people, an ongoing century of discrimination and racist abuse. Within only a matter of hours, Dieudonne was targeted by French Jewish organizations and was portrayed as a racist and an anti Semite .

I am looking forward to see what Black Lives Matter is going to do for one of Europe’s most authentic and profound Black voices.  Just an idea, maybe instead of pulling down bronze statues, BLM should consider calling for every Black artist to close their Youtube channels until Google comes to its senses. This would be a nice proper attempt at a Black power exercise, but as you can imagine, I do not hold my breath.

 Unfortunately, Zionist destruction of the little that is left out of the Western spirit has become a daily spectacle. Yesterday we saw the Jewish press bragging that  Fox Soul — a new Fox chnnel geared toward African Americans  scheduled live broadcast of a speech by Louis Farrakhan.  The Jewish Algemeiner was kind enough to reveal that the Simon Wiesenthal Center had called for the broadcast to be scrapped.

 Zionist organisations never march alone. They are effective in identifying  the odd Sabbos Goy who stands ready to lend his or her ‘credibility’ to the ‘cause.’   This time it was CNN anchor Jake Tapper who tweeted, “Farrakhan is a vile anti-LGBTQ anti-Semitic misogynist. Why is a Fox channel airing his propaganda?”

 As we all know, Jews often claim to be there for Blacks. Jewish outlets often brag about the significant Jewish contribution to the Civil Rights Movement. According to some Jewish historians, a large amount of the funds for the NAACP came from Jewish sources – some experts estimate as much as 80%. Howard Sachar begins his article  Jews in the Civil Rights movement, by claiming that “nowhere did Jews identify themselves more forth­rightly with the liberal avant-garde than in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.” This would seem a positive moment in Jewish history until we remember that Judaism has, throughout its entire history as we know it,  sustained uncompromised ‘segregation bills’. What are kosher dietary rules if not a ‘segregation bill?’ What is the rationale behind the Zionist attitude toward mixed marriage other than a segregation bill? Even within the Palestinian solidarity movement, many Jews choose to march within racially segregated political cells (JVP, IJAN, JVL etc.) rather than voluntarily strip themselves of their Jewish privilege.

It is true that some of the greatest voices of the Civil Rights Movement were Jews. But I am afraid that this is where the good part of the story ends. Historically the Jewish attitude towards Blacks has been nothing short of a disaster. It is difficult to decide how to enter this colossal minefield without getting oneself into serious trouble.

In European Jewish culture the word shvartze  (Black, Yiddish) is an offensive term referring to a low being, specifically a Black person (“She’s dating a shvartze. Her grandmother is probably rolling over in her grave”). Zein Shver, a Jewish Black American, points out that “Shvartze isn’t Yiddish for Black. Shvartze is Yiddish for Nigger!”

The reference to ‘shvartze chaya’ is a direct  reference to ‘black beast,’ meaning the lowest of the low. Shvartze chaya is also how Ashkenazi Jews often refer to Arabs, Sephardi Arab and  Falasha Jews. I guess that, at least culturally, some Ashkenazi Jews find it hard to deal with the colour black, especially when it comes on people. It is therefore slightly peculiar to witness white Ashkenazi Jews complain endlessly about ‘white supremacy.’ It is, in fact,  hard to imagine any contemporary cultural code more racially oriented than the Ashkenazi ethos.  I would suggest that if Jews are genuinely interested in combating white exceptionalism, that maybe they should first uproot those symptoms from their own culture.

This is an anomaly — the same people who played a fundamental role in the civil rights movement, are themselves instrumental in an historic racist segregation project. In my work on Jewish Identity politics I have noticed that Jewish organisations dictating the boundaries of Black liberation discourse is hardly a new symptom. This political exercise is a fundamental feature and symptomatic of the entire Jewish solidarity project. It is the ‘pro’ Palestinian Jews who make sure that the discourse of the oppressed (Palestinians) will fit nicely with the sensitivities of the oppressor (The Jewish State for that matter).  It seems as if it is down to Jews to decide whether or not the civil rights activist and scholar Angela Davis is worthy of an award for her lifetime of activity for her community.

A review of the ADL’s attitude to the Nation of Islam (NOI) in general and its leader, Louis Farrakhan, provides a spectacular glimpse into this attempt to police  the dissent.  

NOI according to the ADL, has “maintained a consistent record of anti-Semitism and racism since its founding in the 1930s.” The ADL’s site states that “under Louis Farrakhan, who has espoused and promoted anti-Semitism and racism throughout his 30-year tenure as NOI leader, the organization has used its programs, institutions, and media to disseminate its message of hate.”

“He (Farakhan) has repeatedly alleged that the Jewish people were responsible for the slave trade as well as the 9/11 attacks, and that they continue to conspire to control the government, the media, Hollywood, and various Black individuals and organizations.”

The real question we need to ask is whether Farakhan’s criticism is ‘racist.’ Does he target  ‘The Jews’ as a people, as a race or as an ethnicity or does he actually target specific elements, segments or sectors within the Jewish universe?  A quick study of Farakhan’s cherry picked quotes provided by the ADL reveals that Farakhan doesn’t really refer to ‘the Jews’ as a people, a race, a nation or even as a religious community. In most cases he refers specifically and precisely to segments within the Jewish elite that are indeed politically dominant and deserve our scrutiny.

Let us examine some of Farakhan’s most problematic quotes as selected by the ADL: “During a speech at Washington, D.C.’s Watergate Hotel in November 2017, Farrakhan told his audience that the Jews who ‘owned a lot of plantations’ were responsible for undermining black emancipation after the Civil War. He also endorsed the second volume of the anti-Semitic book, ‘The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,’ which blames Jews for promoting a myth of black racial inferiority and makes conspiratorial accusations about Jewish involvement in slave trade and the cotton, textiles, and banking industries. Farrakhan believes this book should be taught in schools.”

It is obvious in the quote above that Farakhan refers to a segment within the Jewish elite. Those who “owned plantations,” those who were specifically involved in the Atlantic slave trade, those who were and still are involved in banking and so on. And the next question is; does the ADL suggest that Jewish slave owners are beyond criticism?  Is the Jewish State axiomatically on the right side of history so neither Farakhan nor the rest of us is entitled to criticise it? And what about Jewish bankers, do they also enjoy a unique immunity? I am sorry to point out, such views only confirm the supremacist and privileged attitude that Farahkan, amongst very few others,  is brave enough to point at.

The question goes further. If Jews do empathise with Blacks and their suffering as we often hear from Jewish leaders, can’t they take a bit of criticism from the likes of Farakhan, Angela Davis or Dieudonne? If Jews care so much about the Other, as many well meaning Jews insist upon telling us, how come all this caring disappears once Farakhan, Davis  or Dieudonne appear on the scene? 

Jewish solidarity is a peculiar concept. It is a self-centred project. Jewish New Yorker Philip Weiss expressed this sentiment brilliantly in an interview with me a few years back. “I believe all people act out of self-interest. And Jews who define themselves at some level as Jews — like myself for instance — are concerned with a Jewish self-interest. Which in my case is: an end to Zionism.” Weiss supports Palestine because he believes it is good for the Jews. For him the Palestinians are natural allies. I believe that if Blacks and Palestinians or anyone else  wants to liberate themselves and to obtain the equality they deserve, they can actually learn from Zionism. Rather than counting on solidarity, they have to shape their own fate by defining their priorities. In fact this is exactly what is so unique about Farakhan and Dieudonne. This is probably why Jewish organisations see them as prime enemies and invest so highly in their destruction.  

It Is the Century of Falling Racism Statues…And White Supremacy

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By Elham Hashemi

George Floyd’s brutal killing was like a stone thrown into the pond, causing a non-stop ripple effect. For the first time in modern history, people across the United States and Europe sound their disgust and unease towards the racist policies carried out by the US administration and the systems across the Western part of the world.

It started with protests and riots, and so far has not come to an end. One interesting scene is how the streets began to fill up with people despite police violence and statues started to fall down; these are not any statues but are in fact statues of racism and white supremacy.

In the United States, more than a dozen statues have been toppled, including several Confederate figures. To begin with, a few statues of Christopher Columbus who is depicted as “THE hero” began to fall down. Rarely do educational texts or reports refer to Columbus’s true image.

Bartolemé de las Casas, who was said to have known Columbus in person, decried the brutality in his “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1552”. He described how Columbus and the conquistadors disfigured Native slaves and fed them alive to dogs.

 A statue of Christopher Columbus was beheaded in Boston. A Columbus statue was also destroyed and dragged into a lake earlier in the week in Richmond, Virginia. After the figure was removed from its pedestal by protesters using several ropes in Richmond, a sign that reads, “Columbus represents genocide” was placed on the spray-painted foundation that once held the statue. In Camden, a New Jersey city near Philadelphia, protestors took down a statue of Christopher Columbus, joining others across the country.

A 10-foot bronze sculpture of Columbus was also toppled in Minnesota after a group of protests tied ropes around the neck of the statue and yanked it from its pedestal.

Theodor Roosevelt’s statue at NY museum of natural history was reported to be removed soon for its symbolism of the Native American man and the African man who stands beside him.

In Belgium’s Antwerp, thousands of protesters marching for Black Lives Matter filled the streets and demanded the removal of statues of King Léopold II, a brutal colonial ruler. The Belgian king statue who brutalized Congo was burned and ultimately removed.

It was the statue of King Léopold; infamous for genocide with his orchestration of mass violence against the people in the Congo, a large portion of which he considered his personal territory for cultivating and exporting rubber and ivory.

In Britain, a statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston was toppled by protesters and dumped into the very same waters of the Bristol Harbor that launched slave ships centuries ago.

Protesters have also made threats against statues of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the architect of colonial policies that lead to the mass starvation of some four million Indians, the torture of Kenyans, and was in favor of using poisoned gas against “uncivilized” tribes.

Shamelessly, the British government sealed Churchill’s statue inside a protective steel barrier ahead of the massive London race protest which Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed has been “hijacked” by extremists. In this context, it is not surprising to hear the racist language of Johnson and his claims that the protests are hijacked.

At the University of Oxford, protesters have stepped up their longtime push to remove a statue of Rhodes, the Victorian imperialist who served as prime minister of the Cape Colony in southern Africa. He made a fortune from gold and diamonds on the backs of miners who labored in brutal conditions.

Also in London, the statue of 18th Century slave trader Robert Milligan has been pulled down from outside the Museum of London Docklands after campaigners vowed to protest every day until it was removed.

New Zealand’s fourth-largest city removed a bronze statue of the British naval officer Capt. John Hamilton after a Maori tribe asked for the statue to be taken down and one Maori elder threatened to tear it down himself. The city of Hamilton said it was clear the statue of the man accused of killing indigenous Maori people in the 1860s would be vandalized.

The statues and monuments that have long honored racist figures are being boxed up, beheaded and sprayed in paint. It is not only because black lives matter, it is because the racist and white supremacist discrimination cannot be tolerated any longer. The New York Times reported that in dozens more cities across the US, statues that still stand have been marked with graffiti, challenged anew with petitions and protests, or scheduled for removal.

Among these statues, a “living statue” named Donald Trump must also be removed in order to preserve human dignity and freedom and end racism. White supremacists and other hateful actors attack immigrants, communities of color, and religious minorities with impunity — all under the Trump administration’s watch.

Tragedies during the Trump time have taken place across the US, targeting African Americans, immigrants and minorities, and these were encouraged by the same force of white supremacy. White supremacists including president Trump and his loyalists deploy disruptive rhetoric and enact racist policies like the Muslim Ban, family separation, attempts silence voters of color. At the end of the day, policies of violence and hate produce acts of violence and hate. The people of America, Europe and the world are rising in face of imperialism and white supremacy, it is no longer a time when the US administration can manipulate the free people of the world.

White Privilege and Racism Debate: a British East European point of view

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June 22, 2020

by Nebojša Radić for The Saker Blog

In this country^[1]I am regarded as White and therefore, privileged – it seems.

People in the streets and on television say that Whites should kneel and apologise.

Really?

How come I find myself in this bizarre situation?

How did I get here?

How did a refugee from warn-torn socialist Yugoslavia turned fisherman in the South Pacific become a privileged White male?

Did I miss anything?

Is it something I did?

Something I said?

No, it’s not something I did or said. It has nothing to do with me.

Except that… it has everything to do with me and there is no-one to speak out for me!

So, there you go now, hear my voice.

I was born in Yugoslavia, the most multicultural country in Europe. Through the non-allied movement, it had many links with third-world countries and we used to call Africans: braća crnci, Black Brothers. I grew up in Belgrade listening to African American blues musicians such as BB King, Jimi Hendrix, John Lee Hooker and Blind Lemon Jefferson, playing basketball to better the likes of Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson! It was only in the late 90s that I noticed that the footballer Edson Arantes do Nascimento better known as Pele was black! And I remember watching him play for the first time in Sweden 1970! It took me thirty years or perhaps, ten years of living in an English-speaking country to think of the great football magician in terms of race.

In the early nineties, like many of my countrymen (and women, yes), I fled the war. I found myself in Nelson, New Zealand where a friend of a friend operated a fleet of fishing boats. I learnt the trade and a couple of years later, upon graduation, I could tell ALL the commercial fish species in the South Pacific. Filling the many forms of the New Zealand immigration service and later of the government, I identified as a Pakeha, the Maori term for white people and, apparently, also for a pig. Pakeha or Caucasian, that was the choice I had. At the same time, for most the Yugoslav immigrants in Aotearoa,^[2], I was naš – ours. I was just one of us, ex-Yugoslavs and we all spoke naški – our language. We never bothered (very wisely) to call it Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian or…

Locals struggled to tell us apart the same as we struggled to tell the English from the Dutch or the Maoris from the Pacific Islanders (nota bene: the great rugby player, Jonah Lomu was of Tongan origin, an Islander – not a Maori^[3]).

While in Nelson, down very South, a good friend of mine Kit Carson, a farmer, wood turner and artist taught me an important lesson. We were barbequing some meat near the Tahunanui beach when Max said that as an Irish-born immigrant, Kit wasn’t a real Kiwi. The already well-aged and proud son of Joyce, Beckett, Heaney and a very long line of Celtic storytelling alchemists stood up from his chair with a drink in his mighty rugged hand and roared:

– You were born in this country, Max, but I chose to come here out my own free will. I am much more of a New Zealander than you will ever be!

Thus, spoke Kit Carson, Down Under Below, raising his glass to a thunderous – slaintè!

On the day the New York twin towers fell, I left Aotearoa^[4] and moved to Britain (this country?). I now live in Cambridge, a multi-cultural city with a peculiar town and gown historical (class, racial?) divide.

For the immigration service and the government here, I am White, the other White, mind you. The official government web page lists those options:

One of the home nations^[5] or Irish (Kit Carson!), Gypsy or Irish Traveller (Tyson Fury, the boxer) or any other White background. You can also belong to mixed ethnicities or declare yourself to be Jewish, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese or of any other Asian background. You can be African, Caribbean or of any other Black background. You could be Arab too (Dr Ali Meghji^[6])!^[7]

So, all Europeans are other Whites. Nigel Farage however, the prominent and outspoken British politician, does not complain about his French, Italian or German and not even Greek neighbours. He just does not recommend living next door to a bunch of Romanians!

At the same time, ‘Go home Poles’ graffiti compete with Banksy’s excellent artwork, anti-Russian hyper-hysteria (you don’t really want me to give you any links for this one) and the already metastatic anti-Serbian bias (uh, where shall I start with links…) that I have been exposed to over these 30 years.

Nine in ten of my conversations that started with where are you from originally? and continued with me saying I am from Serbia, ended right there – in embarrassment and silence. A sure sign that my interlocutors were educated on the topic by alphabet soup corporations (CNN, BBC… ESPN, CIA?) rather than history or any other books. While I do not expect people to have read all the novels by the Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić or seen the films of multiple Palme d’Or winner Emir Kusturica, to have ever found themselves trapped in one of the Marina Abramović arty installations, to have understood the principles of Nikola Tesla’s coil and wireless transmission of electricity or even watched Novak Đoković play tennis, it would be nice if they could make a small mental effort to move beyond the “murderous Serbs” stereotype and the likes of Milošević, Karadžić and Mladić.

So, the western political correctness pill may pretend to be covering Muslims, Blacks and Jews but it does not cover the others, with special reference to Eastern Europeans (our subject).

I can inform you, for instance, that there is no such a thing as an East European accent.^[8] Same as there is no such a thing as a Western European accent. The geographical Eastern Europe features languages that belong to different groups : Finno-Ugric, Greek, Romance, Slavic and Albanian among others. Native speakers of these language do not and cannot possibly have the same English accents. Again, is there such a thing as a Jewish, African or Muslim accent?

For instance,

• Talking to a woman wearing a burka you ask leisurely: Oh, is that a Muslim accent that I hear, darling?
• Talking to Shaquille O’Neal during a pick-up basketball game you say: Where does your accent come from? West Africa, perhaps? or,
• Talking to a rabbi who happen to be dressed as a rabbi: Interesting accent that you have – Semitic isn’t it?

(Nota bene: do NOT try any of these techniques at home)

East European is not an ethnicity. East Europeans as a compact group do not exist linguistically, culturally оr religiously and they are no different from Western Europeans in that respect. East European is a prejudiced political, cold war denomination for marginalised white (other) people.

My ancestors fought the Ottoman Turks for centuries not to be enslaved or taken away by the Janissaries. As my name is not Muhammed and I am a Christian, grandad seems to have done well. Now both the descendants and victims of the British Empire slave traders tell me I should apologise. Uh, let me see…

Is racism, as we now know it, not a construct of Western European maritime imperial nations, of genocide, slave trade and slavery?

Where I come from we learnt about these sinister exploits at school. We were told about what happened to the American Indians, the Aborigines, the Mayas and the Incas, the Africans abducted from their ancestral homes, enslaved and shipped to the new brave world. We knew about the East India Company, the British concentration camps in South Africa, Churchill’s racism and crimes, the utter high-tech barbarism visited upon the civilian populations of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden.

This was all common knowledge among people outside the Anglo-Saxon imperial reach.

The British Empire is racist, you now tell me? No kidding.

The American fathers of the exceptional nation were slave owners? Say no more.

The Empire committed atrocities with the ‘excuse’ that their victims we not really human.^[9] If they now, suddenly accepted the humanity of the colonised, exploited and murdered peoples, their minds would blow and disintegrate along with all of their cherished ethical, religious principles and civilised posturing.

But let’s go back to our topic, my Eastern European predicament. I am White, remember? Other White but still – sort of, White! To be better represented, I might want to join forces with the other Asians and the other Africans perhaps? So much for an identity crisis of the Others (capitalised though, mind you)!

I don’t think I am either privileged or responsible for racial tensions. I support human rights and equality and will not kneel or beg for forgiveness.

One day, when I return to the Balkans I may lay down and die of shame for what we allowed to happen to my generation and my country in those mountains. But I will not kneel. Not here, not now, not ever!

So, East Europeans are other Whites. We are not privileged and we often find ourselves at the receiving end of prejudice and intolerance. Do not paint us thus, with the old, stained, black & white brush. There are too many dirty brushes around us already… and so many wonderful colours.

Nebojša Radić is a native of Belgrade, Serbia. He has published fiction, essays and academic work in English (nom de guerre Sam Caxton), Serbian and Italian. He is Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge in the UK. Nebojša has two PhDs, one in Creative Writing from the UEA in Norwich and one in fish chucking form Talley’s Fisheries in Nelson, New Zealand.

Cambridge, UK

1. No-one ever says in Britain, England, the UK… ↑
2. New Zealand is officially bilingual and this is the Maori name. Aotearoa translates as The Land of the Long White Cloud) ↑
3. Advice based on personal experience acquired on the deck of a 15 metre-long fishing trawler at high sea during a storm: never call a Maori an Islander – BIG difference! ↑
4. Maori for New Zealand – The Land of the Long White Cloud. ↑
5. English, Northern Irish, Scottish or Welsh. ↑
6. ↑
7. https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/ethnic-groups ↑
8. My enunciations have been accused many times over of possessing such a dubious quality. ↑
9. “Churchill was a ‘racist’ and comparable to Hitler, says academic.”↑

Guess Which Surrender Monkey Won the Battle Of The Monuments?

Source

June 21, 2020

by Ilana mercer posted by permission for the Saker Blog

Steve Hilton is a Briton who anchors a current-affairs show on Fox News.

Mr. Hilton made the following feeble, snowflake’s case for the removal of the nation’s historically offensive statues:

It’s offensive to our Africa-American neighbors to maintain statues in public places that cause not only offense, but real distress. And it is disrespectful to our native-American neighbors to glorify a man who they see as having committed genocide against their ancestors. None of this is to erase history. Put it all in a museum. Let’s remember it and learn from it.

“What’s wrong with Camp Ulysses Grant,” Hilton further intoned sanctimoniously. He was, presumably, plumping for the renaming of army installations like Fort Bragg, called after a Confederate major general, Braxton Bragg.

Sons of the South—men and women, young and old—see their forebear as having died “in defense of the soil,” and not for slavery. Most Southerners were not slaveholders. All Southerners were sovereigntists, fighting a War for Southern Independence.

Hilton, it goes without saying, is a follower of the State-run Church of Lincoln. To the average TV dingbat, this means that Southern history comes courtesy of the likes of Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Lincoln idolater and the consummate court historian.

“Doris Kearns Goodwin,” explains professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo, the country’s chief Lincoln slayer, “is a museum-quality specimen of a court historian, a pseudo-intellectual who is devoted to pulling the wool over the public’s eyes by portraying even the most immoral, corrupt and sleazy politicians as great, wise, and altruistic men.”

When Doris does the TV circuit, evangelizing for power, she never mentions, say, the close connection between her great Ulysses Grant and Hilton’s “native-American neighbors.”

Yes, Doris, Steve: who exactly exterminated the Plains Indians?

Indian-Americans will likely be hip to the fact that the Republicans, led by General Sherman himself, supervised the genocide of some 60,000 Plains Indians from 1865 to 1890. The Plains Indians endured land dispossession that culminated “in the late 1880s, with the surviving tribes of the West being herded onto reservations,” writes DiLorenzo, in “The Feds versus The Indians.”

Primary sources notwithstanding, to make his case in this tract alone, DiLorenzo galvanizes sources such as L.A. Marshall’s Crimsoned Prairie: The Indian Wars (1972), John F. Marszalek’s Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (1993) and Sheridan: The Life and War of General Phil Sheridan (1992), by Roy Morris, Jr.

“We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, Sherman wrote to Ulysses S. Grant (commanding general of the federal army) in 1866, ‘even to their extermination, men, women and children.’ The Sioux must ‘feel the superior power of the Government.’ Sherman vowed to remain in the West ‘till the Indians are all killed or taken to a country where they can be watched.’”

“‘During an assault,’ he instructed his troops, ‘the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.’ He chillingly referred to this policy in an 1867 letter to Grant as ‘the final solution to the Indian problem,’ a phrase Hitler invoked some 70 years later.”

Hilton, who believes in the Republican Party’s moral supremacy, can’t be expected to know that, in “eradicating the Indians of the West,” Sherman was delivering good old “veiled corporate welfare” to “a segment of the railroad industry, which heavily bankrolled the Republican party.”

Some things never change.

More so than The Other Worthies mentioned, “our native-American neighbors” have a tendency to harken back to a once-proud history. If they retain any historic memory, then, America’s First Nations should balk at serving on Camp Ulysses Grant, or at Fort William Tecumseh Sherman.

The folks Hilton dubs “our Africa-American neighbors,” on the other hand, are more vested in breaking and burning stuff to get what they want, which is, invariably, other people’s stuff, sometimes called “reparations.”

It follows that Conservatism Inc. usually uses American Indians as its perennial piñata, while generally acceding to the aggressive demands of African-Americans for permanent victim status. It’s to Hilton’s credit that he even mentioned Native-Americans, who have little political clout and even less of an extractive approach to politics.

Given the state of his knowledge, Steve Hilton can’t be expected to be familiar with Lord Acton’s nuanced thinking on the Confederacy. According to another good, English thing, Encyclopedia Britannica, Acton was “the first great modern philosopher of resistance to the state, whether its form be authoritarian, democratic, or socialist.” And this enlightened British thinker favored the Confederacy.

Lord Acton certainly supported, even admired, Robert E. Lee, and saw secession and states’ rights as a check on the sovereign will.

The general, surmised Lord Acton, was fighting to preserve “the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will”: states’ rights and secession.

Lee’s inspired reply to Lord Acton:

… I believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people … are the safeguard to the continuance of a free government … whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.

“Lee,” argues Clyde Wilson, distinguished professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina, “was the product of a pre-ideological society, whereas the ‘treason’ shouters [Lincoln and his accomplices] were [modern statists] products of post-French Revolution nationalism. [To them], the Union meant the machinery of the federal government, under the control of their party, to be used for their agenda.”

“But as the Southern poet Allen Tate put it, the original Union was a gentleman’s agreement, not a group of buildings in Washington from which sacred commandments were issued.”

The acolytes of the French Revolution have carried the day, in their nihilistic Jacobinism. Still, for its radicalism, America circa 2020, makes the philosophical descendants of the original Jacobins look positively clingy about their symbols and statues.

President Emmanuel Macron evinced the resolve the Anglo-American surrender monkeys are too feeble to feel, much less display:

Said Macron, “The [French] republic will not erase any trace, or any name, from its history … it will not take down any statue.”

Bravo, Monsieur Macron.

**

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Facebook & Gab. New on YouTube

Protests And A Prognosis

 Posted by Lawrence Davidson

Part I—A Dangerous Dichotomy

If we go with the United States’ own picture of itself as a constitutional democracy that aims to guarantee citizens equal rights under law, how are we to interpret President Donald Trump’s reported desire to use ten thousand active duty troops to “dominate the streets” and quell largely peaceful protests against racist police behavior? A reasonable interpretation of President Trump’s attitude, and that of his supporters as well, is that they seek to prioritize the political and cultural desires of a largely racist subgroup of whites over the constitutional rights of citizens in general. This sets up a very dangerous dichotomy that constitutes a danger to the country’s democracy—at least as defined above.  

It should be kept in mind that the right-wing side of this dichotomy, and its challenge to a democracy based on a liberal interpretation of the Constitution has always been with us. Considering just the 20th and 21st centuries, figures such as Woodrow Wilson and his consistently racist use of power both prior to and during World War I; J. Edgar Hoover and his rights-defying use of the FBI; Joseph McCarthy and his pernicious use of anti-Communism; George W. Bush and his initiation of war on false premises; and now the clearly autocratic aspirations of Donald Trump. Such “leaders” have ruined countless lives while eroding the constitutional basis of equal rights.

Part II—The Bureaucratic Factor 

Why has the Constitution proven so fragile in this regard? One reason is the autocratic nature of bureaucracies. All these men wielded power through bureaucracies, and their power was magnified by such institutions. Bureaucracies are top-down affairs, and so those operating within them are expected to, and almost always do, follow the orders of their superiors. For instance, the President of the United States is also “Commander-in-Chief” of the armed forces—which in turn are themselves top-down bureaucracies. When, in early June, Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump demanded ten thousand active duty soldiers for deployment onto the streets of America, none of them could be expected to pull out a copy of the U.S. Constitution and fact-check the legitimacy of the orders issued. Nor were they expected to take seriously their induction oaths to “defend” the integrity of that same document. They were expected to readily follow their orders regardless of constitutional limits. Thus, all things being equal, President Trump should have gotten what he asked for. We are very fortunate that at that moment all things were not equal—a factor is to be considered below. 

If the regular army had hit the streets in June of 2020, they would have done so in order to suppress largely peaceful protests over the lack of equal rights and lack of legal treatment under the law. Indeed, in Washington, D.C.—the only place Trump’s order was partially followed—active-duty military police and the D.C. National Guard did act side-by-side against peacefully demonstrating citizens. Elsewhere, the National Guard called up by governors abetted the police in “riot control,” during which almost no distinction was made between looters and peaceful demonstrators. A few National Guard troops have subsequently expressed regrets over their participation.

The typical police force is also a bureaucracy with its own institutional culture that in many ways mimics the military. Most (there often proves to be a small number of exceptions) of those in the ranks are going to follow the orders of whomever they recognize as having authority. Quite frankly, there is a strong tendency over time for the police, particularly those assigned to minority neighborhoods, to forget all about the U.S. Constitution, its Bill of Rights, and other niceties of law, and slip into a fraternal (often white supremacist) culture which sets them apart from those they are “policing.” They are then easily used as an arm of establishment power. That certainly was the expectation of President Trump and many of the nation’s chiefs of police.  

Part III—All Was Not Equal

At this point we can ask, What were the demonstrators protesting? Specifically, thousands of citizens across the country were protesting the behavior of the police, who had long been brutalizing African American and other minority group citizens in the name of law enforcement. Most of the demonstrators understood their cause within the context of both human and U.S. Constitutional rights of citizens to live in a community where the law serves the cause of equitable justice. “No justice, no peace.”

The nation was fortunate that most of the protesters understood rights in this way. That understanding allowed them, in their great numbers (less a relatively small number of both black and white looters), to quite literally save American democracy. They did so by demanding that those who had authority confront one of the autocratic threats of our day—racist police forces, the brutality of which was captured repeatedly on video. The demonstrators used that evidence to force the issue, and this, in turn, caused the bureaucrats to eventually stop acting in a knee-jerk fashion. Thus, city councils, mayors, governors and even military officials had to choose between oppression (which included, in this case, following Trump’s order that they “dominate the streets) and the Constitution. Choosing oppression would have resulted in two things: erosion of the constitutionally sanctioned rule of law and the burning of cities across the land. No one, except perhaps Donald Trump and his white racist base, wanted either of those two consequences. So the notion that “without the right to protest, there can be no [liberal] democracy” was upheld, and that made the protesters “the nation’s true patriots.”

Part IV—Will the Changes Last?

According to a recent piece in the HuffPost, the demands of the protesters for a just and safe America are being heeded. As proof, the article notes the following:

—Police officers are being held accountable for brutal behavior.

—Some police departments are reforming police practices.

—Monuments to racist and hardline historical figures are coming down.

—Technology companies are halting cooperation with police departments when it comes to facial recognition techniques. 

—Finally, there has been a shift in public opinion: Americans “support the anti-racism protests by a 2 to 1 margin.”

 All this is for the better, but will it last? Barack Obama has compared the present protests to those of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He believes that they have brought about a similar “sea change” or profound transformation. Is that actually the case?

It should be recalled that the earlier civil rights protests led to a series of changes in law and, ultimately, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that banned discrimination in the public realm. These changes smoothed the way for other legislation expanding rights to people with disabilities, to homosexuals, lesbians and transgender folks, and to others. However, and quite significantly, these events triggered a culture war that focused white resentment and resistance within conservative political and fundamentalist religious movements. Among their unofficial institutional allies were and are some of the nation’s police forces. The racism, now exhibited by today’s Republican Party and its leader, President Donald Trump, as well as modern episodes of police brutality toward African Americans, should be understood within the context of that on-going culture war.

Looking at things this way, we can ask if the progressive response to today’s protests is best described as a “sea change” or a continuing, albeit important, chapter in what is still a very long-term struggle? As one activist and organizer, Sajari Simmons, realizes this is certainly not the end of the struggle for justice. Referring to the protests, she noted that “This is not just it. This is just one component,” she said. “There’s a lot more that we can do to help impact and educate and support.”

Part V—Conclusion

The American political system is lobby based. If the average citizen is important, it is only to be rallied at election time. However, if they are organized into politically potent interest groups, those citizens can have a long-term impact. To ultimately win the culture war, today’s protesters must be somehow united into a standing movement capable of “educating and supporting” their cause at local, state and national levels over the long run. 

Lest we forget, the enemies of a liberal, non-discriminatory interpretation of the Constitution are still out there and they have power. President Trump and his minions are still in place, as are millions of racist voters. Their political power must be broken at the polls, in the courts, and through a multigenerational process of reeducation. In working toward these goals, demonstrations are necessary, but not sufficient. Without a competently led and lasting movement, police brutality will come back, and “ten thousand soldiers” might, someday, really “dominate the streets.”

About Lawrence Davidson

Lawrence Davidson is professor of history emeritus at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He has been publishing his analyses of topics in U.S. domestic and foreign policy, international and humanitarian law and Israel/Zionist practices and policies since 2010.

AMERICA WITHOUT THE SUGAR COATING: WISHING ILL WILL ON OUR WORLD

Source

June 20, 2020 A

As an American, it’s hard to admit things are not as they seem. Democracy, that ideal we were taught as children to worship, it turns out to be only a fancy idea. Like all the other noble, fancy, ideas in history, the illusion of true freedom makes these edges of our existence warm and safe. Even while we live in a deadly, cruel, and unpredictable world. American’s are supposed to be different. Or so we were told. But we are no different from citizens of any ancient empire.

I was reading this morning a story on the Wall Street Journal, which is supposed to be a financial newspaper. The title, especially given the situation in the world now, slapped me hard across the face. The title read:

“Pandemic Upends Putin’s Plans to Raise Russia’s Dwindling Birthrate”

“What are they wishing for here?” this is what I asked myself. For, you see, this is what editorial is, a mirror into the desired effect. As journalists or analysts were are trained to present cases and Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper trains its cause toward the destruction of the evil billionaire’s enemies. And the Australian born American media mogul hate Vladimir Putin and Russia. He wants the Russian people to die out, and his scribes spend their days writing a bible about how it can happen. Come on, it’s not so difficult to see.

You can’t read the whole story of wonderful infertility in Russia. Because the Wall Street Journal has a paywall. This fact not only ensures that Murdoch gets his twenty pieces of silver, but it also certifies that the audience of bankers, brokers, and politicians who consume WSJ content get what they want. An old testament to a world where Russia is a history chapter in the New World Order’s religion of greed and chaos.

But why? Doesn’t every American wonder how we’ve managed to go nowhere in the more than seven decades since World War 2? Black lives still don’t matter in the US? And neither do, red, yellow, brown, Slavic, Celtic, Christian, or Muslim ones anywhere. And least of all, do Russian children matter – but why? When did Russia attack America? Where are the dead and buried in America’s wars with the USSR or Russia? Are the memorial cemeteries secret? Has the liberal order that’s run things hidden from us the very premise on which we base our almost religious fear and hatred of a people?

No. There are no battalions of dead warriors from the Russo-American war. Because there never was such a war. I wonder why we can’t ask “why” on that one? Oh, I am sorry. It’s because Australian-American billionaires and golf playing American presidents protected us from the evil Putin and the war-hungry Ruskies! Yeah, I forgot.

I want to end this observation today with a couple more questions. First, and foremost, how can we Americans stand idly by and watch the foundations of our country destroyed? How can we fight amongst ourselves over problems that should no longer exist, while the purveyors of every evil we ever fought against, they are thriving in their ivory towers? Second, how did we get to be so mean and nasty? Or, were we always hoping Russians or Iranians or Chinese people would have more hardship? And Murdoch, the man referred to as “the man whose name is synonymous with unethical newspapers,” is but one of the privateers hell-bent on taking his share of Russia if Putin fails.

I won’t delve too deeply into Murdoch’s Russian ventures but ousted oligarch Sergei Pugachev and many others align with the News Corp dictator. The thrives Putin uncovered and banished from Russia are the henchmen who would butcher her people for their gold. Here’s where it started, back in 1998, when News Corp. made the move to influence Russia the way it influences the west. You may recognize another famous name from the UPI story, which begins:

“Media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has entered the Russian market, joining with Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky in a venture holding exclusive rights to sell advertising time on two major Russian television networks, ORT Channel 1 and TV-6.”

Murdoch, Ted Turner, and other media moguls had their sights on expanding their propaganda/advertising businesses into Russia back when. Eventually, Vladimir Putin’s straight game of preserving Russia for Russians ran contrary to their plans, they pulled out, and we see the revenge they take every time we pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV.

In America, and in much of the so-called “west”, a subculture of thought, academia, journalism, and business has taught anti-Russia narrative for generations now.

However, what concerns me is not deep think, Cold War policy still going on behind the scenes in Washington and Moscow. What bothers me is how we Americans allow such unfair and improper relations to go on. Russia was never a real enemy, only a contrived perceptual opponent made so by our imperialist drive for control. The United States, more than any other country in the world, has become rich and powerful at the expense of the world, not alongside the world. This is an incontrovertible truth. But a truth any “Trumpster” would fight to the death to hide. We create so much harm and destroy so much goodwill believing in these lies. We condone things like races of people just “dying out” – and THIS is what those headlines mean.

This is not the country I went into the armed forces to defend. This is not the country may parents, grandparents, and ancestors pledge allegiance to their entire lives. Americans are not supposed to be unfair, cruel, bad sports, and ruthless. We’re just not supposed to be.

---

By Phil Butler
Source: New Eastern Outlook

Malcolm X about race, crime and police brutality: ‘You can’t be a Negro in America and not have a criminal record’

Date: 18 June 2020

Source

Author: lecridespeuples

Malcolm X Speech in Los Angeles on May 22, 1962

On April 27th 1962, two LAPD police officers instructed to closely monitor a mosque’s activities (Muslim Temple 27 in Los Angeles) saw Black men taking clothes out of the back of a car outside the mosque. They approached aggressively and soon got violent, and as Malcolm X puts it, “hell broke loose”. The situation ended with seven unarmed Black Muslims shot outside the mosque. Nation of Islam (NOI) member William X Rogers was shot in the back and paralyzed for life. Temple Secretary Ronald X Stokes, 29, was killed. “They’re going to pay for it”, Malcolm X declared, going to Los Angeles to eulogize Stokes at a funeral attended by 2,000 people. Despite an autopsy that established Stokes was shot at close range and had been stomped, kicked and bludgeoned while dead or dying, an all-White coroner’s jury deliberating the Stokes’ killing, took 23 minutes to conclude it “justifiable homicide.” By contrast, 14 NOI members were indicted for assault in the incident and 11 were found guilty. Elijah Muhammad’s reluctance to aggressively retaliate to Stokes’ death and refusal to work with civil rights organizations, local Black politicians and religious groups, would be the first of a series of events, causing irreparable rifts between The Honorable Malcolm X and the so-called ‘Messenger of Allah’ Elijah Muhammad. And lead to his eventual departure from the Nation of Islam and embrace of traditional, Sunni Islam.

Source : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJw2ip7TD94

Transcript:

In the name of Allah,  the beneficent, the merciful to whom all praise is due, whom we forever thank for giving us the honorable Elijah Mohammad as our leader, teacher, and guide. And I specifically, ladies and gentleman, and brothers and sisters, open up like that because I  am a representative of the honorable Elijah Mohammad. And were it not for him, you and I wouldn’t be here today.

In order for you and me to devise some kind of method or strategy to offset some of the events or the repetition of the events that have taken place here in Los Angeles recently, we have to go to the root. We have to go to the cause. Dealing with the condition itself is not enough. We have to get to the cause of it all. (crowd concurs) Or the root of it all. And it is because of our effort toward getting straight to the root that people oft times think  we’re dealing in hate.

But first I would like to congratulate and give praise to the Negro, so-called negro leaders and so-called negro organizations and, excuse me if I say so-called, it’s hard for me to just outright say Negro when I know what that word Negro really means. (thunderous applause)

The person whom you have come to know as Ronald Stokes, we know him as Brother Ron – one of the most religious persons to display the highest form of morals of any Black person  anywhere on this Earth. And as one of the previous speakers pointed out, who knew him, everyone who knew him had to give him credit for being a good man. A clean man, an intelligent man, and an innocent man when he was murdered.

The Negro, so-called Negro, organizations and leaders should be given great credit for their failure or refusal to let the White man divide them and use them, one against the other, during this crisis. (thunderous applause) As Reverend [Walkard] Wilson pointed out, I think it was eight years ago today that the Supreme Court handed down the desegregation decision. And despite the fact that eight years have gone past, that decision hasn’t been implemented yet. (applause from audience)

I don’t have that much faith. I don’t have that much confidence. I don’t have that much patience. And I don’t have that much ignorance to… (thunderous applause) If the Supreme Court, which is the highest lawmaking body in the country, can pass a decision that can’t get even eight percent compliance within eight years, because it’s for Black people, then my patience has run out. (applause)

When Black people who are being oppressed become impatient, they say that’s emotional. (murmuring) Please… When Black people who are being deprived of their citizenship… not only of their civil rights, but their human rights, become impatient, become fed up, don’t wanna wait any longer, then they say that’s emotional. (laughter and applause)

The Negro, so-called Negro, leaders and organizations should be praised. They should be congratulated. They should be complimented because out of all of them combined, the White man has not yet found one who will play the role of Uncle Tom. (thunderous applause) But yet he has found no Tom, no puppet, no parrot, who is still dumb enough in 1962 to represent the injustices that he is inflicting against our people. (applause)

We don’t care what your religion is. We don’t care what organization you belong to. We don’t care how far in school you went or didn’t go. We don’t care what kind of job you have. We have to give you credit for shocking the White man by not letting him divide you  and use you one against the other. (applause)

In the past, the greatest weapon the White man has had has been his ability to divide and conquer. As Jackie Robinson pointed out beautifully on the television last night, 4/5 of the world isn’t White. Isn’t that what Jackie said? (applause) And if 4/5 of the world is dark, how is it possible for 1/5 to rule, oppress, exploit, dominate, and brutalize the 4/5 who are in the majority? How did they do it? Divide and conquer.

If I take my hand and slap you, you don’t even feel it. It might sting you, because these digits are separated. But all I have to do to put you back in your place is bring those digits together. (applause) This is what the White man has done to you and me. He has divided us, and used us one against the other. But today, thanks to Allah… You can say thanks to God, or thanks to Jesus, or thanks to Jehovah – whatever you want. (applause) But as a follower of the honorable Elijah Muhammad, we have been taught to say thanks to Allah. And that’s what Jesus said. Jesus called on Allah. He said, “Allah! Allah! Allah [Inaudible]” I believe what’s good for Jesus is good for you. If Allah was good enough for Jesus to call upon, I think He should be good enough for you to call upon. (man: That’s right!)

Since the so-called Negro community has shocked the White man by resisting all efforts to divide us, I think that you and I should continue to shock him by singing and working together in unity. Despite religious, political, economic, or educational, or social differences, let us remember that we are not brutalized because we’re Baptists. We’re not brutalized  because we’re Methodists. We’re not brutalized because we’re Muslims. We’re not brutalized because we’re Catholics. We’re brutalized because because we are Black people in America. (applause)

Here your mother is being raped, and you’re not supposed to be emotional. Your women – please – your woman can’t walk the street without some cracker putting his hands on her, and you’re not supposed to be emotional! (applause) If you say that you’re fed up, if you teach the Negro… (film skips)

They don’t even know their own name (woman: That’s right!) Why? Because he took took it away from her. Please, please. 20 million Black people don’t even know their own language. Why? Because he took it away from us. 20 million Black people who don’t even know the history of their ancestors. Why? Because he took it away from us! And if you try and tell them how thoroughly and completely they’ve been robbed, he says you’re teaching hate. (applause) That’s something to think about. (murmuring)

Today we’re coming out of college, you’re coming out of the leading universities. You’re trying to go in a good direction. But you don’t know which direction to go in. And if somebody tries to take you right to the root of your problem they say that that man’s a hate teacher. If I ask why should the Senators in Washington… and, then again, if we tell you that Negroes are being hung on the tree, or being shot down illegally, unjustly… and those Negroes should do something to protect themselves, you say you’re advocating violence.

The White man is tricking you! He’s trapping you. He doesn’t call it violence when he lands troops in South Vietnam. (applause) Please, please, please! He doesn’t call it violence when he lands troops in Berlin. When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, he didn’t say get non-violent. He said, “Praise the Lord, but pass the ammunition.” (applause) But when someone attacks you, when someone comes at you with a club, when someone comes you with a rope, when someone comes at you with a gun, despite the fact that you’ve done nothing he tells you, “Suffer peacefully.” (murmuring) “Pray for those who use you to spite me.” “Be long suffering.” And how long can you suffer after suffering for 400 years? (applause)

So I just wanna play up that little point right there because he said that we play on your emotions. And when you turn on your television tonight, or your radio, or read the newspaper, they’re gonna tell you in that paper that I was playing on your emotions. Imagine you, a second class citizen. That’s not getting emotional! It’s getting intelligent.

And as far as your mayor is concerned, I see… (I) should say their mayor. A man named Yorty, who has been slandering the Muslims, a professional liar… a professional liar. (applause) Who has mastered the art of using half truths. Put in the paper that they break into our religious place of worship and got records that they can use to prove that most of us have criminal records. You can’t be a Negro in America and not have a criminal record. (thunderous applause) Martin Luther King has been to jail. (applause) Please. James Farmer has been to jail. Why, you can’t name a Black man in this country who was sick and tired of the hell that he’s catching who hasn’t been to jail. Charged him with being seditious.

They put Moses in jail! (woman: Yeah!) They put Daniel in jail. (woman: Yeah!) Why, you haven’t got a man of God in the Bible that wasn’t put to jail when they started speaking up against  exploitation and oppression. (applause) They charged Jesus with sedition. Didn’t they do that? (crowd concurs) They said he was against Caesar. They said he was discriminating  because he told his disciples, “Go not the way of the gentiles, but rather go to the lost sheep.” He discriminated! Don’t go near the gentiles, go to the lost sheep. Go to the oppressed. Go the downtrodden. Go to the exploited. Go the people who don’t know who they are, who are lost from the knowledge of themselves and who are strangers in a land that is not theirs. Go to those people! Go to the slaves. Go the second class citizens. Go to the ones who are suffering the brunt of Caesar’s brutality.

And if Jesus were here in America today, he wouldn’t be going to the White man. The White man is the oppressor! He would be going to the oppressed. He would be going to the humble. He would be going to the lowly. He would be going to the rejected and the despised. He would be going to the so-called American Negro. (applause)

To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace. I formally was a criminal. I formally was in prison. I’m not ashamed of that. You never can use that over my head. And he’s using the wrong stick! I don’t feel that stick. (laughter and applause) I went to a prison because I believed in men like Sam Yorty. I went to prison because I  trusted men like Sam Yorty. I went to prison following the philosophy of men like Sam Yorty. But since I’ve been following the honorable Elijah Muhammad, I have been reformed  and that’s more… Please… That’s more than Sam Yorty and Chief Parker and all these other White politicians that have been able to do with the inmates in the prisons of this State. They should give Mr. Muhammad credit. They should give Mr. Muhammad credit for reforming and rehabilitating men whom they have failed to reform and rehabilitate. (thunderous applause)

Mayor Yorty went forward to some press report that Mr. Muhammad had once been found guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He failed to explain, purposely, that in 1934, the honorable Elijah Muhammad refused to send his children to White schools in Detroit, Michigan, that were teaching you about Little Black Sambo. That’s the minor that he contributed to the delinquency of. You see this vicious, fork-tongue  White man has been able to take lies and make you turn against those who want to help you and make others turn against you. This is the contributing to the delinquency of a minor that this mayor, or a man who calls himself mayor, is talking about.

In the same article he said that the Muslims are the same people who rioted in the United Nations. Someone should pull his coat and let him know that at the present moment there’s six million dollars worth of suits [inaudible] levelled against two of New York’s leading newspapers  for making a mistake of charging the Muslims as being involved in those United Nations riots. We were not involved! And if this fork-tongued man who calls himself your mayor had taken the time to find that out, he wouldn’t be walking into the trap that he’s letting his ignorance lead him into! (applause) And if you take the time to read the Washington Post that came out the Sunday after that incident took place, the Washington Post pointed out on the front page that the Muslims had nothing to do with the UN riots and they quoted, in saying so, the person who was at that time the Commissioner of Police in New York City. See, it’s lies that the White man has spread about the Muslims to try and make you afraid of the Muslims, or to try and make you think that the Muslims were a criminal element, an uncouth element in things that you have not liked to be associated with.

Also, they say that… I’m just clearing these things up and then we’re going to get into what happened. They also say that the honorable Elijah Muhammad was draft dodger. No, he wasn’t. He just refused to go to the army because he was a man of peace. He was a minister of a religion of peace. He was teaching peace. So he outright refused to go to the army. That’s not draft dodging. That’s intelligence. (cheering)

Here, before the grand jury, because the coroner’s jury is stacked against Negros. (cheers and applause) The Grand Jury is stacked against Negros. The press, the radio, the television and the newspapers are stacked against negros. (crowd concurs) But, please, the Los Angeles Police department is stacked against all Negroes, all except those he has appointed to high positions.

The controlled press, the White press inflames the White public against Negroes. The police are able to use it to paint the Negro community as a criminal element. The police are able to use the press to make the White public think that 90%, or 99%, of the Negroes in the Negro community are criminals. And once the White public is convinced that most of the Negro community is a criminal element, then this automatically paves the way for the police to move into the Negro  community, exercising Gestapo tactics stopping any Black man who is in this… on the sidewalk, whether he is guilty or whether he is innocent. Whether he is well dressed or whether he is poorly dressed. Whether he is educated or whether he is dumb. Whether he’s a Christian or whether he’s a Muslim. As long as he is Black and a member of the Negro community, the White public thinks that the White policeman is justified in going in there and trampling on that man’s civil rights and on that man’s human rights. (applause)

Once the police have convinced the White public that the so-called Negro community is a criminal element, they can go in and question, brutalize, murder, unarmed innocent Negroes and the White public is gullible enough to back them up. This makes the Negro community a police state. This makes the negro neighborhood a police state. It’s the most heavily patrolled. It has more police in it than any other neighborhood, yet it has more crime in it than any other neighborhood. How can you have more cops and more crime? (laughter) It shows you that the cops must be in cahoots with the criminals. (laughter, applause)

(They hate) the texture of the hair that God… Please… That God gave them so much that they put lye on it.  (laughter) Do you realise… now, you know brother; lye will eat a hole in steel and you know your head is not that hard. (applause) Who taught you… Please. Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin to such extent that you bleach to get like the White man? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to? So much so that you don’t want to be around each other. You know, before you come asking Mr. Muhammed does he teach hate? You should ask who, yourself, who taught you to hate being what God gave you. (applause)

Malcolm X’s ‘conk’ during his delinquent youth, when he was nicknamed ‘Detroit Red’. Here is how he tells it in his Autobiography: « How ridiculous I was! Stupid enough to stand there simply lost in admiration of my hair nowlooking “white,” reflected in the mirror in Shorty’s room. I vowed that I’d never again be without a conk, and I never was for many years. This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are”inferior”-and white people”superior”- that they will even violate and mutilate their God-createdbodies to try to look “pretty” by white standards. »

We teach you to love the hair that God gave you. Here you, way out in the middle of the ocean, can’t swim and you worried about someone that’s in the bathtub and can’t swim. (laughter and applause) We don’t steal. We don’t gamble. We don’t lie, and we don’t cheat. And that also deprives the government of revenue (laughter) because you can’t get into a whiskey bottle without getting past the government seal. You can’t open a deck of cards without getting past the government seal. Hell, the White man makes the whiskey then puts you in jail for getting drunk. (cheering) He sells you the cards and the dice and puts you in jail when he catches you using ’em. So, he’s against us because we fix it where he can’t catch you anymore. We take the dice outta your hands and the cards out of your hands and the whiskey out of your head.

The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman. And as Muslims, the honorable Elijah Mohammad teaches us to respect our women and to protect our women. And the only time a Muslim really gets real violent is when someone goes to molest his woman. (man: Right!) (applause) We will kill you for our woman. I’m making it plain. Yes. We will kill you for our woman. (applause) We believe that if the White man will do whatever is necessary to see that his woman gets respect and protection then you and I will never be recognised as men until we stand up like men and place the same penalty over the head of anyone who puts his filthy hands in the direction of our women. (thunderous applause)

We respect them, but we want them to respect us. We think that the law should respect the Negro community. The law should protect the Negro community. The law should approach the negro community with intelligence if it expects the negro community to react intelligently. So, the honorable Elijah Mohammed teaches us to always avoid anything that smacks of disrespect for the law. And if the police department tells the truth, they will have to admit that they have never had any, uh, experiences with Muslims that have ever been anything other than honorable unless they themselves come at us in a dishonorable way.

There’s no case against the Muslims. It has no case against these brothers whom they shot down. And because it has no case, it’s trying to create a case. It’s trying to manufacture a case. And therefore they set up a grand jury hearing of the case so that they could hear it behind closed doors, and after hearing what we have to say then they’ll… their particular strategy or defense against the actions that they committed on that April the 27th. So, at the advice of our attorneys, we purposefully, the victims, those who have been indicted, or rather those who have been arrested and are out on bond, have purposefully refrained and refused from making any statement whatsoever until after the case appears in court.

And when you hear their story it will be in a public trial. We have already been… had experience with these private hearings behind closed doors. Anything that the White man has to do to the Muslim, he has to do it in the open. He has to do it in public, or he has to put every single one of us behind bars for the rest our our lives. (applause)

When Mayor Yorty called for a government investigation of a religious group that have the highest moral standards of any group in the Negro community, Mayor Yorty was giving you an example of what Hitler did in Nazi Germany when he began to go on the rampage. (applause)

We feel, we have confidence that  the White public and the Black public, if they hear our case, if they hear and have access to the investigation, will never be fooled by this phony set up that’s stacked from the top all the way down. And if you doubt it, when you leave home tonight, when you go home tonight, look for the press. I’d like at this time to call forth these brothers who are under, uh, who were arrested. The brothers who were arrested. Come up here behind these chairs, please. (applause) They were suspects. (laughter) This wouldn’t happen in a White neighborhood. White man can walk down the street with packages on his head, packages under his arm and packages anywhere else and won’t anybody question his right to carry those packages. But a negro is suspect because the press makes you suspect. Yes, the White press makes Negroes suspect. (murmuring) (video skips)

… all the information you need, Officer. And the Officer made one stay at the rear of the car and the other go to the front of the car, and while he was taking the one to the front of the car, the polite attitude, the humble if, the submissive, intelligent peaceful spirit that he uexpectedly found in this Negro infuriated him. And he began to… He told the brother; ‘Put down your hands.’ Brother was talking, he’s not a criminal. A man has a right on the sidewalk to talk with his hands. ‘Put down your hands, don’t talk with your hands.’ And when the brother continued to gesture with his hands the Officer grabbed his hand, twisted it around, ’round behind his back flung him up against the car and then that’s when hell broke loose. That was when hell broke loose. A struggle ensued, shots were fired by the police and by a Negro door checker. (laughter)

An alarm went out. When the alarm went out, instead of the police going to the place where the incident occurred, the police went one block away to the temple. When they arrived there, they got out of their cars with their guns smokin’. You woulda thought it was Wyatt… What’s his name? Wyatt Earp. I’m telling you, they came out of those cars, and we have enough witnesses to hang ’em. With their guns smokin’. Chief Parker knows this, Mayor Yorty knows this and every police official in the city knows that. They didn’t fire no warning shots in  the air they fired warning shots point blank at innocent, unarmed, defenseless Negroes. As I say, two of the brothers were shot in the back. Another was shot in the shoulder. Another was shot, two of them were shot, excuse the expression, through the penis. (murmuring) Another was shot in the hip and the bullet came out the other side. But Arthur here was shot 1/4 of an inch from his heart.

Let me tell you something, and I’ll tell you why you say ‘we hate White people’. We don’t hate anybody. We love our own people so much, they think we hate the ones who are inflicting injustice against them. (applause) (video skips)

… who has been shot, the bullet having passed a 1/4 of an inch through his heart. I’m not gonna let him talk, which I think you can understand why. You should listen to the conversation of the police officers while it was going on. Two of the brothers who had been shot, who were lying hand in hand, the officer said they were chanting a death chant. You read that. They were saying ‘Allahu Akbar’. What does that mean? It means that God is the greatest. It means that God is the greatest. (applause)

Understand what the White officer called a death chant was a prayer. They were praying when they were shot down. They were saying Allhu Akbar. And it shook the officer up that they haven’t heard Black people talk any kinda talk but what they taught ’em. And two of the brothers who were shot in the back were telling me that as they lay on the sidewalk, they were holding hands. They held hands with each other saying Allahu Akbar. And the blood was seeping out of them where the police bullets had torn into their insides. Still, they said Allahu Akbar and the police came and kicked them in the head. Police kicked them in the head telling them to shut up that noise while they were laying on the sidewalk in front of our temple. Kicked them in the head. Shut up that noise.

And one of them, when he was on his way to the police station in the ambulance, one of the ambulance attendants told the White cop, ‘Why don’t you kill the nigger?’ He said, ‘I’ll tell them that he tried to get away. Why don’t you kill the nigger? While you got a chance. I’ll swear that he tried to get away.’ If he didn’t say this, then I need to be put in jail, and I’ll gladly go. (applause)

One of them who was being taken to jail in a police car as the ambulance sirens were coming to the place, one of the policeman said to the other: ‘What are the ambulances rushing for? Nothing but some niggers.’ So, he looked then and saw the Muslim brothers sitting beside him  and he shut up. But after he got to the jail, the same officer that said this turned to the brother and said; ‘I hope that you didn’t get offended by what I said back there under the heat of emotion, because some of my best friends are colored.’ (roaring) That’s what he said. That’s his password: ‘Some of my best friends are colored.’

And I for one, as a Muslim, believe that the White man is intelligent enough, if he were made to realise how Black people really feel and how fed up we are without that whole compromising sweet talk. Why you’re the one that make it hard for yourself. The White man believes you when you go to him with that old sweet talk ’cause you been sweet talkin’ him ever since he brought you here. Stop sweet talking him. Tell him how you feel. Tell him how or what kinda hell you been catching and let him know that if he’s not ready to clean his house up, if hes not ready to clean his house up, he shouldn’t have a house. It should catch on fire. And burn down. (applause)

As Muslims, we identify ourselves with the dark world. So we’re not any minority. We’re a part of the majority and the White man is the minority. (applause) You have to know this to understand us: we don’t think any odds are against us. We don’t fight a battle like the odds are against us. Why, the whole dark world today is in unity. It’s one. If you don’t think so, look at the United Nations. When the dark world votes, they vote as one. They gettin’ the colonialists out of Africa, and out of Asia. Tellin’ them to get out. They don’t have any nuclear weapons but they got a solid, united voice and their unity alone is sufficient to drive the oppressor and exploiter of their people out of their own country.

You and I need to learn a lesson from that right there. In the UN, the dark world consists of Buddhist’s, Hindu’s, Shinto’s, Taoist’s, Christian’s, Muslims, everything. But they’re together. They forget their religious and political differences. They think as one. They move as one against a common enemy. And [the French occupier] of Algeria, he’s going, don’t think he’s not going, he’s going. (applause) They’re getting him out of Angola, out of Tanganyika, out of Uganda, out of Kenya. He’s going from South Africa, too. He hasn’t got long to be there. All over this earth, dark people who have been oppressed and exploited by those who are not their own kind, strangers, are coming together to get the oppressor off their back. You and I learn a lesson from that.

We are oppressed. We are exploited. We are downtrodden. We are denied, not only civil rights, but even human rights. So, the only way we’re going to get some of this oppression and exploitation away from us, or aside from us is come together against the common enemy. (applause) When they sat down at the Bandung conference, everyone there had this in common: a dark skin. Some of those who were sitting there were socialists, some were communists, some where capitalists, some were Christian, some were Buddhist. They were everything! But all of ’em was dark skinned. And they looked at that dark skin and agreed that this is one thing they had in common.

Forget that you’re a Methodist, forget that you’re a Catholic, forget that you’re a Protestant, forget that you’re a Muslim. Remember that all of us are Black, and we’re catching h… [end of video].

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America’s Own Color Revolution

By F. William Engdahl

Global Research, June 17, 2020

Color Revolution is the term used to describe a series of remarkably effective CIA-led regime change operations using techniques developed by the RAND Corporation, “democracy” NGOs and other groups since the 1980’s. They were used in crude form to bring down the Polish communist regime in the late 1980s. From there the techniques were refined and used, along with heavy bribes, to topple the Gorbachev regime in the Soviet Union. For anyone who has studied those models closely, it is clear that the protests against police violence led by amorphous organizations with names like Black Lives Matter or Antifa are more than purely spontaneous moral outrage. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans are being used as a battering ram to not only topple a US President, but in the process, the very structures of the US Constitutional order.

If we step back from the immediate issue of videos showing a white Minneapolis policeman pressing his knee on the neck of a black man, George Floyd, and look at what has taken place across the nation since then, it is clear that certain organizations or groups were well-prepared to instrumentalize the horrific event for their own agenda.

The protests since May 25 have often begun peacefully only to be taken over by well-trained violent actors. Two organizations have appeared regularly in connection with the violent protests—Black Lives Matter and Antifa (USA). Videos show well-equipped protesters dressed uniformly in black and masked (not for coronavirus to be sure), vandalizing police cars, burning police stations, smashing store windows with pipes or baseball bats. Use of Twitter and other social media to coordinate “hit-and-run” swarming strikes of protest mobs is evident.

What has unfolded since the Minneapolis trigger event has been compared to the wave of primarily black ghetto protest riots in 1968. I lived through those events in 1968 and what is unfolding today is far different. It is better likened to the Yugoslav color revolution that toppled Milosevic in 2000.

Gene Sharp: Template for Regime Overthrow

In the year 2000 the US State Department, aided by its National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and select CIA operatives, began secretly training a group of Belgrade university students led by a student group that was called Otpor! (Resistance!). The NED and its various offshoots was created in the 1980’s by CIA head Bill Casey as a covert CIA tool to overthrow specific regimes around the world under the cover of a human rights NGO. In fact, they get their money from Congress and from USAID.

In the Serb Otpor! destabilization of 2000, the NED and US Ambassador Richard Miles in Belgrade selected and trained a group of several dozen students, led by Srđa Popović, using the handbook, From Dictatorship to Democracy, translated to Serbian, of the late Gene Sharp and his Albert Einstein Institution. In a post mortem on the Serb events, the Washington Post wrote, “US-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet of the anti-drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count. US taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl anti-Milošević graffiti on walls across Serbia.”

Trained squads of activists were deployed in protests to take over city blocks with the aid of ‘intelligence helmet’ video screens that give them an instantaneous overview of their environment. Bands of youth converging on targeted intersections in constant dialogue on cell phones, would then overwhelm police. The US government spent some $41 million on the operation. Student groups were secretly trained in the Sharp handbook techniques of staging protests that mocked the authority of the ruling police, showing them to be clumsy and impotent against the youthful protesters. Professionals from the CIA and US State Department guided them behind the scenes.

The Color Revolution Otpor! model was refined and deployed in 2004 as the Ukraine Orange Revolution with logo and color theme scarves, and in 2003 in Georgia as the Rose Revolution. Later Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the template to launch the Arab Spring. In all cases the NED was involved with other NGOs including the Soros Foundations.

After defeating Milosevic, Popovic went on to establish a global color revolution training center, CANVAS, a kind of for-profit business consultancy for revolution, and was personally present in New York working reportedly with Antifa during the Occupy Wall Street where also Soros money was reported.

Antifa and BLM

The protests, riots, violent and non-violent actions sweeping across the United States since May 25, including an assault on the gates of the White House, begin to make sense when we understand the CIA’s Color Revolution playbook.

The impact of the protests would not be possible were it not for a network of local and state political officials inside the Democratic Party lending support to the protesters, even to the point the Democrat Mayor of Seattle ordered police to abandon several blocks in the heart of downtown to occupation by protesters.

In recent years major portions of the Democratic Party across the US have been quietly taken over by what one could call radical left candidates. Often they win with active backing of organizations such as Democratic Socialists of America or Freedom Road Socialist Organizations. In the US House of Representatives the vocal quarter of new representatives around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib and Minneapolis Representative Ilhan Omar are all members or close to Democratic Socialists of America. Clearly without sympathetic Democrat local officials in key cities, the street protests of organizations such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa would not have such a dramatic impact.

To get a better grasp how serious the present protest movement is we should look at who has been pouring millions into BLM. The Antifa is more difficult owing to its explicit anonymous organization form. However, their online Handbook openly recommends that local Antifa “cells” join up with BLM chapters.

FRSO: Follow the Money

BLM began in 2013 when three activist friends created the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to protest the allegations of shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin by a white Hispanic block watchman, George Zimmermann. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi were all were connected with and financed by front groups tied to something called Freedom Road Socialist Organization, one of the four largest radical left organizations in the United States formed out of something called New Communist Movement that dissolved in the 1980s.

On June 12, 2020 the Freedom Road Socialist Organization webpage states, “The time is now to join a revolutionary organization! Join Freedom Road Socialist Organization…If you have been out in the streets this past few weeks, the odds are good that you’ve been thinking about the difference between the kind of change this system has to offer, and the kind of change this country needs. Capitalism is a failed system that thrives on exploitation, inequality and oppression. The reactionary and racist Trump administration has made the pandemic worse. The unfolding economic crisis we are experiencing is the worst since the 1930s. Monopoly capitalism is a dying system and we need to help finish it off. And that is exactly what Freedom Road Socialist Organization is working for.”

In short the protests over the alleged police killing of a black man in Minnesota are now being used to call for a revolution against capitalism. FRSO is an umbrella for dozens of amorphous groups including Black Lives Matter or BLM. What is interesting about the self-described Marxist-Leninist roots of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) is not so much their left politics as much as their very establishment funding by a group of well-endowed tax-exempt foundations.

Alicia Garza of BLM is also a board member or executive of five different Freedom Road front groups including 2011 Board chair of Right to the City Alliance, Board member of School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL), of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), Forward Together and Special Projects director of National Domestic Workers Alliance.

The Right to the City Alliance got $6.5 million between 2011 and 2014 from a number of very established tax-exempt foundations including the Ford Foundation ($1.9 million), from both of George Soros’s major tax-exempts–Open Society Foundations, and the Foundation to Promote Open Society for $1.3 million. Also the cornflake-tied Kellogg Foundation $250,000, and curiously, Ben & Jerry’s Foundation (ice cream) for $30,000.

Garza also got major foundation money as Executive Director of the FRSO front, POWER, where Obama former “green jobs czar” Van Jones, a self-described “communist” and “rowdy black nationalist,” now with CNN, was on the board. Alicia Garza also chaired the Right to the City Alliance, a network of activist groups opposing urban gentrification. That front since 2009 received $1.3 million from the Ford Foundation, as well as $600,000 from the Soros foundations and again, Ben & Jerry’s ($50,000). And Garza’s SOUL, which claimed to have trained 712 “organizers” in 2014, when she co-founded Black Lives Matter, got $210,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation and another $255,000 from the Heinz Foundation (ketchup and John Kerry family) among others. With the Forward Together of FRSO, Garza sat on the board of a “multi-racial organization that works with community leaders and organizations to transform culture and policy to catalyze social change.” It officially got $4 million in 2014 revenues and from 2012 and 2014, the organization received a total of $2.9 million from Ford Foundation ($655,000) and other major foundations.

Nigeria-born BLM co-founder Opal Tometi likewise comes from the network of FRSO. Tometi headed the FRSO’s Black Alliance for Just Immigration. Curiously with a “staff” of two it got money from major foundations including the Kellogg Foundation for $75,000 and Soros foundations for $100,000, and, again, Ben & Jerry’s ($10,000). Tometi got $60,000 in 2014 to direct the group.

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization that is now openly calling for a revolution against capitalism in the wake of the Floyd George killing has another arm, The Advancement Project, which describes itself as “a next generation, multi-racial civil rights organization.” Its board includes a former Obama US Department of Education Director of Community Outreach and a former Bill Clinton Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. The FRSO Advancement Project in 2013 got millions from major US tax-exempt foundations including Ford ($8.5 million), Kellogg ($3 million), Hewlett Foundation of HP defense industry founder ($2.5 million), Rockefeller Foundation ($2.5 million), and Soros foundations ($8.6 million).

Major Money and ActBlue

By 2016, the presidential election year where Hillary Clinton was challenging Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter had established itself as a well-organized network. That year the Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy announced the formation of the Black-Led Movement Fund (BLMF), “a six-year pooled donor campaign aimed at raising $100 million for the Movement for Black Lives coalition” in which BLM was a central part. By then Soros foundations had already given some $33 million in grants to the Black Lives Matter movement. This was serious foundation money.

The BLMF identified itself as being created by top foundations including in addition to the Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundations. They described their role: “The BLMF provides grants, movement building resources, and technical assistance to organizations working advance the leadership and vision of young, Black, queer, feminists and immigrant leaders who are shaping and leading a national conversation about criminalization, policing and race in America.”

The Movement for Black Lives Coalition (M4BL) which includes Black Lives Matter, already in 2016 called for “defunding police departments, race-based reparations, voting rights for illegal immigrants, fossil-fuel divestment, an end to private education and charter schools, a universal basic income, and free college for blacks.”

Notably, when we click on the website of M4BL, under their donate button we learn that the donations will go to something called ActBlue Charities. ActBlue facilitates donations to “democrats and progressives.” As of May 21, ActBlue had given $119 million to the campaign of Joe Biden.

That was before the May 25 BLM worldwide protests. Now major corporations such as Apple, Disney, Nike and hundreds others may be pouring untold and unaccounted millions into ActBlue under the name of Black Lives Matter, funds that in fact can go to fund the election of a Democrat President Biden. Perhaps this is the real reason the Biden campaign has been so confident of support from black voters. What is clear from only this account of the crucial role of big money foundations behind protest groups such as Black lives Matter is that there is a far more complex agenda driving the protests now destabilizing cities across America. The role of tax-exempt foundations tied to the fortunes of the greatest industrial and financial companies such as Rockefeller, Ford, Kellogg, Hewlett and Soros says that there is a far deeper and far more sinister agenda to current disturbances than spontaneous outrage would suggest.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from NEO

What kind of “popular revolution” is this?!

Source

THE SAKER • JUNE 16, 2020

Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan Chase

I have to say that I am amazed that so many folks on the Left seem to think that the current riots in the US are a spontaneous rebellion against police violence, systemic racism, and history of persecution and exploitation of Blacks and Indians, etc. As for the violence, looting and riots – they are either excused as a result of some kind of righteous wrath or blamed on “infiltrators”. In my previous article I tried to show how the Democrats and the US media tried to instrumentalize these riots and to use them against Trump’s bid for reelection. I accompanied the article with a carefully staged photo-op of US Democrats “taking a knee” in solidarity (as if the leaders of the Democratic Party gave a hoot about Blacks or poor US Americans!).

What I did not mention was how the US (and even trans-national) corporate world backed these riots to the hilt. Here are just a few examples of this:

YouTube:

Amazon, Bank of America & Sephora:

And it is not only in the USA. Check out what Adidas in Germany has been up to:

and finally, my personal super-favorite:

Jamie Dimon and the JP Morgan Chase Bank:

All those of us who thought that the corporate world was all about money, that the corporate “culture” had all the signs of severe psychopathy and that billionaires did not give a damn about the poor and the oppressed, but now we know better: we thought of them as evil 1%ers, and it turns out that there are kind, highly principled people, who care about injustice and freedom and who truly feel bad, very very bad, for all the injustices done to Blacks!

Do you really buy this?

I sure don’t!

These are not small mom-and-pop stores where ethics and kindness still exist. These are the very corporations who benefited most from all the inequalities, injustice, violence and imperial wars of aggression and it would be truly pollyannish to think that these corporations and their CEOs suddenly grew a conscience (the exact same applies to the leadership of the Democratic Party, of course!).

So let’s go back to the basics: corporations are about money, that is a truism. Yes, sometimes corporations try to present a “human face”, but this is nothing more than a marketing trick destined to create consumer loyalty. Now I don’t believe for one second that the mega-corporations listed above expect to make much money from supporting the riots, at least not in a direct way. Nor do I believe that these corporations are trying to impersonate a conscience because they fear a Black consumer boycott (what was true in Tuskegee in the late 1950s is not true today, if only because of the completely different scale of the protests).

So if not money – what is at stake here?

Power.

Specifically, the US deep state – at a major faction within that deep state – is clearly desperate to get rid of Trump (and not for the right reasons, of which there are plenty).

Another victory of the “coalition of minorities” and another defeat for Trump

There are plenty of signs that illustrate that Trump is even losing control of the Executive, including Secretary Esper contradicting Trump on what is a key issue – restoring law and order – or the US Ambassador to South Korea voicing support for BLM (I consider that these actions by top officials against their own Commander in Chief border on treason). Needless to say, the pro-Dems neo-libs at Slate immediately began dreaming about, and calling for, a military revolt against Trump.

Last but not least, we now have a “free zone” in Seattle, the notorious Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, “CHAZ” aka “CHOP” where, among other “curiosities”, Whites are told to give 10 bucks to a Black person. This means that until law and order are restored to what is now the CHAZ, the United States has lost its sovereignty over a part of one of its cities. That is a “black eye” for any US President who, after all, is the leader of the Executive branch of government and the Commander in Chief of a military supposed (in theory only, of course) to defend the United States against all enemies.

What do all of these developments have in common?

They are designed to show that Trump has lost control of the country and that all good and decent people now stand united against him.

There are several major problems with this plan.

For one thing, this is all completely illegal. What began as a typical race riot is now openly turning into sedition.

The second major problem of this plan is that it relies on what I call a “coalition of minorities” to achieve its goal, it is therefore ignoring the will of the majority of the people. This can backfire, especially if the chaos and violence continue to spread.

Will he take orders from Pelosi?

Next, there is the “Golem/Frankenstein” issue: it is much easier to launch a wildfire than to contain or suppress it. Nancy Pelosi might be dumb enough to think that she and her gang can control the likes of Raz Simone, but history shows that when the state abdicates its monopoly on violence, anarchy ensues.

By the way, it is important to note here that Trump, at least so far, has not taken the bait and has not used federal forces to reimpose law and order in Seattle, Atlanta or elsewhere.

He must realize that liberating the so-called CHAZ might result in a bloodbath (there appear to be plenty of weapons inside the CHAZ) and that the Democrats are dreaming about blaming him for a bloodbath. Trump’s strategy, at least so far, appears to let the lawlessness continue and blame the Democrats for it.

While Trump’s strategy makes sense, it also is inherently very dangerous because if the state cannot reimpose law and order, then all sorts of “volunteers” might decide to give it a shot (literally). Check out this headline “Bikers For Trump Organizing to Retake Seattle On July 4th“. Whether these bikers will actually try to take over the CHAZ or not, even the fact that they are preparing to do so shows, yet again, that the state has lost its monopoly on violence.

Finally, this strategy to oust Trump by means of lawlessness and anarchy could greatly contribute to the breakup of the United States, if not de jure, then at least de facto. How?

For one thing, the United States is a big country, not only in terms of geographical size, but also in socio-economic and even cultural terms. Some US states have a large Black population, others much less. But they all mostly watch the same news media. Which means that when there are race riots in, say, Los Angeles or Baltimore, the people who live in states like Montana or the Dakotas feel that it is their country which is threatened. Coincidentally (or not?), these mostly White states happen to have a large part of their population as, Hillary’s famous “deplorables”. Some liberals call these states “flyover states”. It also happens that civilians in these states own a large number of firearms and know how to use them.

The same applies to different locations within any one state. Take California for example, which many view as being very liberal, progressive. Well, that might be true for many cities in California, but as soon as you enter rural California, the prevailing culture changes rather dramatically. The same urban vs rural dichotomy also exists in many other states, including Florida.

The risk here is the following one: some parts of the United States can collapse and become zones of total lawlessness while others will “circle the wagons” and take whatever measures are needed to protect themselves and their way of life.

This does not mean that the US, as a country, will break-up into several successor states. That could only happen much further down the road, but it does mean that different areas of the country could start facing the crisis autonomously and even possibly in direct violation of US laws. When that happens, poverty and violence typically sharply rise. There are already reports of vigilantism in New Mexico(interestingly, in this case the authorities did send in the cops).

In his seminal article “Race and Crime in America” (an absolute MUST READfor any person wanting to understand what is taking place today!) Ron Unz makes a very interesting observation:

“The empirical fact is that presence or absence of large numbers of Hispanics or Asians in a given state seems to have virtually no impact upon white voting patterns. Meanwhile, there exists a strong relationship between the size of a state’s black population and the likelihood that local whites will favor the Republicans”.

In other words, the larger the Black minority, the more likely Whites will vote Republican. Of course, one can dismiss this by saying that these Whites are all racists, but that does not help either because it begs the question of why Whites do not become racists when living next to Hispanics and Asians, but do so when they live near Blacks. The explanation is in Ron’s article: “local urban crime rates in America seem to be almost entirely explained by the local racial distribution” (please see the charts in Ron’s article for the data supporting this conclusion).

This makes for a potentially very explosive mix, especially in a time when police officers now risk a reprimand, a demotion. being fired or even criminal charges for using “excessive force” against any Black suspect (yes, US cops often do use excessive force, but the solution here is not to paralyze the police forces, lest the civilians feel like they need to defend themselves.

As I have said it many times, I don’t believe that the term “race” has a scientific basis, nor do concepts such as “Black” or “White”. This does not mean that they don’t have a political meaning, especially in a country which is obsessed by race issues (yes, one can obsess about non-existing things). In the US most people self-identify with a color, thus to them this is something very real. For example, the figures used in Ron Unz’ article are based upon these concepts understood sociologically, not biologically, and this is the only reason why I use them too, though somewhat reluctantly, I will admit.

Conclusion: this is no popular revolution at all

It is undeniable that a major chuck of the US ruling classes have decided to support the BLM movement and the riots it instigates. Furthermore, these US ruling classes have instrumentalized these riots in a transparent attempt to prevent a Trump reelection in November. And just like the Republicans have been destroying the AngloZionist empire on the international scene, the Democrats have been destroying the United States from within. Far from being a real popular protest movement, the BLM movement is a tool in the hands of one faction of the US deep state against another faction. A lot of Trump nominees/appointees are now seeing the writing on the wall and are betraying their boss in order to switch sides and abandon what they see as a sinking ship.

My personal feeling is that Trump is too weak and too much of a coward to fight his political enemies (if he had any spine, it would have shown at the time when Trump betrayed Flynn only a month into his presidency). History, however, shows that a political vacuum cannot last very long. In Russia the chaos lasted from February to November 1917, at which point the Bolsheviks (who were a relatively small party) easily seized power and, following a bloody civil war, restored their version of law and order. I still don’t see a civil war taking place in the USA, but some kind of coup is, I think, a very real possibility. This is especially true considering that most Democrats will never accept a Trump reelection while most Republicans will never accept a Biden presidency. This is a case of “not my president” powerfully backfiring on its creators.

Those of us who live in the US better prepare for a very dangerous and difficult year!

Protests show ‘American exceptionalism’ is over: political researcher

Source

June 17, 2020 – 12:0

TEHRAN – Lebanese political researcher Ali Mourad tells the Tehran Times that the anti-racism protests across the United States show that “American Exceptionalism” has come to an end.

Following the suffocation of George Floyd, a black African-American, at the hands of a white policeman on May 25 in Minneapolis, anti-racism protests have engulfed the United States.

Mourad also says, “We are witnessing an apparent ‘conflict of ideologies and identities’ in American society.”

Following is the text of the interview:

1. What are the messages of the recent protests in America against racial discrimination?

Answer: Of what we’ve seen up till now in those protests we can note that the Black struggle against systematic racism in the United States has risen back again, with new means of expression and a broad base of solidarity worldwide, which is more comprehensive than the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It tells us also that it’s a declaration of the end of the so-called “American Exceptionalism” or what was also named as the “American Melting Pot.” We are witnessing an apparent “Conflict of Ideologies and Identities” in American society.

“Trump is somehow trying to make use of the protests by showing that it’s a rebellion of the blacks against the system ‘that is owned and run by the white people’.”2. Do you think that the Trump administration bears the responsibility for what happened against George Floyd, who was suffocated under the knee of a white police officer, or should we accuse the political structure in America, which is built based on racism?

A: Since he entered the White House, Trump is indeed responsible for inciting the violent actions against people of color in America, looking forward to tightening the loyalty of the electoral base that delivered him into power in 2016. However, I believe he’s not the only one or his party to blame for the Black community grievances. What the African Americans experienced and still inside the United States dates back to 400 years ago. The so-called “Founding Fathers” of the U.S. who wrote the “Declaration of Independence” were racists and owned slaves. Even the third president (Jefferson) writes: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that their Creator endows them with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. However, he had 600 slaves. He even started raping his slave “Sally Hemings” when she was 14 years old and had six children from her whom he refused to accept them as his children officially. It’s always been a racial system that governed in the United States. Right after Abraham Lincoln freed Blacks they were used to reconstruct the country after the civil war ended, later on, the Blacks were enrolled in the U.S. army so they could fight America’s battles in WWI and WWII and other conflicts. Even today, the majority of U.S. prisoners are black, and they are used under forced labor to manufacture the weapons of major U.S. arms companies.

3. Do you think that Trump is trying to militarize response to civil unrest for economic and geopolitical considerations which may enhance the prospects of a civil war in the future?

A: I think Trump wants nothing but re-elected again, so he’s reading from Richard Nixon’s book. The latter used the “Law & Order” speech to win the votes of the white population in the southern states, who were upset with the massive protests of the black community in spring 1968 after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. By then, the Republicans had what they called “The Southern Strategy” that aimed to flip the white conservative political views in the southern states from Democrats to Republicans, by adopting a militarist fear-mongering speech from the black community so they would attract them. It worked for the Republicans, and since the early 1970s, all Republican presidential candidates used the same strategy, and Trump is using it today. So yes, Trump is somehow trying to make use of the protests by showing that it’s a rebellion of the blacks against the system “that is owned and run by the white people.”

“MBS (Muhammad Bin Salman) and some other heads of Arab sheikhdoms believe their destiny is linked with Trump’s, that’s why they’re defending him.”4. What is the secret behind some Arab countries’ silence on recent events in the U.S. and the Saudi media attack on all those who support the protests and criticize Trump’s racism?

A: Most of the Arab regimes are very careful when it comes to Trump. They don’t want to upset him because they fear his reaction. As for Saudi Arabia, you can easily realize how nervous Riyadh was during those protests. In general, Saudi doesn’t believe in the right to protest, what if it was a protest against the protector of MBS? So yes, the Saudi media was doing the job that no U.S. media outlet dares to do, trying to alienate the protests and even accuse the protestors of being run by outsiders! MBS (Muhammad Bin Salman) and some other heads of Arab sheikhdoms believe their destiny is linked with Trump’s, that’s why they’re defending him.

5. How do the American protests affect the upcoming presidential elections?

A: It’s still early to evaluate the outcomes of the protests, but I think what matters to the un-politically affiliated “silent majority” is the economy, more than the racial issue. That’s America, and it will always be so. Between 1970 and 2020, African Americans conducted tens of significant protests and uprisings all over America, but little was achieved concerning gaining their full civil and economic rights. Trump is acting in a way that’s clear he doesn’t care if he lost the vote of the little margin the voters of color. He is trying to focus on his “successful” economic performance to gain some points for his polls.

6. The U.S. is using methods of violence against domestic protests, a practice it has repeatedly used in its imperial adventures abroad. How does it show the brutality of capitalism against suppressed people?

A: There is news that some major U.S. arms companies are about to sell police departments and law enforcement military tools and weapons, so that be used against U.S. citizens. Trump is pushing forward, so this happens when he says, “I’ll support and fund the law enforcement.” I think it’s a moment where we realize the deep quagmire America is facing: Washington is not capable anymore of starting a new war that they guarantee a victory in it after their defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. And since arms companies need to sell their products, it seems Washington has no problem to pour those weapons inside the country. With the U.S. 2nd amendment being guarded by white supremacy and arms companies’ lobbyists, America would be heading towards a second civil war in the future so that the capitalist corporate industrial complex gains more money. They did it to the oppressed people all over the world; now, they might be doing it against the minorities or even themselves inside America. That’s what you call: “Greed Capitalist Ideology.”

 

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