#and has he done any internal white supremacy work

[swampndn]

Omfg I get asked to be on a lot of panels and be a reviewer for a lot of opportunities like fellowships, commissions, awards, etc. I usually say yes because I use that positional privilege to move Natives, artists of color, and other marginalized people through such a white system. And to also be a roadblock for awful white people.

And that is exactly what I had to do today.

A white man submitted an item of their work that was aggressively racist. I shouldn't go into detail, but it was JAW DROPPINGLY BAD AGAINST BLACK AND NATIVE PEOPLE. Also it was written by a famous person, and I was so mad that he has just gotten whatever he wanted because he's a white man who people know.

I scored his ENTIRE application as a 1.8 out of 20.

Bitch ain't getting this opportunity 🔪

[qqueenofhades]

I frankly sometimes feel like social media has ultimately given a lot of people the illusion of power, while also causing them to become corrupted in a similar way to traditional forms of power, only without any actual power that goes with it. The similarities in their behavior to the latter is disturbing as hell, ESPECIALLY given the horrid behavior of online types the past few months.

I really can't emphasize enough how much of a constructed and artificial environment social media is, especially these days, and especially the Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, which is still the main avenue by which a lot of people attempt to "do" social justice. Once upon a time, Twitter was a moderately beneficial public communication service because everyone and God was on it and you could therefore get communiques directly from the source, there was a blue-check verification service that actually helped you understand who was real and who was not, and while there were serious and ongoing flaws such as there is when useful public discourse is sacrificed on the Great Altar of Profit, there was at least some attempt to monitor or ban Nazis, white supremacists, bad actors, and eventually Trump himself. All of that changed and/or was directly destroyed when Apartheid Clyde took over and turned it into a revenue-generating service for Russian propaganda, alt-right cranks, bots, and the rest of the Elon Fanclub willing to pay $8 for a meaningless blue checkmark, while trashing the site's guardrails and any other useful features. It basically exists for Elon to fanboy Putin, Trump, white supremacy, his 4chan trolls, and anything else that makes his money (while Mr. Free Speech Absolutist arbitrarily bans anyone who hurts his man-child fee-fees). This is not an unbiased, neutral, or constructive environment to start with. You don't have any certainty about who you're interacting with or who is amplifying your messages, and only a hardcore-radicalized (of whatever persuasion) base of human users remain, while a lot of casual users have left.

As such, if you're basing anything (hypothesis, claim, source, evidence, opinion) on "what everyone on Twitter thinks," that is fatally flawed data to start with. Even at the peak of its popularity, something like 24% of all American adults regularly used Twitter. That still means 76% of the country who doesn't (and the number is larger now as Chucklefuck McGee has continued driving it into the ground). If you're forming your ideas or looking for "what America thinks" just by quoting or relying on the tweets of people who already agree with you, you've done basically nothing and you certainly haven't proved it, you've stunted your own critical thinking skills, and you are selecting from a data source that is already fatally poisoned and limited in any number of ways. Adding to the echo chamber of similar opinions on Twitter is not going to actually influence public policy or make lasting change. Yes, the interns and/or public relations staff of the public figures still on there will probably check the feed every so often and make note of things that come up, but couching it as mindless vitriolic abuse and/or demonstrably nonsensical things is not going to get back to their boss. It will just be ignored and/or given less weight in the limited space available for things that are deemed important enough to actually follow up on/make policy around.

Also, a lot of people saw Trump tweeting insane things at 3am for four years, and somehow decided that was actually how US/American presidential and governmental policy was made, rather than that he was a fucking narcissistic-personality-disorder psychopathic lunatic. But uh, and it should go without saying, it didn't work. Just because Trump posted something absolutely unhinged and announced it was now policy, that doesn't mean it was. Half the time he didn't even do so much as issue an executive order, those can be and regularly are challenged in courts, and so forth, because despite all its flaws, America is not an absolute monarchy where the king can rule by fiat and have it totally done, no questions, the end. That's also why Trump's second term would be even more dangerous than his first. In his first, he was flailing around and yelling on Twitter and not really paying attention to anything. In his second, the administration will be staffed top to bottom with dedicated fascists like the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 people, who have spent the last four years brooding on revenge and drawing up detailed plans to actually co-opt and suborn all the levers, checks, balances, controls, and functions of government directly to Trump's personal will (and/or the outrageously evil people pulling strings behind the scenes, because Trump is now basically a gibbering orange vegetable and the media is still far too beholden to the Biden Old!!! narrative to accurately report this).

In short, another Trump term (God fucking forbid) would be run by the kind of methodical and careful evildoers who know that policy isn't made by tweet, and would act accordingly. That would be much, much harder to remove, counteract, or fix, it would almost certainly lead to the end of American democracy at least for most of our lifetimes, and the repercussions of that would be absolutely terrible. But because we still have people who act like Trump is somehow a preferable option, who think that it's bad that Biden is trying to work through established and long-term channels to make sustainable policy and not just get short-term chuckles from an internet dopamine approval rush, that is the risk we are running from now until November 2024. After that, either way, we'll know for sure: we'll finally have a measure of safety, or we will be comprehensively fucked for generations. We all have the power to influence which of those outcomes come to pass. I suggest we use it.

[fullhalalalchemist]

there's this sort of inevitably around trump/fascism. even if he lost this time, it would've won in 2028 because of how conservative and neoliberal america has gotten. and that's not the fault of americans, but the leadership in this country. no one, none of the Dems, have ever or will ever hold him or anyone accountable for anything. hell, none of the orchestrators of the Iraq war were ever held accountable, instead trotted out like saviors of democracy. i'm not saying his ascension to power is a good thing, nor am i in the camp that we have to "break it before we fix it". but when the democrats have so utterly failed to deliver on any of their promises, when we saw our social fabric tear and nothing be done to address the rampant racism and sexism, when price gouging kept happening and no one held the companies accountable for their greed, when people's standard of living is objectively worse now than it was in 2020, when they have abandoned us....what else is there? this country has had a horrific turn towards conservatism that was caused by so many factors, and the democrats, instead of meeting that and the pandemic infected world with robust economic reform and social welfare programs, cut nearly every single one of them back and gaslit the nation on how the economy is "better" and pointed at graphs while people turned more homeless. when their base said again and again we need gun reform, police abolition, an end to climate change, they met it with a genocide. the fix has been in.

they screwed us over. the fix has been in since at least 2016 in their camp. it is now just glaringly obvious to anyone who sees past their shitty DC brain propaganda that their main objective has been always to protect their own pocketbooks and uphold white supremacy.

the institutions have failed us. the "leadership" has failed us. there is an entire oligarchy, an entire cabal of criminals that have a stronghold on western governments who have been working behind the scenes for decades to work for this moment. because it's not just us. this is happening in so many countries across the western world. we're fucked. they fucked us over. i truly believe biden never intended to win. how do you see his internal polling which was showing an even WORSE loss, all his actions over the past year, and expect otherwise? how do you see the internal fights with everyone from her staff to BILL KRISTOL telling kamala to go more left, and him telling her to turn more conservative, and think otherwise? the only reason he didn't go forward is because he got sick with covid, in the most biblical version of irony.

and i say all this to say, do not blame yourself for this. do not blame your fellow voter/non-voter. they didn't fail you. "leadership" did. these institutions did. you are only ever responsible for your response. so either despair and put our head down in hopes you survive a few more years, or get radicalized and get organized. we have to build our own hope, with blood sweat and tears.

i love you for the sake of humanity.

[the1975attheirverybest]

https://twitter.com/MercuryJax/status/1682468577310576640?s=20

so i saw this thread on twitter and at first I got it but I'm a bit confused because while matty speaking up might make restrictions tighter surely that means no one is then allowed to say anything about what is going on therefore only leaving the very people who will get hurt to do the work??? and as much as the band have ultimately got out scott free they were not at no risk? like there was still a chance of imprisonment or violence? and I swear I saw someone mention how international awareness often helps push for change in these types of circumstances? and if he were to be an ally in the traditional sense by uplifting the voices of those in Malaysia is he not directly putting those people at risk? but I don't want to be like "you should be grateful he tried his best" but blaming him for speaking up seems counterproductive when the issue is the government?

also what you said earlier is so so so sweet genuinely 🥺 - 🐸

Yeah, I mean, like I said to the anon before, there was no damage-free option here. But I think the least acceptable option to the band would’ve been to say nothing at all. Like in no world was the 1975 going to perform in a homophobic country, take the money, do and say nothing, and walk away.

Also, like I said yesterday, if we only ever made acts of resistance when outcomes were 100% favorable (like nobody getting hurt, the band not getting blamed, no risk for any involved, etc) then nobody would ever do anything. But that’s not how the world works. Sure, as leftists or progressives, ideally, we would love for the band to have said what they said, and for the people of Malaysia to have been 100% exempt from any consequences, and then for the government to have said “ah yes we have now realized that we are oppressive and it’s bad and wrong and we shall change. Thanks Matty Healy, we truly needed you to knock some sense into us.” But that’s impossible and that wasn’t even the point of the whole thing.

Yeah, sometimes extraordinary circumstances like this do bring in international attention. Like, I can only speak on the U.S. but sometimes, a country will be struggling with health issues or with war or with systemic discrimination for agessss. And the US will be aware. And do nothing. Until just by accident, an American who happens to be visiting the country, ends up being caught up in whatever struggle or issue the country has, and then SUDDENLY! All the white people are horrified and up in arms about it. It’s a sad truth but it is how the world works. Cuz of white supremacy. So, yeah, Matty and Ross being dragged into the conversation has probably made it reach the eyes and ears of others who wouldn’t have cared.

I mean, all the people in my ask box degrading Matty right now, where were y’all all these years when Malaysians were being oppressed well before the 1975 even went there?

So, I guess what I’m saying is that the situation is probably somewhere in the middle of those two seemingly opposing possibilities. There’s likely some truth to both kinds of responses. But I think it wasn’t the intention behind this wasn’t to like fix homophobia once and for all. So it not being perfect means it’s fallen short. No. They never claimed to be politicians. Let alone Malaysian politicians. They saw an injustice. A group of people who are not as able to speak up for themselves. And they decided to do their part. It’s a STEP in the direction of having the conversation. But there’s still a lot to be done.

[worstloki]

please read the article 'How White Fandom is Colonizing "Character-Coding"' by Shafira Jordan and quit while you're ahead

Okay, so I read it and see the problem, and I’ll try to address all their points in order because I don’t wholly agree with the article. I know it’s a lot to read so I’ve put tldr; sections at the end of each :)

Misusing the Term Reinforces Negative Stereotypes for Marginalized People 

The article essentially argues that labeling characters which are villainous as POC-coded is bad because they’re not morally pure and doing so "reinforces the idea that people of color are naturally dangerous and not to be trusted.”

Which is fair as you don’t want all the representation to be of ‘bad’ characters, but I also don’t believe all representative characters have to be ‘good’ either as it would be equally racist to divide good/bad in such a way. Not that I would place Loki under ‘bad’ to begin with, but arguing that characters shouldn’t be labelled as POC-coded for reasons unrelated to what’s presented in the narrative or because they did bad things is :/ even if lack of good representation is a prevalent issue in current Western and influenced media. 

Ideally there should be a range of representative characters that fall into ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘anywhere in-between’ because variety and complexity in character types should, in theory, be treated as common practice (which can only happen with a multitude of representation!).

And a bit unrelated but... within the fictional context of Thor 1, all the Jotnar (sans Loki) are presented to the audience as ‘bad’ by default. They desperately want to get their Casket back to the point of attempting stealing it (from the ‘good’ characters), they fight the heroes and even when the gang and Thor (’good’ characters) are enjoying or going overboard with taking lives it’s inconsequential, Laufey wants to kill the opposing king (who just happens to be a ‘good’ character) and will resort to low-handed methods to do so, etc. The narrative itself is from the frame of reference of the ‘good’ and we only see warriors of Jotunheim though so we understand why it’s like this, because regardless of their race/experiences the narrative carries, even if it most definitely would be seen as racist from our real-life perspectives if the ‘monstrous’ race were presented by actual people of colour, even if it would make sense for the people on on different realms living in different environments to be different from each other, and realistic even for that to be the root of some conflict. 

tldr; not using a specific label to prevent negative presentations of the characters seems a bit strange to do when the coding would be based off the text, but with limited representation available I see why it would be done, even if I still believe minority-coding is free game to expand/interpret.

Improperly Labeling a Character as “POC-coded” Suggests the Experiences of All People of Color are the Same 

The article argues that labeling Loki as POC-coded “suggests that all people of color have the same experiences, when in reality, people of color come from different places, have different cultures, and have different traditions.” And while it’s true that the term doesn’t go into detail about which particular experiences (and these experiences can vary vastly due to diversity!) the appropriate measure would be to remove the umbrella term POC altogether as people of colour tend to also vary. But that’s also exactly why it’s an all-encompassing general term? It’s a way to denote anyone who isn’t “white” and has the associated cultural privilege that comes with the concept of white supremacy.  

And, obviously, in the fictional setting presented, the concept of white supremacy is not prodded at, but cultural supremacy is definitely one that makes recurring appearances, right next to the parts about Asgard being a realm built on imperialism with ongoing colonial practice. 

My take on this is that Loki’s narrative features a struggle with identity after finding out he’s of a different race and was being treated differently his entire life and being Jotun was presumably a part of the reasoning even if he didn’t know it. He’s basically treated as of less worth for inherently existing differently. I do believe that racism is a common-enough POC experience, but that while Loki was born with blue skin he passes/appears white which is why I don’t say that Loki is a POC, just that he has been coded/can be interpreted this way. 

There’s also the entire thing with Loki trying to fit in and prove he belongs by trying to fit the theory and be The Most Asgardian by committing genocide (which ultimately makes no difference as he’s still not the ‘acceptable’ version of Asgardian), and the denial/rejection of his birth culture in destructively lashing out towards them (which even Thor is confused by because Loki isn’t typically violent), and the fact his self worth plummets and he is passively suicidal upon finding out he’s Jotun (internalized racism? general drop in self-worth after finding out he’s adopted and has been lied to? Bit of both?), but what do I know, I’m sure none of those are, at their base, common experiences or relatable feelings for anyone or decent rep because we see such themes on-screen presented wonderfully in different lights all the time. 

tldr; every set of experiences could be different, some types of discrimination could overlap, if you limit an umbrella term to only very specific circumstances then it’s no longer an umbrella term.

Suggesting that White Characters are Meant to be Seen as People of Color Ignores the Actual Characters of Color that are Present in these Stories

I don’t agree with most of this section, but that may just be the way the arguments are put together, which I don’t blame the author for.

“ Implying that Loki is a person of color completely ignores Heimdall and Hogun, the only Black and Asian Asgardians who appear in the movie. ”

Characters such as Hogun and Heimdall which are played by actual people of colour have smaller roles in the films and any prejudice they could face for being POC in-universe isn’t made apparent, while Loki at the very least comes to the realization that something he couldn’t change (race, parentage,) was having him treated differently his whole life and had to come to terms with it. The Vanir/Aesir are also both treated similarly on-screen, and Heimdall having dark skin isn’t plot relevant, whereas Jotnar are treated as lesser consistently and are relevant through the movie (breaking into the vault, Thor and co. attack Jotunheim, Loki’s deal with Laufey, the attempted regicide (and the successful one XD), destroying jotunheim, Loki saying he’s not Thor’s brother,). 

I also see including characters as POC-coded as... more representation? In all canon-compliant interpretations of the characters Hogun being Vanir is always explicitly mentioned because it’s a fact that just is, up to the appearance and even the world-building of Vanaheim in some fanworks use particularly East Asian culture as inspiration. I have never come across a Marvel fandom Heimdall interpretation where he’s not Black... but because these characters are more minor/side-characters of course they get less attention! 

“ In Loki’s fandom, Heimdall’s name sometimes gets thrown in to suggest that it was he all along who was the real villain due to his “racism” against Loki and the rest of the Jotun. It is, of course, ironic to suggest that somehow the only Black Asgardian to appear in the movie can oppress the privileged white prince. “

I... don’t know where to start with this. But the example of theorizing given in the article wasn’t suggesting Heimdall was bad or trying to explain his actions in Thor 1 by saying he is Black... and just looking at a character’s actions shouldn’t be done less or more critically because of skin tone in my opinion. Heimdall may have been trying to do what was best and protect the realm but if the audience didn’t know that Loki was up to dodgy things then the coding would be switched around because he was trying to spy and committed treason and then tried to kill Loki. People... can hold feelings towards others... regardless of skin... and suspect them... for reasons other than skin... although I do still have questions about whether Heimdall knew Loki was Jotun or not. (Even if I personally don’t think it’d make a difference to how he’d treat Loki?)

Some Loki fans have also suggested that because Jotuns have blue skin that this alone makes him a person of color (even if the audience is only allowed to see Loki in his true Jotun form for mere seconds of screentime). This, again, shows a lack of understanding when it comes to race. It doesn’t matter what skin color the Jotuns have. 

Race can differentiate between physical and/or behavioural characteristics!! Not being blue all the time doesn’t make him any less Jotun!! He’s got internalized stuff to work through and is used to being Aesir!! At least 1 parent is Jotun so even if Loki was passing as Aesir he’s probably Jotun!! (I don’t know how magic space genetics work for sure but Loki being Jotun was an entire very important jump-starting point in Thor 1!!). It’s a fantasy text and typically things like having different coloured skin indicates a different race or is sometimes if a species has multiple then is just considered a skin colour. That’s how coding works!! The Jotnar are very specifically the only race we see in the movie with a skin-tone not within the ‘normal’ human range, which alienates them to the audience from the get-go!! They’re an “other” and on the opposite side to the ‘good’ characters.

Both Loki and his birth father, Laufey (Colm Feore), are played by white men, and it is impossible for a white man to successfully play a character of color. 

The specification of men here bothers me, but yes, you don’t get ‘white’ people to play characters of colour if it can be avoided. (And it can be avoided.)

This also connects with the previous point made that people of color come from various places. There is nothing specifically about the Jotun that could be traced to any specific person of color, and even if there were, there would be no way for white men to portray them without being disrespectful.

This is where arguments about the definition of coding and how specificity/generalizations and do/don’t come in. I know I’m subjective and lean towards the more rep the better, but while I agree ‘white’ people wouldn’t be able to respectfully play a POC I don’t think that rule should have to carry over into fantasy-based fiction. I know texts reflect on reality and reality can reflect within texts, but if contextually there is racial discrimination and there are similar ideas which resonate with the audience’s own experiences I’d say it’s coded well enough to allow that.

tldr; Thor 1′s narrative revolves mainly around Thor and Loki, of which race is kinda kinda a significant theme in Loki’s part of the story. Not so much explored with less-developed side characters such as Heimdall and Hogun, even though their actors are actual people of colour. 

How Much of this is Really Well-Intentioned?

In the fantasy space viking world Heimdall and Hogun don’t face any on-screen prejudice and their appearance is not mentioned (which is nice, for sure! good to have casual rep!) but adding on to the roles they play in the narrative the explicit fantasy-racism in the movie isn't aimed at Asian/Black characters, but towards the Humans -to a lesser extent- and the Jotnar, including Loki, who only just found out he comes under that bracket.

The article mentions how fandom space toxicity often “reaches the actors who portray the characters,“ which is true, and it’s shameful that people have to justify their roles or presences are harassed for the pettiest things like skin tone/cultural background, but I don’t see coding characters as removing the spotlight from interesting characters such as those which are actually POC, rather expressing a demand for more rep, since well-written complex characters which are diverse are often absent/minor enough in the media, and therefore can get easily brushed aside in both canon and fandom spaces.

tldr; It’s obviously not a replacement for actual representation, but, if a character is marginalized and can be interpreted as coded, even if they would only be considered so within the context of the textual landscape, I don’t see why spreading awareness through exploring the coding as a possibility for the character shouldn’t be done, even if the media is being presented by people who are ‘white’ or privileged or may not fall into the categories themselves, as long as it’s done respectfully to those it could explicitly represent.

[princeescaluswords]

Maladaptive Daydreaming vs. Unreliable Narrator: FIGHT!

Since the far-fetched theory of “Scott was an unreliable narrator of Teen Wolf who twisted what happened to make himself look good” is still making its way through the fandom, I’d thought I’d talk about how accepting this theory as true requires its adherents to pretend certain scenes never happened and how that becomes a cover for a racist re-interpretation of the show.

It was prompted by a notorious pro-Hale member of the fandom arguing that the canon scene of Scott figuring out that Derek was kidnapped at the beginning of season four had to be twisted by Scott because Peter would have to have noticed that Derek was missing first, would be the one who told Lydia or Stiles, and would be looking for Derek himself.   There’s an amazing amount of speculation to wade through there with not a single supporting scene to back the fan’s interpretation up, but I have to admit that if you believe that a major television production would go to such lengths as to create an entire narrative sequence which is completely false and yet never reveal to the audience what really happened in any way … and why would the production do that? … you could perhaps, if you strain yourself, see it.

But there is an earlier scene which serves to point out the incredible incapacity of the ‘Scott the Unreliable Narrator’ theory, and that’s the scene at the end of Season 3B.  In it, Derek is attacked in his loft by the Calaveras and by Kate, and in his terror, he retreats into what I’ve heard some people call a maladaptive daydream, where he talks with Stiles in a locker room, only for him to realize it’s not real when Stiles has six fingers on one hand.

If we apply this particular fandom theory, the scene is being told to the audience by Scott and thus passed through the filter of his perceptions.   The concept presents several interesting questions that will probably go unaddressed by the proponents of this theory.

How would Scott know the contents of Derek’s maladaptive daydream?  If, as they like to conclude, Scott reinterprets his relationship with Derek to be far more positive than it was, why would Derek confide in Scott about his moment of psychological weakness in the face of enemies?   After all, they argue that Derek does not like Scott, does not trust Scott, and does not see Scott as his alpha. What would Derek’s motivation be then?  An alternative would be that Derek didn’t have this daydream -- what a blow for Sterek shippers -- and that Scott is the author of this sequence, cleverly imposing it on Derek to show his weakness.   What cunning!   Scott’s motivation remains ... obscure.

If Scott is an unreliable narrator who is twisting the story to make himself look good, why would he present the dream in this fashion? This scene sets up Derek’s relationship to a member of Scott’s pack. They often present Scott as being an Evil Moron Tyrant, constantly self-absorbed and making everything about himself, so why wouldn’t he make this about himself as well?   If he was going to turn around the next episode and steal the credit for noticing Derek was missing, why not claim that he was so important to Derek that Derek would turn to him in his dream?  

If the narration of this dream was not twisted by Scott at all, revealing that Derek looks to Stiles for emotional insight, what other scenes in the show are presented without Scott’s manipulation?  There would be no reason, by the proposed interpretation of how the show is biased, for a distrustful Derek to tell Scott about this for Scott to twist.  Unless they want to make the argument that this scene and only this scene was not tainted by Scott’s bias, conscious or unconscious, what other scenes fall under this category?  If the goal of the production was to throw doubt on every single part of Scott’s story, why wouldn’t they make it clear what parts of the story were free of his point of view?   I know that meta specialists (if you can call them that) have tried to point toward examples of t-shirt colors and the presence of mirrors, but none of these serve as consistent indicators.  What’s the payoff for the production to do this in the long run, especially if they never staged a reveal?

The proponents of this theory argue against every single aspect of Scott’s hero’s journey, presenting him as the primary villain instead of the lead protagonist by claiming – without a shred of external evidence and no internal evidence that is not the subbest of subtext – that none of the scenes presenting Scott in a positive light are true but all of the scenes presenting Scott’s flaws should be taken as honest depictions.  They ignore the inconsistencies of its application and the conclusions implied by their arguments.   If Scott and Deaton (and only Scott and Deaton -- this isn’t applied to Isaac or Lydia or Liam or even  frickin’ Chris Argent) are the oppressors of the Hales and Stiles, if all examples of Scott’s virtue are manufactured and Deaton’s benevolence false, then that implies that the Hales and the Stilinskis and the entire cast were victims of a Latino teenager’s and a black veterinarian’s malicious behavior.  Yet, the powerful and noble born wolves of the Hale Clan did nothing.   And yet, the amazingly intelligent and resolute Stilinski family did nothing.  No one did anything!  

Or, even worse, an alternative implication is that characters tried to do something against the vile tyrannical reign of the Tree Alpha, and they failed.   That Derek’s noble purpose faltered; that Peter’s ruthless efficiency was helpless; that super-mega-genius Spark Stiles was stymied.  Perhaps they were too distracted gazing into each other’s eyes.

Now, anyone who understands how stories work would realize that while it is entirely possible to have the villains win and still be a satisfying story, it has to be done a certain way.   There has to be an awareness of the consequences of the defeat of the protagonist.   Think about the ending of The Empire Strikes Back.   But Teen Wolf … doesn’t have that.   If, as these people believe, the walk off at the end of The Wolves of War was the triumph of a deluded monster, it was amazingly bad storytelling.  It would be like if in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, if John Walker had managed to remain Captain America due to the manipulations of a congressional subcommittee.   Possible, but the audience would have burned Marvel to the ground.

In the end, there has to be a motivation behind this elaborate and easily disprovable fandom theory. It’s not hard to imagine the utility of having a means by which you can simply dismiss every single positive action by a character by claiming that the audience is being lied to. It would certainly free parts of the fandom to create any sort of alternative history that they wanted, and many have taken advantage of this to promote a narrative of denied white male character supremacy.  They have decided that the Hales and their fandom self-insert are not only victims of a deranged, selfish Latino teenager, but of the very people who created all of them.  

They don’t know, nor do they care to speculate, what Jeff Davis’s and MTV’s purpose would be for creating a show whose truth is composed entirely of inconsistent subtext.  They can’t explain why this would happen, and they certainly can’t explain why they would go to elaborate lengths to transform the narrative into something that doesn’t match anything on the screen.

BUT IT’S NOT RACISM. 

[canchewread]

Editor’s Note: our Book Blog feature combines a shareable quote from, and a short review of, an important left wing or left-leaning work of nonfiction I’ve read and would like to share or expound on.

Terminal Point

A little while ago, I published a lengthy piece about how corporate media coverage of the so-called ���migrant crisis at the U.S. border” uniformly conformed to the dictates of the Chomsky-Herman propaganda model; regardless of the ideological bent of the outlet publishing that coverage. Towards the end of that essay, I discussed the difference between describing how America created the crises driving migration, and what is actually happening on the ground in relation to those crises; before recommending readers who wanted to know more, check out “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the mind of America” by Greg Grandin.

As longtime readers of this blog may remember, I’ve always been a big fan of Grandin’s work; in particular his scholarship on U.S. imperialism in Latin America is absolutely first rate. Given these factors, today I’d like to return to that portion of the discussion by offering a quote from (see above,) and a brief review of “The End of the Myth” here on Can’t You Read. 

Frankly, for a guy whose writing is so accessible, Greg Grandin remains an extraordinarily complex thinker whose historical analysis explores a sometimes overwhelming number of “variations on a theme” in the larger scope of his primary thesis. Given the sad state of the term intellectual in our society, I won’t burden professor Grandin with the title, but as scholars go this guy genuinely fulfills his obligation to present the facts, and challenge established assumptions vigorously where warranted. 

In that vein, the author opens The End of the Myth with a fundamentally sound, but deceptively simple thesis; that America has always resolved the staggering contradictions between its stated ideals, and its horrifying practices by projecting its identity, and even its very conception of the term “freedom�� through the lens of an endless expansion across a wholly mythical, and ultimately metaphysical, frontier. Indeed, as Grandin notes quite early on in The End of the Myth, the contradiction between the colonial enterprise that eventually became America, and escaping the crushing poverty and violence of the old world was resolved by a genocidal project to claim the frontier before early-American settlers even had a word for the frontier. The story outpaced reality, right from the beginning.

Tracing the line of history from the foundation of the colonies, through the American Civil War, and into the modern era of Pig Empire dominated globalized trade, Grandin demonstrates that at each phase American society resolved the deferred promise of freedom inherent in its foundational mythos, by projecting the violence and conflict inherent to its settler-colonial, hyper-capitalist nature, outward and against a constantly-shifting “other.” From Manifest Destiny, to the Monroe Doctrine and on through our modern War on Terror, the solution to America’s problems has always been found in the destruction of an external enemy, and the expansion of the mythical “frontier.” 

Where Grandin’s work really starts to get interesting however, is when he meticulously dissects the internal conflicts a settler colonial project of genocide and slavery created; conflicts that a romanticized vision of endless frontier expansion both rationalized, and reinforced. It is in this analysis that the author exposes the myth of freedom for those who can claim it on an endless frontier, as the skeleton key for understanding the increasingly critical flaws in Pig Empire society. After all, all wars, even an endless war based on the myth of infinite growth, have casualties, and the unrelenting legacy of violence, dehumanization, and ruthless exploitation of the eternal other have fundamentally altered American society in ways no idealized frontier could ever heal. In a wholly disturbing way then, the very existence of marginalized nonwhites inside “the nation” becomes a taunting reminder of a faltering white supremacist legacy the Pig Empire has never made any attempts to reconcile with, let alone end.

These consequences are the dark, unspoken truths of both American history and America’s present; and they are rarely if ever exposed to the public eye. In doing so, Grandin lays bare the roots of American imperialism, white supremacy, colonial exploitation, and even U.S. dominated “borderless capitalism” in the modern era. Like a cancerous tumor, the myth of the American frontier has fueled the endless growth of a Pig Empire capitalist class that threatens to unleash fascist violence to maintain control now that the frontier thesis has run into the hard walls of both history, and reality. By exposing the catastrophic fallout of worshipping frontier mythology in America’s past, Grandin does much to reveal how “the land of the free” has never really stopped being “the home of the slave.”

Importantly however the author does not remain entirely in the past. Grandin also draws stark attention to the fact that although the myth of the frontier has lost its power to obscure America’s horrifying contradictions, it has done nothing to satiate the greed and arrogance of the primary beneficiaries of those contradictions in modern life:

“The fantasies of the super-rich, no less than their capital, have free range. They imagine themselves sea-steaders, setting out to create floating villages beyond government control, or they fund life-extension research hoping to escape death or to upload their consciousness into the cloud. Mars, says one, will very soon be humanity’s “new frontier.” A hedge-fund billionaire backer of Trump who believes “human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make” and that people on public assistance have “negative value,” a man so anti-social he doesn’t look people in the eye and whistles when others try to talk with him, gets to play volunteer sheriff in an old New Mexico mining town and is thereby allowed to carry a gun in all fifty states. Never before has a ruling class been as free - so completely emancipated from the people it rules - as ours.”

Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth.

Of course, given that The End of the Myth was published in 2019, a certain percentage of the book is focused on specifically what Trump, Trumpism, and Trump’s promise to build a border wall mean for modern American politics. Even this seemingly contemporary discussion however, offers timeless insights on both the past and future of an America that continues to embrace nativist ideas and ideology. Although Grandin never uses the term, he subtly notes that in many ways Trumpism itself represents an explicit ideological rejection of endless growth along an infinite frontier, and even offers a horrifying “solution” to our present day climate crisis - white nationalist infused eco-fascism.

Look, you probably don’t need me to convince you a Pulitzer-prize winning book by a celebrated American historian is “a good read.” What I’d like to add here however is that Grandin’s book isn’t just a guide to understanding American nativism, immigration policy, and right wing fantasies of migrant invasions; this book is a guide to understanding both American political thought, and rising Pig Empire fascism - which in a lot of ways, are very much the same thing.

I don’t know if this is the best American history book ever published, but frankly I suspect it’s in the running. Even though I don’t agree with everything Grandin says in The End of the Myth, I’d still ultimately give it an enthusiastic five star rating. More importantly, I would strongly suggest this work as a must-read volume for folks looking to understand why the Pig Empire works the way it does.

Additional Resources:

Infinite Frontier (The Nation review)

America can no longer run from its past (Guardian review)

A Monument to Disenchantment (Jacobin review)

Slavery, and American Racism, Were Born in Genocide

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

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“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

[feminist-propaganda]

Single Mothers Will Probably Cry During Every Episode Of Queen’s Gambit - Episode 6

“Men are gonna come along and wanna teach you things” predicts Alice at the beginning of Episode 6. “Doesn’t make them any smarter” she continues. “In most ways, they’re not. But it makes them feel bigger. They can show you how things are done. You just let them blow by and you go on ahead and do what the hell you feel like”.

 Little Beth listens carefully. 

“It takes a strong woman to stay by herself in a world where people will settle for anything just to say they have something.”

As she finishes her sentence, the camera zooms out and we see her finishing the embroidery of Beth’s name onto the dress. Beth smiles, and her mother says “There we are”. She’s almost finished her project.

Episode 6 : Learn From Straight White Men

To survive under capitalism, it is necessary to learn from those who created it, ie Straight White men. Many feminists might want to avoid capitalism all together, and avoid the mentorship of White men, which they don’t find useful. But Beth’s mother understands that to truly extract oneself from the oppresive system she is in, Beth first needs to navigate that system. 

In the first part of the episode, we see Beth ride with Benny to New York. He seems good for her. He doesn’t let her drink. He improves her chess. He introduces her to his friends. 

A bunch of people don’t know this, but New York’s original name was New Amsterdam and it was founded by the Dutch. 

The city, like Mexico, is symbolically chosen in the mini-series, as it is the epicenter of modern day capitalistic activities.

The Netherlands was a poor nation swamp up until the 1600s, when the Dutch figured out that they could trade goods, ensure the boats that transported the goods they traded and then eventually created the stock market. To this day, Amsterdam remains the international capital of financial technology. Every year, hundreds of higly skills migrants from countries like India, Turkey, China or Greece come to Amsterdam to develop faster robots to trade at higher rates for trust funds and billionaires.

Trading changed the Netherlands forever. It launched what some history books still call the “Golden age” which is now being deconstructed as a racist era, where the Dutch played a key role in organizing the trans-atlantic slave trade. 

Even though modern day Dutch society likes to downplay the role the Netherlands played in the slave trade, it is proven that the Netherlands became immensely rich thanks to the slave trade. They were experts in importing the coffee and sugar that was grown by the slaves and trading it inside of Europe.

New York, is the projection of the Dutch dream in the West. It is the home of Wall Street, where we find the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) as well as the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ), which is the same as the stock exchange only this time we let the robots to the high frequency automatic trading for us (yup).

In 1904-1905, right when Einstein was discovering the photoelectric effect in Germany, a man called Max Weber coined the phrase “the protestant work ethic”.

According to the theory of the “The protestant work ethic”, it is believed that there is something in protestant culture that encourages protestant communities to work very hard. As a result, a great deal of “ excess” is produced, and these goods can then be traded. According to this theory, the inventors of capitalism were just very hard working people, who accidentally made too much of something, and started selling it in a very organized way (the stock market). Then they became rich.

Martin Luther King disagrees:

“We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor — both black and white, here and abroad.”

As the car pulls up in Benny’s street, and looking at these ever so simple Brownstone houses, I am reminded of the myths that protestants like to perpetuate about themselves. “We work so hard!” “We’re such simple people” “We eat stew” “My grandfather used to raise pigs”.

The never ending lies that protestants propagate about their work ethic serves an important purpose in White Supremacy. It tries to convince us that the wealth isn’t unequally distributed. That the privileges that the ruling class have are deserved, rather than stolen.

Benny is the ambassador of these White Men. He lives ever so simply. He offers Beth a mattress to sleep on the floor. He lives in a basement. There is no decoration on the walls. There are only the prizes he’s won at his competitions and tournaments, and some magazine covers. Again, the underlying subtext here is that Benny works hard, lives frugally, and deserves all of the awards he’s won.

Instead of resenting Benny, Beth accepts to learn from him, just like her mother told her to. She looks around his house, but doesn’t say a word, doesn’t judge. She’s here for a purpose, she’s here to take everything that he has in his head, and bring it with her to Paris to win against the Soviets.

She seems dissociated from the situation most of the time. The only time we see her getting a bit excited is when she meets the French model. Again, it’s the high fashion that seems to attract her, as if it’s a sign, an indication of something grander and more appropriate, something that she needs to follow. 

An adjournement in Chess, which is also the name of the episode, is when a player secretely puts his move into a sealed enveloppe after 5/6 hours of game. The players resume their play the following day. 

Towards the middle of the episode we find Beth right where we met her: in Paris. She plays her matches and makes it to the final with Borgov. Unfortunately, on the day before the final, she meets the French model from Benny’s, drinks and is so hangovered the next day she makes a fool of herself. Not even the two tranquilizers she takes before coming down from her hotel room can help her.

Losing to Borgov in Paris destroys Beth. She goes back to Kentucky and drinks her life away. By the end of the episode she looks sick. 

She’s probably discouraged because she’s gotten to the end of her mother’s advice for this episode. She followed the White Man, and all of his advice. She met him in the capital of capitalism, learned everything that was in his head. She even met his friends. She copied his cool. She became him. When she meets the french model in the hotel, they are themselves being the men they seek. They smoke, they drink pastis, they casually talk about fucking.

It’s also worth noting that by losing to Borgov, Beth isn’t failing Benny. He never won against Borgov either. Her presence at these tournaments is already the best that he’s ever achieved for himself. This is also why Benny’s teachings alone won’t get her past Paris, beyond the iron curtain, to Moscow and beyond. He’s never been where she needs to go, where her mother wants her to be. How can he take her there?

A single mother will tell her children to learn from the White Man, but she isn’t telling them to be the White Man. The White Man is probably the reason why she’s single in the first place, why she’s alone. The single mother tells her children to learn the White Man’s way to survive in his world first and then to unbuild it.

Single mothers are often poor, so they understand capitalism very well.  They understand that often times money does buy happiness. It gives you security. Strength even. And joy. Beth can’t extract herself from Kentucky, the deep south, segregation and the feminine mystique if she doesn’t have cash.

After she comes back from Paris, Beth finds Mr Wheatley is looking for her. He needs money and wants the house back. She buys his share from him and calls him pathetic. it’s another sign that she’s outgrown the men she used to learn from.

Now there is nothing else but the void, the emptiness beyond her, and she doesn’t know where else to go. It can be overwhelming and Beth copes with alcohol. Who could judge her?

[allthefilmsiveseenforfree]

Dangerous Minds

Those of my readers who haven’t known me long may not know that I was once a corps member of Teach for America. I taught 10th and 11th grade English for about 5 weeks, then I was told on a Friday about my “involuntary transfer” to another school in the district, where I’d be teaching 7th and 8th grade English instead. I went from having about 110 students to about 190. My classroom had no books (textbook or otherwise), no pencils, no paper, no markers or chalk, but it DID have one of those folding lamps that come out of the ceiling at the dentist’s office. The kids had been in there for 5 weeks with a rotating roster of subs; they’d done no schoolwork of any kind. I was teaching in a very poor area of the city, and my students were predominantly Black and Hispanic. One of my 10th graders wrote his first personal essay about getting shot the previous year. I say all this to tell you that when Chad asked that I review Dangerous Minds, the 1995 adaptation starring Michelle Pfeiffer of the true story of Louanne Johnson’s experience teaching in inner city schools in California, I was prepared to laugh it off as a cringey, Lifetime-movie representation of my experience. Is that what I got? Well...

For the most part, what I got was a ball of anxiety in my chest. It’s well-worn territory, obviously. A teacher bonds with their students from the wrong side of the tracks, and ends up learning just as much from them as they learn from him/her. Usually poetry or music features heavily as a tool that can set the students free from the depressing circumstances of their lives. Depending on the rating, usually a student dies, and the teacher learns just how Important their job is, so they commit to it even harder even though it pays no money and garners no respect from the administration who just doesn’t “get it.” But these cliches and stereotypes and broad strokes exist because at their core, they’re true, and they make me anxious and uncomfortable and I can’t laugh at them or Michelle Pfeiffer being a Nice White Lady because I’m too busy being angry about the systems we put in place that straight up abandon so many kids, all in the name of white supremacy.

Some thoughts:

Oh we’re starting right off the BAT with “Gangsta’s Paradise.” Fantastic news. Two things I associate so strongly with this song is skating around the skating rink in 2nd grade and buying the Weird Al cassingle of “Amish Paradise” and wearing it out. 

Ooh, the score was composed and performed by Wendy & Lisa! Love that, you don’t see nearly as many film scores as you should composed by women.

God, the salary is $24,700 a year and Louanne acts as though that is appealing - I can’t tell if that’s because it was 1995 or because teacher salaries are so dismally low that this feels like a good salary?

This scene in which Louanne goes into her classroom for the first time and the kids are all shouting at her and getting in her face and sexually harassing her and throwing paper balls at her is giving me stress hives. 

Also her friend Griffith (George Dzundza) saying, “You wanna teach, so teach! All you gotta do is get their attention” is rather disingenuous. Trust me, you can have their attention, and still not be able to teach. 

I’m excited to see Sally-Can’t-Dance from Con Air as Raul (Renoly Santiago). He’s honestly fantastic in this, with a tough exterior but a sensitive and gooey inner sweet boy. All of the teens give pretty solid performances, but he’s a real standout.

I recognize this is based on a true story and Louanne Johnson’s lived experience, but I am not sure it’s wise for any teacher, regardless of grade or subject, to be teaching her students how to fight each other. Or taking them to dinner on what looks to outsiders like a date. I know some people have a problem with the bribery (giving her students candy for speaking up in class) but I have no problem with it - you get paid to do all the dumb stuff you don’t want to do at work, why shouldn’t kids be compensated for going to school if they don’t want to be there? External motivation goes a long way to building up internal motivation.

Mm I do love me some Courtney B. Vance, but he’s such a quiet, condescending ass in this. It’s a different vibe than I’m used to seeing in a principal in a movie like this. 

Ooh, Griffith grading papers and saying “What a fuckin’ idiot” is a real mood. 

“Since when has the Board of Education done anything for us? We barely get fuckin lunch” is legit. The lunches my students were served in summer school were some of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen. One day it was spoiled milk, white bread, and pickles. And one of my students put his in a microwave that was hidden in the back of my classroom behind some dividers and left it for a week. And just so you know, as stomach-churningly awful as that sounds, the day I found “pickle man” as my student called him, isn’t even in my top 5 worst days teaching list. 

I like Griffith, and I’m glad Louanne has a friend, but frankly I’m not that interested in these interludes between them - they really feel like they slow down the momentum from the scenes of her in the classroom slowly earning the kids’ trust. The pacing is kind of a mess, because the most dynamic sections all revolve around the kids in the classroom, and I feel like that only makes up about a third of the movie. 

One thing I know for sure is you do not get in the middle of a fight between students. I have a friend who worked in the same district I did who interrupted a fight and got punched in the face because of it. And her principal blamed her. 

Oh wow the way the soundtrack picks up when Emilio finally engages in the class is some kinda cheesy. And it continues through the rest of the scene to a distracting degree. Oh Wendy and Lisa, I hoped for better. 

Can I just emphasize that to reach these kids, Louanne uses her experience as a LITERAL MARINE by demonstrating she can kick all their asses, and then she bribes them by paying for 25 kids to go to an amusement park for the entire day with her?

Also, even if they like and respect her now, I call bullshit at any scene in which ALL of  the kids are A) sitting in their seats or B) silent, and especially C) both. 

Um suddenly feeling some weird vibes with Louanne and Raul having a dinner date at this fancy restaurant by themselves. Also, the double standard here is pretty telling - there’s no way this scene makes the movie if Louanne had been a male teacher and Raul was a female student.

Wait wait wait, she’s also loaning Raul $200? Like, is this why I didn’t make it as a teacher? Because I wasn’t a former Marine taking students to amusement parks and fancy dinners and lending them money? I was 25 and could barely afford rent. Maybe teachers who have enough money to take care of themselves are better equipped to take care of others. Idk, I’m just spitballin here.

Oh “Gangsta’s Paradise” is happening again! We already heard the whole song over the opening credits but now it’s happening again about 3/4 way through. I mean this song is definitely the best thing about the film, so I get it, but it feels weird that they think we wouldn’t notice it playing to completion twice.

Michelle Pfeiffer is doing everything she can to make this movie feel less cheesy and more real. Like, you can tell she’s really trying with her performance. Of course, it’s not like the character is a huge challenge acting-wise, but she is definitely committed to the part and can walk the line of both accessible and tough. 

This scene where Louanne tells her class she is not going to be there next year, that what happened to Durell and Lionel and Callie and Emilio made her too sad to stay has not aged well at all. And it’s certainly true to life, and I say that as someone who did the same thing. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s a reality - the fact that I’m a nice white lady is exactly the reason that I can choose to leave when things get too hard. Just because the kids convince her to stay at the end in this very rushed “all’s well that ends well” way doesn’t sweep this scene under the rug, and it shouldn’t. 

Ope, “Gangsta’s Paradise” shows up one last time in the credits for good measure. 

Side note: after the film, I researched Louanne, and she’s still teaching, which honestly made me emotional (in a good way). And I’d like to point out the racist ass bullshit the studio and screenwriter Ronald Bass pulled by changing the poems the students read to Bob Dylan lyrics when Louanne originally used rap lyrics from popular artists in ‘89-’90 to teach the kids about poetry. 

Did I Cry? No, but I did get heartburn from anxiety flashbacks.

This genre of film is easy to mock and parody because it tells the same story and hits the same beats to the point that they’ve become cliche. Ultimately, the truth at the heart of the movie (which is the un-nuanced and candy-coated depiction of Johnson’s real memoir, My Posse Don’t Do Homework) is that high schoolers crave someone who will see them and validate them, someone who is willing to put in the effort. The quality of the package that truth is wrapped in varies, and this one certainly leans in hard on stereotypes that feel like cheat codes rather than any real illuminating depictions of living teenagers. But as cringey as it is to watch, maybe it’s not a bad thing to remember that all people - including those who are trapped in poverty and all the cruel injustices that entails - want to be seen and valued for who they really are. 

If you liked this review, please consider reblogging or subscribing to my Patreon! For as low as $1, you can access bonus content and movie reviews, or even request that I review any movie of your choice.

[antiracistkaren]

On Grief and White Women

The stages of grief are well known: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

I am always surprised when I start coming out of the other side of grief, because the stages don’t feel like the typical grief cycle for me. Acceptance feels first: yeah, that person died. Or part of my life died, and it is that acceptance that kicks off my grief. And I’m angry, not in denial, but depressed, certainly.

It’s a weird depression though. It doesn’t make me sleepy, it makes me sharp and dangerous. It doesn’t keep me in bed, it keeps me focused on all of the pain. Any new pains added in are reacted to in a huge way: I cannot take any more, so I cause harm to others to force my experience of pain to be shared.

I am finding that my experience of pain--physical and emotional--are very intense. I am unsure if it is because of autism, or if it is because I have spent my life connecting my brain to my body, and notice the physical sensations that are a product of my stress much more readily than the average adult.

My threshold for physical pain is almost nil, in some regard. Especially internalized physical pain. I can deal with a cut, sometimes not feel it like others, but any internal discomfort radiates out from my body. It forces me to collapse mentally, I can’t make coherent thoughts from it, and due to that incoherence, I am then unable to figure out or communicate effectively about/around my pain.

So I had a surgery, and then I had a death in the family. Was it sudden? No, the person had been diagnosed with cancer in 2018. However, the speed with which she declined was shocking. I have an email written from her--a response from my own email where I poured out all of the love I had in my body for her--stating she felt really good, and didn’t think that she would be passing any time soon. She passed less than 10 days later.

Now I am about a month out from her death, and I am just starting to see how dark my world was for a long time. How angry I was that she didn’t fully accept my love, how angry I am for not having pushed to have my partner at her bedside sooner, how angry I am at myself for having a surgery which made it hard for my partner to get to her quickly and without concern for my welfare. I carried it all willingly, for a while. It was a welcome distraction from study. An excuse to dip into poor habits that brought out the worst of my anxiety. It was a reason to bomb the LSAT (unconfirmed at this moment, but I’m a catastrophizer), to not be able to focus.

I’m not denying myself those feelings and that time, but I couldn’t even see it until I started to see some sunlight again. Until I could start to receive some of the love my friends had been desperately throwing my way, until I could grab on to some of these lifelines to save myself.

All this to say: it makes me think about white women, a lot.

I learned in undergrad, when I was getting my PoliSci degree, that it is impossible to see the depth and breadth of oppression when you’re still in it or under it. On TikTok this week, white women have been handed a lot of flack for their inability to recognize that although they are oppressed by the patriarchy, they are not the most oppressed people, and their oppression (though difficult) is not the same as the oppression put on Black folks, and especially anyone who is LGBTQ, Disabled, or AFAB and also Black. That’s intersectionality, and white women suck at it.

Much like I sucked at seeing how my own sadness and oppressive grief was causing me to act out in ways that vented some of the physical and emotional pain, I think white women struggle in the same way. When you don’t feel pain, (and although women in general are abused, Black women are 3x more likely to be murdered than white women, more likely to be abused than white women) your introduction to it feels overwhelming.

However, it’s categorically wrong to try to compare oppression for oppression. It’s not a zero-sum game. I think of oppression like a ladder: white cis straight able-bodied christian men are at the top, with zero oppression and a society built around them. They have no notion of oppression, and mistake any pain they feel as systemic oppression and tantamount to the pain that others feel under the boot heel of white supremacy and patriarchy.

Everyone standing under them on the ladder know that those at the top of the ladder are not oppressed, and are aware that those on top have no idea.

White cis straight abled bodied christian women are just one rung below. Woke liberal white women start to wake up to their own oppression and fail to look down. They only look up at the men who are standing on their shoulders keeping them down, and have not a care for the myriad of people below them on the ladder. They can’t even conceive of a person who is LGBTQ, homeless, disabled, BIPOC, and a sexworker as someone who even exists, but they do.

When white women start to attempt to equate their unhappiness with oppression, it is tone deaf and very similar, if not exactly the same, as when a white man feels pain and starts screaming oppression.

Yes, we are oppressed by the patriarchy... but so are men. Yes, we are more likely to be murdered by a partner than a man, but Black women are 3x more likely than we are to be murdered by a partner or family member. Fight for women’s rights, yes, but not White women’s rights. Oppression has an additive effect: that’s what intersectionality is. Oppression has layers, and the more oppressed you are, the harder it is to find you in American Society, the more your voice is buried. The more you’re erased from consideration.

White women, if they are to participate in the liberation of all women or in smashing the patriarchy, have to take a long hard look at themselves, the ways they have upheld the patriarchy when it suits them, and the ways they benefit from specifically white patriarchy in their own lives.

Half-woke white women are dangerous allies. They scream “me too!” when Black women or Indigenous women start talking about their struggles, often over those women who are trying to share their harder, deeper, and more intense experiences. Half-woke white women who fly the banner of ally are dangerous to BIPOC. They’re the ones who will scream that a Black man is threatening because he is a man, without a care to the racism that lives in their minds alongside their fear of men.

And most of all, most white women--especially those are are not close to being awake--have no idea what the depth of oppression feels like. In order to even come to the table with BIPOC, it is our job to examine our own grief, our own mistakes, our own anger and work on that before we step out trying to lend a hand in the community. Getting triggered as a white woman can get a person of color killed in America. Only when a white woman has done her research, committed herself completely to uplifting the voices of women of color--over her own most of the time--can she really start to be effective.

Only when the healing is mostly done can we start to see the overall oppression. Until then, we are a double-edged sword that will swing back on BIPOC every time, to their detriment.

[revlyncox]

Dreamers (2021)

Working toward a better world, a world of racial justice and an end to interlocking oppressions, requires imagination. On this weekend when we remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., let's also consider both the history of civil rights and the unbounded creativity of speculative fiction by writers of color as sources of inspiration. 

Expanded and revised for the Washington Ethical Society, presented January 17, 2021. 

“We are creating a world we have never seen,” writes Adrienne Maree Brown in Emergent Strategy. On this weekend, as we remember the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., support a peaceful transfer of power, and recommit to his legacy and the work of civil rights yet to do, it may seem like a luxury or a distraction to engage with imagination. It is not. Just like we cannot allow oppression to steal our joy, we cannot let it steal our imagination. Neither threats of violence, nor attempts to push us into re-creating a fictional and regressive society of the past, nor manufactured austerity preventing relief from reaching working people, nor white supremacy in any form should be allowed to steal our imagination. Our ability to dream of a better world is a matter of collective survival.

What does it take to dream big? What fuels our ability to imagine a future without limits like racism, classism, and sexism? Entering a dream state where equality is possible takes some practice. Music can get us there. Listening to activists who are moving our society forward can help us get into that frame of mind. Great art can invite us into that kind of transformational trance.

Dreaming is important. Dreaming gives us creativity, energy, and a warm vision around which we can gather a community. Dreaming is not enough. Once we have imagined a better world, we have to (we get to) build it, to keep building it, and to rebuild the parts that got torn down when we weren’t paying attention. The next step is to use those dreams as a doorway to action.

Dr. King’s words and actions demonstrated connections between systemic racial inequality, economic injustice, war, threats to labor rights, and blockades to voting rights. All of those forces are still relevant. He and the other activists of his era left a very rich legacy, for which we are grateful. We are not done.

I’ll be drawing today from Dr. King’s 1963 work, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” (Also available as an audio file from the King Institute.) I think the critiques he offered in that letter are still valid, especially for us in this community that strives to be anti-racist and yet must acknowledge that we are impacted by the norms of what King calls, “the white moderate.” His letter was a response to Christian and Jewish clergy, who had written an open letter criticizing nonviolent direct action. Though Ethical Culture uses different language and methods than our explicitly theist neighbors, I think it is incumbent upon us to hold on to the accountability that comes with being part of the interfaith community. So I believe this letter is written to us as well. Dr. King wrote:

I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the … great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises [us] to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I would like to think that, in this community, we have made some progress since 1963, and that majority-white communities have stopped explicitly trying to slow the pace of civil rights. Indeed, WES can be proud that racial justice has been woven into its goals from the beginning, though we must also be honest that a perfectly anti-racist history is unlikely. At the same time, I see people who claim to be progressive rushing to calls for “civility” or “unity” without accountability. Understanding the direct link between the intended audience of this letter and the people and communities with which we have kinship today is an act of imagination that we must embrace in order to learn from the past and to continue Dr. King’s legacy. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” can help us understand why we need to dream of something different in the world.

We need dreams and we need plans. We seek inspiration as we continue to work toward bringing a dream of economic and political equality fully into reality.

One place I turn for inspiration is toward socially conscious science fiction. Looking at how the art form has offered critiques of what’s wrong and pathways to what’s right, I see suggestions for how we can nurture the dream of a better world.

Science fiction has even helped me understand spiritually-connected social movements, such as the one depicted in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. The series depicts a self-governing poetic community that tries to live sustainably in an environment affected by catastrophic climate change, and that maintains an improbable vision of exploring the stars. The poetry uses the word God, but not in the way that it is normally used. Recognizing that WES is not a community that makes use of theism, I hope you’ll be able to hear how that metaphor is used in the world of the story. In Parable of the Talents, the main character, Lauren Olamina, writes a poem for her community:

God is change

And hidden within change

Is surprise, delight,

Confusion, pain,

Discovery, loss,

Opportunity and growth.

As always, God exists

To shape

And to be shaped 

(Parable of the Talents, p. 92)

In the book, the community that reflects on change in meditation and song is able to use that energy to maintain resilience, even in the face of white supremacist violence and criminalization. Butler imagines an inclusive community led by People of Color who strengthen and encourage one another, inject their strategic planning with an expectation for backlash, and still imagine and make their way toward a better world. Her books provide inspiration to those who know that the negative extremes of the world of the story are possible.

Socially conscious science fiction spins dreams that are extreme, that challenge us in good ways. In science fiction and in practical experience with progressive movements, we learn that dreams need help to become reality.

The alternate universe where justice rolls down like water may seem too fantastic to believe, it may be cobbled together in ways that seem mis-matched to mundane perceptions, and it will certainly take work to achieve. Nevertheless, like Dr. King, I believe “we must use time creatively.”

Dreams Are Extreme

The first thing to note about dreams, whether sleeping or socially conscious, is that they are extreme. Things that would be totally absurd or unthinkable in everyday reality are woven into the fabric of a new vision. The dream might be a positive one, in which we imagine what it would be like to live in a better world. On the other hand, dystopian dreams can also be effective at stirring us to action. In an imagined world, we are met with the possibility that a flaw in our current society might go too far. Absurdity comes uncomfortably close to the truth.

Dr. King spoke about the role of discomfort in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” saying that nonviolent direct action is meant to bring that discomfort to bear so that those in power will sit down and negotiate, to recognize people of good conscience. This is different from using violence as coercion, which is destructive to democracy; this is using peaceful means to declare the right of people to have a voice in what concerns them. Dr. King writes:

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth.

Tension has a place in literature and drama that can also be used for racial justice. I once served as an intern at a regional theater. In one of the plays we presented that year, the plot hinged on something unexplainable and highly improbable, which is one definition for science fiction. It was the 1965 play Day of Absence by African American playwright Douglas Turner Ward. In the story, white citizens of a racist town awaken one day to find that all of the African American residents have mysteriously disappeared. They slowly come to realize that they cannot function without the neighbors they mistreated and took for granted. Rather than try to solve their problems, they spend the rest of the play panicking and blaming each other in comedic ways.

Between the satirical script, the exaggerated makeup, and the abstract set, the show turns reality inside out in an effort to alter the audience’s collective conscience. Day of Absence shines a spotlight on the links between racial oppression and economic oppression, and is an incitement to join a movement for change. Consistent with the Revolutionary Theatre aesthetic, the play is meant to make people uncomfortable. We should be uncomfortable with the real systems of inequality parodied in the play.

It worked. Audiences were uncomfortable. Some patrons were able to take that discomfort and use it to grow. Some patrons were not ready to deal productively with their discomfort. For art or spirituality or dreams or anything else to offer the chance for transformation, creating the opportunity can’t wait until everyone is equally ready to begin the journey.

One goal of satire is to take something that is true and to exaggerate it until the truth cannot be ignored. When that something is oppression, making art that can’t be ignored and suggesting a justice-oriented overhaul to society is going to seem extreme to some people.

Speculative fiction by writers of color, even when not satirical, can also use exaggeration for a positive effect. The 2019 HBO Watchmen series explored this, creating an alternate history that lifted out problems with racism and policing in our own timeline. The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin explores extremes of climate change and identity-based exploitation, and weaves in glimpses of generational trauma between parents and children trying to survive in a society that rejects their wholeness. Extremes in literature can reflect back to us the plain truth.

Similarly, a dream that draws people together for the hope of a society that is very different from what we have, a dream that re-imagines the future of justice and economic opportunity, is going to be considered extreme, which is not a good thing by some standards. Every time there is a popular movie or TV show in the science fiction/fantasy genre that uses multiracial casting, and every time a speculative fiction novel by a writer of color receives sales or awards, there are claims that social justice warriors are running amok, or that trends have gone too far. Allowing for multiracial imagination is considered a violation of balance, a bridge too far. Inclusion is considered extreme, rather than a tool for bringing imagined futures into being.  

Dr. King explored this critique of extremism. In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he expresses some initial frustration at being labeled an extremist for his peaceful methods. It seemed that any movement toward change was too radical for the white moderate clergy. But the status quo was not and is not acceptable. Dr. King writes:

So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." … (Dr. King gives a few more examples before he goes on.) So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? … Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists. (paragraph 24)

I believe the nation and the world are in need of creative extremists. We need dreamers. We need bold playwrights, courageous writers, and artists who cannot be ignored. We need the power to imagine a more just and radically different future.

Dreams Need Help to Become Reality

Another point that connects science fiction with visions of equality is that dreams need help to become reality. We hear often that “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” but the unwritten part of that is that actual people have to do some bending. Dr. King wrote about that, too; though he uses “man” in a way that was common at the time to mean people of all genders, and he invokes his own religious tradition, we can all hear the collective responsibility in this passage. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King wrote:

Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity. (paragraph 21)

We can and should have hope. We still need to act according to our values. No act of encouragement, no vote cast, no letter written is a wasted effort. We must use time creatively. In the case of arts, literature, and entertainment, we must also use time travel creatively. Progress does not happen by accident.

Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura in the original Star Trek series, spoke about the creation of her character and why she chose to stay on the show. None of it was an accident. When she first met with Gene Roddenberry, she was in the middle of reading a book on Uhuru, which is Swahili for freedom. Roddenberry became more convinced than ever that he wanted a Black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise. Nichols said:

When the show began and I was cast to develop this character – I was cast as one of the stars of the show – the reality of the matter was the industry was not ready for a woman or a Black and certainly not the combination of the two (and you have to remember this was 1966) in that kind of role, on that equal basis, and certainly not that kind of power role.

Nichols was also an accomplished singer and stage actress. The producers never told her about the volume of fan mail she was receiving. She was considering leaving the show to join a theatrical production headed for Broadway, when she was at an event (probably a fundraiser for the NAACP, but Nichols doesn’t remember clearly) and was asked to meet a fan. The fan turned out to be the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He told her how much he enjoyed the show, and that it was the only show he and his wife allowed their children to stay up late to watch. She told him that she was planning to resign. “You cannot!” he said. Nichols goes on:

Dr. King said to me, ‘Don’t you understand that you have the first non-stereotypical role in television in a major TV series of importance, and you establish us as we are supposed to be: as equals, whether it’s ethnic, racial, or gender.’ I was breathless. ‘Thank you, and Yes, I will stay.’

Nichols’ decision to stay had a ripple effect. Whoopi Goldberg said that the first time she saw Lieutenant Uhura on television was a major turning point for her as a child. Mae Jemison, the first African American astronaut in space, spoke about Uhura as an inspiration. Stacey Abrams is a fan.

The inner workings of a TV show with cheesy special effects, beloved as that show may be, might seem inconsequential to the future of human rights. I maintain that anything that expands our ability to dream of a better world is necessary. Stories that give us building blocks for change make a difference. And representation matters. People are hungry for diverse, respectful, innovative stories. Representation increases the chances that someone from a marginalized group can get the resources to tell their own stories rather than relying on the dominant group to borrow them. In this age of communication, it is possible to engage people from all over the planet in a conversation about our shared future. The trick is that we have to work to make sure all of the voices are included. The dream of a better world needs people who can make it a reality.

Imagination is key, and it is a starting point. In Emergent Strategy, Adrienne Maree Brown writes:

Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. I suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world. What we pay attention to grows, so I’m thinking about how we grow what we are all imagining and creating into something large enough and solid enough that it becomes a tipping point.

Earlier, you heard another quote from the book, in which Brown names the Beloved Community that we can use imagination to grow ourselves into. She names “a future without police and prisons ... a future without rape … harassment … constant fear, and childhood sexual assault. A future without war, hunger, violence. With abundance. Where gender is a joyful spectrum.”

Brown frames this imagined future world, this Beloved Community, as a project of both imagination and community organizing. A better world is possible.

Conclusion

The arts, in particular science fiction, can ignite a kind of a dream state. By using time and time-travel creatively, we can envision a world of justice, equality, and compassion. We have yet more ways to craft stories and plans that respect the inherent worth and dignity of every person. The dream of economic equality, the dream of equal voting rights, the dream of equal protection under the law all need foundations built under them.

If we wish to count ourselves among the dreamers, let us take action. We can continue to build coalitions with partner organizations of other faiths and cultures. We can send representatives to workshops and meetings, and listen carefully to their findings when they return. We can read about dismantling oppression and share what we find with each other.

This community is a place where we can dream freely. Let us use time effectively. Let us enter into the powers of myth, creativity, and art to imagine a better future. And then let us work and plan to make that better future come to pass. May our dreams refresh us and energize us for the tasks ahead.

May it be so.

[buzzdixonwriter]

America: Not The New Jerusalem, Merely Another Rome

”When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” -- Paul the Apostle (1 Corinthians 13:11 KJV)

”And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” -- Jesus Christ of Nazareth (John 8:34 KJV)

Ronald Reagan, tending the garden of thorns Dick Nixon had sown, referred to America as “a city on a hill”, thus appropriating Jesus’ words via John Winthrop through John F. Kennedy.

It’s interesting to chart the progression.  Let’s do so in reverse.

Reagan: ”I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.”

Kennedy: ”I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before…’We must always consider…that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us’. Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill—constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities…History will not judge our endeavors—and a government cannot be selected—merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these. For of those to whom much is given, much is required…”

Winthrop: ”Now the only way to…provide for our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God, for this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities, we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality, we must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body, so shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace… for we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world, we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak…curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whether we are going”

Jesus: ”Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.” (Matthew 5:14 KJV) 

Go back and read Reagan’s statement.

While I’ve trimmed Kennedy and Winthrop’s quotes and edited the latter for clarity (God bless Noah Webster for standardized spelling!), there’s a striking difference between what they saw as a city on a hill and what Reagan saw.

Reagan operates under the presumption that of course we’re the best, of course everyone else will look up to us, of course we are the New Jerusalem referenced in the Bible.

We are God’s anointed, His new chosen people.  America is God’s Promised Land, a nation to which all other nations can merely hope to aspire to be.

Our shitte truly stinketh notte.

Reality?   We have fucked up and we have fucked up badly.

Compare Reagan’s self-congratulatory, ignorant nostalgia with the dire warnings of Kenney and Winthrop.

Yes, there is great promise.

Yes, there is great potential.

Yes, we are a city on a hill.

But Kennedy and Winthrop both cautioned that history and the world would not be kind if we failed to live up to our own grandiose promises.

 (And, yeah, there’s irony in that, considering how both failed to make good on those promises, ///but at least they knew the danger was there///.)

Look at Matthew 5:13, the verse immediately preceding Jesus’ original “city on a hill” reference: ”Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.”

America is no New Jerusalem, no Holy Israel of the New World, no Promised Land.

Rather, we are the New Rome, an empire built on greed and ruthlessness and blood and genocide.

And slavery.  Let us never omit that original sin, or its bastard step-sibling, white supremacy.

As long as the history of this nation was written by the Parson Weems of the world, be they well meaning hagiographers or unprincipled propagandists, it was the history of white Christianist* men of property succeeding because God and / or providence had deemed them the masters of the universe, the unquestioned rulers of the earth.

(Oh, there might be a mean one once in a while, maybe an occasional bad one, but it was a white man with money’s world, and if non-whites and non-males wanted to enjoy even the slightest taste, the first thing they had to doo was make sure white Christianist male supremacy reigned supreme.)

Our nation has been at war virtually its entire existence.

It has slaughter and subjugated literally millions of people around the world.

Don’t give me that bullshit about the American Revolution being a good and just war -- Canada stayed under British rule and did just fine, thank you, and although they have their own problems, a far less bloody history than the United States.**

Don’t give me that bullshit about the Civil War being a good and just war -- there shouldn’t have been any need for a civil war if the first shipload of African slaves to arrive in North America had simply been seized and freed.

Don’t give me that bullshit on World War Two being a good and just war -- if Hitler hadn’t declared war on us, we would have never gotten involved in Europe.***

America has waged incessant war against other nations and native peoples in order to make a few wealthy people even wealthier.

Can we justify the War of 1812?  No.

Can we Justify the Mexican War?  No.

Can we justify the Spanish-American War or the too numerous to recount Latin American bush wars?  No.

Can we justify the Philippines, or Korea, or Vietnam?

Don’t even pretend we can justify what we’ve done in the Middle East.

And as terrible as those are, those are the crimes we’ve committed against others.

Look at how terribly we treat one another.

After centuries of enslavement, African-Americans then needed to endure the humiliation of segregation.

Hispanic Americans who can trace their ancestry in this land much further back than any Anglo found themselves aliens in their own country.

Women and non-Christians and anybody outside of toxic white male heterosexual norms declared unfit and excluded from the public sphere.

And we allowed the tiny greedy few at the very top to rob us and pick our pockets and let our families and children suffer because they promised us if we did so, they’d let us feel that we were the best simply because we were white Christianist males.

We are long overdue for our moment of clarity, our agonizing reappraisal, out “come to Jesus” moment when we recognize our sins and shortcomings.

We gotta stop eating our own bullshit and recognize ourselves for the villains we are.

Only by identify the source of the contagion and draining the virulent infection can we hope to cure it.

”Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

”And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.” -- Jesus Christ of Nazareth (John 8:44-45 KJV) 

 © Buzz Dixon

 *  “Christianist” is a term coined by the political commentator Andrew Sullivan to refer to those people who are culturally Christian, who may even think of themselves as Christian, but in reality are as far from the teachings of Christ as is possible and just use their so-called Christian identity as an excuse to do whatever the fuck they feel like doing because “God loves us and forgives us and wants us to be in charge”.

**  The taxation in “no taxation without representation” referred to England trying to get the colonies to take at least partial responsibility for triggering the bloody Seven Years War (in the U.S., the French & Indian War) that virtually drained England’s treasury and wrecked a couple of European empires in the process.  One may argue the crown made a fatal misstep in not allowing token colonial participation in parliament, but you can’t say they were unfair in wanting the colonials to help pay for a war ///we started/// in direct violation of international treaties.

***  Not only were many prominent Americans against getting involved in European affairs, but a large number were pro-Nazi to boot, and they went to ground only when Hitler made it impossible to defend him any longer. And while we’re at it, let’s dispel with the myth that Hitler and the Axis would have won if the U.S. hadn’t stepped into the fray; Hitler lost WWII on June 22, 1941 when he invaded Russia. Contrary to the popular culture of the US and western Europe, it was Russia that took on the brunt of the German war machine, and Russia that painstakingly ground them down at great cost. To put it simply, Russia would have still beaten Germany without the help of the Allies; the Allies might not have beaten Germany without the help of the Russians.  And while Japan was reeling from saturation bombings and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Russia declaring war on them was the moment they realized there was no hope left.

[yesterdayandkarma]

Black Power by Stokely Carmichael 1966 Berkeley, California

Several people have been upset because we’ve said that integration was irrelevant when initiated by blacks, and that in fact it was an insidious subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy. In the past six years or so, this country has been feeding us a "thalidomide drug of integration," and some negroes have been walking down a dream street talking about sitting next to white people. That does not begin to solve the problem. We didn’t go to Mississippi to sit next to Ross Barnett (former governor of Mississippi), we did not go to sit next to Jim Clark (sheriff of Selma, Alabama), we went to get them out of our way. People ought to understand that; we were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy. In order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man after he is born free, and that is in fact what this country does. It enslaves blacks after they’re born. The only thing white people can do is stop denying black people their freedom.

I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people. For example, I am black. I know that. I also know that while I am black I am a human being. Therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people don’t know that. Every time I tried to go into a public place they stopped me. So some boys had to write a bill to tell that white man, "He’s a human being; don’t stop him." That bill was for the white man, not for me. I knew I could vote all the time and that it wasn’t a privilege but my right. Every time I tried I was shot, killed or jailed, beaten or economically deprived. So somebody had to write a bill to tell white people, "When a black man comes to vote, don’t bother him." That bill was for white people. I know I can live anyplace I want to live. It is white people across this country who are incapable o fallowing me to live where I want. You need a civil rights bill, not me. The failure of the civil rights bill isn’t because of Black Power or because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or because of the rebellions that are occurring in the major cities. That failure is due to the white’s incapacity to deal with their own problems inside their own communities. And so in a sense we must ask, How is it that black people move? And what do we do? But the question in a much greater sense is, How can white people who are the majority, and who are responsible for making democracy work, make it work? They have never made democracy work, be it inside the United States, Vietnam, South Africa, the Philippines, South America, Puerto Rico, or wherever America has been. We not only condemn the country for what it has done internally, but we must condemn it for what it does externally. We see this country trying to rule the world, and someone must stand up and start articulating that this country is not God, and that it cannot rule the world. 

[firewindmill]

Nemo, my buddy. My guy. Please PLEASE tell me that “Voltron remake” is just me hallucinating or having nightmares. 😩 Please tell me people are not actually pulling this racist bs and even calling Shiro fxcking ‘Hachiko’.. I can’t...

I ACTUALLY HAVE THOUGHTS ON THIS AND TWEETED ABOUT IT IVE BEEN STEAMED ABOUT IT THAT ITS PUSHED ME TO SPEAK ABOUT IT ON MY DAMN RADIO PROGRAM HANG ON OH MY GOD. I was like..should i say this on this hell site…okay I’m gonna give you my 2 cents and more, from both my radio and art account where the salt leaks. 

I tweeted this earlier over here:

How do I say this…we should be thankful for the content that we didn’t get as kids NOW and fight for what we want NOW for future generations in the areas of ideal representation in media. It’s never going to be perfect in the beginning because it’s never been done before. Everyone has to crawl before they take their first baby step, walk and then run. It’s just how things work, or you put the work you wanna see in the world with your own original work. That’s what I’m seeing these days for queer representation in media, on TV or cartoons.There’s a lot of stuff big companies are not gonna pick up on and many people want different things but you need to celebrate those baby steps and encourage more work CONSTRUCTIVELY to take things places it hasn’t been before.Also put your money where your mouth is. And don’t attack queer people while playing fake progressive and using outdated queer tropes that harmed our communities or weaponizing other tropes without understanding what they actually mean when applied.

Then after hearing more about what the fucking reboot was doing, I had this to say this over here and its sad because Lance isn’t even my top favorite character, I love him now but he isn’t my favorite compared to Pidge, Hunk, Keith and Shiro.

Lmao can unaffected latinx folks not speak over latinx folks that are affected AND offended by renaming L*nce to Le*ndro.Y'all not get the nuance and history of getting easy to pronounce names for English speakers vs a “Spanish” sounding name. When my mom was a kid, her brothers all had different but traditionally Hispanic names as it would go, my uncles Octavio, Raul, Jesse, Gerardo.Teachers would mispronounce Raul as “Roll” “Rall” & kids would call my uncle Octavio “oco the taco man”My mom didn’t wanna fuck w that. So when she had my sister and I, she named me after my(her) godmother Sara (this is now my deadname because I’m queer) and named my sister Elizabeth(she prefers Lizard now) because she didn’t want her kids to go through that shit. So uh, its racist to be searching for a more “Spanish” sounding name for our identities to be exploited for whites to jerk off to cause it’s “exotic” and “different”. Don’t talk to me if you disagree and stay in your lane. I could never stand w that bigoted side of fandom, hesitated to call it what it is but bigotry bleeds into everything we do, even in fandom spaces & I will not associate with anyone who’s “okay” with it.AU’s are one thing.Reboots consisting of bigoted entitlement is another.

You’re not hallucinating and quite frankly, I’d be keeping receipts on this since their racism is out in the open publicly and keep it up to hold them accountable if they’re gonna change and serve as a reminder of the monsters they once were. But I’m not fucking surprised considering the atrocious way they’ve treated other fans, treated their own fellow shippers, treated US, many that are in the groups that identify with Shiro one way or another whether we’re queer, disabled, Asian, mentally ill or a mix of 2, 3 or all of these aspects, the REAL, tangible and quite frankly the most progressive I’ve seen in any form of media because it’s INTERSECTIONAL and not based on disgusting tokenism. Some folks are saying oh I wanted to give it a chance, give it the benefit of the doubt…let me tell you something that hasn’t steered me wrong.

Never give the benefit of the doubt. People will tell you what they want you to know, and what these people want us to know is that they want their old fashioned stereotypes where queer people are predators, poc are their stereotypes, are the same, and will exploit identities like the latest jerk off material for their fake woke points. I’ve thought to myself…Nemo…you shouldn’t be using academic language on prejudice and oppression in fandom spaces…these are fictional and that’s real life.

But now I’m gonna say what I’ve held to myself for literally since the  beginning of the discourse because I was here when Voltron was being talked about in articles, BEFORE it launched on Netflix

Antis in fandom are experiencing extreme cognitive dissonance and fragility that is commonly seen in privileged groups. They say one thing but disagree with the idea when its presented to them in an actual realistic manner and what they’ve done, and always have done is reacted in a series of defensive moves when they’re challenged on their bigotry and supremacy, internalized or otherwise, then self-destruct as they’re doing now, showing the faces that many of us have already known or seen. Some are just realizing it now but its better now then never seeing or acknowledging it. Contrary to popular belief, sometimes fake liberalism is just as if not more harmful than straight up alt-right people being open about it because the former sneaks up on you and kills you if you let it, and that’s coming from someone who’s lived in the culture of the passive aggressive midwest of the United States all my life. 

I’m so sorry this got so fucking long but mark my words, I’ll never accept any form of bigotry in my personal online spaces, and will be muting the tag and unfollow/block anyone i’m following as I see fit because I cannot and will not stand by that behavior.

[aboriginalnewswire]

TheAngryindian

07.06.2001

‘As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right’.

-Patrick Buchanan

[FOTO: Public memorial one day after the Breivik attacks. Credit: Johannes Grødem]

As sensible people try to find psychic balance after the deplorable attacks in Norway against cultural progressivism in Europe, it has become painfully clear to all that Christian fascism, xenophobia and right-wing violence have again become an undeniable part of everyday life in the west. As much as it hurts, White society must finally accept the fact that what occurred in Norway did not arise out of a vacuum. Only a flat-out bigot would try to deny that right-wing Christian terrorism does not has a long and sordid history of violent opposition to ethnic and religious minorities, left-wing politics and progressive social change. Despite what conservative apologists might say, their religion has not taught them anything about tolerance and peace.

The racist doctrine of White ‘ethnic’ supremacy has been lovingly nurtured in popular culture, spiritually endorsed by Jesus’ theologians and accepted by many within the White and non-White mainstream as an equitable politic in the 21st century. When wealthy Caucasian dandies like fashion designer John Galliano and pop icon to the forlorn, Morrissey, start playing around with far-right racialism, it is painfully obvious that being a dedicated follower of fascism has become more than respectable. It’s back in vogue. We can continue to bury our heads in the sand like the Obama administration and pretend that White racism on a global scale does not exist, or, we can pragmatically move forward by bravely addressing the ugliness that is staring us in the face.

Like it or not, White racist attitudes have been a prominent part of the European social fabric since antiquity. And it is foolhardy to overlook the reality that xenophobia is still used as a political tool by the European and Euro-settler upper-classes. Visible examples of pro-White, anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic sentiment have been simmering in Western Europe ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Inspired by US President Ronald Reagan’s ceremonial state visit to honour the Nazi dead of Bitburg, Germany in 1985, Eastern European fascists simply brought their admiration for Adolf Hitler along with them to the now unified Bundesrepublik Deutschland. And guess what, no one cared.

In the UK, Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher deftly contributed to the rise of the right by making it perfectly understood that she felt White Britons were ‘tired of being swamped by immigrant cultures’ as Brick Lane slowly began to turn sepia. A conscious move on her part to make peripheral use of the National Front and the British Movement which began attacking Asians, Africans and Jews at will. And during that time, they were quietly protected by the veiled racialist sympathies of the British media and local law enforcement.

It sounds like a chapter pulled out of the Mussolini years but it isn’t. It is a matter of the international public record and it is rarely mentioned in connection with the role of fascism in modern Europe. The acceptable line of selective thinking argues ‘that was then and this is now’. Things have changed they tell us. But do not be fooled by what seems like progress. The rank unpleasantness the ‘Great Communicator’ and Baroness Thatcher gave birth to in the 1980’s is still with us. Only the superficial veneer is different. The current US President Barack Obama may be of African descent, but his portfolio as an American politician is no less Europocentric and no less racist than any of his predecessors. By and large, the most powerful Black man in history has done more than any other world leader on record to enforce the machiavellian processes of White Christian supremacy by any means necessary. And no one knows this better than self-aware African and Indigenous peoples.

Conservative White folks and other suckers suffering from acute Europhilia may be able to ignore the realities of this apathetic disdain, but people of colour and the poor are suffering loudly and in plain sight. It does not take more than a glance to see just how little his administration is concerned with how bad African people in America are doing under federal Black leadership. Although he is deep into his first term as Commander-in-Chief, Mr. Obama has yet to address institutional anti-African or anti-Indigenous racial discrimination, the widespread social crisis of racial profiling or the established inhumanity of overtly racist police departments or conservative judicial brutality against the poor. Now that it is achingly clear to the conscious that the incessantly repeated fear of an Obama-led era of Marxist-neo-Nazi-Wahabbist ‘reverse-discrimination’ against White Christian American world is patently ridiculous, what next? Will the racists and politically stupid now cease behaving like the goofy characters in ‘Springtime for Hitler’ or will they persist in their pursuit of a global Whites-only agenda? You know the answer to this question as well as I do.

So for brevity’s sake let us cut to the chase and admit to a few well-known social variables. Even if it happens to embarrass the Europeans who may be reading this commentary. The phenomenon of pro-European racism and exploitation of darker peoples is, and has been, a reality across the world since the classical Roman Empire. We can get into lengthy discussions about how and why later. But let us suffice it for now by saying that what we are dealing with in terms of the ‘new’ Christian fascism is in reality, a White man’s problem. Faulting the people of the Third and Fourth Worlds and social progressives for what has happened in Norway is like blaming Jews for the Odessa pogroms.

And truth be told this is exactly what is being done with the editorial reportage of Breivik’s bloody massacre of the innocent. The victims, mostly young socialist-leaning citizens and residents of Norway, are ultimately being blamed for what happened to them. And US media jester and devout Mormon Glenn Beck did just that when he equated the socialist victims of the Utøya attacks with the Hitler Youth cadres of the German Nazi era. And really, is anyone in the literate world really surprised by this, or the fact that this vicious Mormon bigot still has his job? The sad fact is that Glenn Beck and the other unrepentant Völkisch journalists like him in the US, UK and Israeli news media did exactly what they were expected and paid to do. In a conscious fit of blatant White supremacist damage control they all blamed the attacks on Islamic extremism, even after it became clear that the perpetrator was a Christian zealot hoping to spark an anti-Islamic ‘Holy War’ in the traditional lands of the Master Race and Palestine.

The ‘Truth’ Game

For once it would be refreshing if White society actually took responsibility for its own congenital insanities, but this isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. Expecting the dominating Europocentric racist world order to willingly come to grips with its own xenophobic hubris is foolish. Denial is central to the paradigm and White racism as an ideology has been spinning the same outrageous frequent liar programme across the globe for generations. The reality that people around the world are being starved, maimed and killed in the name of positive White control has always been soft-pecked and dismissed as inconsequential. Although racialist laws are considered morally reprehensible, Apartheid in South Africa was clearly defined as racial separation and it was still supported by all of the major democratic powers.

We can make believe that we are witnessing a sudden sea change in social and political attitudes, but this just isn’t credible. The writing, in large part due to the maddening and sickening violence of Anders Breivik, is on the proverbial wall and it is written in scarlet. You and I both know what is really going down in the world, to whom it is happening to and ultimately, who it is that benefits from the institution and maintenance of human-on-human brutality. And we are all cowards for knowing this and for allowing it to continue in a democracy. And Whites who work overtime to deny what has been going on in their name for centuries are the greatest cowards of all.

At some point one would hope that White people as a demographic would eventually come to their senses and stop playing games with the lives, minds and general welfare of others by facing up to the truth of their own belligerent behaviour. They could actually begin right now by admitting to themselves that the Christian terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, is one of theirs. This hasn’t happened yet because the conservative lobby is doing everything possible to deny the obvious connections him and the rest of the White ‘race’. Some are even going so far as to deny that Breivik is actually ‘White’ since we now know that Breivik decided to undergo plastic surgery in the United States in order to look, ‘more Aryan’. Twisted identity politics maybe? Perhaps. But no matter how the conservative lobbies in the US, UK and Israeli may try to spin things, Anders Breivik in all his anti-Muslim, bathed in the blood of Jesus glory belongs to them lock, stock and bloody barrel.

Anyone who has watched the rise of the far-right in Europe and North America is not surprised by this omission of kinship. And this writer for one does not accept the juvenile arguments of the White Christian talking heads that are trying to convince us that no one could have seen this coming. You and I both know that this is indeed a lie. And further, we know that such protestations are more than just disingenuous. They are also telling in that any rush to vigorously defend Breivik’s Christian terrorism and racism at this moment only blatantly exposes the establishment’s unmistakable fondness for this sort of Europocentric extremism.

There is no excuse for this. How can there be after the ravages of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco? Pretending that they did not do their very best to burn their way across the subcontinent in pursuit of ‘purity’ is inherently dangerous and stupid, but who really remembers anymore? Who really cares? Not the educated, apathetic Judeo-Christian democratic populations of the exalted west. They have made a conscious choice to dismiss the lessons of any history they regard as a passing joke, including their own.

Considering the hard reality of the mass graves left over from the ethnocidal breakup of Yugoslavia, how can anyone in the progressive world sit quietly while it happens all over again? Remember that Yugoslavia was supposed to be the genocide everyone said was impossible.

Yet, it happened right in front of the United Nations and the world’s news cameras while the European and American far-right laughed at the world community. Why not? They were watching their fascist compatriots from World War Two, the Hrvatski Revolucionarni Pokret (or Ustaše) of Croatia come back to the world stage blessed and endorsed by the world’s superpowers as a legitimate government and military force. They also thought well of the Kosovar Albanian Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës or KLA, an extremely violent and xenophobic criminal faction that Yugoslavian government and intelligence authorities officially identified as a terrorist group on line with the Sicilian Mafia. NATO, along with several foreign observers and journalists in the country during the conflict, even went so far as to declare that the KLA were dead-serious about ‘cleaning-out’ Kosovo’s Serb population and expanding their criminal enterprises internationally.

Curiously, no one was interested in this news. And despite their murderous activity, the US state dept. and the other European powers who could have stopped them did not regard the KLA as terrorists while Slobodan Milosevic’s government certainly did. And when the KLA was finally removed from the official terrorism watchlist in 1998 by the US, UK and France, the capitalist powers began building business relationships with the major Kosovar caporegime as if nothing had happened. The victims are not remembered much less regarded any longer and the rest of the story is simply seen as the bygone history of an unpleasant time in the Balkans. Business as they say, is business.

As we can see, if the far-right were really considered a threat by the ruling classes they would have been stopped cold in the 1940’s. Instead, (and with considerable help from Pope Pius the XII and US intelligence) the Nazi’s simply moved to the Americas and continued on with their work. This goes a long way in explaining why even the organised, government sponsored madness that swept Europe under fascism has been largely forgotten aside from its unfortunate misuse as a political tool. We know this because when US Christian-Zionists began defining the European Holocaust as a gift sent to them from the Almighty, virtually no one objected. And as bizarre as this idea sounds, the fact remains that this outlandish belief is shared amongst a great number of ethnic Jews.

The Zionist Organization of America for instance not only defended but actively promoted the US evangelical shaman John Hagee when he began preaching that the genocides of the last century were necessary for Yahweh (יהוה) to bring back the state of Israel. Clearly, the Evangelical Christian desire for Armageddon, the Rapture and a holy ‘race war’ far outweigh any logical of moral considerations for social justice. The victims of White religious and capitalist violence are simply seen as acceptable exodus fodder, nothing more. They are either exploitable pawns or annoying hindrances standing in the way of God’s divine plan. Either way, they must and will be moved into positions of advantage for European uses. This is the vicious cycle Scotsman Adam Smith described with his ‘Vile Maxim of Mankind’, the willingness of the rich to take unfair advantage of the weak while actually believing that such an arrangement is ‘fair’. So much for the wonder that is capitalism.

Social xenophobia is bad enough, but denying that it isn’t a political and economic device when it is clearly evident in thought and deed is vulgar. This is why conservative media attempts to downplay what happened in Oslo and Utøya are patently absurd. They selectively ignore the political role of Judeo-Christian violence, slavery and ethnic repression in Europe and throughout its colonialist holdings during the Catholic-led Crusades immediately after the Reconquista in 1492. It also leaves out the horror-show that developed after those overseas colonies became independent and internally-colonialised the native populations they displaced or enslaved for their own benefit. This includes the direct involvement of German and US private industry, international banking and the Catholic Church who knowingly assisted in carrying out the ‘Final Solution’. Because of this moral negligence, belligerent fascism has returned with a vengeance. And seemingly, no one in authority is willing to stop it.

Especially not the first African leader of the whole free world. Like the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus Augustus or the native collaborators who proudly served with the South African Police during Apartheid, Mr. Obama has shown precious little mercy to other people of colour at home or abroad. Native Americans, Africans across the Diaspora and Spanish-speaking Indigenous immigrants are doing worse now than ever before. While at the same time, White conservatives gripe and grumble about Obama’s supposed war against European American and the White Christian heritage. This is of course absurd on a variety of levels, mostly because Mr. Obama has done more to uphold traditional standards of ‘Whiteness’ in the United States than any one else.

By the same token, the European conservatives that are complaining about him the most do not believe in the system nearly as strongly as he does. The ideal world these idiotic people claim to want is being given to them by the Obama administration on a platter. Arabs and Muslims are being militarily intimidated, Africans and being starved and racially profiled and immigrants, (who aren’t White) are being ejected from the US at record numbers. So what are they complaining about? Thanks to Mr. Obama and his financial backers, it is the people of non-White, non-Christian world that are paying for US capitalism’s rampant and unrestricted greed. Self-evidently, then, it stands to reason that the racist opposition to Barack Obama is just that, an issue of White racism, not of political differences.

The sordid hoaxes circulating about his non-connections to Weather Underground alumni Bill Ayers, the location and conditions surrounding his birth, his genealogy and his religious convictions are all about White fears of a Black and Brown planet. Their racism is so ingrained and so blinding that they cannot see how closely the Obama presidency actually mirrors their twisted vision of White American global supremacy. Politically, militarily and economically, the United States is without a doubt still the biggest bully on the block. This is the reality. And the Obama administration has done absolutely nothing but expand their capabilities while US citizens bear the brunt of the nation’s economic collapse. Without mercy, the Obama administration has pressed on with the so-called ‘War on Terror’ in search of its ‘enemies’, the very people, these ignorant arses say Barack Obama ‘really’ represents.

Their nonsensical theories also painstakingly leave out the fact that the Goldman Sachs Group and other wealthy capitalist contributors to his campaign were clearly making an investment for their own best interests, not for the working classes most of these White supremacist Neanderthals happen to hail from. Their gross ignorance of politics and history, even of their own country, makes it nearly impossible for them to comprehend what is really happening. Their fears that the election of Barack Obama is some sort of depraved Manchurian Candidate socialist coup d’état’ designed by Islamic mullahs to enslave America’s non-White population is based on absolute smoke. Just as is was during the Antebellum Era and Jim Crow, White folks, bigoted or not, live in morbid fear of an angry and massive backlash for all that has and continues to happen under European racialism and exploitation. But it is not the dark masses that encourage this derangement, it is the inner-human, the race-neutral consciousness

And because of this historical paranoia, Europeans have never felt totally secure anywhere, even within their own territorial domains. Anti-miscegenation laws, ‘Separate but Equal’ education restrictions and the application of indiscriminate White terrorist violence are symptoms of this fear. The mark of the racist is the stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge his or her own fears of the ‘Other’.

And if one is to take the late Algerian psychologist Franz Fanon seriously, Whites often react as explosively as they do precisely because they know how they would react if it was they who were faced with the same sort of oppressions non-Europeans are expected to endure quietly. White people for the most part walk the Earth as if they own it most anywhere and in relative safety. Nonetheless, those Whites that cannot or refuse accept even this are, as we have seen in Norway, prepared to go to extraordinary lengths in the name of White racial and cultural ‘security’. From false propaganda about the first African US president to violent acts directed against non-White people and left-wing political activists, White racism as a movement is willing to go that extra mile. It needs to be reckoned with as a danger to the greater society but until the powers that be decide to a ‘War on Racism’, expect the White Power movement to grow even more as the world’s economic health continues to deteriorate.

Xenophobia, Paranoia and Negligence

Almost from the moment Anders Breivik declared himself the hero of White Christian Europe, conservative opinion makers began doing ju-jutsu with the facts behind his ideological ideas and inspirations. Why is the far-right allowed to get away with this? Obviously because someone within the Europocentric power structure wills it and the psychologically downtrodden masses passively allow it to continue. It is clear that the more White control is challenged, the more White society is seen to overreact. This is indisputable. And it also gives us an important clue as to why Anders Breivik is being accorded such undue preferential treatment and extreme tolerance by the White, mainstream press. Very few conservative news agencies refer to him as a terrorist and most far-right media pundits now enthusiastically describe him as insane and ‘deeply disturbed’. We are told by his lawyer and other experts that he is not entirely responsible for his actions. At first this seems almost reasonable until you think for a moment about how Arab, Muslim and left-wing terrorist suspects and acts are handled by the establishment information paradigm as opposed to how White, far-right terrorist activity is dealt with.

Have Jose Padilla or Pfc. Bradley Manning received this sort of consideration or attention from the mainstream media? When was the last time you read a story or report discussing at length the mental stability of a known Muslim terrorist or noticed a veiled tolerance for their extremist religious convictions? And why is this not a legitimate question? Neo-Nazi, White supremacist and anti-immigrant factions operating in Europe, North America and Australia are by their own admission using violence and intimidation to get their politics across through a policy of fear. Yet, democratic governments in the west are only concerned about such groups when their actions cross the line into threatening their own legal authority or political existence.

Given the extensive record of far-right violence in the past as well as the present one would logically expect to find these entities at the very top of the list for anti-social threats, not at the very bottom. But this is the reality of the situation internationally, and American and European governments are entirely at fault for allowing and encouraging the existence of such organisations in the first place. Democratically-elected governments are supposed to defend their societies against threats to the progressive well-being of their constituents. But they cannot do that and covertly align themselves with the very same negative forces that almost destroyed the world at the same time and call themselves moral. We are forgetting what it means to be and how to remain human. And it is unambiguous that no one is a position of authority thinking in terms of raw political and economic power is willing to identify such movements as contrary to the social good.

The extant Europocentric paradigm operates on two distinct principles: first, it makes damn sure that the literate population only understands the world through a rhetorical mythology concerning the ‘Enlightened European’ and two, that the class-separated masses observe a closed-minded and emotional rejection against their own betterment. Under such jaundiced circumstances, White Christian violence and marginalisation against minorities, Muslims, socialists, atheists, homosexuals, anti-war protesters and non-submissive women can almost always be dismissed as justifiable. Particularly if you repeatedly and intentionally mischaracterize these issues as conservatives regularly do via their lapdogs in the mainstream corporate owned media.

Not a day goes by when the spokespersons for the powerful do not make light of the everyday concerns of real people. With the authority granted to them by the political and religious elite, the problems of historical and institutional White racism, Christian hegemony and capitalist domination are articulated as someone else’s problem. In this way the sole responsibility for doing anything about it is placed on the victims, not the perpetrators. The international discourse concerning social injustice is little more than a sad joke. Europeans are held accountable for nothing. And the United States, now led by a son of Africa, will belligerently defend the influence of White racism and politicised Judeophobia so long as it is beneficial to their imperialistic aims.

I don’t say this without credible evidence. When reports began circulating that the USA’s chief media jester Glenn Beck had the unmitigated gall to tell his dim-witted public that the people killed by Anders Breivik were left-wing ‘Hitler Youth’ wannabes, everyone just shrugged. By rights, Beck should have not only have lost his job but should have been swiftly drummed out of the industry for such callous insensitivity. But if you look closely you’ll notice some things you might not wish to see. For one, its hard not to notice that the usual Zionist jackals obsessed with ruining the lives and careers of honest journalists and bloggers have not gone after Glenn Beck. Even after his numerous verbal assaults against the ‘uniqueness’ of the Jewish holocaust under the Nazis, Beck and people like him have yet to be seriously hindered by their hypocritical positions concerning gentile bias towards the world’s Jews.

In fact, it seems as if their radical Jewish support actually increases after such utterances of stupidity. Following his nonsensical remarks about Reformist Judaism being a different kind of ‘radical Islam’, support for Beck among hard-line Zionists in the US and Israel grew substantially. And let’s not forget that the head of the very Zionist Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, actually had the audacity to apologise to Beck after the popular ‘Two Minutes’ Hate’ chap suggested that capitalist George Soros, a Jew, helped ‘send other Jews to the death camps’.

Where is the Zionist lobby when the western world could really use them? As I have said before, Beck’s shameless, pro-gentile Zionism is simply Christian theological chauvinism in drag. It isn’t serious. But now that Beck has yet again crossed the line into territory that has permanently ruined the careers and personal lives of better mortals, where are the usual Zionist loudmouths and why haven’t they called for his symbolic flogging? Where are the ‘responsible’ talking heads of the mainstream media, the American Exceptionalist crowd and the Zionists now that Beck has identified the young victims of a rabidly fascist, anti-Islamic Christian terrorist as a left-wing gaggle of the ‘Hitler Youth’?

In a logical world, Israel’s zealous-minded supporters in the west would have a great deal of explaining to do. But as we have seen in the editorial aftermath of the Norway tragedy, the Zionist lobby not only approved of the Oslo and Utøya attacks but cheered the racism, Islamophobia and the terrorist proudly taking responsibility for the attacks. As writer J.J. Goldberg has accurately noted, radical as well as moderate Jewish conservatives have gratefully given their sympathy and support to Breivik mostly because of what they perceive as his uncompromising stance in support of their claim to Occupied Palestine.

After this, let there no longer be any doubt that international Zionism is perfectly willing to stand by a frenzied, racist Christian terrorist seeking to reestablish the decidedly Judeophobic medieval Order of the Knights Templars:

‘The debate exploded aboveground on Saturday in an opinion essay at Ynet (in Hebrew only) by Ziv Lenchner, a left-leaning Tel Aviv artist and one of Ynet’s large, bipartisan stable of columnists. It’s called “Dancing the Hora on Norwegian Blood.” He argues that the comment sections on news websites are a fair barometer of public sentiment (a questionable premise) and that the overwhelming response is schadenfreude, pleasure at Norway’s pain’.

Historically speaking, the Templars were a professional Catholic military organisation that violently occupied and looted Jerusalem during the Crusades by killing Jews, Muslims and non-European Christians in the name of the Mother Church. Their religious biases against the people who dared crucify ‘The Christ’ at Golgotha is beyond credible refute. But modern Zionists simply gloss over this specific by only recognising the Islamophobic and Europocentric aspects of the story. They do this in favour of the ‘White makes Right’ philosophy, a racialist gospel that assumes for itself a dominating role within any given setting no matter what the circumstances are. Proof of this can easily be found in any popular English of Hebrew-language web portal that is covering Breivik’s gross act. Without a doubt, Israelis and Israel-supporters that have bothered to comment at all on the attacks or the debate surrounding the attacks have clearly focused their attention on whether or not the victims of Oslo and Utøya ‘deserve’ any respect at all.

Don’t believe me, read the disturbing comments left by conservatives on the web for yourself via the anti-Zionist crew over @ Jews Sans Frontiers and a translation provided by one of their compatriots from the original Hebrew by way of Ynet:

1. And in the mosque there won’t be some ceremony?

2. It’s fun and warms the heart to see them crying!!!!

3. Go to hell. Haters of Jews/Israelis, anti-semites busy with the problems of others all day—here you got some too. [signed Zionist]

4. I have no identification with an anti-Semitic country that leads to the hatred of Israel. Not happy, not sorry.

5. All in all, what they asked for is what they got!!!!

6. [in Norwegian.] Serves you right, you Nazis.

7. He is a hero, kill all leftists, expel all Muslims.

8. European efficiency.

9. It’s only a matter of time until an Israeli rightwinger will do something similar.

10. My heart with the families of all the victims. I wish you will never know more sorrow and I wish all the wounded will heal as quickly as possible and will put this tragedy behind them. Condolences and sympathy from Israel. [Norwegian and English]

11. I have hope too… that you have many more days of mourning and tears.

12. Feel a little bit of what we feel here all the time, maybe now you’ll understand what it is, terror.

13. The ugly Israeli continues to talkback. Shame on you, you bunch of people who rejoice in the suffering of others dancing on the blood. It’s a shame that you even hold Israeli IDs.

As you can see, Norway is viewed by Zionist hard-liners as too pro-Palestinian for its own good. Once it became clear via his numerous online screeds that Anders Breivik as anti-Arab spree killer was acting on his anti-Islamic theological and political beliefs to combat Islam in Europe, he immediately gained their loyalty as a fellow fighter engaged in their struggle. Don’t be surprised by this. Especially since the discourse has evolved, if you will, into a Hasbara-driven controversy suggesting that any objective criticism of the pro-Breivik position amongst Zionists and Israel’s goyim supporters is actually veiled anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish prejudice in disguise.

The Dynamics of Denial

‘It is out of the question for the leader of the Western world to lay a wreath in a war cemetery where Nazi storm troopers are buried. … The stated purpose, reconciliation, is being drowned in a rising flood of long-buried passions from the death camp survivors, who feel as betrayed and abandoned as they did 40 years ago.’

– Washington Post, 23 April 1985

If you are confused at this juncture be not afraid, because that is exactly the point of all of this circular semantic diarrhoea. Remember if you will for a moment how all this began. The mainstream media in the west immediately began flooding the international news cycle with false and sensationalist headlines stating as fact that al Qaeda had finally penetrated Europe by attacking two targets in Norway. Although they had absolutely no evidence for this, their contemptible reportage on the story forced the public opinion broadly against Muslims whom they mistakenly held responsible for the double attacks.

The propaganda politruks working within mainstream media did their damndest to create the falsehood that militant Islam was making a serious bid to make itself known in Europe. Even the technical journal Wired published a story that assumed only Muslims could have been behind the attacks showing, rather embarrassingly, that the supposedly ‘liberal’ sectors of US society are not all that tolerant of religious differences. Apparently even ‘geeks’ can share the very same knee-jerk prejudices of the rabidly extreme anti-Muslim far-right.

What about the other overlooked fact that the establishment media’s knee-jerk ‘terrorist’ label was abandoned the split-second Anders Breivik was identified as the culprit? How does his act of religious indiscriminate violence differ qualitatively from other acts of theological xenophobia? Does Breivik’s ideological position in full support of White Power globally exclude him from being considered a terrorist? It is a reasonable question since independent investigators and journalists not swamped by corporate censorship have been finding connections between Breivik and known White supremacist organisations operating in Europe. Including ties to the Christian fundamentalist movement gaining social and political ground in the United States.

This isn’t a big secret. The US based New York Times, to its credit, did admit that Anders Breivik was extremely enthusiastic about the rise of the racist right-wing in the United States. But they noticeably stopped short of holding traditional American fascism responsible for its role for what happened in Oslo and Utøya. Not surprisingly, popular media attention in the US has been critically focused upon the entertainment aspects of this story instead of the serious speculation one would expect considering the importance of the issues at hand.

Earnest, investigative journalism concerning the conspicuous ideological and religious use of US, UK and Israeli cultural Islamophobia and political conservatism is difficult to find in the mainstream. As expected, the Christians have given themselves a pass. The religio-political movement founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, when one really thinks about it, is perhaps ultimately responsible for creating the sort of poisonous social climate that has made unconscionable far-right bastards like Anders Breivik possible. But do not expect to read anything about this is the western press which is still ideologically blaming Muslims in Europe for Breivik’s murderous rampage.

The artful dodging of responsibility for US Euro-settler Christian fascism’s international influence says a great deal about the level of cowardice shown by conservatives and White racists when faced with the morose reality of their twisted and hypocritical rhetoric. The American racists and Islamophobics cited by Anders Breivik in his detailed writings, (still available online for the time being) represent a hodgepodge of right-wing ideologues. But is it clear from reading his work that his main source of inspiration is centrally rooted in the United States and the US-led anti-Palestinian Zionist movement.

His list of popular anti-Muslim media propagandists includes such luminaries as Pamela Geller, (creator of the wildly ridiculous ‘birther’ myth suggesting that Barack Obama is Malcolm X’s illegitimate son) Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer and hard-line Israelis like Avigdor Lieberman and Caroline Glick. Each of these names figure prominently in his writings as definitive reference points for articulating his personal insecurities about non-White inclusiveness in European social life. A concern duly noted by US pundit and legendary pro-Europocentric bigot Pat Buchanan who succinctly put it this way, ‘Breivik may be right’ when he opined that the Norwegian Christian Berserker’s idea of a major military conflict between the Christian European world and Islam may actually be the next logical step forward for White survival.

Scared yet? If not you should be. While the fascist 1930’s are without question furiously nipping at our heels, the bright minds of the political, legal and journalistic establishment say their is nothing for us to worry about. Rest assured they tell us, the culture war against Muslims in Europe and North America is still on the table despite its idiocy. Especially if professional Islamophobic politicians like Irish Republican Army supporter Rep. Peter King and the very Catholic Rudolph Giuliani have anything to say about it. And if you can see past the glaring hypocrisy you’ll notice that their stated political beliefs and religious convictions are as weak as their antiquated, narrow-minded arguments. Please believe, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, democratic, religious or sane about conservative politics in the west.

Still not convinced that there is more to this tragedy than the conservatives are making things out to be? If that is the case, it would do well for the reader to consider the base ideas behind Breivik’s obsession with ‘Whiteness’ and his affection for Christian cultural and racial ‘purity’. Ideas often do have an ideological genealogy and unfortunately, many of the visible road signs along Breivik’s explosive path lead directly to the doorstep of the American and United Kingdom’s organised far-right. Although Breivik’s connections to the Scandinavian branch of the English Defence League and infamous Irish loyalist and Neo-Nazi supporter Jonathan ‘Mad Dog’ Adair (former brigadier of the notorious West Belfast UDA) have been positively confirmed, his emphatic allegiance to America’s brand of White supremacist thinking is being selectively ignored.

The US ideological component is interestingly rarely mentioned in relation to Brevik’s politics and you should be asking yourself why. Very few foreign observers would try to refute that the United States is currently the world leader in popular racism although most mainstream US citizens and residents will vociferously argue the reverse. No matter, American conservatives regularly and treacherously perpetuate the false myth of an organised left-wing/Islamic extremist alliance against the entire White world population all day long. The craziness is now so embedded that socially conservative politicians, pundits, clerics and politicians, both White and non-White, are finding it necessary to ride the wave of populist racism if they intend to stay socially relevant.

Europocentrism Revisited

This is a clear throwback to the melodramatic and quasi-religious whinings of traditional Euro-American White Power terrorist organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the ‘respectable’ Bible-thumping bigots who populate the membership of John Birch Society. And Anders Breivik is known to have travelled, (and sought surgical services) to the United States where he hoped to make personal contact with professional Islamophobes such as the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ maven Pamela Geller, (who is doing everything possible to refute any link between them) American White supremacist Christian militia extremist groups like the Army of God and the belligerent members of the pro-corporatist Tea Party. If you have the stomach and the time for it, try reading some of Breivik’s published Christian Übermensch manifesto, his 1,500-page statement regarding his admiration for the Americans and the conservative Christian movement. In his own words he makes it plain that the US is his main inspiration and that he was certain American fascists would approve of his ideas:

‘A majority of Europeans love the U.S….just like a majority of Europeans support Israel’s fight against Jihad. But considering the fact that 80-90% of the media + politicians ‘officially’ support Cultural Communist views it’s only natural that the coverage is extremely biased’.

Now, where have we heard this line before? Taking his cues from the American fascist nut-cases he likes so much, Breivik parrots the groundless fib that liberal bias in the mainstream media distorts the ‘truth’ of White Christian superiority and the threat of Islamic infiltration. A charge that makes little sense considering that the US media industry is a field hopelessly overloaded with stiff, conservative-minded simpletons who do little but intentionally report misleading and contradictory information to serve the extant corporate interest. This is incontestable. Simply look at the ownership of the major news providers and see for yourself who actually ‘owns’ the media. Under such obviously parochial conditions the concept of ‘truth’, as one UK official candidly put it, ‘can be a dubious proposition’.

How US conservatives can spin the Norway incident into a ‘warning’ about the evils of Islam in the White world only makes sense when you consider the actions of American extremists at home. Anders Breivik may very well have gained some of his inspiration from the rogues gallery of American Christian terrorists that have made the news headlines in recent years:

 Eric Robert Rudolph – The pro-Christian anti-abortion extremist responsible for numerous bomb attacks in the United States between 1996 and 1998 that killed two and injured at least 150 other people. He hoped that attacking the Olympic Centennial Park in Atlanta would lead to the end of the radical Marxist and homosexual ‘agenda’ in the US.

 Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier – Hard-line Christian Identity followers and militia movement members who planned and executed the bomb 1995 attack against the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

 Byron Williams – Inspired by the conspiracy theories endorsed by right-wing conservatives such as Glenn Beck, this unemployed carpenter donned body protection, loaded his mother’s vehicle with automatic weapons (loaded with armor-piercing rounds) and headed off with the expressed intent of killing of progressives in liberal San Francisco. After he survived an extended fire-fight with the California Highway Patrol who stopped his car for erratic driving, Williams readily admitted that he wanted to start a revolution by ‘Killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU’.

 George Sodini – A devout Christian upset with the Obama election and his belief that: ‘Black dudes have thier choice of best white hoez….’ decided to take three loaded weapons into a Pennsylvania dance class and shoot wildly after he shut off the lights. He killed three women and severely wounded nine other people before killing himself.

 James W. Von Brunn – A lifelong White supremacist and cold-blooded Judeophobe, Von Brunn led a lone armed assault against the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC in 2009 that killed an African-American security guard. Later, when US President Barack Obama spoke of the need to ‘remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms’, he failed to mention that Von Brunn’s racism was not limited to Jews.

This is far from a complete list. I could have added minor White Power superstars like Christian terrorist Scott Roeder who murdered the well-respected Dr. George Tiller while he was in church, or the seditious ‘Hutaree Group’, a ‘Christian Warrior’ militia outfit accused of conspiring to commit acts of violence against their local law enforcement department. And of course there are the ‘patriotic’ anti-immigrant ‘Nativist’ goons of the Minuteman Project, Inc., the self-ordaining racial separatists of the Phineas Priesthood and the Council of Conservative Citizens who would prefer it if the planet was only populated by White Christian heterosexuals and women like Ann Coulter. I also left out the murders of radio chat-show host Alan Berg by the White Power terrorist group, The Order and of African immigrantMulugeta Seraw by neo-Nazi ‘boneheads’ in Portland, Oregon. I even could go further by citing how the Ruby Ridge incident did much to help fertilize the notion that White racists in American deserve sympathy too and other underreported stories detailing the religious far-right’s reach in the United States. but in spite of all this documented violence you will be hard pressed to find major news services, in English, willing to do objective, investigative reporting on these issues.

Earlier this month I presented an editorial entitled, ‘Why the Time to Dismantle Edward Bernay’s Corporatist Propaganda Paradigm is Now… ’ laying forth a reasoned case for why the organised left should get off its befuddled arse and start aggressively challenging the legal and moral credibility of Rupert Murdoch and his fascist-friendly international media empire. Like any other sober political analyst paying attention to the rise of Europocentric paranoia and the gross inequalities of the never ending class-struggle, I fully expected Murdoch’s News Corp and the UK Tories to deny everything and take responsibility for absolutely nothing.

And true to form they did just that and were allowed to feign total ignorance to the inner workings of their own media organisation. Moreover, they provided a functional example for their American executives to follow as they actively downplay the severity of the wiretapping of 911 victim families phone calls in the US with mobile devices provided to them by News Corp employees.

Mainstream politicians, journalists and academics are consciously turning a blind eye to the rise of pro-White supremacist/Christian fascism in their nations while at the very same time they capitalise upon the social bad-jacketing of non-European ethnic and cultural groups. Occasionally this is intelligently discussed in fair terms, but the fact remains that the victims of discrimination in Europe and the Americas are the same ethnic and cultural groups that have been demonised in European and Euro-settler social tradition, religion and law for centuries.

This dynamic however is rarely discussed at length because to do so would be a self-convicting acknowledgement that xenophobia in the White world is an undeniable fact of life. Further, such an admission would empirically unshroud the reality that White racial perspectives and prejudices undoubtedly remain to be the primary reason why the world is in the shape it is.

The popular post-modernist argument that ‘all oppression is the same everywhere and in every circumstance’ is a Europocentric deception. It suggests a sociopolitical, educational and economic equality amongst all people that does not exist. It flatly denies the harsh realities of White Power, its hatreds, its inconsistencies and its long and sordid history of violence against those they declare to be feeble and powerless. It is also a blatant insult to the basic humanity of the victims who have generally been convinced that it is proper and noble to acquiesce quietly to their own disenfranchisement. This of course is not by accident. It is by calculated design. White society is not ignorant of the routine stresses that demoralise the hearts and minds of the non-European world. It simply masquerades institutional marginalisation and exploitation as the normative division between the better and the worse amongst human society.

And the problem is everywhere and anywhere you may care to look. Worldwide, the struggle between human dignity and the stubborn persistence of White racist advocacy, religious violence and economic robbery continues unabated by modern liberalism or common sense. Those of us who realise that our political, social and psychological under-development is the direct result of our struggle against racialism understand that have a great deal to do in terms of standing firm during these difficult times. We are not swayed by the pretty talk of the establishment or Barack Obama’s skin colour.

We live with the gross indignity of White racism and its by-products every day of our lives. What’s worse, every White person in the Americas is fully aware of this reality, but only a precious few are prepared to do more than simply wax philosophical about it.

There is a reason for this and it is important that we understand the issue fully for what it is. Peer pressure is a very powerful thing. And when decent White folks stand up to White racism they often place themselves at considerable social and physical risk. White people who are not shy about their anti-racism can experience rejection, insult and sometimes violent retaliations from family, lifelong friends and other Whites who object to their ‘cultural’ and/or racial dissent. This is sometimes so damaging emotionally that people who do indeed believe ethnic equality may decide to either stay ‘in the closet’ about their feelings or, they may even pretend to ‘go along’ with the traditional attitudes as a means of social survival. Even for ‘good’ White people, the risk of being socially marginalised as a ‘Nigger Lover’ is simply too much to deal with when it is easier to simply acquiesce to the mainstream and agree that White’s have an inherent God-given ‘right to rule’.

And whether White people in the US, UK or Israel want to accept it or not, they are all to an individual actually profiting from non-White social and political disenfranchisement and genocide. Forget about the hypocritical statements made by US Justice Robert Jackson as he sat in judgment of German Nazis while his own country was still eliminating Native Americans to steal their lands and brutalising African people for profit and sport. The fact is, White supremacist attitudes, Europocentric power and unearned White privilege are the end results of racist imposition and belligerence, not the assumed frailties of the chosen victims. White power is a lot like the Christian concept of the Devil in that it claims it does not exist, yet it informs everything that occurs in national, international and inter-cultural relations. And if you dare tell the truth, the way Brazil’s former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva did when he correctly pointed out that the international financial crisis is entirely the fault of the White people who really control what happens in the world, expect to be painted as a reverse-racist who despises ‘civilisation’ itself:

‘This crisis was caused by the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing. I do not know any black or indigenous bankers so I can only say [it is wrong] that this part of mankind which is victimized more than any other should pay for the crisis.’

– Lula da Silva

European conservatives took great offense to this but what could they really say? He was spot-on with his analysis and moreover, he was using the apologetics of White supremacy to effectively support his statement. The concept of White racial and cultural superiority isn’t his idea, its the most elemental argument presented by the ever-dominating White male power structure. It is also the primary fundamental hypocrisy of White racist philosophy. If the White man is the only cultural and ‘racial’ entity on Earth that has ever produced anything of consequence, this means that White society must also accept its central role in all that is wrong with the world they assert they alone have created.

Rational Alternatives to Manifest Destiny

The rise of the far-right is not simply a populist response to non-White immigration and modern religious and ethnic tolerance in the west. It is an engineered sociopolitical phenomenon created, financed and directed by the economic and social upper-classes of continental Europe and their corporate Euro-settler offshoots in the Americas and Australasia. And while ‘Old Europe’, (as former US Vice-President Richard Cheney rudely put it) is still a very important player internationally, the real bulk of actionable world power rests squarely within the intellectual domain of the United States which has occupied this exclusive position since the end of World War Two. Think beyond Bretton Woods, which is still important, and ask yourself why the literate world chooses to believe that the US is a bastion of democracy and human rights.

Are the educated around the world not cognizant of what is happening in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan? Of course we are. It is virtually impossible to avoid the ‘designated information’ streamed to the masses about the glorious mission to bring ‘freedom and democracy’ to the Arab world. Are we ignorant of the overt oppression and covert repression of Indigenous peoples, the African population, Spanish-speaking immigrants, political dissenters and religious minorities in the Americas? No, we are not ignorant of these human rights abuses but we are willing to turn a blind eye because the perpetrators are White. As long as the victims are not White Christians or Ashkenazi claimants to the Holy Lands, all forms of injustice to the human dignity of those deemed unworthy of being regarded as ‘legitimate Europeans’ will be justified in deed, faith and the written word as sanctioned by the great Aryan deity of Providence.

This sad state of affairs is of course helpful to Judeo-Christian industrialists and bankers, but it is bad business for those whom they regularly rob, rape and pillage without mercy in the name of profit and Europocentric hegemony. This is why understanding the White nationalist duo-doctrine of American Exceptionalism and Christian fundamentalism is vital if one is to make any sense out of what has happened in Norway. While the United States did not invent White racist religiously-sanctioned philosophy or violence, it certainly has perfected its practise and political apologia like no other society in history. And the United States is unique amongst the Euro-settler nations in that its institutional practise of ethnic hierarchy, marginalisation and racial terrorism are regarded as normal, if not benevolent, for those who are subjected to it.

And understand this too if nothing else, Europe’s irrational intellectual belief in its own supremacy and cultural superlative will serve to be the factors that will bring about its eventual downfall. Like Apartheid is South Africa, White Power simply cannot last. Just do the math. Whether the situation is in Aotearoa (New Zealand) or Occupied Palestine, Europeans are not a racial majority anywhere outside of Europe, (except for maybe Argentina). Ignore the usual multicultural arguments for a moment and just deal with basic numbers. Racism in any form is a foolish and black-hearted practise, but White racism in particular is completely daft and totally unrealistic. If White folks were smart, they would be eagerly finding ways to work along with non-European folks rather than seeking ways to exploit them.

And despite the wacky suspicions of the insecure, people of colour, even after centuries of mistreatment and neglect, still do not hate White people simply because they are ‘White’. We hate the oppression and we hate the arrogance. If this were not the case, non-White feuds against Europeans would be a very regular occurrence all around the world. It simply isn’t happening. Outside of a few very well publicised incidents, non-Whites have been pretty forgiving. And although ‘normal’ people are finding ways to adjust to the new circumstances, the current trend we are witnessing of compulsive White racialism is clearly reactionary. It is a symptom of the White world’s psychological failure to come to grips with a decaying system of monolithic Europocentric authoritarian domination.

Not that the major press agencies, celebrity psychologists or mainstream politicians report on it much, but conservative folks are frankly just a pitiful rabble of sad, insecure little sods afraid of the world their prejudices made out of whole cloth. And on that basis alone they should not be feared. Just like the American, (and now Canadian and Australian) Ku Klux Klan, the violence exhibited by White conservatives only betrays them. It just proves just how afraid they really are of things that logically challenge their closed-minded perspective of the world.

Their childish fear of non-Whites, Catholics, homosexuals, Jews and anyone else who crosses them is unfortunate. Its also a clear and easily readable indicator of just how deep set and how self-immolating such hatred is for those that hold on to such ideas. Bigots of any colour are mentally ill, and Whites who practise race-ism are consciously vile. There is a very big difference between the two, disliking someone because of their ethnicity is bias, having the social power to actualise that bias is something else entirely.

Ignore the conscious liars and the loony songbirds of the conservative and neo-Confederate media lobby, Anders Behring Breivik, the devout Christian fascist terrorist who has openly admitted to planning and executing the recent attacks against organised leftists in Norway is one of theirs. They own this tragedy and we should not allow them any leeway to disassociate their politics or their intentional falsehoods from what has happened. And most importantly, we must not let Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp be exempted from blame for pressing the bigotry button the moment they found out that Oslo was burning in the name of the risen Christ.

Despite the obvious cognitive and social setbacks of racialist thinking, the important business of Europocentric, pro-Christian, ultra-conservative and neo-Confederate propaganda will roll along. Even in the face of extreme hypocrisy, White supremacist attitudes and terrorism can always be assured of a warm and welcoming reception from the people who bring us the news and from those who claim to serve us politically. This is a shame and people of goodwill must do more than just politely ignore such issues.

Racism is everyone’s problem. And the problem of White nationalism and racist violence will not go away unless we all, all of us, work earnesty to expose and ridicule these attitudes and the movements that fuel them. Violence is the refuge of the weak-minded, so let’s educate them, and ourselves, by taking the fight to another level. When we expose the roots of Eurpocentric ethnic bias we do more than just fight racism, we get to the heart of the unfair exploitation that threatens us all. Even the bigots.

After Vlakplaas, I think we all deserve better than this.

– TheAngryindian

[ramenfallsbutnotudon]

I firmly believe integration was the worst thing to happen to the contemporary black community.

Let me explain.

I do not knock the Civil Rights Movement, The Black Panthers or any other solidarity movement for the socio-economic advancement of the Black communtiy. However, racism and white supremacy are ever evolving entities and our current system won in the 60s is no longer cutting it.

Most people nowadays are not about creating something and if they are it’s just too hard to compete with the “white” companies. It’s more of a “let me keep my head down, fake laugh and assimilate to do what I need to do to get this check” or it’s just about seeking white approval.

(Case and point, Kanye West after marrying into the Kardashian mess - dying for European acceptance of his existence & trash ass clothing line) 

It’s about not copyrighting our own culture and allowing it to be overrun and consumed. 

I’ll take two recent examples I can think of off the top of my head.

In the late 70s-80s Hip Hop was created in Brooklyn as a way to uplift and unite the black community. Today it is a misogynoir hell hole run by white jews. 

You have that Lil Dicky incident where Chris Brown gave him a seat at the table in that song and white girls are going around whining and crying about not being able to say nigga & going on racist rants. 

You turn on Hot 97 or Power 105.1 and you don’t hear black voices. You hear white jewish voices and misogynoir coons like Charlemagne tha God. Who’s self hatred is so strong he’s a completely different color than he was when he was working for Wendy Williams.

But he’s buried that part of himself.

You turn on Wendy’s show and you see no black people in the audience, but stuffy whites and her showing off the ‘diversity’ in her audience by shouting out whose from whatever bland european country. She talks about topics and no one is cheering or agreeing with her and she seems uncomfortable and wonders why her audience is so dead. It’s dead because those upper-crust white women didn’t support your black ass when you were on 107.5 talking shit and being messy. They didn’t support you when you got that show and the numbers were low.

The fucking fact that I just did a quick google search to make sure I had the timeline correct on Hip Hop, a photo of a white group popped up along side the search. I clicked on the article and it is completely unrelated to hip hop. Not one black person appeared. All of the black rappers are being replaced by watered down white versions.

I simply searched hip hop then and seen some great black rappers, and for some reason Eminem. Who talks about hating black women in his music but go off I guess...

Rock was created by a queer black women and we lost that. Jazz, blues, etc. 

in the LGBTQ community rights were won at Stonewall and other places by trans black women throwing rocks at cops. But who is the face of the community? A white man who happily accepts discrimination because he comes out on top on the backs of those men, women and others. 

Same thing with Shea Moisture’s ‘diversity’ campaign like white people don’t have every single hair product in the hair care aisle with the exception of two or three brands, depending on the store. But that wasn’t my second point.

Why does something unique to the Black community suddenly have to be everyones culture when it’s making money? When there is an ability to profit, without a doubt corporate entities always swoop in in their white capes to start the bastardization of said thing.

Or these fucking commercials with classic black songs like Biggie or others over food, or white soccer moms dancing in a fucking car to it. Like i’m sick of the fetisization of it all. I’m sick of kpop artists wanting to dance like niggas but when a black person comes to their country they wanna throw them out. They want to have shows about blackface. They want to hate the people whose culture they are profiting off of. And why? Someone gave them a seat at the table.

My second point is the recent controversy with ex (”dancer”) stripper sucking married men’s dicks for money and homes Kim Zolciak. 10 years ago Bravo was not looking for a white women for Real Housewives of Atlanta and Nene recommended her. Nene gave her a seat at the table and it resulted in her storming off the show calling the ladies niggers (those tapes are probably still floating around online) and Bravo gave her her own damn show, her own platform on the backs of these Black women.

Not one of the ladies have been a guest on her show. 

Then she comes back this season for the check, doing the absolute bare minimum, arguing with the ladies and showing up to the reunion barefoot with a solo cup and a cell phone out. Absolute disrespect. We have Sheree “sweetie’ Whitfield carrying black bones back to her cooning and fueling the unnecessary fire.  Then karma comes for her ass and she has the nerve to pull the ‘defenseless white women™’ card and cry to white jew Andy Cohen about how “five African American women attacked her” and how he didn’t help her out. Because the ladies were holding her accountable for her actions, she literally said that they owe the world an apology and that “racism wasn’t all that real”.

Stop giving them a seat at the table. They do not give a fuck about us. 

I know saying this does nothing, it is easier said than done. Decolonization and internalized racism is a lot of subconscious thoughts and behaviors to undo. Trying to establish a black-supported economy will be tough. Policing ourselves and getting rid of homelessness and hunger in our own communities will be tough. But it has to start somewhere. It has to be better than this. We have to be better than this. There has to be more than just waking up everyday to see the new hashtag, who died, and just shaking our heads and moving on.

When it becomes enough to see BlackLivesMatter demonized but the METOO Hollywood hashtag be uplifted, fundraised and elevated. 

Like c’mon ya’ll. Can we at least fucking try? We are not our grandparents and parents generation. Our world is changed. We have nothing. No job security, no housing market, crippling (student) loan debt. How much will be enough to change things?