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Post by Admin on Jun 26, 2020 13:18:43 GMT
Jun 24, 20 Corporate Co-Option As Ruling Class Strategy Filed Under: Critique, US itsgoingdown.org/corporat-cooption-as-ruling-strategy/"The Following Editorial From Three Way Fight Points Out That In Different Times Of Mass Upheaval, The Corporate Class Has Helped The State Co-Opt And Recuperate Social Movements And Act Of Rebellion. It’s the biggest threat the U.S. power structure has faced in many years—a Black-led, multiracial wave of protests, uprisings, and strikes against the police and white supremacy in cities across the country. Defenders of the established order have responded with a variety of countermeasures, including direct police repression, vigilante violence, and propaganda campaigns designed to demonize, divide, and weaken the movement. Another countermeasure that’s received less attention is cooptation—not just immediate, small-scale tactics such as mayors proclaiming Black Lives Matter or cops taking a knee, but large-scale strategic efforts to channel mass rage into limited changes that leave existing systems of power, hierarchy, and oppression fundamentally intact. This kind of cooptation isn’t coming from the White House and may be beyond the capacity of the Democratic Party leadership, but it is a force we need to contend with. Because as popular pressure increasingly exposes weaknesses in the current systems of social and political control, it creates openings for a resurgence of ruling-class liberalism and the cooptation strategies it has promoted for generations. The U.S. ruling class has leaned right for so long, it’s easy to forget that this stance isn’t inherent—or permanent. In the 1930s and again in the 1960s, during times of deep social crisis and large-scale radical mobilizations, capitalists sanctioned dramatic changes in the system of rule to preserve their own power. The business community abandoned New Deal liberalism starting in the late 1970s, partly for economic and geostrategic reasons and partly in response to grassroots-based right-wing backlash. But to assume that capitalists are automatically committed to neoliberalism or right-wing authoritarianism is to take a dangerously narrow view of ruling-class politics. To put this situation in perspective, it’s helpful to look at how the U.S. ruling class responded to the African American urban uprisings of the 1960s. An excellent way to do that is by revisiting the book Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History by journalist-turned-academic Robert L. Allen. First published in 1969, Black Awakening is important for a number of reasons. For one, it’s a keen exposé of contradictions and tensions within the Black Power and Black nationalist movements of the late 1960s. For another, it’s a pioneering analysis of U.S. racial oppression as a system of domestic colonialism. Anticipating part of Butch Lee and Red Rover’s Night-Vision by over 20 years, Allen argued that “black America is now being transformed from a colonial nation into a neocolonial nation; a nation nonetheless subject to the will and domination of white America.” Under colonialism, state power had been fully in the hands of whites, but with neocolonialism African Americans were granted a significant degree of political power yet remained subordinated through various “indirect and subtle” means (14). A third reason that Black Awakening is important, and the one I’m most concerned with here, is that it includes an invaluable discussion of ruling-class responses in the face of mass upheaval. In the broadest terms, Allen argued that “In the United States today a program of domestic neocolonialism is rapidly advancing. It was designed to counter the potentially revolutionary thrust of the recent black rebellions in major cities across the country. This program was formulated by America’s corporate elite—the major owners, managers, and directors of the giant corporations, banks, and foundations which increasingly dominate the economy and society as a whole—because they believe that the urban revolts pose a serious threat to economic and political stability. Led by such organizations as the Ford Foundation, the Urban Coalition, and National Alliance of Businessmen, the corporatists are attempting with considerable success to co-opt the black power movement” (17)." & this perspective - America’s Own Color Revolution www.globalresearch.ca/america-own-color-revolution/5716153"Color Revolution is the term used to describe a series of remarkably effective CIA-led regime change operations using techniques developed by the RAND Corporation, “democracy” NGOs and other groups since the 1980’s. They were used in crude form to bring down the Polish communist regime in the late 1980s. From there the techniques were refined and used, along with heavy bribes, to topple the Gorbachev regime in the Soviet Union. For anyone who has studied those models closely, it is clear that the protests against police violence led by amorphous organizations with names like Black Lives Matter or Antifa are more than purely spontaneous moral outrage. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans are being used as a battering ram to not only topple a US President, but in the process, the very structures of the US Constitutional order. If we step back from the immediate issue of videos showing a white Minneapolis policeman pressing his knee on the neck of a black man, George Floyd, and look at what has taken place across the nation since then, it is clear that certain organizations or groups were well-prepared to instrumentalize the horrific event for their own agenda. The protests since May 25 have often begun peacefully only to be taken over by well-trained violent actors. Two organizations have appeared regularly in connection with the violent protests—Black Lives Matter and Antifa (USA). Videos show well-equipped protesters dressed uniformly in black and masked (not for coronavirus to be sure), vandalizing police cars, burning police stations, smashing store windows with pipes or baseball bats. Use of Twitter and other social media to coordinate “hit-and-run” swarming strikes of protest mobs is evident. What has unfolded since the Minneapolis trigger event has been compared to the wave of primarily black ghetto protest riots in 1968. I lived through those events in 1968 and what is unfolding today is far different. It is better likened to the Yugoslav color revolution that toppled Milosevic in 2000."
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Post by Admin on Jun 26, 2020 15:38:00 GMT
Definition of Racism:
“A system of advantage based on Race”
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Post by Admin on Jun 26, 2020 17:14:45 GMT
Black Lives Matter Everywhere: Its Time to Defund the US Military The case for Black Lives Matter should be applied globally and the push to defund police should be extended to the US military. by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies www.mintpressnews.com/black-lives-matter-everywhere-defund-police-and-military/268399/On June 1, President Trump threatened to deploy active-duty U.S. military forces against peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in cities across America. Trump and state governors eventually deployed at least 17,000 National Guard troops across the country. In the nation’s capital, Trump deployed nine Blackhawk assault helicopters, thousands of National Guard troops from six states, and at least 1,600 Military Police and active-duty combat troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, with written orders to pack bayonets. After a week of conflicting orders during which Trump demanded 10,000 troops in the capital, the active-duty troops were finally ordered back to their bases in North Carolina and New York on June 5th, as the peaceful nature of the protests made the use of military force very obviously redundant, dangerous and irresponsible. But Americans were left shell-shocked by the heavily armed troops, the tear gas, the rubber bullets and the tanks that turned U.S. streets into war zones. They were also shocked to realize how easy it was for President Trump, single-handedly, to muster such a chilling array of force. But we shouldn’t be surprised. We have allowed our corrupt ruling class to build the most destructive war machine in history and to place it in the hands of an erratic and unpredictable president. As protests against police brutality flooded our nation’s streets, Trump felt emboldened to turn this war machine against us—and may well be willing to do it again if there is a contested election in November.
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Post by Admin on Jun 27, 2020 18:14:44 GMT
Corporate Backers of the Blue: How Corporations Bankroll U.S. Police Foundations Companies that say they stand with protesters have been funding police foundations for years. readsludge.com/2020/06/19/corporate-backers-of-the-blue-how-corporations-bankroll-u-s-police-foundations/This article was first published at Eyes on the Ties, a news site by LittleSis.org As calls to defund the police gain traction, bloated police budgets are coming under scrutiny for siphoning public resources away from black and brown communities. While police budgets are typically public documents that must be approved by elected officials, there are other institutions in place with the sole purpose of funneling even more resources toward law enforcement. Police foundations across the country are partnering with corporations to raise money to supplement police budgets by funding programs and purchasing tech and weaponry for law enforcement with little public oversight. Annual fundraising events and parties like the St. Paul Police Foundation’s “Blue Nite Gala” and the Chicago Police Foundation’s “True Blue” event are huge moneymakers. The NYC Police Foundation reported that it raised $5.5 million from its annual benefit in 2019. If police departments already have massive budgets – averaging 20% to 45% of a municipal budget – why do these organizations exist? Police foundations offer a few unique benefits to law enforcement. First, these foundations can purchase equipment and weapons with little public input or oversight. The Houston Police Foundation has an entire page on its website showcasing the equipment it purchased for the police department, including SWAT equipment, LRAD sound equipment, and dogs for the K-9 unit. The Philadelphia Police Foundation purchased long guns, drones, and ballistic helmets. The Atlanta Police Foundation helped fund a major surveillance network of over 12,000 cameras. In Los Angeles, the police used foundation funding to purchase controversial surveillance software from Palantir. If the LAPD purchased this technology through its public budget, it would have been required to hold public meetings and gain approval from the city council. By having the foundation purchase it for them, the LAPD was able to bypass that oversight. Second, these foundations provide a public-private structure wherein the corporate elite can overtly support police departments through direct donations, sponsorships, special programs, and by serving as directors on foundations’ boards. The ongoing protests have emphasized that police exist to enforce a racist social order that protects corporations, capital, and buildings rather than black and brown lives. Police foundations are a key space for orchestrating, normalizing, and celebrating the collaboration between corporate power and the police. The corporate interests backing police foundations across the country cover a wide range of industries. We profile some of these industries and corporate actors below.
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Post by Admin on Jun 27, 2020 19:14:35 GMT
JUNE 26, 2020 How Racism is an Essential Tool for Maintaining the Capitalist Order by RICHARD D. WOLFF www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/26/how-racism-is-an-essential-tool-for-maintaining-the-capitalist-order/"U.S. capitalism survived because it found a solution to the basic problem of its instability, its business cycles. Since capitalism never could end cyclical downturns and their awful effects, its survival required making those effects somehow socially tolerable. Systemic racism survived in the post-Civil War United States partly because it helped to achieve that tolerability. Capitalism provided conditions for the reproduction of systemic racism, and vice versa. Every four to seven years, on average, capitalism produces a downturn (“recession,” “depression,” “bust,” “crash”—many words for a problem so regularly repeated). Political leaders, economists, and others have long searched for a cure for capitalism’s instability. None was ever found. Capitalism has thus already recorded three crashes in this new century (spring of 2000, autumn of 2008, and now in 2020). Defenders of capitalism prefer to call its inescapable instability the “business cycle.” That sounds less awful. Yet its cycles’ hard reality has always frightened capitalism’s defenders. They recognize that when large numbers of people suddenly lose their jobs, many businesses die, production shrinks, and governments lose tax revenues, the results can and often do threaten the entire economic system. Capitalism’s cyclical crises could potentially turn their victims against it and make them receptive to the system’s critics. This would more likely happen if everyone in the society were roughly equally vulnerable to cyclical downturns. Most employees would then rightly worry that their jobs would be lost in the next crash. They would periodically face income losses, interrupted educations, lost homes, and so on. Whatever relief employees felt if neighbors, rather than themselves, got fired, they would know that it might well be their turn in the next cycle. The losses, insecurities, and anxieties produced by such a capitalism would long ago have turned employees against it and provoked transition to a different system. U.S. capitalism solved its instability problem by making cyclical downturns afflict chiefly a minority subpart of the whole working class. It positioned that minority to bear the brunt of each cycle and suffer its damages disproportionally. That minority was repeatedly drawn into and then thrown out of jobs as the cycle dictated. Any savings it might accumulate when working would be lost when unemployed. Repeated firings precluded such a minority from enjoying the benefits of job longevity (seniority, promotion, household stability, etc.). Poverty, disrupted households and families, unaffordable housing, education, and medical care would haunt such a minority. It would become capitalism’s “business cycle shock-absorber”—the last hired, first fired—across the four-to-seven year average duration of its cycles. For capitalism, making such a minority absorb most of the costs of capitalism’s instability allowed the majority of the working class to be relatively exempted, relieved, freed from them. The majority could be less subject to cycles because the minority was made relatively much more subject. Capitalism promised the majority relatively secure jobs and incomes because it took those away from the minority. The majority could thus worry less about the next cycle, whereas the minority had to worry more and adjust their lives more. Racists could then attribute the resulting differences between minority and majority subparts of a population to inherent qualities of different “races” instead. Other advanced capitalist countries found parallel solutions. Some condemned immigrants to play the role assigned to African Americans in the United States. Racism aimed at immigrants often followed. In cyclical upswings, immigrants would be brought in: North Africans into France, southern Italians into Switzerland, Turks into Germany, and so on. Then, cyclical downswings would return those immigrants to their home countries. Capitalisms would thus save on costs of unemployment insurance, welfare payments, etc., for the workers who had returned. While some capitalisms relied on domestic minorities to be shock-absorbers and others relied on immigrants, some countries relied on both. The United States used Central American immigrants alongside domestic African Americans, and it still does. Germany allowed some immigrants to settle and acquire German citizenship alongside Turkish and other immigrant “guest workers.” In the United States, married white women also played the role of business cycle shock-absorber. During cyclical upswings, they would enter the paid labor force in part-time or full-time positions. Like African Americans, they earned less than white men. Women’s jobs, too, were likely to be temporary, undone by cyclical downturns. Whatever communities were forced into the shock-absorber role, poverty, depression, broken families, slums, and inadequate education and health facilities became more widespread among them than they were among the majority of the working class. Insecure jobs, incomes, homes, and lives often bred bitterness, envy, desperation, crime, and violence. These collateral damages had to be “managed” by the capitalisms whose survival depended on producing and reproducing those communities. Police and prisons were and are assigned that management task."
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Post by Admin on Jun 27, 2020 19:15:27 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 28, 2020 20:05:03 GMT
This is from 2016 about an FBI report from 2006. It isn’t new, and it still must be addressed. *************** “In the 2006 bulletin, the FBI detailed the threat of white nationalists and skinheads infiltrating police in order to disrupt investigations against fellow members and recruit other supremacists. The bulletin was released during a period of scandal for many law enforcement agencies throughout the country, including a neo-Nazi gang formed by members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who harassed black and Latino communities. Similar investigations revealed officers and entire agencies with hate group ties in Illinois, Ohio and Texas. Much of the bulletin has been redacted, but in it, the FBI identified white supremacists in law enforcement as a concern, because of their access to both “restricted areas vulnerable to sabotage” and elected officials or people who could be seen as “potential targets for violence.” The memo also warned of “ghost skins,” hate group members who don’t overtly display their beliefs in order to “blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes.” “At least one white supremacist group has reportedly encouraged ghost skins to seek positions in law enforcement for the capability of alerting skinhead crews of pending investigative action against them,” the report read. Problems with white supremacists in law enforcement have surfaced since that report. In 2014, two Florida officers — including a deputy police chief — were fired after an FBI informant outed them as members of the Ku Klux Klan. It marked the second time within five years that the agency uncovered an officer’s membership in the KKK. Several agencies nationwide have also launched investigations into personnel who may not be formal hate group members, but face allegations of race-based misconduct.” FBI warned of white supremacists in law enforcement 10 years ago. Has anything changed? www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-in-law-enforcement
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Post by Admin on Jun 29, 2020 8:37:38 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 29, 2020 14:58:18 GMT
Racial-communalist politics and the second assassination of Abraham Lincoln 25 June 2020 "One month after the killing of George Floyd, the mass multi-racial demonstrations against police violence are in danger of being hijacked and misdirected by reactionary political forces who are attempting to promote racial divisions, sabotage the unity of working people and youth, and undermine the development of the class struggle against capitalism. This campaign is now concentrated on desecrating and destroying the statues of figures who led the American Revolution and the Civil War. It is difficult to find words that adequately express the sense of revulsion produced by the monstrous attacks on memorials that honor the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the United States’ greatest president, who led the country during the Second American Revolution that destroyed the Slave Power and emancipated millions of enslaved African Americans. On the evening of April 14, 1865, less than a week after the surrender of the main Confederate army, which brought the four-year Civil War to an end, Lincoln was shot in the head by the pro-slavery actor John Wilkes Booth. Nine hours later, at 7:22 on the morning of April 15, Lincoln died of the wound inflicted by the assassin. Standing beside Lincoln’s death bed, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously declared: “Now he belongs to the ages.” Lincoln’s martyrdom produced an outpouring of grief throughout the United States and the world. The working class recognized that it had lost a great champion of democracy and human equality. Karl Marx, writing on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association, wrote in the days after Lincoln’s assassination that he was “one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good.” Abraham Lincoln was an extraordinarily complex man, whose life and politics reflected the contradictions of his time. He could not, as he once stated, “escape history.” Determined to save the Union, he was driven by the logic of the bloody civil war to resort to revolutionary measures. In the course of the brutal struggle, Lincoln gave expression to the revolutionary-democratic aspirations that inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives for a “new birth of freedom.” Every period of political upsurge in the United States has drawn inspiration from Lincoln’s life. Since its opening in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC has been the site of some of the most important moments in the struggle against racial oppression and for equality. In 1939, when Hitler’s Nazis were on the march in Europe and fascism had many sympathizers among the American ruling elite, the famous African American contralto Marian Anderson was denied the right to sing at Constitution Hall. So instead she sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before a crowd of 75,000. In 1963, at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr. stood at the same location as he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, calling for equality and racial integration before a crowd of 250,000. Later in that decade, tens of thousands of youth protesting the Vietnam War assembled at the monument. It is not coincidental that the working-class upsurge of the 1930s was associated with many great artistic depictions of Lincoln, including the films Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940). Aaron Copland’s beloved orchestral-narrative masterpiece, Lincoln Portrait (1942), concludes with the declaration that the sixteenth president of the United States “is ever-lasting in the memory of his countrymen.” But now, 155 years after the tragedy at Ford’s Theater, Lincoln is the subject of a second assassination. This one must not succeed. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington DC’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, said she will introduce a bill to remove the famous Emancipation Monument from the Lincoln Park in Washington, DC. The race-fixated protesters have declared their intention to tear down the monument, which was paid for by former slaves and movingly dedicated by black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1876. “The designers of the Emancipation Statue in Lincoln Park in DC didn’t take into account the views of African Americans,” Norton stated in a Tweet. Democrats assert that the statue demeans “the black community” because it depicts Lincoln freeing a slave crouched in a runner’s pose, which the sculptor intended to symbolize the liberation of the Civil War. Norton’s reactionary effort is being supported by Democratic Party officials in Boston, who will hold hearings in the coming weeks to entertain demands for the removal of a replica of the Emancipation Memorial in that city. Lincoln is not the only leader of the anti-Confederate forces to be targeted. In San Francisco last week, a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the great general of the victorious Union army and later president of the United States, was torn down. An even filthier example of the racialist campaign is the desecration of the Boston monument honoring the legendary 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The 54th Massachusetts, led by abolitionist Robert Gould Shaw, was the second all-black regiment organized in the Civil War. Protesters object to the fact that the 54th, famously depicted in the film Glory (1989), was commanded by a white officer, Shaw. Holland Cotter, the New York Times’ co-chief art critic, slandered the monument as a “white supremacist” visual for its depiction of Shaw leading his African American battalion. Another Union monument, a statue of abolitionist Hans Christian Heg (1829–1863), was pulled down Tuesday night in Madison, Wisconsin. The statue was beheaded before being thrown into a nearby lake. A Norwegian immigrant, Heg led the 15th Wisconsin regiment, known as the Scandinavian Regiment, against the Confederacy. Prior to the war, Heg, a member of the Free Soil Party, fiercely opposed slavery and headed an anti-slave catcher militia in Wisconsin. He was killed at the age of 33 at the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. The Socialist Equality Party rejects all the lame liberal excuses and justifications that are offered to legitimize the desecration of these memorials. Actions, whatever the motivations ascribed to them, have objective significance and very real political consequences. The assault on Lincoln monuments and other memorials honoring the leaders of the American Revolution and Civil War are political provocations aimed at whipping up racial animosities. Such provocations are well-known forms of communalist politics, which resemble the burning down of Muslim mosques by Hindu fanatics or Hindu temples by Muslim fanatics. Here in the United States, the statues are being attacked as examples of “white” rule. The attacks on the statues are the outcome of a campaign by the two capitalist parties and various reactionary elements in the upper-middle class to racialize and communalize American politics. The growing intensity of this campaign is a response to the upsurge of working-class militancy, which is seen as a threat to capitalism. Far from welcoming the interracial unity displayed in the demonstrations against police brutality, the ruling elites and most affluent sections of the middle class are terrified by its political implications. In the promotion of racial politics, there is a division of labor between the Democratic and Republican parties. Trump and the Republicans pitch their appeal to the most politically disoriented elements in American society, manipulating their economic insecurities in a manner intended to incite racial antagonism and deflect social anger away from the capitalist system. The Democratic Party employs another variant of communalist politics, evaluating and explaining all social problems and conflicts in racial terms. Whatever the particular issue may be—poverty, police brutality, unemployment, low wages, deaths caused by the pandemic—it is almost exclusively defined in racial terms. In this racialized fantasy world, “whites” are endowed with an innate “privilege” that exempts them from all hardship. This grotesque distortion of present-day reality requires a no less grotesque distortion of the past. For contemporary America to be portrayed as a land of relentless racial warfare, it is necessary to create a historical narrative in the same terms. In place of the class struggle, the entire history of the United States is presented as the story of perpetual racial conflict. Even before the outbreak of the pandemic, efforts to create racial foundations for contemporary communalist politics were well underway. The New York Times, the principal voice of corporate and financial patrons of the Democratic Party, concocted the insidious 1619 Project, the central purpose of which was to promote a racial narrative. The main argument of this project, which was unveiled in August 2019, was that the American Revolution was undertaken to protect North American slavery and that the Civil War, led by the racist Abraham Lincoln, had nothing to do with the ending of slavery. The slaves, so the new story went, liberated themselves. The purpose of lies about history, as Trotsky explained, is to conceal real social contradictions. In this case, the contradictions are those embedded in the staggering levels of social inequality produced by capitalism. These contradictions can be resolved on a progressive basis only through the methods of class struggle, in which the working class fights consciously to put an end to capitalism and replaces it with socialism. Efforts to divert and sabotage that struggle by dissolving class identity into the miasma of racial identity lead inexorably in the direction of fascism. Through the promotion of a racial version of communalism, all factions of the ruling class seek to divide the working class so as to better exploit it and ward off the threat of revolution. It is no coincidence that when American society is straining under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 120,000 people and sparked an economic crisis on the scale of the Great Depression, the Democrats are ever-more ferociously seeking to make race the fundamental issue. The alternative to the politics of racial communalism is the socialist politics of working-class unity. This is the program of the Socialist Equality Party, and those who agree with this perspective should join our party." Niles Niemuth and David North www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/25/pers-j24.html
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Post by Admin on Jun 29, 2020 15:54:36 GMT
THE PROBLEM OF KLAN DENIALISM AMONG LEFTISTS abeautifulresistance.org/site/2020/6/19/the-problem-of-klan-denialism-among-leftists"Klan denialism doesn’t only mean to deny the existence of the KKK, it also means to minimize its scope and power. Even among leftists who proclaim antiracist views and denounce white supremacy, many still reduce racialized violence to isolated cases involving specific individuals, and list nationwide KKK groups as if they were separate from each other. We tend to attribute their violence to ‘dumb rednecks’ operating on a freakish fetish of the past, as opposed to a widely orchestrated operation involving powerful people with a biblical sense of purpose. The obsession white supremacists have with Roman and Greek antiquity may be mocked or debunked, but in doing that we can overlook the powerful space this ideology has occupied in civilization for centuries. Perhaps we think that acknowledging their power is the same as empowering them, when not acknowledging it might be where they draw power from. Whiteness may influence how history is written, but it also informs our reading of it, and the extent to which we chose to perceive ourselves as distant from it without actually being so. More important than which is the correct reading of history is the acknowledgment of how supremacy is inscribed all across it, because we must have a clear understanding of the problem to fight against it. For thousands of years, the Christian battle against the Muslim world — which consisted of black and brown people of Africa and the Middle East — has successfully forged race into Western expansion. Chattel slavery was not a period in history isolated from what was before or after, it was a result of a powerful social construct that has continued to reinvent itself throughout history. The Bible proclaims: “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh (…); not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ (…)”. Words often are twisted for political purposes, but we can still question why words like these were written in the first place. More modern versions of Christianity may take the servitude of the flesh quite literally, and even write new sacred texts, as was the case of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where the cursed mark of blackness of the flesh is a sign that to enslave and subjugate is to honor the will of God. With the shift from colonialism to industrial capitalism, pseudo-secularism became one of the most efficient tools of Western Christian expansion as they sought ‘business’ partners in non-Christian regions — the business of Imperialism. Pseudo-secularism became a new way to exploit others within the framework of Christian goodness. In the United States, because the constitution is marketed as inclusive, we often overlook the presence of Christianity, and Protestantism in particular, in every governmental decision. This presence is not merely religious, it’s white, and seeks to conquer the other — which is rooted in the othering of the ‘Muslim world’. This dispute still happens today, engaged globally through white American votes, and locally through the self-proclaimed defenders of ‘White America’. Western writers from the 18th century philosophy era, like Adam Smith and Bernard Mandeville, exchanged on how selfish capitalist interests could be framed as a good Christian deed. Mandeville, a Dutch man, wrote that “Private Vices by the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician may be into Publick Benefits” in the book Fable of the Bees, which Adam Smith cited in his work. Politicians still advance their private interests under the pretense of collective benefit while waving around a bible. And I’m not just talking about Trump. This principle is shared by more than most of his co-workers, friends, family, employees and predecessors. This principle is also shared by the creators of the mass media most leftists consume. Mandeville’s writing is tattooed on the arm of Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of Vice, a beloved leftist enterprise which might as well have been called “Private Vices”. Aside from endorsing David Duke's book on Jewish Supremacism, McInnes fathered the Proud Boys organization. Among other things, they were the personal bodyguards of Roger Stone, Trump’s personal advisor, before he was convicted in relation to the Mueller Report. There is no reason to believe these people aren’t powerful, well-connected, full of secrets, and very close to us. Even if McInnes is placed in this leftist Media Group’s obscure past, note that, in the present, Vice is losing money because several brands aren't interested in advertising next to BLM content; brands they refuse to oust. Why praise them for taking the financial hit instead of changing their content, while the real concern should be the fact that racist companies have been funding the content leftists have been consuming? After all, it might not be so bad that we are the ones black-listed by them, bad is their hypocritical P.R. strategies. In a Rebel News crowdfunded trip to Israel, McInnes’ videos show a beautiful mosque and moment of public prayer juxtaposed with tense cinematic music and bold text describing Bethlehem — Jesus’ birthplace — as desecrated by brown people and the occupation of (Muslim) Palestinian authorities. He even describes Israeli authorities as succumbing to “capitulation”, and that “stealing” is just how countries are born. To him, righteous is the private vice of stealing land, especially the ground where Jesus first joined us on Earth; there is no question that to seek what is in the best interest of white men is a calling from the beginning of times, literally — Anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi."
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Post by Admin on Jun 30, 2020 18:33:28 GMT
'As the Black Liberation Movement and other progressive struggles increase in magnitude and intensity, the judicial system and its extension, the penal system, consequently become key weapons in the state's fight to preserve the existing conditions of class domination, therefore racism, poverty and war.' Angela Davis on the political prisoner, now available on the Verso Blog: Angela Davis: The Political Prisoner The political prisoner has played a central role in the history of modern liberation struggles, argues Angela Davis. www.versobooks.com/blogs/4773-angela-davis-the-political-prisoner
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Post by naominash3 on Jun 30, 2020 20:50:42 GMT
'As the Black Liberation Movement and other progressive struggles increase in magnitude and intensity, the judicial system and its extension, the penal system, consequently become key weapons in the state's fight to preserve the existing conditions of class domination, therefore racism, poverty and war.' Angela Davis on the political prisoner, now available on the Verso Blog: Angela Davis: The Political Prisoner The political prisoner has played a central role in the history of modern liberation struggles, argues Angela Davis. www.versobooks.com/blogs/4773-angela-davis-the-political-prisonerIt's a very intense power struggle right now. Being calm and black is very refreshing to my white neighbors.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 30, 2020 21:27:32 GMT
'As the Black Liberation Movement and other progressive struggles increase in magnitude and intensity, the judicial system and its extension, the penal system, consequently become key weapons in the state's fight to preserve the existing conditions of class domination, therefore racism, poverty and war.' Angela Davis on the political prisoner, now available on the Verso Blog: Angela Davis: The Political Prisoner The political prisoner has played a central role in the history of modern liberation struggles, argues Angela Davis. www.versobooks.com/blogs/4773-angela-davis-the-political-prisonerIt's a very intense power struggle right now. Being calm and black is very refreshing to my white neighbors. My problem with all of it is why anyone would choose to have an intense power struggle over something that has gone on for such a long time in the middle of a pandemic. And why BLM protests don't spread the virus but people going to the beach does. Masks are not foolproof against spreading infection. 'Social distancing' is almost impossible at protests. It doesn't make sense that that doesn't cause more cases but crowds at the beach do. Is ok for the white neighbours but people have a right to be angry. They should have been angry like this ages ago though; I suspect s lot of it has been whipped up by a strangely attendant media. Is like #MeToo for 2020, a distraction from other things. Nothing will change after people forget about it and move on. But it makes for a good sideshow. Am not belittling the experiences of black people. But the media never cared in.the past; they must have their own reason for reporting on it so widely right now.
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Post by naominash3 on Jun 30, 2020 21:32:18 GMT
Maybe the power struggle is really stupid people struggling to keep their power.
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Post by Admin on Jul 3, 2020 19:35:17 GMT
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