Tag: racism

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The Master Race — A Nice and Precise Historie of Britain and its well-known suburb, Europe

The Master Race

A Nice and Precise Historie of Britain and its well-known suburb, Europe

April 17th, 2021

Marjorie Taylor Greene and a couple of the more ignorant racist oafs in Congress have decided that what America really needs is an “Anglo-Saxon” caucus in the government to represent the needs and wants of the poor, downtrodden Angles and Saxons. Yes, Greene is the new White.

I guess the first thing they need to do is tell the Normans to get out. They invaded Great Britain, quite illegally in the eyes of the Britons, back in 1066, and proceeded to subsume the regional culture over the ensuing 400 years until “Anglo-Saxon” was a quaint (and inaccurate) term used by historians to give a blanket description of the people who lived on the islands prior to and for a while after the invasion.

When William the Conqueror finished consolidating his takeover in the ensuing twenty years, the culture of the country had been utterly transformed. The dominant language was now the more-or-less Germanic Anglo-Norman, and the largely French-based Saxon tongue was relegated to peasants. Slavery was abolished, a new currency established, and the Angles and Saxons who had the resources to flee had left, most to the Byzantine, and a handful to Gaelic and Celtic regions, where they weren’t particularly welcome.

The Scots and Irish term for Saxons to this day is “Sassenach,” broadened to include all English people, and it is not a term of affection.

One of the weirder things the racists embrace is the notion that “Anglo-Saxon” is basically a Scots and Irish culture. It’s a bit like saying the dominant culture of the United States is Cherokee, and will offend respective groups in much the same way. English relations with the Scots and the Irish ranged from uncomfortable marriage to flat-out rape. Telling the people to the north and west of England that their culture is based on a group that got their asses kicked and obliterated a thousand years ago and replaced by non-Sassenach Sassenachs won’t win you any friends.

Assuming Scotland and Ireland are just suburbs of England is a dire mistake. Trump gave a good demonstration the day after Brexit won, warmly congratulating the Scots on voting for it. Scotland voted heavily against it, and is likely to leave the UK as a result, and Americans widely broadened their vocabularies in a unique and dark way by reading the Scottish responses to Trump’s blunder.

When racists talk about “European culture” they don’t know what the hell they are talking about. Italy and Norway, to pick a random pairing, do not have much in the way of cultural homogeneity. You may as well say that the Serengeti and Keewatin are pretty much the same climate. Most individual countries in Europe have several different and often conflicting cultures. The Basque and the Normans (yes, the Normans, they’re still around) both live in France. And are none too happy about that. And despite having invaded Britain in the 11th century, present day French Normans feel little affinity for the resulting dog’s breakfast of a land they call Angleterre. Yes, that means “land of the Angles.”

About the only definition of white supremacy that is sillier than “Anglo-Saxon” is “Caucasian.” This refers to the Caucasian range, which separates European Russia from Asiatic Russia. The majority of the inhabitants of the region are called Caucasian, but they aren’t the Hitler wet dream of blond hair and blue eyes. Most look Turkish or Semitic, having interbred cheerfully with both groups with whom they share the region. Most of them have been invaded and massacred by the Russians (and others) over the past few centuries, particularly the Chechens, the Armenians, the Kurds, the Semites and the Georgians.

When racists say “Caucasian” they usually refer to people some 1,500 miles north and west, such as the Danes, the Swedes, the Germans…basically, the Vikings. Except DNA evidences show that even amongst the Vikings, brown (or black) hair, brown eyes, and copper skin were abundant. There is no common tongue amongst these groups. Nor a common culture, or a common religion, or even agreement on what “Nordic” means.

“Nordic” bears the same relationship to Europe that “Los Angeles” does to Californians: the further away you are from it, the wider its borders, and the less desirable a neighbor it becomes. I live in far Northern California, and LA is seen here as beginning around Bakersfield/San Luis Obispo and going straight to hell from there south. From Rome, “Nordic” is pretty much anything they didn’t invade back in the glory days of the Empire. What they did invade includes large chunks of what the racists like to call “Nordic” now. Including Angleterre, but not Scotland or Eire.

In other words, the whole “white heritage” thing is nothing but a bunch of bloody nonsense. They are celebrating a history that didn’t exist, or if it did, existed thousands of miles from where they like to pretend it was. The mythology raises the level of subjugated and subsumed cultures to the level of movers and shakers on the world stage. Nobody has even seen a Pict in 300 years, and nobody can pronounce a single word of their language. Nonetheless, they are seen as an apotheosis of white supremacy.

Well, Hitler pretty much invented the history and culture of “the master race,” and he was a whole lot smarter and better educated than the right wing clowns who are trying to puff themselves up into a position of superiority today.

And Hitler was a vicious and self-defeating fool. These clowns won’t do any better.

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Transitioning — The World is Changing—Fast

June 14th 2020

In front of Parliament in London, they encased the statue of Winston Churchill in plywood and put barricades around it to protect it from defacement and possible destruction at the hands of demonstrators. Just a few weeks ago, such a situation would have been unthinkable, let alone that it could have arisen from the murder of a black man by police in Minneapolis, four thousand miles away and three weeks before.

But in a social convulsion analogous to the Arab Spring, the mass demonstrations sparked by the murder of George Floyd have spread beyond America and throughout the west.

The Churchill statue is under threat much the same way the Confederate statues are under threat in America. There are quite a few distinctions that can be made, of course: Churchill didn’t fight for the enemy, and the statue wasn’t put up to try to keep alive a racist legacy. Now, if a statue of Klaus Barbie

had been erected in Coventry as a not-too-subtle reminder to the Jewish population to know their places, then it might make a lot more sense that people might want to pull it down.

Churchill had a lot of baggage, to be sure. He was a bigot, contemptuous of the peoples the English subjugated, and had a track record of enormous incompetence. But he was also one of the main reasons the United Kingdom still exists today. When England needed a heroic leader, he rose to the occasion. So unlike the Confederate statues that dot the US, there are actually legitimate reasons to honor Churchill with such.

Unfortunately, movements like this tend to overreach, and hopefully common sense will prevail in London. Teach Churchill’s flaws, but honor the man for his greatness.

In the United States, the groundswell of discontent is still taking shape. A lot of what we’re seeing is hopeful. African-Americans deserve far better treatment than they’ve been getting, and have a right to walk the streets and drive their cars without fear, just like the rest of us. The role of police in society needs to be rethought from the ground up. In the 60s and 70s, when society was obsessed with crime and social unrest, the concept arose of cowboy cops who didn’t play by the rules and didn’t mind breaking a lot of eggs to make an omelet. It became fashionable to have out-of-control cops protected by a ‘thin blue line’ mentality that took care of their own, no matter how corrupt and self-defeating it might be. Few noticed or cared that there were no omelets, just plenty of broken eggs, and the police were seen, more and more, as vicious bullies and swaggering cowards. Community relations, in far too many places, was seen as being for weenies.

Additionally there was the racial component. Cops in far too many places were there to uphold white privilege. And subjugate black people. Police batons were called ‘night-sticks’ even though they were most often used in broad daylight, and had worse names. The war on drugs, itself a tactic of racial oppression, made things even worse. So did increasingly draconian laws, such as ‘three-strikes’ which overwhelmingly targeted African-American populations.

It wasn’t enough to attack minorities, though; police were useful for attacking other vulnerable parts of the population, those seen as unprofitable by capitalist leaders. So more and more, police were sent to deal with homelessness, mental illness, poverty, and any other social problem that presented itself. They weren’t just the bully boys of capitalism; they became its janitors, as well.

Black Lives Matter and the rest of the movement hope to address that, and that can only be an improvement.

But there are two other elements of American society that also scream for reform, and without them, the chances of success are much slimmer.

First, there is the problem of capitalist domination of society. No fascist society is free, and a fascist society is one in which the people serve the economy, rather than the other way around. Capitalism requires a large pool of economic outcasts in order to threaten the workers and consumers. Its morality is not the morality of human beings, and bullying and subjugation are essential to maintaining control. Putting jails and the justice system on a “make it pay” basis ensured a vicious abattoir of oppression and viciousness in lieu of justice.

The GOP, now a Nazi Cult, insists that Americans must be prepared to die in the hundreds of thousands in order to protect billionaires from becoming millionaires, as witness Trump’s determination to pretend the coronavirus has gone, and America can resume business as normal. His Nuremberg rally, the Repulsa in Tulsa, planned now for the day after Juneteenth, will require that attendees not wear masks or practice safe distancing, but also sign a waiver relieving the Trump campaign of liability if they become sick from this plague that [cough] doesn’t exist.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but America must reduce the role of the upholstered parasites who use racism and unfairness as means of control.

The other major item is guns. That the President is a cowardly racist who thinks it’s fine for disgusting white neo-Nazis to carry weapons of war, but hides in a bunker behind 12 foot high fences at the thought of black people chanting, clearly demonstrates the racist and vicious nature of “gun rights.” Far too many of the wrong people have weapons meant to terrify and harass the rest of society—including cops. Cops are constantly being afraid because so many howling nuts have so many weapons, and that in turn makes them more trigger happy. I’m not saying that to excuse the behavior of pigs who think that killing blacks as a warning to the rest is legitimate police work—this is a problem in addition to that, one that affects good cops as well as bad. We saw the white trash Nazi movement in action in Michigan; America needs to rethink a philosophy that allows such cretins to have .50 cal machine guns.

It’s scary, and nobody knows where it’s going to go, but one thing is certain: America needs this social tsunami. It wasn’t survivable in its present form.

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Taking the Knee — Will the murder of George Floyd shatter America’s emotional paralysis?

May 30th 2020

As I write this, we’re moving into the fifth night of civil unrest and full-on riots in the wake of the video of four Minneapolis police systematically murdering an African American man for – supposedly – spending a ten or a twenty dollar bill that might have been counterfeit. There’s pretty much zero evidence of any criminal intent, and even if Floyd was an evil mastermind producing millions of bogus notes in his basement, that usually doesn’t carry a death sentence.

Under any circumstances, the videos of Floyd’s murder would have been horrifying, but what made this stand out was how calm and collected the four cops were as a man lay dying under their knees. They were chatting, who knows about what? The Stanley Cup round robin? The weather? Lamenting about how the Civil War made killing slaves illegal? It was a cold, calculating murder, of the sort you associate with the Nazis, or Bond villains.

I was scared that America was becoming inured to the willful murder of African-Americans. In recent times, there have been Trayvon Martin, who was shot in 2012 by a murderous cop wannabee, George Zimmerman. Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, and neo-Nazi bigots crowed that he had it coming because he shoved a shopkeeper a half-hour earlier. Brown’s murder sparked the “Black Lives Matter” movement, much ridiculed by Donald Trump and other right wing trash. Dontre Hamilton was killed for being schizophrenic in public. Aside from being noisy, he wasn’t breaking any law, but a cop, Christopher Manney, decided to pat him down, and when Hamilton pulled away, Manney shot him.

Eric Garner was famously murdered by New York’s finest for the crime of selling cigarettes on a street corner. He uttered the phrase, hideously echoed this week, “I can’t breathe.” There are still apologists for racist murders who say if he could speak, he could breathe, and that he probably actually died from an ingrown toe nail, or some other hidden medical condition aggravated by having oxygen to the brain cut off for ten minutes. The same fools were saying the same thing six years later.

John Crawford, 22, was gunned down for picking up a toy .22 rifle in a WalMart and walking with it to the checkout stands in order to purchase it.

Ezell Ford, unarmed, was shot in the back by two police officers. He was accused of no crime, and the investigation was put on “administrative hold.”

Dante Parker was tased to death by San Bernardino cops. Tanisha Anderson, 37, died after cops smashed her head repeatedly against the pavement. Apparently they considered that a viable treatment for schizophrenia. Akai Gurley, 28, was shot for no reason at all by a cop. “Accidental discharge” they called it. Gurley wound up accidentally dead as a result.

Tamir Rice, age 12, was just a kid playing with a toy gun. In Cleveland, that, and black skin, is enough to get you killed. The poor panicked cops mistook him for an adult with an AR-15. The one who actually killed Tamir got fired, but don’t worry—he’s a cop somewhere else now, protecting white society from kids with toy guns.

Jerame Reid, 36, was shot and killed by police on suspicion of being black while a passenger in New Jersey.

That just brings us up to 2015. There have been a dozen or more incidents each year since of African-Americans dying at the hands of police where there were images proving that the cops were, at best, reckless, and at worst, murdering swine. Multiply that by dozens, perhaps hundreds of incidents where it was the word of our noble police against that of some black street thug who “reached for his waistband.”

According to the Guardian, in the first five months of 2015, “In total, 478 of those people were shot and killed, while 31 died after being shocked by a Taser, 16 died after being struck by police vehicles, and 19 – including 25-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore – have died after altercations in police custody.” We were on course for, and eventually met a total of 1,100 dying in police custody or confrontations with police. Over half of those killed were black. Twenty percent were white. It’s only gotten worse since then, led by a fascist regime that values vicious police suppression. Further, there’s no federal law requiring police departments to report fatal encounters to any central agency (the Guardian did its own, private survey), so the number of people killed by police may be double what we know about, or even worse.

Most encounters aren’t caught on camera. Personal webcams some police have to wear have a way of failing at critical moments, so until the rise of smartphones, it was always the word of sorrowful-looking officers against that of some dead guy.

But phones have changed all that. As Will Smith the actor acidly remarked, “Racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed.” And dozens of times a year, the viciousness and sadism of our alleged public defenders is put on full display.

Such spasms of rage are nothing new in America, of course. Slave revolts were so common, and so feared, that the Founders put the second amendment in, giving cover to slaveowners to hunt down and/or kill rebellious slaves. Slavery led to the civil war. Tulsa, Oklahoma saw its black community nearly exterminated by a mass lynching some 120 years ago. Lynchings were common, and praised by civic leaders from 1870 to 1960. The race riots of the 60s were sparked by a minor incident in Watts, where police stopped a youth, determined he had an outstanding warrant, and arrested him. They didn’t kill him or even rough him up. But onlookers were tired of constantly being detained on suspicion of being black. Then Martin Luther King Junior and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and the rage broke wide open.

The only thing surprising about this week’s events is that it took so long to happen. We’ve had three years of a president who has devoted his whole vicious, wastrel life to cheating and defaming African-Americans, a weak, cowardly racist even by the shit standards of the white supremacist.

He demonstrated his hate and fear on the third night, tweeting that that protesters could have been attacked with “vicious dogs and ominous weapons” wielded by the US Secret Service. He also attacked the Washington DC, mayor for supposedly not providing police to protect the White House. Poor defenseless widdle American president. I posted that perhaps the best answer was to put one of those vicious dogs in the Oval Office and put Trump out on the White House lawn to snarl at passers-by. Certainly it would be a win-win for the nation.

“They let the ‘protesters’ scream and rant as much as they wanted, but whenever someone got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, hard – didn’t know what hit them,” Trump said. Nothing more pathetic than a blustering, cowardly, racist bully.

In all of this, there was one gleaming, memorable moment that happened after the night protesters burned Minneapolis’ 3rd Precinct, the pig pen that housed the four cops that murdered George Floyd. The nearby Gandhi Mahal Restaurant was severely damaged by fire. The owner, Ruhel Islam, told a friend, “Let my building burn,” he said. “Justice needs to be served.” The next day, he stood by that statement, saying, “We can rebuild a building, but we cannot rebuild a human. The community is still here, and we can work together to rebuild.” Mind you, Mr. Islam is almost certainly a Muslim. He’s as much a target of Trump’s fear and hate as any African-American. Nonetheless, he believes in us, whether we deserve it or not.

In the 18th century, a slaveowner, anguished by guilt and aware of the incredible damage slavery and bigotry would do to the country he helped create, wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Thomas Jefferson, no Christian, knew the price to be paid because humans value justice. He would be totally unsurprised by the events of this week.

He might have even felt that justice was being served.

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Trumpanazi – American descent into Nazism continues

April 13th 2019

The Premier League of Britain has a problem with some of its fans. Granted, footies have never been a particularly sedate lot, sometimes preferring to discuss the friendly rivalry between clubs with clubs, or chains, or shivs.

There have always been racist and bigoted assholes in their ranks, who delight in throwing bananas at black players, or shouting some of the particularly lurid racial abuse that is the hallmark of British hooligans.

But in recent times, the nature and frequency of these attacks has sharply increased. WestHam United is in the process of banning fans who videoed themselves singing racist ditties about the Jewish players on that night’s match rival, Tottenham. Two days earlier, Chelsea supporters sang anti Moslem chants about a player in Slavia Prague, and attacked one of their own fans who objected to the vile chants. And on the same night, Arsenal fans screamed anti-Islamic abuse at players on the other club, in a match in the Emirates. Those fans were lucky; most Islamic countries have notoriously little patience for slurs against Allah or his followers. Public whipping is the local equivalent of community service.

Of course, it isn’t just soccer. The number of such incidents has been on the rise throughout Europe and in North America. In Québec, a player, Jonathan Diaby, a 24-year-old defenseman for Marquis de Jonquière of the Ligue Nord-Américaine de Hockey, and his family who were watching him play were subjected to such intense racial abuse from the filth in the stands that he was pulled from the game and he and his family escorted from the stadium for their own safety.

And unfortunately, it’s not just sports where this is happening.

Nazism—and let’s stop pretending it’s anything other than Nazism—has been on the rise, and emboldened by political power in many parts of Europe and the United States, Nazis come out from under their rocks in force. This is how they behave when they think they can get away with it.

It’s a phenomenon that puts us all at risk. Yes, even if you are a member of the so-called ‘master race’, male, and Christian. It’s not a political philosophy, not that such are especially coherent or good at attending to the interests of their own followers. It’s a mental illness, and an ethical vacuum using hate as a substitute for faith and strength. It eventually destroys everything in its path.

Hitler famously executed 12 million people, including six million Jews, between 1936 and 1945. No matter what the Nazis say, that happened. And among the six million he killed who were not Jewish, many were white, ‘pureblood’ Germans, who happened to be communist, socialist, atheist, liberal, intellectual, or just not approving of Nazism’s murderous tactics. And of course, the actual fighting killed even more of the very people who supported Hitler, beginning with the Brownshirts. Nazis killed many people, and resulted in many more being dead.

So if you’re sitting there watching Faux News, smug in the certain knowledge that Trump and his ilk will only target groups you hate, read some history. He’ll get you killed, too, one way or another. If you don’t flunk some unseen test for ideological purity, you’ll die in the fighting, or in the starvation after Trump and his kind have destroyed the country and the economy. You are as much at risk as any Hispanic immigrant, or Moslem, or African American. Your death may just be later, rather than sooner.

Hitler was able to con the German people—his followers—into believing he was acting on their behalf. The war nearly destroyed them, but even without the war, he would have gotten around to putting them in work camps and then death camps after he used up all the groups he hated and needed to feed bodies to the endless maw of his nationalistic ego. The millions who died because of him are nothing compared to the hundreds of millions he envisioned killing.

Trump—and there really is little difference between Trump and Hitler at this point—doesn’t even pretend to be addressing the needs of his followers. His “tax reform” was a vicious cheat that targeted the lower middle class, the source of much of his following. He proposes to make massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and to dismantle what remains of Obamacare. Probably about three quarters of the people who voted for him will be hurt by those proposals. Many will be killed.

But Trump doesn’t care. They served their purpose. They voted for him once. Like Hitler, that one election is all he needs. Once he consolidated power, Hitler’s only use for ‘the common man’ was that of cannon fodder.

Trump is trying to stage a coup against the United States now. He purged the department of Homeland Security last week, leaving the reptilian spawn of Goebbels, Stephen Miller in effective control of an organization capable of jailing millions. The bitch who threw children in cages wasn’t vicious enough for Trump, you see. He is defying Congress on its request for his taxes—a demand Congress unequivocally has a right to issue. He is using his lapdog Barr to try to bury the Mueller report, and its doubtlessly damning contents.

He tried to threaten ‘sanctuary’ cities with sending them what he considers to be animals and subhumans—immigrants. To the credit of the American people, most of those cities said they would welcome Trump’s castoffs. And his goosestepping followers won’t even stop to consider the mad logic behind protecting America from immigrants by sending immigrants to major American cities. Bigotry and hatred don’t run on logic.

He’s attacking a member of Congress for her Islamic faith. He tweeted twice a falsehood that she was dismissive of the attacks on 9/11. Never mind that Trump rejoiced in the attacks, claiming that it left him with the tallest building in New York City. (It’s a truism that when Trump attacks someone, he almost always ends up describing his own behavior). Equating someone with 9/11 for no other reason than that they are Moslem is exactly the same as claiming that Jews like to drink the blood of Christian babies, or that African Americans live only to rape white girls.

They are blood libels, these threats and smears. It’s the sort of thing you expect to hear from Nazi filth.

And it’s what we now hear from the President of the United States.

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Four stories

A grim day in the news

July 23rd 2011

Scanning the top four stories of the day, I found that one left me utterly mystified, another was so inevitable that it hardly even seemed to qualify as news, and one that manged to seem inevitable and utterly unexpected all at the same time. The last one sort of provides a framework for the social milieu in which the first three reside.

I keep trying, and failing, to make sense of the shooting in Norway. There have been so many mass shootings here in America, if not on that scale, that it scarcely seems worth asking “why?” The main question to me is “how?” How did one, or possibly two men build a bomb on that scale, and how did they get it next to the Prime Minister’s office building. How was one man able to get a police uniform, and what was he carrying that enabled him to kill 60 teenagers who crowded around him trustingly in just the first few minutes of his rampage? How did he manage that?

American right wing response was predictable, if in the usual demented fashion. As the story broke, of just the bombing, a loud howl arose about how important it was to do something about the Moslems, and that the bombing was doubtlessly Islamic revenge for those cartoons of the prophet Mohammad. Fox harpy Laura Ingraham tried to link it in some way to Park 51, the “ground-zero mosque.”

Continue reading “Four stories”

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