Do not fob this UK Ruling Faction's behaviour off as incompetence - it is clearly deliberate

a repeated behavioural pattern indicates intentionality

Whose Immunity?

"deliberate action

by the Ruling Faction -

a harmful infraction

of a States duty of care

to the citizen,

and to other states.

They spread the virus,

they spread the cash,

These venal people

are a lethal rash,

one we cannot even scratch.

they have an 80 seat

immunity."

More than 9 months ago, New Zealand reported their first death caused by COVID19, on February 29th, 2020. 

The first UK death from COVID19 was recorded a month earlier in England, the death occurred on January 21m and was reported January 29th. 

On the 3rd of February, the UK Prime Minister in a speech in Greenwich, publicly rejected taking the known, proven steps to prevent an epidemic escalating within the UK.

His words: 

"there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other."

Throughout that month, the UK was importing the virus via 80,000 English Ski tourists travelling to and returning from Northern Italy and Austria, where an epidemic was known to be taking place.  The UK abandoned existing contact tracing and isolation systems that had been operating. They lost control of the virus, and made no effort to suppress and control it, and stop community transmission - at best their policy choice has always been to somehow control it and manage a slow spread, in order to 'protect the economy'.

Both countries had the same information available at the same time.

Both Governments and their expert advisors and external independent expertise knew about this new infectious respiratory disease, how it spread, what the implications were in terms of case fatality rates, asymptomatic spread etc.

All of this was known at the time, and the need to prevent community transmission was very well understood.

The experts all understood that no matter how slowed down the spread of the virus might be by obviously inadequate measures, it always contains the potential to rapidly move beyond control causing widespread and deep harm, and thus necessitating a series of full lockdowns. Waves upon waves of disaster.

Here, Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand's Prime Minister, speaks to a news anchor on the first New Zealand fatality..

One of the items they discuss is managing borders. 

I urge all my readers to watch it.  Pay close attention to Ardern's logic, and compare that with what we know about the English Ruling Faction's apparent 'logic'.




In this global pandemic, every state has a duty of care to not export the virus, to achieve zero community transmission within it's own borders, every state has a duty of care in this to all other states.

Just as you and I, as people sharing the same streets and areas, we too have that same duty of care -to not spread the infection - it has to be said that those who wilfully risk spreading the disease are harming the entire community, and cannot be said to be acting on the available evidence.

Those who, due to lack of financial support, are forced to take risks cannot be scapegoated to protect the governments that refuse to take the correct action. Those whose work is essential - shopkeepers, rubbish collectors, nurses, porters, care workers, teachers, bank clerks serving the public, post offices and their staff, public transit staff, police, ambulance crews and many, many others - need the rest of us to prevent the spread of the virus so that they can get to and from their essential it us all work, in relative safety.

Comparing New Zealand's leadership with the UK ruling faction leadership:

Being Social.

New Zealand  is not a Socialist state by self definition - however their Government  has behaved as a genuinely socially caring state should in terms of dealing with the viral infection spread by SARSCOV2 in order to avoid the deaths and harms caused by the disease stage of the infection, COVID19.

The New Zealand Government acted on the available evidence and the skills learned in China, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and others and they have suppressed community transmission and they have fully supported the health and welfare of all the people, with all the resources of the state, without profiteering.

That is socialistic in action.

Social. It is not an ideological stance - it is a social stance.

Community. All of us matter. 

Nobody is superior, nobody is inferior.

What the Ruling Faction of the UK is doing is disaster capitalism - profiteering from the disaster.

Deliberately, callously exploiting people's vulnerabilities in spite of warnings, in spite of their 'errors' being clearly defined, identified, quantified and presented to them, they have persisted with policies that ensure slow spread of the virus, which guaranteed surges would occur.

If this was being done within a family group, we could have no problem calling this outright lethal intentional abuse and cruelty.

We would not fob it off as incompetence. 

We cannot fob the behaviour and actions of this English Ruling Faction as mere incompetence.

It is abusive behaviour.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

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Bullies, Power and the child-mother bonding attachment.

When we study the evolution of the human neuro-endocrine system and how it functions we discover something.

Egalitarian life was generally peaceful,  beautiful, healthy, grounded in solid attachment and mature affective state self regulation which reduced incidence of lost tempers and general violence

.

This will trigger some people within a culture where self regulation is dysregulated more often than not.

Social Behavioural Characteristics of different cultures.

 

source : www.violence.de

Societal Social Behavioural Characteristics.

Different modes of society exist, ranging from egalitarian collectives to hierarchies of power. 

Egalitarian behaviour is healthy. 

Hierarchy behaviour is unhealthy.

People bully because they learn to bully

People demonstrate love because they learn to love.

Unhealthy behaviour is not a biological norm.

Healthy behaviour is a biological norm.

That is why egalitarian cultures exist, and have always existed.  

Biology would not create a species designed to be unhealthy.

Healthy peoeple do not abuse their power disparity over others, especially not over their own children, family, partners... they will use that power disparity to nurture, care for and protect, to demonstrate healthy bonding and love as a lived experneice.

Bullies always seek as much control over the bullied as possible, to the point that it is unhealthy for both bully and the bullied.

In cultures where socio-econimic status is thing, wealth gives a person more material power to than other persons who have no wealth.  A man with a sword and a man with a stick.

Vast wealth creates a much larger power disparity. A president commands an Army, and a civilian living in the pathway of the war that army is prosecuting is utterly powerless, and must flee.

This is not healthy behaviour.

Great Wealth as an institutional agency controls populations.

States, Dictators, Kings and Queens, Presidents and Prime Ministers have access to material power - through the institutions they dominate and through alliances with Oligarchy. It is access to those that allows them to transmit and project their 'power', without them they are ordinary folk, impotent in the face of immense power.

The ordinary citizen is rendered utterly powerless by the structure.

The power disparity is close to that of parent and infant.

All of this control is to remain in a powerful position, to maitain the power disparity - it's a fractal of existential insecurity.

If I do let go it will all fall to pieces, and they will eat me alive.

The person or Institution is unwilling, unable to let go of that material capability to exercise power to retain power. Thus they resist all attempts at healing, they resist all attempts to confront their abuses, they cover up, mask, deflect, distract...

Unhealthy behaviour is not a biological norm.

Or put it the other way.

Healthy behaviour is the biological norm.

That is not to say that disease does not exist.

Which begs the question.

Why do or how do some people learn to become bullies?

Before we go on i want to place two scientifically proven understandings before you, that are uncontested, incontrovertible data.

- disrupted child-mother bonding is more common in communities that are traumatised or subjected to chronic stress, and in cultures that are violent hierarchies than it is in healthy egalitarian communities.

- example - Trump, his infancy and childhood, plus the culture of his fathers corrupt businessm within the culture of U.S. which is a hierarchy of power and violence. He is someone who is unable to regulate his emotional outbursts.

- example - The vast majority of people in prison for violent crime have experienced childhood trauma, abuse that was never resolved.

These are people whose ability or willingness to control their emotional states is profoundly damaged.

Angry, violent, abusive, manipualtive, traumatised people.

And there are many more who are not in prison, whose damage goes 'un-noticed' and yet it is the object and subject of humour in sit-coms, rom-coms, heroic war movies and there is enough of low level loss of self regulation to generate a psychotherapy industrial complex that deals with the results of the psycho-marketing industrial complex that manipulates that loss of self regulation.

Self Regulation of Emotional State.

Living in the real world, a human organism has to be able to master his or her emotional states - for example, climbing a tree to access something entails taking the risk of the climb. That risk is something to be feared, yet one needs to control the fear to do the climb safely. It's not fearlessnes, it's the ability to self regulate the emotional state in order to get things done, to avoid falling.

Allan N. Schore is an American psychologist and researcher in the field of neuropsychology. His research has focused on affective neuroscience, neuropsychiatry, trauma theory, developmental psychology, attachment theory, pediatrics, infant mental health, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and behavioral biology

What he is presenting in the video below is an over view of the scientific learning and clinical experience of the past 40 years, in this field, which is  telling us more about how human neonates and babies and infants and toddlers develop emotional self regulation, sense of self and other social keys in the first 1000 days of life, starting at conception.

In the language of neurobiology, enodcrinology, epigenetics, nurtition, physiological and psychological development as it relates to mother-child

So yes, starting from conception.

What happens at the biological level?
 
We see now that the human brain is designed to be organised by how the person (a developing foetus is a person) experiences being alive. 

Environment and experience plays a major role in brain development, more so than genetics alone.

“The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortext from genes.” 

― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
 
The epigenetics  (the way that portions of the parents genes are switched on or off or disrupted by their lived experience) of the parents lived experience is passed through to the child, through genetic transmission. So even without any direct experience, the child carries markers of the changed genetic coding of their parents lived experience prior to conception.

At the same time, the lived experience of the mother is the ennvironment within which the foetus and the new brain develops, given those conditions which of course vary from mother to mother, from culture to culture.  Both develop within a cultural environment, that affects both child and parent.

Thus we see that brain development being elastic, that fluidity gives the developing human brain the widest scope for learning. There is very little in behaviour that is 'programmed', most of our behaviour is learned. We write the pathways of experience as we go. Experience programs us, yet not all is hard wired, it can be modulated, attenuated.
 
Because the human brain never stops learning or growing.

Think of it as a small brain growing inside the mother, relating to the mothers brain. Learning all the time. Developing all the time. Everyday in the womb becoming ready for the next stage, which is not a from scratch state. Hearing starts at 18 weeks, which means that listening starts soon after. That is to say paying attention to the sound, with a focus.

The sounds of the mothers body, the sounds of life close by, a washing machine, a waterfall, thunder, laughter, crying... someone inside is listening, a little person is learning, developing, reacting and responding.

A baby in the womb can be soothed, as much as the baby can be disturbed. The baby can respond to the mother. A biological conversation, in the language of hormone cascades, neurological pathways plays between both mother and child.

The new-born babies recognises the mothers voice, and those of close family members, the new born feels everything any adult would feel, yet has no language. Communication is by empathy, connectedness, skin to skin.

The caring of the mother initiates further emotional development  of the child as a separate autonomous being, and her care sustains that development for as long as it takes the child to mature, healthfully. This is the bioligical mandate for healthy development.

There are key experiential inter-relational dynamics between mother and baby, and later on between any care giver and child, that are essential to nurture the development of the child's emotional maturity, at the earliest stage possible.

Biologically this makes sense. As a thought experiment, try to imagine a group living on an ice flow, or in a desert, or a rain forest having to move about with a few children throwing tantrums, screaming in rage, running off in all directions, refusing to co-operate?

It doesn't happen in healthy communities.

So here is Allan Schore, and he puts it so much clearer than I could...

Alice Miller

In 1986, Alice Miller published "For your own good :The Roots of Violence in Child Rearing"

In this work she traced the childhood of Hitler, and the childhoods of other well known 'cases' - a serial killer (Jurgen Bartsch) and a heroin addict (Christiane F) and looked at the cultural background in Europe at that time, and the history of child punishment.

She examined the early childhoods of these three subjects, and drew correlations and causative lines from those, put into the wider social material context of Christian Europe as a war like culture, where traditional parenting was authoritarian, and adult to child sanction or punishment was the norm.

Miller looked at the history of Parenting as transmitted in books, from old and ancient manuscripts to the printed press and traced a line of instruction, from Sparta (spare the rod, spoil the child)  to Vienna (Frued, and the Oedipus Complex) in 1880s, to middle class parenting books in the 1930s.

The traditional view was based around the concept of breaking the wilfulness of the child - that child willfulness was seen as the gate through which the Devil or Evil or Badness could enter and corrupt the child, and it was the parents Christian responsibility to make sure that never happened because such people could disrupt the established order. Society demanded that the parent dominate the child's will, and 'rear' the child, 'raise' the child to be a good citizen.

This is a culture where Christianity is ubiquitous, and the vast majority truly believe and are influenced by the Christian psyche.

Thus for them, to fail to 'raise' the child to be a good Christian would put the entire social order out of balance.

Freud's betrayal.

Freud, for what ever reasons, placed the dangerous element within what he assumed was the child's innate lust or competition for the opposite sex parent. It was a quality of the child. A biological norm.

He made that up, obviously. He had no science or meaningfully observed and measured data, it was merely his plagiarism of Greek Mythology projected onto a crime no one was willing to acknowledge, not even he himself, in spite of the little evidence that he did have. That crime was upper middle class  fathers sexually exploiting their own daughters.

His client base was the daughters of upper middle class families, who came to his psycho-therapy sessions and told their stories. They told him what they had experienced.

When Freud presented a paper on this, his contemporaries rejected it, and him, outright.

Freud retreated, and wrote a new  paper, which is known as The Aetiology of Hysteria, in which he put the 'blame' on the child...

Freud was doing what his culture told him to do. Loyalty, fit in, do not disturb the established order.

He followed orders. Creatively.

Alice Miller argued that the way a culture treats the children feeds into the willingness across a population to 'follow' Authoritarian leaders, not least because the unresolved anger, pain and dispair of lived experience that remains unresolved generates a pressure that is intense albeit largely unconscious, and bullies, those who seek to exercise power over others know how to tap into that to manipulate a significant part of the population, enough to control the majority...

Within this the vast majority peaople remain basically decent, albeit prone to being manipulated by demagogues.

Then a significant percentage will become bullies, at what ever

Brexit, and the age divide, the parenting divide reflects this dynamic in part.

A generation raised in War and traditional Christian values vs a generation raised in relative peace and secular values grounded in Human Rights.

It's a part of the dynamic, not it's whole.

Blaming the victim is a core aspect of the division to conquer dynamic.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Political Grooming Gangs and Racism - Taboo must be broken.

Why do some news media twist stories of violence to reframe them as stories of cultural or racial difference, in an attempt to imply inferiority or superiority? 

The issue with grooming gangs that target vulnerable children and then exploit them is not a racial issue. 

It is clearly a behavioural and cultural issue, in the sense that this behaviour occurs in every hierarchically violent culture, irrespective of race, religion, skin tone, language group or gender. 

The only place you will not find this behaviour is in egalitarian cultures.

Two mass murderers, two human beings, two skin tones, two cultures and two utterly different approaches towards how they are placed. Similar events that happen within the same culture are treated differently.

This is just one example of the way the issue of race and perceived difference is handled by some news media and by some politicians -  it sets people within the different communities against each other., rather than opposed to the violence itself. The violence becomes a secondary issue. 

Racists and Xenophobes delight in this kind of caricature. Those who would prefer that different communities do not find solidarity with one another appreciate the advantage such a twisted and slanted caricature provides.

The issue here is clearly not skin tone, culture or demographic - the issue is the violence -  and yet there are those will who co-opt the narratives of the violence to make indirect claims about race and culture that are aimed at audiences who will be influenced to internalise those claims, and that will feed the expression of petty hatreds, which in turn fuels more dismal street level abuse adding to the existing sense of oppression and all of this perpetuates social division, it breaks down bridges of solidarity between ordinary folk, and it is being used as political distraction in the public domain.

Why is this form of Racism so common?

Where did this come from?

Who benefits from this skewed portrayal?

Political Grooming: inventing Race as a social weapon. 

Racist ideology was invented in the Americas, while they were still British Colonies, under British Rule, paying taxes to the British State. Race was defined by Christians, using the Bible as the source of their reasoning, and instituted into Laws defining the White Race.

Race was invented as a carefully crafted novel social phenomenon, and rather than emerging as some natural outpouring, it was enabled via pulpit, pamphlet and deliberate legislative action that favoured different low class labouring groups, one over the other -  white free workers above white indentured workers, who stood over black indentured workers, all of whom were favoured over slaves who had been freed, with slaves and Native peoples placed at the bottom of the new hierarchy, and this was carried out during the 1640's - 1690's,  a four decade program.

Slavery was already a substantial dynamic across the Spanish Empire colonies in South America.

Yet in early Colonial years it was rare, as the indentured worker was the dominant mode of labour.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p262.html

There were some Africans who were brought to the 'New World' who ended up as indentured labour.

In most cases they were people who had been taken as slaves from Africa by the Spanish or by the Portuguese, and who were then captured as booty by English pirates, who were at war with the Catholic Spaniards and their allies.

The pirates, seeking to monetise their booty then brought them to the 'New World' where they were sold into indentured work - they would work a number of years to pay for their purchase costs, and on completion, would be granted status as a free person, and could work, save money, buy land, farm it, build businesses, marry and contribute to the social development of the colonies and so forth.  There were slaves as well, and in the early years a fair number were freed by their owners or were able to buy their freedom. The bulk of the labour force was European, largely British and Irish.

As the colonies expanded, the need for labour grew too.  Indentured labour was harsh, and had a high attrition rate. Many who started died while they were still indentured. With expansion, there was a need for more labourers.

In time slavery was introduced, then institutionalised and industrialised: turned into a fully fledged commercial operation, and industry, supplying slave labour to the colonies, to meet that need.

This led to a situation where in terms of numbers, the population of workers, indentured, freed and enslaved ran to many times that of the wealthy, the troops that defended the colonies, the urban middle class and their loyal workers. The work was hard, the lifestyle harsh, the social environment oppressive.. There was a huge disparity between the power of the wealthy and the power of the working poor. The labour force lived lives that were pretty much a state of punitive oppression.

The owners started to make laws to control this larger population, bit by bit.

"The shift from indentured servitude to racial slavery in the British colonies is evident in the development of the colonies' laws.

• Virginia, 1639: The first law to exclude "Negroes" from normal protections by the government was enacted.

Virginia, 1639 Act X. All persons except Negroes are to be provided with arms and ammunition or be fined at the pleasure of the governor and council.

• Maryland, 1664: The first colonial "anti-amalgamation" law is enacted (amalgamation referred to "race-mixing"). Other colonies soon followed Maryland's example. A 1691 Virginia law declared that any white man or woman who married a "Negro, mulatto, or Indian" would be banished from the colony forever.Maryland, 1664 :That whatsoever free-born [English] woman shall intermarry with any slave. . . shall serve the master of such slave during the life of her husband; and that all the issue of such free-born women, so married shall be slaves as their fathers were.

• Virginia, 1667: Christian baptisms would no longer affect the bondage of blacks or Indians, preventing enslaved workers from improving their legal status by changing their religion.
Virginia, 1667 Act III. Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children that are slaves by birth. . . should by virtue of their baptism be made free, it is enacted that baptism does not alter the condition to the person as to his bondage or freedom; masters freed from this doubt may more carefully propagate Christianity by permitting slaves to be admitted to that sacrament.

• Virginia, 1682: A law establishing the racial distinction between servants and slaves was enacted."Virginia, 1682 : Act I. It is enacted that all servants. . . which [sic] shall be imported into this country either by sea or by land, whether Negroes, Moors [Muslim North Africans], mulattoes or Indians who and whose parentage and native countries are not Christian at the time of their first purchase by some Christian. . . and all Indians, which shall be sold by our neighboring Indians, or any other trafficking with us for slaves, are hereby adjudged, deemed and taken to be slaves to all intents and purposes any law, usage, or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.

source : https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1h315.html

The rulers/owners turned to the Churches they sponsored to use the Biblical story of The Tribe of Ham to suggest Africans were descendent from Ham, a son of Noah.  The Africans were cast as a lessor race of people in this biblical hierarchy. And so the concept of racial hierarchy was initiated. Prior to that people thought of difference as just that, difference. The concept of  innate biological or racial superiority was unknown.  It was most often religious or political difference that mattered - Christianity vs Islam and Christianity vs Judaism for example, and class.

https://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_(son_of_Noah)

The land owners of the colonies used the Bible and it's Protestant  Puritan Work Ethic interpretations to suggest that Africans could be therefore converted to Christianity, as they were part of the Judeo-Christian narrative, and in that way they could be 'saved',  even within Slavery. Slavery was thus considered more akin to 'work' than imprisonment or punishment, and the idea of working diligently aligned with the Protestant work ethic which was central to the ideology of the colonial Europeans, and that made it easier to pretend that conversion to Christianity and diligence in the work they did could function as a way of saving the Africans from the eternal damnation of Hell, offered as a way to improve their lives and condition.

Native peoples, who were more often than not seen as robust, intelligent and in general honest peoples, in the early years, albeit different in nature and culture, were re-cast as Wild Savage Heathens, and thus they were already damned to Hell and being so savage and wild, they would not be easily converted to Puritan Christianity, and being indolent - they could not be easily enslaved, or put to work.  They could be killed and their lands taken and turned to Christian expansion. That was the point - for the owners saw a potential Empire stretching out to the West.

In this way the Puritan Economy was laid out - Wealth reveals Gods favour, poverty was God's disfavour and thus poverty was seen as the fault of the poor, who could, if they but tried hard enough, win God's favour by working hard for the wealthy. If they did well, it was God's will.

The American Dream, work hard and God will reward you.

Thus a Christian  Puritan Work Ethic Meritocracy social hierarchy was institutionalised, that ran from the owners who were Rich White Protestants, to Middle class white, artisan class white, menial labour white, white indentured workers,white  criminals, black folk. native peoples.

A Hierarchy ordained by God.

The plantation owners established this in order to ensure that none of the oppressed would seek solidarity with each other and resist or rebel against the elite ruling class.

The invention of Race was a Political, Economic and Religious protocol for oppression and social division.

It was in effect the operation of a Political Grooming Gang.

Exploiting studied vulnerabilities within different segments of an oppressed population, triggering the emotion with suitably crafted content, exploiting the reactions,  creating legalised favouritism that deliberately set one group against another.

Political grooming gangs still operate across almost all power systems. Education that does not teach an honest history is in effect a political grooming operation, if only by omission, in some cases..

Such omissions are essential component of manufacturing consent, within Hierarchies of Violence, Power and Wealth.

Education is absolutely key to eradicating Racism across the grass roots.

So that's a little bit of the history on the origins of Racism,. 

What about the realities of what is happening in the year 2020?

We need to understand how situations come to be, in order to confront what is not working, what is dysfunctional.

The Industrial Revolution could not have taken place in England as it did, without the wealth of the colonies, for which the slave trade was absolutely central. That is something we all need to understand. It might have happened in much smaller scale were it not for the vast wealth imported on the broken backs of slave and indentured labour - cheap labour generates profits. Same old, same old.

When slavery was abolished, the American south ensured that the 13th amendment contained a loop hole. Slavery was permitted within the prison system, for convicts.

American Police Brutality.

American policing has a world wide reputation for political corruption and racial violence as well as being portrayed as 'America's Finest' and held up as pillars of the community.

Growing up in the 60s and 70s, in Ireland, images of American police with billy clubs assaulting black civil rights marchers were known, we venerated Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movements.

And yet movies and TV series portrayed the police as decent warriors fighting crime in a hyper violent culture. Good guys, for the most part. A few bad apples.

The 80s saw the War Against Drugs unleash new levels of organised criminal violence, and new levels of police violence in response, even as the drugs industry expanded.

Policing took a different turn after 9/11 and became much more militarised as a result of The War Against Terror.

But there's a history to all of this we in Ireland and elsewhere knew little of.

George Floyd

As I edit this, on June 6th,  there are protests across the Earth, large public events in many countries, in the midst of a global pandemic, in response to the awful murder of a black man, George Floyd, by 5 Minneapolis Police Officers. The grisly murder scene was recorded on various mobile phones, and the murder ran for just under 9 minutes. 

The murder was recorded on smart phones and then broadcast on-line, which drew out much shock, anger and direct criticism. Well of course it did.

There were protests that day, protests which were largely peaceful, focused, and multi-racial.  Local community was outraged and actively seeking immediate action.

The video footage was unequivocal - the police officers had total control of the arrested man, and they killed him, even as witnesses pleaded with the lead officer to take his knee off the mans neck..

People wanted justice, and the exercised their rights, and the people protested.

Justice was not forthcoming. Tensions flared.

In some places the protests erupted into riots, over a matter of days, in part because the murderers were not arrested and charged - they were fired, and that was obviously not just, and that inspired anger and outrage and in part because some people - not Black Lives Matter activists, others - wanted to escalate the situation. 

Just as the media images at the top of this article, there are those who seek to co-opt intense situations for perceived political 'gain'. Agent provocateurs doing their bit. Once that flame is lit, it takes action to quench it.

After a week of night time riots in some cities, and many more peaceful, large scale daytime multi racial protests in others, the lead police officer was arrested,detained and charged with 3rd degree murder. Around the USA young people were talking to their elders about this situation, and many, many white people were being educated on the realities of racist police brutality. The protests continued. Trump made matters worse, by being divisive as ever, braying to his supporting base about being the President of Law and Order, and threatening Militarised Violent against rioters.

Videos of police brutality were flooding social media in ways people have not seen before. There was lots of police brutality before, for example looking back to the Occupy movement, that was not so well recorded and placed online.  This time, the videos were reaching a much wider audience.

The charges were upgraded. And they were extended. The lead officer is now being charged with 2nd degree murder, and the other officers with 2nd degree murder.

Has something shifted? Too early to say. The learning is on going.

I would imagine the youth are not going to let this go.

Race, Policing and history.

Here's an interesting historical insight - the institutional set up of policing with regards to black communities in the North is rooted in assumptions made during the mass migration of black people from the South up into the North during the early years of the 1900s.

The 13th Amendment contained a slavery loophole, exploited across the Southern States.

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation

Policy towards the incoming and expanding black community and how they were to be policed by largely white administrations flowed from assumptions based on data from the South, statistics taken at face value, without digging into the context and background of those statistics. Statistics can be lethal if taken without the correct context.

Khalil Muhammad  is an American historian:

"..Muhammad’s work focuses on systemic racism and criminal justice; The Condemnation of Blackness deals with the idea of black criminality, which he defines as the process by which “people are assigned the label of criminal, whether they are guilty or not.” 

That process has been a vicious cycle in American history, Muhammad explains, wherein black people were arrested to prevent them from exercising their rights, then deemed dangerous because of their high arrest rates, which deprived them of their rights even further."

It's from a Vox article, by Anna North, speaking with Khalil Muhammad, an American Historian.

How racist policing took over American cities, explained by a historian

“The problem is the way policing was built,” historian Khalil Muhammad says.

"The deliberate choice to abolish slavery, [except as] punishment for crime, leaves a gigantic loophole that the South attempts to leverage in the earliest days of freedom. What that amounts to is that all expressions of black freedom, political rights, economic rights, and social rights were then subject to criminal sanction. Whites could accuse black people who wanted to vote of being criminals. People who wanted to negotiate fair labor contracts could be defined as criminals. And the only thing that wasn’t criminalized was the submission to a white landowner to work on their land.

Shortly afterwards, a lot of the South builds up a pretty robust carceral machinery and begins to sell black labor to private contractors to help pay for all of this. And for the next 70 years, the system is pretty much a criminal justice system that runs alongside a political economy that is thoroughly racist and white supremacist. And so we don’t get the era of mass incarceration in the South, what we get is the era of mass criminalization. Because the point is not to put people in prison, the point is to keep them working in a subordinate way, so that they can be exploited."

In the early years after 1900, a migration of black people from the rural South to the urban North started, and this accelerated during WWI and WWII, and afterwards, due to the war economy.

Historians differentiate between a first Great Migration (1916–40), which saw about 1.6 million people move from mostly rural areas in the South to northern industrial cities, and a Second Great Migration (1940–70), which began after the Great Depression and brought at least 5 million black people including many townspeople with urban skills to the North and West.

So there's this influx of people, and an enlargement of the population, and an administration unfamiliar with the new comers. North and South really were two quite different cultures.

The South had exploited the loophole in the 13th Amendment, which permitted Slavery within prisons, to maintain control of the black population as a work force subservient to the white bosses, by using the threat of imprisonment as a whip, by criminalising a range of behaviours common to the black population. In effect they criminalised all sorts of normal behaviour of black people, and so their criminal records taken at face value portrayed the black community as more criminal than they were. And you can understand why so many decided to leave that toxic situation and move northwards.

The basics of this story is that the Northerner Police forces looked around for information, for any data, and the fell upon statistics from official records in the South, to try to plan for this new population dynamic, and in picking up raw data from the South without understanding it's context, the historical threads, they misread it and absorbed a series of incorrect assumptions that led to an institutionalised negative view of black communities from a policing perspective. This led to suspicion, it led to a prejudiced view of black communities, it repeated without analysis the bias of the South, it fostered racist attitudes and it led to much harsher policing tactics applied to the new black communities as a new standard.

And that standard persists to this day, in large part because it has, over time and through not being addressed, become institutionalised, embedded, part of the policing culture.

American Police forces have a profound problem and it is to do with their sense of entitlement to apply lethal violence, and their corrupt politicisation, which is mixed-up with racist perceptions, elitist political and economic policies, and both strands of this fabric of American life must be addressed, not least by the white majority working and middle class communities who elect politicians, sheriffs and district attorneys, and who fund the policing that continues in such fashion.

It is well worth reading the whole article, and looking further at Khalil Muhammad's book on this.

The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

The present is always a thread of the past, and if we do not know how that weave was woven, we can be lost for words when we are trying to understand what we are seeing, and we can be conned or misguided into accepting easy assumptions that knowingly gloss over our lack of knowledge, if we are not careful.

The 13th Amendment 

The 13th Amendment contained a loophole that allowed slavery to continue. The Southern States exploited that loophole to maintain control over the black work force. In order to do so, they maintained the lies of innate superiority of white people, and innate criminality of black people. This documentary digs into that historical dynamic and it's impacts today.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Trauma, Trump, Brexit, Iraq and Recovery

 It's not a matter of Left vs Right, it is a question of  from Institutionalised to Humanised.
- it is not an adversarial process!

"The study of psychological trauma has a curious history - one of episodic amnesia. Periods of active investigation have alternated with periods of oblivion. Repeatedly in the last century, similar lines of inquiry have been taken up and abruptly abandoned, only to be rediscovered much later. Classic documents of 50 or 100 years ago often read like contemporary works. Though the field has in fact an abundant and rich tradition, it has been periodically forgotten and must be periodically reclaimed.

This intermittent amnesia is not the result of ordinary changes in fashion that affect any intellectual pursuit. The study of psychological trauma does not languish for lack of interest. Rather, the subject provokes such intense controversy that it periodically becomes anathema. The study of trauma has repeatedly led into the realms of the unthinkable and foundered on fundamental questions of belief.

To study psychological trauma is to come face to face with human vulnerability in the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature (behaviour). To study psychological trauma is to bearing witness to horrible events.

When events are natural disasters or 'acts of God' those who bear witness sympathise readily with the victim. But when traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim(ised) and perpetrator. It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides.

It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. The perpetrator appeals to the universal desire to see, hear and speak no evil. The victimised, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim(ised) demands action, engagement, remembering.

Leo Eitinger, a psychiatrist who has studied survivors of Nazi concentration camps, describes the cruel conflict of interest between victim(ised) and bystander: "War and victims are something the community wants to forget; a veil of oblivion is drawn of everything painful and unpleasant."

 In order to escape accountability for crimes,the perpetrators do everything in their power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrators first line of defence. If secrecy fails the perpetrator attacks the credibility of the victimised who speak out. If that fails, the perpetrator tries to make sure no one listens.

After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies; it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon themselves; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on."

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These are the opening pages of Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman

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In the UK, with regards to the Invasion of Iraq these words ring out as a clarion call above and beyond the petty concerns of Brexit; they also ring out to remind us all that Austerity kills vulnerable people and that we bystanders, all of us taxpayers, each and everyone of us, without exception, have a role to play in confronting both of these atrocities - the murder of a nation, and the murder of a nations most vulnerable citizens, and many more and we have a role in preventing future atrocities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court_Act_2001

We cannot compare the deaths of tens of thousands of vulnerable people induced by deliberate chronic economic distress with the destruction of an entire countries civil infrastructure and a war that killed a million people, maimed many more and orphaned 4 million children.

We can draw parallels, because the atrocious behaviour of powerful interests is in direct conflict with the needs of ordinary people and at the same time ordinary people, as bystanders are dis-empowered and urged to do nothing to undermine those powerful interests.

The British public are permitted and encouraged to to protest fracking, CO2 in the atmosphere yet totally inhibited when it comes to prosecutions of War Crimes (Iraq) and Crimes against Humanity (UN report on the rights of disabled people in the UK).

Racism, human progress vs evolution and adaptation.

Racism is always top down...

The origins of Cultural, Scientific Racism and Legal Racism are with the elites, the intellectual classes, the ruling oligarchy, who taught, promoted and legislated (legalised) racism reinforcing it through applied trauma and reward, thus normalising and institutionalising the practices of Racism.

Racism has never emerged from the grass roots.

Trump, and others like him who represent Power (and who is himself a traumatised child-adult) say things in public that encourages ordinary folk who are racists by social conditioning and learning (and who are powerless by comparison, and who feel that dis-empowerment and are frustrated by it) to 'come out', and they do, so that they too can feel powerful, superior... and can assuage the pain of their own powerlessness.

The majority of grass roots 'racists' are groomed into that way of thinking and feeling, precisely because they can be triggered to assault other grass roots people.

50 years ago, this week the US Government passed laws banning segregation.

However, they did not teach honest histories in school to show the people how the colonial British invented Race, using the Bible, the pulpit, pamphlets, broadsheets and then Institutionalised Racism as a means to ensure the working poor, the slaves and the native peoples would not rise to defeat their oppressors but would fight with each other for their place in the hierarchy...

Laws are never enough, they can easily be broken, therefore honesty in education is critical for prevention.

Hence, until parents demand honesty in education, Racist views will perpetuate to be used by power to divide the people

Australian Aboriginals legally described as Fauna until 1967 - do you understand what that actually means?

The Ruling class defining for everyone the status of the people who are the ancient inhabitants of Australia....

"Animals!"

"Cave Men", "Ug Ug".

These are terms I hear from 'well educated' people all the time....

They have been educated to describe ancient egalitarian peoples in that way as part of a trajectory of progress and evolution that leads to the current dominant culture of industrialised militarised power and technology as being the apex of evolutionary progress. with a bright future in the stars....

No. That is a lie.

I am a biological organism, and I am ancient design: to be co-operative, happy, loving, empathetic, robustly healthy as part of a social community that is fully part of the habitat..

There is no need for further 'evolution' or progress in this regard..

Does an Elephant herd need to 'evolve' further, to progress to become better Elephants?

Do Trees and Fungi need to 'improve' themselves?

No.

Evolution has nothing to do with 'progress' - evolution is about responding to a dynamic environment....

Industrial Culture is a disease state, a rape of life itself.

Which is why fighting for survival does not work, even though resistance is a natural response, it cannot win. The struggle for survival is not a biological reality, it is a social construct of all hierarchically violent cultures.

The Industrial Rapist will not stop, and it is only the Citizens of the Industrial Culture who could stop that culture from the act of raping the Earth's habitats - if we understood, if we have the courage, solidarity and empathy to live that understanding.

This is why I write.

Who will stop Bolsanaro and the Evangelical Movement tied into the Oligarchy?

Who will stop British Weapons makers from supplying Saudi War planes so that they can continue to bomb Yemeni civilians?

Who will stop the British and American States from funding violent militia?

Who will stop Boris Johnson spending £100 million of Tax payers funds on a marketing campaign - grooming that part of the electorate that are susceptible to being groomed via their vulnerabilities, triggering that part that can be enraged, just to divide and conquer?

Who?

The Healers.

Courage rather than fear.

Knowledge rather than belief.

Recovery rather than progress.

This is hard work, it is terrifying work, and yet what alternative is there?

For me, none.

For many others a whole host of reasons determine whether we act or not.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.