Why 'all lives matter' doesn't matter.
And why it matters that we know and understand that it does not mean anything.
It is merely a marketing tactic - a manipulative, reactionary, childish and ultimately feeble attempt at a come-back. It is empty, void, dull and inept.
'All lives matter' is nothing more than 'nah-nah nah-nah-naaah' - it is a childish, immature reaction to a genuine banner, a feeble riposte to a global movement that is precise, that is clear in it's origin and purpose.
The 'all lives matter' banner is not emerging from the thinking and concern of ordinary folk - it does not reflect any genuine emergent grass roots organising phenomenon that has been created to confront some real and serious abuse of power or any systemic oppression.
Oppression of ordinary white folk does exist, of course. But it has nothing to do with skin colour or physiology.
Poverty is a common structural oppression that afflicts all of us.
All Lives Matter is a scam.
ALM was created as a way to attack 'Black Lives Matter', to cast confusion about the messaging of BLM, to gaslight a portion of the white population, who are distressed, angry, who feel their genuine concerns are not being represented within the political system, whose pain is being exploited by the ruling classes in order to obscure the conversation. The conversation should be about hierarchies of power and violence, it ought to be about structural poverty and class, rather than Race. Race does not exist other than as a concept and a prejudice.
In a video interview with Laura Flanders, Black Lives Matter movement co-founder Alicia Garza said that "changing Black Lives Matter to All Lives Matter is a demonstration of how we don't actually understand structural racism in this country".
She went on to say that "other lives are valued more than black lives, and that to take blackness out of this equation is inappropriate". ALM therefore functions as a reactionary counter-punch to a genuine movement that emerged in 2013 in response to the 2012 killing of an innocent teenager, Trayvon Martin, who was only 17. Black Lives Matter and Trayvon Martin
Trayvon was killed by an armed Neighbourhood Watch volunteer. Trayvon was innocent of any crime at the time of the killing, and he had no record of any criminality or other evidence of bad behaviour. The killer was acquitted in a trial, in 2013, under a vague piece of legislation, 'stand your ground'.
The movement 'Black Lives Matter' began as a hashtag - #BlackLivesMatter - that coalesced online response to that acquittal, because it was not the first time this had happened, and many felt it was unlikely to be the last. The feeling was that because Trayvon was black therefore his life did not matter, that his death was yet another crime that was not being accounted for, and this was felt and understood as an injustice by many, many people.
The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter became a media focus around other cases of race related police brutality that occurred in the years that followed.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is today an organized movement dedicated to non-violent civil disobedience in protest to police brutality. "Black Lives Matter" exists as a decentralized network with over 30 chapters worldwide. The broader movement and its related organizations typically advocate against police violence towards black people, as well as for various other policy changes considered to be related to Racist and associated inter-sectional oppressions.
Racism is both a falsified logic and a real problem.
Racism was invented, it did not emerge as a natural social phenomenon. There are no racist genes.
The White Race as a concept, was invented by the White European Christians who were the wealthy owners of plantations, the elite of the early colonies of Virginia and Maryland, while they were still British Colonies, under British Rule, protected by British Troops. Racial superiority was a Protestant invention. It was invented to divide the working population within the colonies, and to prepare the legal ground for a massive expansion of institutionalised slavery in order to generate vast wealth.
The superiority of the white race over the black race was based on a false interpretation of Biblical scripture to give it weight. Laws were passed to institutionalise that superiority, bit by bit, over a 40 year period. The false interpretation of Biblical scripture has led to many other inequities and atrocities. Thus the invention of the White Race and their supposed superiority over black and native peoples was a political, social and economic commercially oriented invention.
False prophets for profits, if you will allow the pun. 400 years later and it is still the case that White on Black Racism, or White Supremacy, is still very much alive and active within the USA and the UK, and in many other countries.
There is a problem, and it does revolve around the issue of whether or not the lives on non-Caucasian people's matter to the ruling classes of Caucasian origin, and it is a matter of structural Racism and of grass roots Racism.
Leading members of the ruling classes might not be individually actively Racist, (Obama, for example) yet they do permit Racism to persist in order to more easily divide the working people of the population among ourselves, where we might otherwise find political solidarity and act in coordinated democratic ways to elect officials who would change the legislation that keeps the Established Hierarchy in place. Rulers lives matter? It is also true that the lives of all ordinary folk matter less to the ruling classes than the sense of the Rulers assumed entitlement to rule, The Rulers desire to retain, maintain and enhance their artificial power over the majority of the population supersedes all other concerns. This is what Rulers do. Rulers lives matter, and their power as a class matters more. Virus Spread The fact that the UK Conservative government are planning to return homeless people to the streets by de-funding programs for their temporary housing during the corona virus epidemic, or that they were going to cease funding free meals for 1.3 million vulnerable children during summer holidays, until a public campaign by a footballer pushed back, whilst at the same time paying for the Prime Ministers military operated jet to be painted with the Union Jack as a £900,000 PR stunt, gives a topical account of that lack of care for the lives of ordinary folk. Another pertinent example is the disgraceful behaviour of setting up a contact trace app that the Government knew was not going to be trusted (they were warned, and went ahead). They then set up a person to person contact chasing system that could not be effective, run by an un-elected official with no public health experience. Given that effective apps already existed (Germany had them) and were offered, for free, to the UK Government who rejected the offer, this translates into millions of pounds given to friends of the Government being wasted. Importantly, this diversion has wasted precious time and guaranteed more spread of the virus infection. Clearly, vulnerable peoples lives do not matter to the Rulers of the UK.
The policy of allowing the infectious virus SARSCOV2 to spread across the population, rather than do as new Zealand has done, and stop the spread, eliminate community transmission to protect the vulnerable portion of their population, and their economy is deliberate. Whose lives matter? In addition to all the other work being done to address this issue of Racism - and I think Black Lives Matter is doing this work really well and that they need much wider support - I think that a ruthlessly honest history curriculum in all schools and libraries within all former colonial States and their former colonies is essential. The truth will set us free. A lot of people who are racist do not really understand why they are racist, they do not know how they became racist. Honest educative exposure could liberate a lot of those people from their prejudice. Honesty in education could eradicate Racism, Misogyny, Xenophobia and Homophobia from our grass roots communities within a generation. Police brutality and Race. Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police. Risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for men and women and for all racial and ethnic groups. There are similar patterns in other countries, not least the UK. Black Lives Matter has developed into a global activist organisation, with solid, serious work being done to seek justice for cases of police brutality against black citizens, globally and to confront the history of Racism where it is not being addressed. Black Lives Matter has grown and developed many campaigns, and is dedicated and active. There is no 'All Lives Matter' activism, anywhere There is no known organised 'all lives matter' activism anywhere on Earth that is focused on all oppression that causes death and harm to any people, by one group onto another. There is no 'all lives matter' organisation or movement in any nation seeking to draw attention to oppression against any and all people - nada, diddly squat, zilch, zero, a void, empty space, nothing, Not a single cent or penny is being spent on such activism under the banner 'all lives matter'. Nobody is funding and organising a grass roots movement 'all lives matter' that is actively confronting for example anti-Gypsy or anti-Roma abuse, or confronting lethal homophobia or seeking to stop the invasion of Indigenous inhabited undeveloped lands by miners, loggers, prospectors, or confronting genocides, or protesting global poverty or confronting child trafficking. There is no activist group under the banner 'all lives matter' seeking justice through the court systems in any state or country to protect the lives of any group. The entire impetus of the slogan ALM is coming from groups who have plenty of power - white supremacist ruling class - who want ordinary folk to fight among ourselves, who want to undermine the message of Black Lives Matter and use it as a weapon among us - and they are using every technique and every platform available to spread this puerile reactionary slogan, including massive micro-targeting on-line. Micro-targeting “user data is feeding artificial intelligences whose objective is to manipulate the attention and behavior of users without their knowledge or approval.” and "Microtargeting in political advertising: Facebook, in particular, enables advertisers to identify an emotional hot button for individuals that can be pressed for electoral advantage, irrespective of its relevance to the election. Candidates no longer have to search for voters who share their values. Instead they can invert the model, using microtargeting to identify whatever issue motivates each voter and play to that. If a campaign knows a voter believes strongly in protecting the environment, it can craft a personalized message blaming the other candidate for not doing enough, even if that is not true. In theory, each voter could be attracted to a candidate for a different reason. In combination with the platforms’ persuasive technologies, microtargeting becomes another tool for dividing us. Microtargeting transforms the public square of politics into the psychological mugging of every voter.” and “Zeynep Tufekci, the UNC scholar who is one of the world’s foremost experts on the impact of emerging technology in politics, has observed that internet platforms enable the powerful to affect a new kind of censorship. Instead of denying access to communications and information, bad actors can now use internet platforms to confuse a population, drowning them in nonsense. In her book, Twitter and Tear Gas, she asserts that “inundating audiences with information, producing distractions to dilute their attention and focus, delegitimizing media that provide accurate information (whether credible mass media or online media), deliberately sowing confusion, fear, and doubt by aggressively questioning credibility (with or without evidence, since what matters is creating doubt, not proving a point), creating or claiming hoaxes, or generating harassment campaigns designed to make it harder for credible conduits of information to operate, especially on social media which tends to be harder for a government to control like mass media.” Use of internet platforms in this manner undermines democracy in a way that cannot be fixed by moderators searching for fake news or hate speech.” ― Roger McNamee, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe The pattern of use of All Lives Matter falls into this category, as a distraction, a means to confuse, distort, shout down, drown out and thus counter genuine voices seeking justice and an end to racist violence, and an end to Structural Racism. 'ALM' is being worked in conjunction with white supremacist political grooming operations. Questions to ask So if anyone cries 'all lives matter' you might want to ask them these questions: "What are you doing to stop the oppression of all and any lives anywhere? What funds are you donating to what 'all lives matter' activist organisations or campaigns and what are they doing to prevent abuse, and what are they doing to protect the lives of any group of people under threat? What charities or NGOs operating under the 'all lives matter' banner are you supporting that are directly confronting lethal abuse by any party against another? If 'all lives matter' to you, are you actively working to abolish poverty, everywhere? Do you support the immediate abolishing of poverty for all people, everywhere, without exception?" Because if 'all lives matter', and then they do not support these aims, then clearly, they do not really mean that 'all lives matter'. It could also mean that they have not thought this through - it may mean they have been misled, and thus by posing the questions one might offer them a pathway towards helping them work that out for themselves. This is a task for white people, a white in white non-violent action. Either way, Black Lives most certainly do matter - Racism is disgusting invention and a dysfunctional behaviour at every level; it is based on falsehoods that can only be sustained by indoctrination and dishonesty within the social structures around us. We must deal with both, and we must with the violence inherent in one group claiming superiority over another.
What to do, a thought exercise.
In a video interview with Laura Flanders, Black Lives Matter movement co-founder Alicia Garza said that "changing Black Lives Matter to All Lives Matter is a demonstration of how we don't actually understand structural racism in this country".
She went on to say that "other lives are valued more than black lives, and that to take blackness out of this equation is inappropriate". ALM therefore functions as a reactionary counter-punch to a genuine movement that emerged in 2013 in response to the 2012 killing of an innocent teenager, Trayvon Martin, who was only 17. Black Lives Matter and Trayvon Martin
Trayvon was killed by an armed Neighbourhood Watch volunteer. Trayvon was innocent of any crime at the time of the killing, and he had no record of any criminality or other evidence of bad behaviour. The killer was acquitted in a trial, in 2013, under a vague piece of legislation, 'stand your ground'.
The movement 'Black Lives Matter' began as a hashtag - #BlackLivesMatter - that coalesced online response to that acquittal, because it was not the first time this had happened, and many felt it was unlikely to be the last. The feeling was that because Trayvon was black therefore his life did not matter, that his death was yet another crime that was not being accounted for, and this was felt and understood as an injustice by many, many people.
The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter became a media focus around other cases of race related police brutality that occurred in the years that followed.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is today an organized movement dedicated to non-violent civil disobedience in protest to police brutality. "Black Lives Matter" exists as a decentralized network with over 30 chapters worldwide. The broader movement and its related organizations typically advocate against police violence towards black people, as well as for various other policy changes considered to be related to Racist and associated inter-sectional oppressions.
Racism is both a falsified logic and a real problem.
Racism was invented, it did not emerge as a natural social phenomenon. There are no racist genes.
The White Race as a concept, was invented by the White European Christians who were the wealthy owners of plantations, the elite of the early colonies of Virginia and Maryland, while they were still British Colonies, under British Rule, protected by British Troops. Racial superiority was a Protestant invention. It was invented to divide the working population within the colonies, and to prepare the legal ground for a massive expansion of institutionalised slavery in order to generate vast wealth.
The superiority of the white race over the black race was based on a false interpretation of Biblical scripture to give it weight. Laws were passed to institutionalise that superiority, bit by bit, over a 40 year period. The false interpretation of Biblical scripture has led to many other inequities and atrocities. Thus the invention of the White Race and their supposed superiority over black and native peoples was a political, social and economic commercially oriented invention.
False prophets for profits, if you will allow the pun. 400 years later and it is still the case that White on Black Racism, or White Supremacy, is still very much alive and active within the USA and the UK, and in many other countries.
There is a problem, and it does revolve around the issue of whether or not the lives on non-Caucasian people's matter to the ruling classes of Caucasian origin, and it is a matter of structural Racism and of grass roots Racism.
Leading members of the ruling classes might not be individually actively Racist, (Obama, for example) yet they do permit Racism to persist in order to more easily divide the working people of the population among ourselves, where we might otherwise find political solidarity and act in coordinated democratic ways to elect officials who would change the legislation that keeps the Established Hierarchy in place. Rulers lives matter? It is also true that the lives of all ordinary folk matter less to the ruling classes than the sense of the Rulers assumed entitlement to rule, The Rulers desire to retain, maintain and enhance their artificial power over the majority of the population supersedes all other concerns. This is what Rulers do. Rulers lives matter, and their power as a class matters more. Virus Spread The fact that the UK Conservative government are planning to return homeless people to the streets by de-funding programs for their temporary housing during the corona virus epidemic, or that they were going to cease funding free meals for 1.3 million vulnerable children during summer holidays, until a public campaign by a footballer pushed back, whilst at the same time paying for the Prime Ministers military operated jet to be painted with the Union Jack as a £900,000 PR stunt, gives a topical account of that lack of care for the lives of ordinary folk. Another pertinent example is the disgraceful behaviour of setting up a contact trace app that the Government knew was not going to be trusted (they were warned, and went ahead). They then set up a person to person contact chasing system that could not be effective, run by an un-elected official with no public health experience. Given that effective apps already existed (Germany had them) and were offered, for free, to the UK Government who rejected the offer, this translates into millions of pounds given to friends of the Government being wasted. Importantly, this diversion has wasted precious time and guaranteed more spread of the virus infection. Clearly, vulnerable peoples lives do not matter to the Rulers of the UK.
The policy of allowing the infectious virus SARSCOV2 to spread across the population, rather than do as new Zealand has done, and stop the spread, eliminate community transmission to protect the vulnerable portion of their population, and their economy is deliberate. Whose lives matter? In addition to all the other work being done to address this issue of Racism - and I think Black Lives Matter is doing this work really well and that they need much wider support - I think that a ruthlessly honest history curriculum in all schools and libraries within all former colonial States and their former colonies is essential. The truth will set us free. A lot of people who are racist do not really understand why they are racist, they do not know how they became racist. Honest educative exposure could liberate a lot of those people from their prejudice. Honesty in education could eradicate Racism, Misogyny, Xenophobia and Homophobia from our grass roots communities within a generation. Police brutality and Race. Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police. Risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for men and women and for all racial and ethnic groups. There are similar patterns in other countries, not least the UK. Black Lives Matter has developed into a global activist organisation, with solid, serious work being done to seek justice for cases of police brutality against black citizens, globally and to confront the history of Racism where it is not being addressed. Black Lives Matter has grown and developed many campaigns, and is dedicated and active. There is no 'All Lives Matter' activism, anywhere There is no known organised 'all lives matter' activism anywhere on Earth that is focused on all oppression that causes death and harm to any people, by one group onto another. There is no 'all lives matter' organisation or movement in any nation seeking to draw attention to oppression against any and all people - nada, diddly squat, zilch, zero, a void, empty space, nothing, Not a single cent or penny is being spent on such activism under the banner 'all lives matter'. Nobody is funding and organising a grass roots movement 'all lives matter' that is actively confronting for example anti-Gypsy or anti-Roma abuse, or confronting lethal homophobia or seeking to stop the invasion of Indigenous inhabited undeveloped lands by miners, loggers, prospectors, or confronting genocides, or protesting global poverty or confronting child trafficking. There is no activist group under the banner 'all lives matter' seeking justice through the court systems in any state or country to protect the lives of any group. The entire impetus of the slogan ALM is coming from groups who have plenty of power - white supremacist ruling class - who want ordinary folk to fight among ourselves, who want to undermine the message of Black Lives Matter and use it as a weapon among us - and they are using every technique and every platform available to spread this puerile reactionary slogan, including massive micro-targeting on-line. Micro-targeting “user data is feeding artificial intelligences whose objective is to manipulate the attention and behavior of users without their knowledge or approval.” and "Microtargeting in political advertising: Facebook, in particular, enables advertisers to identify an emotional hot button for individuals that can be pressed for electoral advantage, irrespective of its relevance to the election. Candidates no longer have to search for voters who share their values. Instead they can invert the model, using microtargeting to identify whatever issue motivates each voter and play to that. If a campaign knows a voter believes strongly in protecting the environment, it can craft a personalized message blaming the other candidate for not doing enough, even if that is not true. In theory, each voter could be attracted to a candidate for a different reason. In combination with the platforms’ persuasive technologies, microtargeting becomes another tool for dividing us. Microtargeting transforms the public square of politics into the psychological mugging of every voter.” and “Zeynep Tufekci, the UNC scholar who is one of the world’s foremost experts on the impact of emerging technology in politics, has observed that internet platforms enable the powerful to affect a new kind of censorship. Instead of denying access to communications and information, bad actors can now use internet platforms to confuse a population, drowning them in nonsense. In her book, Twitter and Tear Gas, she asserts that “inundating audiences with information, producing distractions to dilute their attention and focus, delegitimizing media that provide accurate information (whether credible mass media or online media), deliberately sowing confusion, fear, and doubt by aggressively questioning credibility (with or without evidence, since what matters is creating doubt, not proving a point), creating or claiming hoaxes, or generating harassment campaigns designed to make it harder for credible conduits of information to operate, especially on social media which tends to be harder for a government to control like mass media.” Use of internet platforms in this manner undermines democracy in a way that cannot be fixed by moderators searching for fake news or hate speech.” ― Roger McNamee, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe The pattern of use of All Lives Matter falls into this category, as a distraction, a means to confuse, distort, shout down, drown out and thus counter genuine voices seeking justice and an end to racist violence, and an end to Structural Racism. 'ALM' is being worked in conjunction with white supremacist political grooming operations. Questions to ask So if anyone cries 'all lives matter' you might want to ask them these questions: "What are you doing to stop the oppression of all and any lives anywhere? What funds are you donating to what 'all lives matter' activist organisations or campaigns and what are they doing to prevent abuse, and what are they doing to protect the lives of any group of people under threat? What charities or NGOs operating under the 'all lives matter' banner are you supporting that are directly confronting lethal abuse by any party against another? If 'all lives matter' to you, are you actively working to abolish poverty, everywhere? Do you support the immediate abolishing of poverty for all people, everywhere, without exception?" Because if 'all lives matter', and then they do not support these aims, then clearly, they do not really mean that 'all lives matter'. It could also mean that they have not thought this through - it may mean they have been misled, and thus by posing the questions one might offer them a pathway towards helping them work that out for themselves. This is a task for white people, a white in white non-violent action. Either way, Black Lives most certainly do matter - Racism is disgusting invention and a dysfunctional behaviour at every level; it is based on falsehoods that can only be sustained by indoctrination and dishonesty within the social structures around us. We must deal with both, and we must with the violence inherent in one group claiming superiority over another.
Aboriginal people, the oldest living culture on Earth then, and now, in chains, in Australia.
Estimates suggest that a total of 2 billion Aboriginal people have lived in that time span, and until the white Christian Europeans arrived, they were a stable, diverse, egalitarian culture, with 500 language groups, spread all over Australia. The last uncontacted group emerged from the bush in the 1960s. They have suffered horror upon horror, and are still profoundly oppressed by the invading culture.
Black Lives Matter.
Racism and White Supremacy was well established, as an international phenomenon, by the time the European Christians arrived. It remains a serious problem within Australia to this day.
It is one of the English speaking worlds most shameful situations.
It is one few speak honestly about.
It is a crime against Humanity.
1. Acknowledge that all Hierarchy of Violence Cultures are toxic, abuse ridden cultures. Just admit it. Say it out loud, now. Get it off your chest. Be honest.
2. The monuments and structures such cultures construct are therefore monuments to pathological abusive behaviour. They may be very well made, beautifully crafted. But being stabbed by a kitchen knife or a bejewelled, golden blade made by superior Japanese craftsman makes no difference. It is still being stabbed. Harm is harm.
3. Take them down, all of them. Dis-establish them.
4. For example, take the stone of the Pyramids, or the Norman Castles, and re-purpose it to build social housing to last centuries. These are both monuments to Power Disparity that was built to enable, justify and rationalise atrocity and abuse. They do not deserve to stand.
5. Create scale models of these monuments for museums, so that we can look back on the odious history and understand the crimes committed, the harms caused, the realities of the lives lived under such duress. And we can say 'never again' and mean it.
6. Be aware of all and every Artificial Power Disparity that permits abuse to occur, and dismantle all of them. A police man with gun, and a bad attitude. Not a healthy social entity.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
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