#white supremacism

[w-m-pitt]

His Imperial Majesty George the Sixth of the British Empire, the man who ruled over more of the earth than any other in human history. His inferiors number over 100 billion, his superiors are none.

[dailyanarchistposts]

At the forest entrance to Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek, a pickup truck aggressively swings in, engine revving and music blaring. Obscenities are yelled at the people on the ground. When the truck is asked to please go, lewd comments are sneered back. And then, the truck just stays, the two men inside glaring and watching the bystanders. One of them gets out and shifts around a parked vehicle, continuing to watch. After what seems like an eternity, the man gets back into the idling pickup truck and they peel out in a cloud of dust and black exhaust fumes.

What makes this obnoxious event stick out from any other, is that this is the same pickup truck that rammed through a Wet’suwet’en solidarity blockade just outside of Cumberland on February 10, 2020: an identical paint job, matching licence plates and the same plume of toxic black exhaust. In that February 10 incident, the men in the pickup truck filmed themselves giggling as they smashed through signs and wooden pallets with a confederate flag unabashedly displayed on their dashboard, as seen in footage broadcast by Global News. According to witnesses, men sporting masks with the Canadian flag on them then emerged from the forest and accosted land defenders. Chek news reported “close to 30 drunk people.”

Although these two incidents are 17 months apart, this pickup truck demonstrates a disturbing example of the presence and continuity of white supremacists actively engaged in disrupting both Indigenous and environmental organizing. To see the Confederate flag displayed alongside the Canadian Maple Leaf while assaulting Indigenous land defenders harks back to when a racist mob attacked Indigenous families at Whiskey Trench outside of Montreal in 1990. In that attack, hundreds of people assembled to pelt a convoy of Kahnawake residents with rocks while the police looked on, resulting in one death and dozens of injuries.

More ominous still is the consistency of this sort of behaviour with counterinsurgency tactics. British counterinsurgency doctrine, for example, emphasizes the use of vigilantes as an effective way to subdue anti-colonial movements and provide a means of evading responsibility. As vigilantes engage in their dirty work, the police are conveniently looking the other way or suddenly out of their jurisdiction. In a clever sleight of hand, the narrative is manipulated into one where the police become necessary to protect people’s physical well being from vigilante violence – a twist on the well used metaphor, ‘good cop, bad cop.’

It must be noted that the signs on the pickup truck – while harassing the people at the Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek entrance July 4th, 2021 – read, “Forestry feeds my family,” and, “I love Canadian Forestry.” These statements are misleading, considering last years’ workers’ eight-month strike against Western Forest Products, a Vancouver-based lumber company trying to chisel away workers’ safety, pensions and seniority benefits. With these pickup truck vigilantes openly displaying their allegiance to Confederate ideology and Canadian nationalism, their attempts to pass themselves off as forestry workers, or at least their allies, is nothing short of fraudulent. The essence and purpose of their actions are immediately laid bare when they are put against the core values of the labour movement: anti-racist, anti-colonial, and solidarity amongst exploited people. The interests, safety, and well being of forestry workers are directly opposed to the priorities of extractivist corporations to pry a profit. The history of labour struggle demonstrates the vast gulf between worker and company man.

In this chaos, the corporations and the Canadian state remain conspicuously silent. While playing the innocent, they continue to brutally subjugate Indigenous people for their own avarice; they continue to make fast money from ecological devastation; and they continue to squeeze profit from the ravaged bodies of workers and loggers.

While the Canadian state and its corporations engage in this exploitative rampage, they spin these issues as unrelated and non-existent. Nevertheless, they have their men on the ground, speeding around in pickup trucks adorned with Confederate and Canadian flags as well as in tactical gear with ‘Blue Lives Matter’ stripes adorning their police insignia.

The face-off at the Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek entrance is but one skirmish in the bigger picture. Do not let the issues be shifted away from their history and redirected into dead ends. Artificial barriers between struggles and people must be broken down, and solidarity re-energized. Indigenous and anti-colonial struggle, workers’ struggle, and ecological balance must not be played off against one another. With the status quo clinging onto power through violence and calculated skullduggery, their legitimacy is an empty myth. Through creativity, energy, and initiative, a more beautiful tomorrow is within reach. Every action creates a new reality!

[tomorrowusa]

If the mustache fits...

All this Hitler/dictator talk from Trump and his toadies is not new. Remember this from November of 2016?

^^^ That incident took place nine months before the neo-Nazi Unite the Right rally whose participants were called "fine people" by Trump.

Donald Trump is determined to empower such people and he's making no secret of it.

[o-the-mts]

Just like Hitler before him, Trump is benefiting from the fact that journalism is an incremental, daily business. Every day, reporters have to find something new to write or broadcast. Trump keeps saying dangerous and crazy things, but that’s not new. He’s said it all before. His impeachments and the January 6 insurrection happened years ago. True, he has been indicted four times and now faces up to four criminal trials, but that’s already been reported. What’s new today? For political reporters covering the campaign, that means usually treating Trump’s authoritarian promises as “B-matter.” That’s an old newspaper phrase that refers to the background information that reporters gather about a story’s subject. B-matter is usually exiled to the bottom of an article — if not cut entirely to save space or time. But the horrifying truth is that when Trump’s dictatorial ambitions are left on the cutting room floor as B-matter, America is in trouble.

The Media Still Doesn’t Grasp the Danger of Trump

[daybreaksys]

the ideology that jews are the ultimate victims and therefore israel can't be accused of committing genocide is just yet another ramification of "oh no you can't accuse me of doing child abuse, don't you know I was abused as a child? I'm just taking revenge on my abusers by doing the same thing to their grandchildren so really who is the victim here?"

it is also racist, it's like "it's only genocide if it's being done to europeans, for you see, genocide is when you try to eradicate a group of people"

[simplegenius042]

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[hellyeahheroes]

How “Moderates” Serve the Right by Second Thought

[professionalkinkshaming]

Yall seen that post about how asking people to not make unnecessary noise in shared public spaces is white supremacist rhetoric (w/out going into ANY detail at all) ?? Lmfao. You demons will say anything to slither out of obligations to be considerate.

[aboutanancientenquiry]

An article of American Classicist Alison C. Traweek on Antiquity, the Classics, the nazis, and White supremacism (with an interesting reference to Herodotus’ views on the Egyptians)

” Himmler’s Antiquity

October 18, 2018    

 By Alison C. Traweek

IN 1924, as a secretary and propaganda assistant for the young Nazi Party, Heinrich Himmler was spending a great deal of time on a train as he traveled Bavaria promoting his party. He had with him a small treatise on the German race called de Origine et Situ Germanorum, or On the Origin and Situation of the Germans. The treatise was written in 98 CE by a Roman senator named Tacitus, and Himmler read it avidly, finding in it eloquent evidence of the superiority and purity of the German race. In Tacitus’s description of the tall, blond, rather savage northern tribes, Himmler saw the superior Aryan stock whose preservation and dominance motivated the Nazis. “We will return to being what we were,” he wrote in his diary, and he vowed to rediscover the “nobility of our ancestors.”

The Germania, as the treatise is commonly known, remained an important source of ideology and pride for the Nazis. Nor was it an isolated use of ancient authority: Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy both proudly and explicitly connected themselves with the ancient Romans and borrowed many of their symbols — the very name “Fascist” refers to an important Roman status marker, and the Nazi Imperial Eagle is derived from the Roman standard.

Himmler’s reading of antiquity, on that train in 1924, was extreme, but it was also the natural extension of the discipline’s origins; earlier classicists had simply been more genteel, or perhaps less proactive, in their application of white supremacy to antiquity. After World War II, classicists were all too happy to denounce explicitly racist appropriations like Himmler’s as abuses perpetrated by extremist ideologues, to sweep them under a rug in an upper chamber, and to return to what they saw as their unbiased, unspoiled, and objective engagement with antiquity. The mainstream of the field continued to do this for decades, leaving the uglier aspects of the discipline’s history largely unexamined, assuming that our dry analyses of the distant past were safely contained in our responsible hands.

In recent years, however, we have seen the danger of our complacency, as the increasing brazenness of the new and very vocal “alt-right” has been proudly asserting Greco-Roman antiquity as evidence of the superiority of what they see as their white European heritage. Groups like Identity Evropa explicitly view the white marble statues of antiquity as evidence for racial purity and the glorification of whiteness. The same people who lobby for making America a white ethno-state use Spartan slogans alongside their Confederate flags. Countless Twitter users who rail against the impending “white genocide” have some version of the iconic crested Greek helmet as their avatar. They have thoroughly and happily accepted the white-washed view of antiquity shaped, intentionally or not, by generations of scholars.

To fully understand these abuses of antiquity, it is important to put them in the context of the development of the field. It isn’t as if the discipline of classical studies arrived complete and fully formed on the desks of early scholars like Friedrich Nietzsche, whose Dionysian versus Apollonian reading of antiquity is still visible in the fabric of the field. The discipline was shaped by mostly elite European men, and their interests determined the early scope of the field. That’s why we learn Greek and Latin but not Hebrew, which was part of the field until the 18th century; it’s why the lives of women and children were largely ignored; it’s why the novels associated with the lower classes were not taken seriously as literature. It’s why Cicero and Socrates, not to mention Jesus, were cast as white, just like the scholars studying them were.

Except, of course, Cicero and Socrates were decidedly not “white.” They would have been thoroughly confused by the claim, since ancient theories of race differed greatly from modern ones, and had no category for “white.” Rather than being primarily physiognomic — that is, based on visible physical features like melanin or hair type — race in antiquity was tied to climate, geography, and even political structures; one’s race might not be easily identifiable at sight, and might even change, based on the exigencies of life, and regardless of external appearances. There was, consequently, no conception of a “white” race — what we see as whiteness did not signify racially.

But the European scholars of antiquity needed Cicero and Socrates to be white, so they were made white. Not consciously or explicitly, for the most part — we have, of course, no early draft of The Birth of Tragedy in which Nietzsche muses on how to support his assumption that the Greeks conceived of race as he did, and, importantly, were white in the same way he was. But the logical contradictions and bizarre dismissals of inconvenient evidence that went against the conception of the ancients as white, and especially of whiteness being seen as superior in antiquity as in their own day, lay bare the motivations, conscious or not.

One of the clearest examples of this is Johann Winckelmann, a German art critic active in the 18th century. Winckelmann almost single-handedly created the discipline of art history by describing and classifying ancient Greek and Roman art. One of his central arguments for the superiority of Greek art over, for instance, Egyptian? That the Greek statues were pure and white. Except, of course, that they weren’t: it is widely accepted now that the statues were far from white in antiquity, and were in fact decorated rather brightly, and were sometimes given darkened skin. The Greek historian Herodotus, active in the fifth century BCE, devotes an entire chapter of his book to describing the history and culture of the Egyptians, a people he clearly admired and a culture he saw as an ancestor of his own. He calls the Egyptians “the most exceedingly devout of all people” and marvels at their dedication to cleanliness. Yet somehow, Winckelmann found in Egyptian art evidence of a dour and slavish people, while he believed that Greco-Roman art could only have been made by a culture dedicated to liberty and in love with beauty.

Egypt was a particular problem for scholars of antiquity. It was an unchallenged premise for them that the ancient Egyptians could not have been black Africans, since they assumed black Africans could not have been responsible for so advanced a society. They clung to this belief even in the face of clear contrary evidence, like Herodotus’s mention of Egyptians’ black skin and woolly hair. At the same time, they were determined to see contemporary Egyptians as childish and savage, and argued that the formerly great race must have been degraded by contact with black Africans and Ottomans. These theories of decline through contact were also useful for explaining what they saw as the inferior natures of contemporary Greeks and southern Italians: their noble ancestors too had been sullied by generations of mixing with barbarians. Edward Gibbon, in his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, laments the ignorance of contemporary Athenians, whom he believed to be tainted by long contact with the Ottomans. Having never been to Athens himself, he writes, “Athenians walk with supine indifference among the glorious ruins of antiquity; and such is the debasement of their character, that they are incapable of admiring the genius of their predecessors.” A similar argument is still part of why the Parthenon sculptures — the so-called Elgin Marbles, after the British Lord Elgin who appropriated them — are still on display in London rather than Athens.

Nineteenth-century advances in linguistics, especially those related to the Indo-European family, gave northern European nations like France, Germany, and England (and, by extension, Anglophone America) the concrete connections they needed to affirm their status as inheritors of the venerated ancient Greek and Roman empires. The discovery of linguistic families, for instance, enabled the French to assert their direct ties to Rome through the Latin origins of French. Evolutionary models were applied to language, and highly inflected languages — like German, Latin, and Greek — were presumed by some (mostly Germans) to be more developed and mature, and the speakers of such languages correspondingly of superior intellect. Sanskrit complicated the matter somewhat, as it was demonstrably older than Greek and Latin but had its home in the Indian subcontinent. Again, migration theories came in handy, and several related theories were proposed that posited an ancient and superior northern European race immigrating to the Asian subcontinent thousands of years earlier, founding the ancient Indic cultures, and then returning to Europe to build the West, with modern Europeans being their descendants. (A similar migration theory, incidentally, is why the Caucasus gives its name to whiteness in America today.)

One of the most powerful and influential tools for promoting the superiority of Europeans over other peoples was provided by the racial science of the day. Race was highly theorized in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly after Darwin made the case for evolution, and it was frequently used to justify the brutalities of colonization. Scholars eagerly used these racial theories to demonstrate that, in spite of differences in language and shifts in geography, northern Europeans were the true heirs of Greco-Roman culture. This was often quite explicit: for instance, Frederick Douglas (not that one), in an 1813 essay entitled “An Essay on Certain Points of Resemblance Between the Ancient and Modern Greeks,” wrote of contemporary Greece: “[I]n such a nation we cannot expect to find a Leonidas, and we are tempted to leave them to have recourse to their saints, for the restoration they so little deserve.” More importantly, perceiving a cultural continuity between northern Europe and the ancient Mediterranean — what Stephen Slemon describes as antiquity “being contiguous to the European present” — made it easy to perceive Greeks and Romans as white in the same way that the British and Germans were white.

The ancient Greeks and Romans were as beset by prejudice and racial bias as any other culture, of course. But their prejudices did not align with, and so do not support, contemporary racisms. They did not see themselves as white, so they were not anti-black — the primary poison of contemporary American and European racism. And they were not ethno-states: the Greeks had a thriving colony in northern Africa by the seventh century BCE, Alexandria at its height was a truly cosmopolitan and international city, and some of Rome’s most important figures were undeniably African. (Certain people will quibble about what “kind” of African, mostly to object to the possibility of them being sub-Saharan black African, but African they certainly were.) Because of how the field was constructed, however, those nuances were largely elided, and Greeks and Romans came to be seen as white.

It could have been a relatively minor elision of social complexity outside of the field if Nazis and other white supremacist groups had not latched onto it as evidence for their claims of racial purity, cultural continuity, and authority. Instead, however, antiquity has become a contested site, with white supremacists pushing one interpretation of the evidence, and expert classicists insisting on distinguishing modern racial categories from ancient ones, and thus modern biases from ancient ones. Crucially, these corrections are not without teeth in the real world. Sarah Bond, a classicist who regularly writes a column on the ancient world for Forbes, published a number of articles explaining that the supposedly serene white marble of antiquity was actually garishly painted, and received death threats for her trouble. Mary Beard, a prolific Cambridge classicist, has been abused and publicly reviled for years for pointing out that ancient Rome was full of Africans, Middle Easterners, and South Asians (not to mention women), and was far from being a white empire. The white supremacists’ hostility to accurate interpretations of the evidence of antiquity is no small part of why classicists must actively commit themselves to correcting the public impression of our field.

And we have begun to: the Women’s Classical Caucus and Lambda Classical Caucus, which lobby for feminist and LGBTQIA+ representation respectively, have both committed themselves to promoting images and stories of diversity in antiquity as well as in the modern field. The primary learned society of the field, the Society for Classical Studies, has taken to holding sessions at their annual meeting dedicated to combating racist uses of the ancient world. And, increasingly, classics departments are running courses pointedly addressed at helping students understand not only the diversity of antiquity, but also the legacy of using antiquity to promote white supremacy; even in more traditional classes, many instructors now go out of their way to present a fuller and more realistic picture of the ancient world, with all its many colors.

It is an unlikely front line, perhaps, since classicists are almost paradigmatically the out-of-touch professor poring over dusty books in an upper room of an ivory tower, but it is an important one: white supremacist groups have long recruited on college campuses. This means we should expect that many of our students have come into at least passive contact with such ideologies and their twisted claims on classical antiquity. The Proud Boys won’t be defeated in a classroom, of course — as the German White Rose, an anti-Nazi resistance group, wrote in their second leaflet in 1942, “[i]t is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialist Philosophy,” and that remains true of today’s alt-right. The leaflet goes on: “Now it is our task to find one another again, to spread information from person to person, to keep a steady purpose, and to allow ourselves no rest until the last man is persuaded of the urgent need of his struggle against this system.” We as classicists are best positioned for this particular battle, and it is well past time that we make our stand.

¤

Alison C. Traweek teaches classics in Philadelphia and publishes on Homer, writing pedagogy, classical receptions, and American women's suffrage.”

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/himmlers-antiquity/

 Alison C. Traweek (Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011), a native Texan, teaches classics in Philadelphia. She has published on Homer, writing pedagogy, classical receptions, and American women’s suffrage. Her current research projects focus on the Iliad, the Gorgon, and ritual lament in ancient Greece (https://liberalarts.temple.edu/about/faculty-staff/alison-traweek ).

Well, obviously I agree totally with most of what Alison Traweek writes in her article. 

More particularly, I agree totally with her message that “whiteness” did not signify much for ancient Greeks and Romans, that anti-Black racism was not a feature of the ancient Greek and Roman worldview, that the White supremacist interpretation of the Classical heritage is not at all legitimate, and that we should not leave this heritage to the far righters and to the nazis. 

I found also very pertinent her remark that the “Nordic” appropriation of the ancient Greeks and Romans went and goes very often hand in hand with racist contempt toward modern Greeks and Southern Italians as “degenerate” descendants of glorious ancestors. 

And of course I agree totally with her remarks on Herodotus’ Book II on Egypt and on Herodotus’ attitudes toward the Egyptians. 

On the other hand, I find excessive her position that the nazi views on Antiquity, although extreme, were just the natural extension of the origin of the Classics as discipline. Not of course that racism and imperialism were not significant parts of the more general intellectual climate of the period before the appearance of fascism and nazism, a thing which obviously had influence on the Classics, but I think that with the nazis these things are radicalized in an unprecedented way. 

I remind also that not only the Classics, but every other achievement of the Western world (political, scientific, literary), and also Christianism have been used for a long time in order to justify ideologies of racial superiority of the Western European and Northern American peoples and above all of the “Nordics” over the ‘rest”, as well as imperialism and colonialism. I say this because I believe that the necessary critical view on the past of the Classics as discipline should not lead to feelings of excessive guilt the people active in the same discipline now, given also the very important truth that the Classics were and are still among the main foundations of humanism. This belief of mine about the Classics as foundation of humanism is one of the most important reasons why I agree totally with Traweek’s message that the Classics should not be left to racists, fascists, and White supremacists. 

 My last critical observation is that Traweek’s suggestion that the ancient Egyptians were Black Africans is unfortunate because not accurate. Moreover, invoking Herodotus in order to support the Blackness of the Egyptians is a misinterpretation of his text. This does not mean of course that I deny that Black Africans played an important role in ancient Egyptian history. 

Despite these critical remarks on some aspects of the article that I have reproduced, I repeat that I believe that Alison Traweek’s main thesis and message in her text on Classics and White supremacism are totally true and very important.

[lejacquelope]

Two years ago insurrectionist traitor Ashli Babbitt was shot dead by a Capitol Hill police officer.

1/6 shall henceforth be known as Fuck Around and Find Out Day. As white supremacists tell black people

OBEY THE LAW AND YOU WON'T BE SHOT!!!

Got a problem with that, subhuman MAGA trash? Off is the direction in which you must immediately fuck. Your arguments will be disregarded and blocked.

Zero tolerance, zero room for discussion. I take pleasure in your pain as you cry about Babbitt.

This is payback for Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, and all the other unarmed black people who died at the hands of cops.

[w-m-pitt]

Long Live our King-Emperor, His Imperial Majesty Willem-Alexander Claus George Ferdinand, By the Grace of God, King of the Netherlands, Prince of Orange-Nassau, Jonkheer van Amsberg, Marquis of Veere and Flushing, Count of Katzenelnbogen, Vianden, Diez, Spiegelberg, Buren, Leerdam and Culemborg, Burgrave of Antwerp, Baron of Breda, Diest, Beilstein, the town of Grave and the lands of Cuyk, IJsselstein, Cranendonk, Eindhoven, Liesveld, Herstal, Warneton, Arlay and Nozeroy, Hereditary and Free Lord of Ameland, Lord of Borculo, Bredevoort, Lichtenvoorde, Het Loo, Geertruidenberg, Clundert, Zevenbergen, Hooge and Lage Zwaluwe, Naaldwijk, Polanen, St Maartensdijk, Soest, Baarn, Ter Eem, Willemstad, Steenbergen, Montfort, St Vith, Bütgenbach, Dasburg, Niervaart, Turnhout and Besançon! 🇳🇱

[weetweetie]

Almost like MAGA attracts criminals. Like do their sister parties elsewhere. Homicide, rape, fraud, graft, you name it. The True Finns in Finland, AfD in Germany, the 'conservatives' in the UK, la Le Pen in France... Not even to mention Putin's russia, a mafia with an army and a navy. When a 'political' party is a crime spree.

Note 28/4: so there was a shooting incident in the streets of Helsinki. The shooter, who has been taken into custody, is a member of the Finnish parliament. Guess of which party?

Best people. #ACAB

Each sentence gets worse. Each sentence gets more MAGA.

[tomorrowusa]

So Trump's fascist rantings may be a form of plagiarism.

A 1990 article from Vanity Fair describes one of the few books Trump actually did read.

So "Heil Hitler" is a Trump family joke? I'd love to hear Dr. Mary Trump weigh in on that.

No wonder Trump buried his Czech-born first wife Ivana on his New Jersey golf course. Maybe he's afraid she'll rise up as a zombie and reveal more of his Nazi secrets. 🧟‍♀️

Ivana Trump’s Bedminster Grave Gets Even Weirder

[marylemanski]

New episode of Mary Kinda Contrary Podcast, part 3 of 3. Episode 10 - I Was Targeted By Proud Boys & the Far Right After Speaking at a School Board Meeting and You're Next - Part 3 of 3

Listen at https://open.spreaker.com/ULqyz25dfhfFrP556

Or at marykindacontrary.com

[feminism-of-course]

”Mainstream patriarchy reinforced the idea that the concerns of women from privileged-class groups were the only ones worthy of receiving attention. Feminist reform aimed to gain social equality for women within the existing structure. Privileged women wanted equality with men of their class. Despite sexism among their class they would not have wanted to have the lot of working class men. Feminist efforts to grant women social equality with men of their class neatly coincided with white supremacist capitalist patriarchal fears that white power would diminish if nonwhite people gained equal access to economic power and privilege. Supporting what in effect became white power reformist feminism enabled the mainstream white supremacist patriarchy to bolster its power while simultaneously undermining the radical politics of feminism.”

bell hooks, Feminism is for everybody, 2015 ed., p.40–41

[somerandomg33k]

Race Equity

Ah yes, Race. One the subjects that the USA is "great on." /sarcasm And the Democrats has a section on Racial Equity in their Party Platform. And yes, the other will be way worse. But let me react to this section none the less.

Here is my latest YouTube Video.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djeIVcCEwCc