The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
On the question of 'Is a trans-woman a woman?', Safe Spaces and The Doctrine of Discovery.
This piece is me taking a look at two hot topics - Transgender Rights and Indigenous Cultures Rights - in the context of the challenge of historical honesty and forward looking empathy based Governance.
There is a widespread assumption that Democratic Governance ought protect the ordinary folk from avoidable harms caused by the powerful and others with malign intent.
Seatbelts. Gun Bans. Health and Safety. Declarations of Interest. Laws criminalising rape, domestic abuse, wars of aggression, invasion, occupation etc.
For thousands of years, certain cultures have oppressed females as a class, a generic group.
For 5OO years, Eurocentric Conquest Culture has oppressed indigenous, native cultures on other continents. In both instances, legal and cultural structures and belief systems were created to permit and maintain the systems of oppression.
The impacts of this long history live on today because the most honest reality of that historical oppression remains obscured, deliberately, in order to preserve the gains accrued by the so-called 'victors'.
People who topple statues celebrating personages associated with that great harm - Slavers and Warlords - are accused of 're-writing history' as if they are doing so with malign and harmful intent. The reality is they do it with good intent, often after much effort to have the issue settled in a just manner, by an honest, public recording of History, in frustration with the obstacles and avoidable delays set against such an outcome.
To tell the truth is the first step in achieving justice and without justice there is neither peace nor equity..
The Truth about Biological Sex and Gender
Biology, at genetic, hormonal, cell chemistry and neurology levels reveals that biological sex is a spectrum, rather than a binary. This information is decades old, garnered from the work of many thousands of scientists, over time, peer reviewed, tested and checked to the extent of providing enough data and evidence to generate new scientific theory - not hypotheses or suppositions. Working models that work.
I urge readers to view this video. It contains critically important information. It helps us understand why so many older, egalitarian and hierarchy cultures alike, presented a wide variety of Gender assignations.
Forrest Valkai, an evolutionary paleo-biologist, walks us through the biology of sex, gender.
Who needs a safe space? Please keep this in mind as you read on.
1. Sex at the genetic and biological level is 'male', 'female' and intersex, with intersex reflecting a natural biological variation, across the linear of 'male-female' rather than aberrations. No question. That is the Science. This is not opinion.
2. Intersex is less a third sex than it is a biologically created range of variations of sex that could suggest any number of genders. Intersex is not a choice. It's a reality. None of us choose what we biologically sexed as, in utero or upon birth. A biological reality. It cannot be wished away. Keep this in mind. Bio-logical Variety has purpose and functional utility. This is not opinion.
3. Gendering is a social cultural activity. It is the behaviour of assigning or attributing a set of traits, qualities, roles and behaviours to persons based only on what is seen in body form and it reflects what is culturally expected behaviour. Gendering has never been rooted in biological science, genetics or brain development. Because for a long time Science did not have the data to understand the true range of sex attribution until recently. Gendering has always been rooted in cultural expectations and practice. This is not an opinion.
To accept this is so, is to accept the facts. And that means to accept that the culture ought to change to meet our new evidence based understandings in how to avoid avoidable harm. Because culture changes all the time, we know this can be done, by choice, by effort. Trade Unions struggled for workers rights. They changed the culture. This is not an opinion.
Trans rights is about Human Rights.
Struggle for cultural and public and legal recognition, understanding and healthy change. The only reason it is a struggle is because there is resistance, and that resistance is often violent and well organised. The new emerging understandings are marginalised and their proponents are othered to protect the old traditions.
Women's Rights, Feminism, Indigenous Peoples Rights, Environmental Rights, Animal Rights and of course Human Rights. They all seek changes in the culture. Healthy changes designed to make the lives of those afflicted by adverse cultural violence and practices safer. Who opposes this?
4. Body form - what one can see - can disguise or veil the biological, genetic sex-at-birth status and variations thereof, and the person carrying the intersex genetic may well feel alienated from the prevailing culturally imposed gendering, because they in their body do not feel or sense those gendered traits as their own, and the task of presenting those sets of associated traits and characteristics attributed to that gendering leads to sense of distress that is not responded to healthfully. This is not an opinion. This happens all too frequently.
On external stimuli and their effects.
This commentator from tiktok asks the question - can being transgender be influenced by outside stimuli? He raises some important points about hostility a form of influence - towards trans-gender people and what it means.
5. In a progressive society, a mature society, a humane society, knowing all this we really ought to be prepared to set the absolutist binary gendering to one side, precisely because it causes harm to a lot of people. We ought to expand our definitions to meet the facts of the case. Cultural change, making life safer for persons. This is my opinion, based on the facts.
6. The binary limitation of Western gendering is a social construct. We can change it and not face an apocalypse. This is a fact.
Exclusive Male/Female binary is entirely a cultural construct.
We know this because many different cultures hold varied gendering dynamics. Facts.
7. It is an echo or form of colonialism to suggest that the Western Euro-Christian gendering is the Natural Law governing all human life as a species. Not least because when Western Culture met many other cultures with a Gender Spectrum of their own, beyond the gender binary of The Christian West, it criminalised those cultures and the existing gender variation presenting demographics of the conquered, the colonised.
Because that binary view was largely informed by Religion rather than Science, it is maintained by indoctrinated belief and is utilised within systemic oppression of Western Colonisation as a weapon of conquest, extirpation and assimilation.
8. The Christian Right is leading the charge on anti-trans activism. By a large margin, it is really well funded and very well organised. Belief as a root of Governance is ideology.
There is a thread of very public hatred directed at trans-gender, homosexual and other people who do not fit the binary denominations. Trans-gender folk, homosexual folk and others are at greater risk, per capita, of violence perpetrated against them by men. Women are at greater risk of sexualised mistreatment and assault by men, than men are, by a long, long margin.
So who needs safe spaces?
The drivers of anti-trans activism are not the funded by the underdogs in our society. They don't represent the marginalised, even if they are often recruited from a nother marginalised group.
9. 'Trans-Women are women' means relating to the trans-woman as a woman - as who she is presenting as, as a person, worthy of respect, dignity and legal protection from discrimination and abuse.
It does not mean and is never meant to mean a trans-woman is a biological sex-at-birth woman. You and I, if we had the funds, could undergo a DNA analysis, a brain scan and other tests and ascertain where on the spectrum of biological reality our bodies and brains are.
We cannot alter our genetics at that level. Everyone knows this.
Thus if a person has mix of genetics of female and male across their biological markers, tipped one direction slightly more than another, it is totally understandable that a person in an at first glance overtly male body may have a female brain, and other markers on that spectrum, and genuinely feel confused and distressed by the limitations of binary genderism, given the strict roles and behavioural characteristics more commonly assigned to binary gender roles in the prevailing culture, political and social.
Thus the question is set as a trap, because it relies on the lack of knowledge of the person to whom the question is posed, in the political context. It is a bully question, a tactical deflection.
The actual question is this - Why does this culture make it so that women, children and others - people of colour, the disabled, the traumatised - need a safe space at all?
10. The technology of medical therapy is available to those who want to, after much consideration and thought, undergo transition medical procedures. Everyone undergoing this knows it will not change the sex-at-birth status of that body. The desire to alter the body according to one's taste, and the choice to do so, as medical and health practice enables safely as possible, is not a problem per se.
11. Nobody is forcing any child or any adult to undergo such treatment, anywhere. It's so obviously a crime to do so. The claims otherwise are all arguments based on inaccuracies and falsehoods.
12. Women's safe spaces are only necessary because of a pre-existing culture of patriarchy, misogyny and the male dominated violence towards women inherent in such a culture, still operating within the current social and institutional setting.
Are the London Met more a threat to women than London's trans-women, as two groups of people?
13. CisGendered men are statistically more dangerous to women than trans-women are dangerous to women, as a demographic.
Obviously this does not mean not all men are a danger or a threat to all women, or all trans-gendered folk, it is that the statistics show that a lot more men cause sexual harm and violence to a hell of a lot of women than would happen in a genuinely healthy society. Men who fall for the trap that 'not all men' sets are reacting to a perceived threat, rather than responding to the existing situation.
This is so because there has been and remains a culture of misogyny at the institutional level, and at the personal level. We internalise the values of the culture we are born into, unless we resist. Those internalisations become part of our sub-conscious psyche.
This has biological utility. For example, among egalitarian land rooted cultures, their people carry an internal mind map of their environment, to the extent that some estimate the range of ethnobotanical information a typical individual of such a culture is thirty times that of a Western trained ethnobotanist for the same environment. Obviously the way the information is gained, processed and utilised will be quite different.
The institutional level of internalised beliefs and values across the prevailing culture of Power and Wealth provides safe space to be misogynistic, be it directly, or through negligence or through patterns of protecting the institutions rather than those who have been victimised. London Met.The Catholic Church
14. CisGendered men are even more dangerous to trans-women than they are to cisGendered women, which is quite horrific when one thinks about it carefully. Trans-women suffer more violence and abuse, per capita, at the hands of men. Their rate of being harmed by men is greater than that of women. The both require and deserve safe places. One might have thought that women would be their most natural allies in this.
15. Their need - that of women and trans-women - for safe space is a shared need, and to set out an argument that puts them as competing with each other for that safe space is an abomination and it is a very carefully laid trap.
16. Don't let your mind or your emotions fall into that trap. It will drag you down and down and down and eventually you will readily dehumanise someone and feel so self righteous about yourself.
The Vatican Repudiates Doctrine of Discovery
For the past 5OO years, older native cultures have sought a safe space. A space free of colonial oppression, conquest and extermination of people, culture, language, polity and land tenure. Who needs a safe space?
Native children, removed from their homes, families and communities, placed in residential schools approved by the State, operated by The Churches, to erase their links to their traditions, to assimilate them into White Christian Society, an outcome of The Doctrine of Discovery.
Last week, The Vatican officially announced its repudiation of The Doctrine of Discovery, which provided the 'spiritual' and 'legal' status of colonisation of lands by Euro-Christian powers for 5OO years and more. Until this announcement was made.
Joint Statement of the Dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development on the “Doctrine of Discovery”, 30.03.2023
1. In fidelity to the mandate received from Christ, the Catholic Church strives to promote universal fraternity and respect for the dignity of every human being.
2. For this reason, in the course of history the Popes have condemned acts of violence, oppression, social injustice and slavery, including those committed against indigenous peoples. There have also been numerous examples of bishops, priests, women and men religious and lay faithful who gave their lives in defense of the dignity of those peoples.
3. At the same time, respect for the facts of history demands an acknowledgement of the human weakness and failings of Christ’s disciples in every generation. Many Christianshave committed evil acts against indigenous peoples for which recent Popes have asked forgiveness on numerous occasions.
4. In our own day, a renewed dialogue with indigenous peoples, especially with those who profess the Catholic Faith, has helped the Church to understand better their values and cultures. With their help, the Church has acquired a greater awareness of their sufferings, past and present, due to the expropriation of their lands, which they consider a sacred gift from God and their ancestors, as well as the policies of forced assimilation, promoted by the governmental authorities of the time, intended to eliminate their indigenous cultures. As Pope Francis has emphasized, their sufferings constitute a powerful summons to abandon the colonizing mentality and to walk with them side by side, in mutual respect and dialogue, recognizing the rights and cultural values of all individuals and peoples. In this regard, the Church is committed to accompany indigenous peoples and to foster efforts aimed at promoting reconciliation and healing.
5. It is in this context of listening to indigenous peoples that the Church has heard the importance of addressing the concept referred to as the “doctrine of discovery.” The legal concept of “discovery” was debated by colonial powers from the sixteenth century onward and found particular expression in the nineteenth century jurisprudence of courts in several countries, according to which the discovery of lands by settlers granted an exclusive right to extinguish, either by purchase or conquest, the title to or possession of those lands by indigenous peoples. Certain scholars have argued that the basis of the aforementioned “doctrine” is to be found in several papal documents, such as the Bulls Dum Diversas (1452), Romanus Pontifex (1455) and Inter Caetera (1493).
6. The “doctrine of discovery” is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church. Historical research clearly demonstrates that the papal documents in question, written in a specific historical period and linked to political questions, have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith. At the same time, the Church acknowledges that these papal bulls did not adequately reflectthe equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples. The Church is also aware that the contents of these documents were manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesiastical authorities. It is only just to recognize these errors, acknowledge the terrible effects of the assimilation policies and the pain experienced by indigenous peoples, and ask for pardon. Furthermore, Pope Francis has urged: “Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others.”
7. In no uncertain terms, the Church’s magisterium upholds the respect due to every human being. The Catholic Church therefore repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political “doctrine of discovery”.
8. Numerous and repeated statements by the Church and the Popes uphold the rights of indigenous peoples. For example, in the 1537 Bull Sublimis Deus, Pope Paul III wrote,“We define and declare [ ... ] that [, .. ] the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the Christian faith; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect”.
9. More recently, the Church’s solidarity with indigenous peoples has given rise to the Holy See’s strong support for the principles contained in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The implementation of those principles would improve the living conditions and help protect the rights of indigenous peoples as well as facilitate their development in a way that respects their identity, language and culture.
The National Congress of American Indians issued the following initial brief response.
"The National Congress of American Indians commends Pope Francis and the Catholic Church for finally repudiating the dehumanizing Doctrine of Discovery and acknowledging what Indigenous peoples have known all along—that the Doctrine ‘did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples'.
It is no secret that many governments -- including the United States -- have relied on this doctrine to justify the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and the taking of our lands.
It is our sincere hope that today’s announcement is more than mere words, but rather is the beginning of a full acknowledgement of the history of oppression and a full accounting of the legacies of colonialism—not just by the Roman Catholic Church, but by all the world governments that have used racism, prejudice and religious authority to not only justify past inequalities, but to allow, fuel, and perpetuate the institutionalization of those inequalities that continue to this very day.
We thank the Creator that Indigenous peoples are strong, resilient, full of wisdom, faith, hope, and love, and we stand ready to have difficult conversations about the future and to work together to build off of today’s step forward to bring about meaningful positive change to our people and nations, and for the healing, reconciliation and restoration of all peoples across the globe.”
Here is a video, 46 minutes, from a Native American, Mark Charles, commenting on the Vatican's Statement, making some useful and accurate observations on the purpose behind it, on the careful language it uses and why The Vatican is trying to insulate itself from varying levels of culpability and the responsibility to make reparations, to correct the situation in full.
Who needs safe spaces and why? And who obstructs the creation and maintenance of those safe spaces?
These are important questions we must deal with, honestly.
Repudiation of The Doctrine of Discovery - what ought flow from this, what 'reparations' really means.
1. Acknowledge the Native Land Tenure as equal standing, as a State, as a Nation, internationally, legally.
2. Acknowledge the Native Polity as a valid polity, with the UN Declaration of Human Rights as their protection.
3. Acknowledge the harm caused, and the harm still being caused and stop it.
4. Acknowledge the loss. Fully. An honest history must be recorded.
5. Make reparations, as determined by the Native people's and the UN, with co-operation from all existing Governments involved.
And regarding Gender and Trans-Gender folk, the movement that opposes their full recognition, status and respect as human beings, with so much hatred and lies, is a cruel movement and it is evasive - it evades the truth. We live within an old, though not really ancient, bully culture, a hierarchy of wealth and power that determines the boxes and categories and class we are forced to internalise.
Who needs safe spaces and why? And who obstructs the creation and maintenance of those safe spaces?
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
Deliberate de-humanisation is a psychosocial and political dynamic, a tactic and outcome of oppression.
Understanding this is key to avoiding being triggered or manipulated into internal conflict among those of us who seek to liberate ourselves and our communities from oppression. The struggle for freedom from oppression is not equivalent to the taking of liberty that Libertarianism promotes.
This is a critically important dynamic to be aware of as the embers of hatred are, on all sides, are being deliberately stoked and fuelled by online political grooming operations, public News and Press media that plays to the biases and vulnerabilities of people, that seeks to exploited the reactions of triggered folk.
The people who are being triggered, by intentional action, on all sides, are vulnerable. They are all being exploited.
It is not that people are pulling the triggers, in the sense it is their fault or that it is somehow a flaw in their character - it is that their vulnerability is being studied and targeted - they are being victimised by others who know exactly what they are doing.
We have to seek to protect all, or the project to humanise our social power structures is doomed to failure.
The consumer driven 'New Age' tends to reduce the project of liberation to a work of self interest.
Admonitions to alter individual behaviour, such as recycling, do less shopping, buy electric cars, stop eating meat etc whilst those who produce the things we need to recycle, who reap vast profits from stimulating our consumerism by offering easy credit make no effort to pay the externalised costs of their profit making is a sleight of hand.
The term 'consumer' to describe a human being is as dehumanising a term as is 'consumer responsibility' without the necessary equivalents of 'producer responsibility' or 'extractor responsibility' or 'mining responsibility'.
The sales pitch is that if only the ordinary person who has no real traction on the action and behaviour of the larger institutional powers that drive environmental degradation and air pollution could do their bit, then improvements would naturally occur and save us all. That is a lie.
Hence the rapidity with which the various streams of consumer pop psychology have become weaponised to support that lie, to normalise it so that ordinary folk cannot see the lie, cannot see the wood for the trees. The deployment of pop psychology to that end is a dehumanising act/
Paolo Friere
Paolo Friere's practical work, among the poor and indigenous of South America stands as testimony to the accuracy of his insight, the practicality of his approach, the humility of his perception.
Paolo Friere
I first read his work in the mid 1990s, and it was, to me at least, a revelation and a reassurance... That said it has taken me decades to integrate.
Freire believed education could not be divorced from politics; the act of teaching and learning are considered political acts in and of themselves. Freire defined this connection as a main tenet of critical pedagogy. Teachers and students must be made aware of the politics that surround education. The way students are taught and what they are taught serves a political agenda. Teachers, themselves, have political notions they bring into the classroom. Freire believed that :
Education makes sense because women and men learn that through learning they can make and remake themselves, because women and men are able to take responsibility for themselves as beings capable of knowing—of knowing that they know and knowing that they don't know.
I offer my readers this link to one of his works, Pedagogy of The Oppressed, as a source of insight, reassurance and focus as we face the wide spread shouting match that is disrupting rational, deliberative discourse on matters that must concern us all - our very survival is on the line, and we need to envision a future not of mere survival rather a future of collective thrivival.
The opening lines of this book are a clear and succinct description of a problem we face, right now.
This link below is to an online version of his book.
The website History Is A Weapon (HIAW) holds a lot of really good practical information and insight for all of us. It has as it's cultural locus a focus on The America's and their Histories. That said, the information is useful to everyone concerned with a healthy future for our cultures.
"While the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind's central problem, it now takes on the character of an inescapable concern.
Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality. And as an individual perceives the extent of dehumanization, he or she may ask if humanization is a viable possibility. Within history, in concrete, objective contexts, both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a person as an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion."
In other words, the possibility of becoming more human - that is to say to become more humane, more empathic, kinder and thus stronger and clearer in understanding how best to resist and then prevent oppression is real. Another world is indeed possible.
"But while both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives, only the first is the people's vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation. It is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity."
Here is makes clear that those who seek freedom from oppression must be aware that their task includes avoiding becoming dehumanisers themselves in their struggle.
"Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. This distortion occurs within history; but it is not an historical vocation. Indeed, to admit of dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. "
This is the root of all dystopian thinking, the acceptance of a falsified given concerning our nature as human social creatures and cultures.
"The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labour, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed."
In other words, if for example, one holds to the Christian worldview of Original Sin as a given, or that Humanity itself is destroying the Earth, (it's not, it's the culture of extractive wealth creation) then the struggle is inevitably undermined at source. That view makes the future appear hopeless.
"Because it (oppression, the entitlement to Rule and dominate - my added comment) is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so."
The use of unjust power over another always creates resistance.
"In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both."
This is the central thread of the hate we see being fuelled as Donald Trump cedes power, yet resists, and quite clearly, deliberately uses dehumanisation as a weapon. It is also the same thread of hate being funnelled back at those people who have been groomed to support Trump, even as they do not understand that Trump is backed by the Oligarchy and he will not, and cannot 'drain the swamp'.
I urge caution to all of us to take these thoughts into consideration, to tone up the accurate analysis, and to tone down the dehumanisation. I need to learn and practice this as much as anyone else.
If we do not do this, we will be enrolled in war fare we are unable to counter.
This is not to make excuses for anyone's abusive behaviour, it is to approach the problem from a stronger, grass roots permeating comprehensive and collective awareness of what we are really dealing with, when we face our oppressors, so that we are not so readily led astray, on all sides.
Trump has a following of people who do feel some degrees of oppression - poverty, loss of income and status, fear for the future, exposure to systemic scapegoating, dehumanisation by those on the Left who claim to be seeking freedom from liberation....
It's easy to look at other ordinary people whose views, attitudes and behaviour challenges us, and it is easy to use them as whipping boys for our rage, on both sides.
Antifa and Racists shouting at each other, threat and counter threats of violence, insult and spittle exchanged to lead towards more violence. Christians at war with Muslims. Older voters voting for Brexit 'betraying' younger voters. Younger voters 'ignoring' the problems of the older voters.
These memes are fully weaponised and are driving social and emotional divisions that undermine potential resolution of problems, the boat we are all in is rocking and cannot make head way to a safe port. We have to counter that.
Not so easy is the task of humanising the situation, of understanding enough to build the bridges that will connect our humanity - the less easy task is the one most critical to our children's children's futures.
I find this song, by comedian Katie Goodman, very humanising, heart warming and reassuring - please enjoy, and take on some of the gentle yet fierce wisdom of it. I like to imagine a large crowd outside a political administration building singing this, with joy and with sorrow, with humility and determination..
Free Speech
Free Speech is a responsibility, it is neither an automatic right nor is it an entitlement or privilege.
The responsibility inherent in Free Speech into the public domain is that one must speak honestly, one must be, as far as possible, evidence based.
The responsibility inherent in Free Speech is to be as good a listener as a speaker and to acknowledge what is verified, reliable and true as such, and to also acknowledge beliefs as made up, as guess-work at the very best.
Free Speech is not a right to promote beliefs over evidence in action on matters concerning the shared commons, the welfare of people and their lives.
Free Speech is not a right to groom, manipulate or exploit others through use of language and various logical fallacies.
Lots of very clever abusive people hide behind Free Speech - the correct way to deal with that is to identify what is being done, name it and do so in full transparency.
This blog by Kitty Jones, is really, really useful in helping with this. How bullying operates within the political and media sphere..
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
Racism is an invention. That's the first thing I would like my readers to understand about Racism.
Racism is not a personal flaw. It is much, much more than that. That's the second aspect my readers ought to understand. It's easy to caricature the racist, to be dismissive. That misses the point.
Racism is a cultural artefact.
"The grooming (gaslighting) of human vulnerability is one of most vile things any human being can do to another." Racism is a device, Racism is a tool. Racism is a weapon, designed to break asunder the potential of human solidarity across the group of people, all workers, oppressed in different manner, by the same hierarchically violent rulers.
Racists are being utilised. Their bodies and minds are instrumentalised by others, who wield much more power than any ordinary person ever can. The rage of the ordinary Racist is lateral violence, and it does not resolve their problems, it only exacerbates them.
Racism is not a natural phenomenon.
"The working population in late-17th Century Virginia was quite diverse, including white indentured servants, black and Native American slaves, and free whites who had completed their term of service. Outnumbered, plantation owners grew increasingly fearful of threats to their political control. In particular, there was the danger of a cooperative insurrection among the various working demogrpahics. The solution was to divide and conquer. Through new laws passed by the Virginia assembly, plantation owners consciously encouraged racial hatred between blacks and poor whites."
"When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no “white” people there. Nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. In this seminal two-volume work,The Invention of the White Race, Theodore W. Allen tells the story of how America’s ruling classes created the category of the “white race” as a means of social control. Since that early invention, white privileges have enforced the myth of racial superiority, and that fact has been central to maintaining ruling-class domination over ordinary working people of all colors throughout American history.
Volume I draws lessons from Irish history, comparing British rule in Ireland with the “white” oppression of Native Americans and African Americans. Allen details how Irish immigrants fleeing persecution learned to spread racial oppression in their adoptive country as part of white America.
Since publication in the mid-nineties, The Invention of the White Race has become indispensable in debates on the origins of racial oppression in America. In this updated edition, scholar Jeffrey B. Perry provides a new introduction, a short biography of the author and a study guide."
Healthy human behaviour, on the other hand, is a social, psychological, emotional and material biological reality.
It is a real and natural phenomenon, a fundamental continuum. Every species presents with health behavioural dynamics that support the individual and the collective, that tend to tie into nurturing their habitat rather than toxifying or undermining their habitat. One could say that healthy behaviour is mandated for all species.
We humans are social creatures, a social species. Healthy behaviour is very much part of our 'nature'. Healthy behaviour is a real baseline for humans to thrive.
Sadly, unhealthy behaviour is also real.
What we rarely see is bullying as part of any thriving social species - whilst we do see it in stressed primates, in parts of Africa, we tend to see it less among primates in Bhutan, or the deeper parts of the Amazon, where their populations are not so stressed.
Both dynamics - healthy and unhealthy - have causation at their root. Both are learned. The healthier the situation of the society, then the healthier the general behavioural dynamic will be of those who form that society. Behaviour has roots, there are reasons and there causes for behaviour.
Family, community and society matter hugely in terms of the environment they set for learning how to be fully human.
Healthy behaviour is learned.
From the womb, and from the mothers arms, from the actions of early carers onward, behaviour is learned by example, by feed back, by mirroring .We learn how to walk, how to talk, how regulate our emotions, how respond to others through seeing and experiencing others doing those things. That is what mirror neurons are about.
We learn how to connect, how to resolve conflict, how to meet our needs through direct experience of being connected, through having our needs met, through developing the skills to meet our own needs over time, and through meeting the needs of those around us to what ever degree we can. Our basic setting is one of trust, and the egalitarian mode of social organisation is our most ancient, and that setting is the one we are most perfectly evolved for - our sensitivity, our warmth, our loving all speak to this.
We are learning all the time. We learn how to live. We are born vulnerable, inexperienced yet exquisitely sensitive and therefore we must learn how to live, we must learn how to be and we need to do that learning in safety, within a loving environment, where we are protected and nurtured until we are resilient enough to cope with what the natural world presents, as co-operating, connected human beings. Children want to be helpful to those who treat them with respect and love. Children have an innate desire to contribute, in response to the love they are showered with, and to do that they have to learn how to live, how to co-operate, how to master themselves and the skills they need to thrive.
Hierarchies of Violence are inventions, they are cultural structures, born of traumatised societal, social and individual behaviours that remain unresolved, unhealed. The healthy group of humans is loving, attentive, creative, intelligent, curious and they co-operate because they value each other.
There is no Racist gene code. There is no empathy gene either. There is no kindness gene. There is no 'Warrior Gene' and we know that there is no genetically determined propensity for violence. There is no biological a priori bully disposition. All of these behaviours are learned
Genes and behaviour. “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 cortex from genes.” ― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
There are no genetic components to Hierarchy of power. Socio-economic status is cultural rather than genetic. There is no genetic component for the propensity towards creating and using artificial power disparities. All of this is learned.
Much of it is taught, for that is the nature of a violent culture - the children of that kind of culture will be taught that violence can be rationalised, that some are entitled to utilise violence to maintain their status and position, and they will be habituated to that rationale as part of their education, formal and informal.
All people - you, me, Donald J Trump, Harold Shipman, Boris Johnson, Martin Luther King, Hitler, Mao, your mother, your father, your siblings, your friends and lovers were, and are born, ready to learn to be decent. But we need the experience of decent parents, we all need a decent family and a decent society, and a healthy culture within which to learn and develop those qualities.
Most of us live decently as we can, given whatever circumstances we are born into, circumstances not of our making. Even within a bully culture, bullies are not the majority. That is an amazing fact. Consider what this means, that even within the bully cultures, the majority of people are not bullies. That speaks to something in our 'nature' that leans towards the pro-social qualities. It speaks to our sensitivity as a form of balance making.
Trump and Johnson cannot be held responsible for their parents, or for the society into which they were born. Their responsibility emerges later in life, as they become adults, to some degree aware of their actions, observant of the consequences, and dealing with or denying their roles in outcomes of their behaviour, adverse or benign.
Bullying.
Bullying is quite obviously not a healthy behavioural dynamic, it clearly undermines the social aspect of our nature as a species. Bullying is a profoundly un-cooperative, disruptive, stress inducing behaviour. It is not a useful behaviour for a thriving family, community or society.
This is revealed by the fact that bullies must use force or guile or deceit to maintain their ability to exercise power in their 'interests' at whatever level of social influence they operate within, be they the school bully or the King, the Prime Minster, the President, the Policeman, the Priest, the abusive dominating family member, the abusive spouse or partner must manipulate the other partner to maintain the 'relationship'.
Racism is bullying.
Racism is bullying, with a false logic rationalisation to prop it up. Misogyny is bullying, with a false logic rationalisation to prop it up.
Bullying behaviour is more common place within cultures of hierarchy and violence. The trickle down effect of abuse of power afflicts the entire society. This is easy to understand. Think of a family where one of the parents is a bully, and how that might affect the behaviour of the other members of the family.
Guile, Deceit and Racism.
Racism was invented as a tool of social control and conquest - it was specifically designed at an exact time and place, as a legalised tool with which to divide various oppressed groups, It was invented and institutionalised within the American Colonial system, and it was also utilised to enable expansion by violent conquest into the pre-existing cultures of Native 'America', to underpin and underwrite the Christianisation of their natural ranges and land tenures as a good thing.
Racism is all invention, artifice, falsehood. It does not come naturally, at all. In spite of various pseudo-scientific claims to the contrary.
The many explanations for othering founded on 'survival' and competition and in group/out group as an evolutionary development of the human species are, in my view, the psychological projections of the bully culture.
Rationalise cruelty.
Make it seem normal. Habituate by exposure.
We humans are self organising social beings as a species, and our health/disease profile suggests no adaptive biological mechanisms exist to adapt to chronic trauma, to war fare, to socio-economic status, bullying or poverty.
We become sickened, diseased and unwell under all those stressors: very, very ill indeed. Our bodies are not designed to be so stressed, and though they are resilient, and we can and do survive severe abuse, we do not thrive under such conditions.
The bully system must teach it's children that its lies are truths, and it must mask the truth at every turn.
And a very large part of the problem of Racism and xenophobia lies within various forms of social conditioning: all of that which influences what adults say and do in their relations with each other and with children, formally and informally. How the bully family relates to and treats the children, what the bully culture does to children to prepare them for the world they are to participate in: it is the same dynamic, scaled up.
If the bully culture taught an honest history, it would cease to be a bully society. If our Education systems told the truth about the effects of power upon the lives of the ordinary folk, the oppressed, the poor, the civilians caught in the cross fire of history, then the establishment would not be able to recruit willing participants, it would not be able to convince the grass roots emerging generations of youth to carry on the system. It must teach lies and it must habituate each generation to those lies.
In these days, the internet has posed the power centers a serious problem - a generation of youth who can self educate, who are curious, interested, smart are learning the truth, independently of the education systems. There is a push back by the 'alt-right' movement in reaction to that.
Honesty undermines oppression.
What honestly happened, and what honestly happens, transparency rather than interpretation, is how to make sense of history. Education needs to be honest to be a genuine education - if it is dishonest in any way, it becomes indoctrination. The liar wants the target to think a certain way, the lie is telling the target what to think.
Evidence always speaks for itself, and evidence puts opinion in it's place.
Nobody wins any war, precisely because warfare is a culture: a cultural process activated by human agency, all wars occur within the dynamic of competing (militarised industrialised states) power groups as a cultural continuum.
Looking at who started the 100 Years War, or WWI, or WWII, or The Iraq War or who 'won' those wars is a futile exercise, because the cultural dynamic, the continuum that each of those wars exists within can be traced back to ancient Greece, and further back. European cultures, and others, have been engaging in war as a socio-economic and political tool for thousands of years. They still do.
Racism is a tool, a utility, a war strategy.
So let us look at how and why Racism was invented, and how it was promoted. Indentured servitude appeared in Virginia by 1620. Initially a device used to transport European workers to the New World, over time servitude dwindled as black slavery grew in importance in the British colonies.
"The Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton invented the concept of ‘white people’ on 29 October 1613, the date that his play The Triumphs of Truth
was first performed.
The phrase was first uttered by the character of
an African king who looks out upon an English audience and declares:
‘I
see amazement set upon the faces/Of these white people, wond’rings and
strange gazes.’
As far as I, and others, have been able to tell,
Middleton’s play is the earliest printed example of a European author
referring to fellow Europeans as ‘white people’.
A year later,
the English commoner John Rolfe of Jamestown in Virginia took as his
bride an Algonquin princess named Matoaka, whom we call Pocahontas.
The
literary critic Christopher Hodgkins reports that King James I was ‘at
first perturbed when he learned of the marriage’.
But this was not out
of fear of miscegenation: James’s reluctance, Hodgkins explained, was
because ‘Rolfe, a commoner, had without his sovereign’s permission wed
the daughter of a foreign prince.’ King James was not worried about the
pollution of Rolfe’s line; he was worried about the pollution of
Matoaka’s.!
Both examples might seem surprising to contemporary
readers, but they serve to prove the historian Nell Irvin Painter’s
reminder in The History of White People (2010) that ‘race is an idea, not a fact’.
From this we can see that the rulers of one culture were prepared to acknowledge the rulers of another culture as equally elite, superior to the common person over whom they ruled.
That said, both groups in this example misread the other as equivalents, when they were certainly not equivalent - King James was an absolute Ruler, whose position was ordained by God, the Algonquin culture had no such custom. Theirs was a federated deliberative democracy, and their leaders were spokespersons, rather than absolute rulers. The community governed itself.
So there we have the earliest recorded references to Whiteness as a distinction. Before that distinctions were made, but more by religion or culture or language than by skin tone.
Skin-colour Racism was institutionalised in the the 13 Colonies of North America, during the latter 1600s, as a political and economic utility, designed to undermine solidarity across oppressed groups within the Colonial dynamic.
A 'Brexit-style' campaign of deliberate political grooming.
"The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the
whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from
blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the
1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus
whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of
America."
"Smith's
conclusion is supported by a more recent study of servants in seventeenth-century Maryland, where
it was found that the first batches of servants became landowners and politically active in the
colony, but by the second half of the century more than half the servants, even after ten years of
freedom, remained landless.
Servants became tenants, providing cheap labor for the large planters
both during and after their servitude.
It seems quite clear that class lines hardened through the colonial period; the distinction between
rich and poor became sharper.
By 1700 there were fifty rich families in Virginia, with wealth
equivalent to 50,000 pounds (a huge sum those days), who lived off the labor of black slaves and
white servants, owned the plantations, sat on the governor's council, served as local magistrates.
In
Maryland, the settlers were ruled by a proprietor whose right of total control over the colony had
been granted by the English King. Between 1650 and 1689 there were five revolts against the
proprietor." https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncolorline.html - The People's History of the United States, chapter 2 and 3.
-- so there you have it, Racism invented by a class of Northern European Christian Rulers as a means to divide the population over which they held power, in order to dilute the numbers of potential alliances among that group that might unite and rebel. Racism as a defence of the establishment. "The first recorded slave revolt in the United States happened in Gloucester, Virginia, in 1663, an event involving white indentured servants as well as black slaves. In 1672, there were reports of fugitive slaves forming groups to harass plantation owners." Those over whom they had power included black and white free people, men and women who were landowners, small business people, farmers, merchants, artisans and labourers, slaves and the native peoples.
This was a time when the owners of the plantations, and urban land owners, the wealthy and influential people operated as a divinely appointed ruling class. The system was ordained by God.
"If this seems like a crazy way for people to behave, it’s important to think about what was believed about the natural order of things back in the 1600s.
Nowadays, we don’t really think about class as a thing that often, and certainly not a natural thing.
But when the concepts of white and black people were conceived, the idea of class was literally believed to be handed down from God.
Aristocracy flowed from the divine right of kings, and by their blood or elevation. The poor were poor because God so wished it.
Keeping peasants in line and using them to their fullest was what the aristocracy was for, and the tactics that accomplished this were considered wise stewardship. Sometimes that meant concessions, and sometimes divide and conquer, but as long as you didn’t have peasant rebellions, you were doing a good job.
This view of the world, never universal but powerful and prevalent, held on in one form or another for a very long time. It infected the views of British, Spanish, Dutch, and French imperial masters all over.
The powerful were those God had chosen, and those in their power were chosen by God to be of use. While fainter, this idea is so strong it still leaks into the modern era in places like the atheological ideas of Prosperity Christianity. In the frame of mind of aristocracy and a divinely ordained ruling class, such a plan to reorder people and make them pliant was understood to be a move of genius blessed by god and king, if it worked.
This plan worked, in fact it worked so well it became the blueprint for the next few centuries of colonization, revised and spread all over the world, even beyond the conception of white and black."
The Ruling class were a network of families and organisations, they were the institutionalized power of the colonies, in the sense of occupying and dominating Governance systems, as overlords of the economic and cultural organisation of life in the colonies. Each family that had risen to wealth and power over time, and in time the men that had inherited it formed a power center, they all knew each other, they intermarried around the edges of their family alliances. And those alliances were critical to the emergence of an elite who felt entitled to rule.
They were a devout, white Anglo Saxon protestant elite.
Their position was proof of Gods favour, God's World Order. The GWO.
They saw themselves as a series of co-operating dynasties, building a potential political and economic Empire, even then. Manifest Destiny.
They had a problem. They were outnumbered. They could not trust in God alone to protect their interests.
They had troops, British regiments, loyal to the Crown, protecting them. They were a British Colony, they paid taxes to the British Crown, which was at least 12 weeks sailing round trip away. Getting more troops was difficult, and a lengthy process.
The American Revolution was still a century away in the future.
They did not have enough well equipped, well trained professional and loyal troops to cover their expanding territories.
Never enough, it would seem.
The owner class were outnumbered by slaves, indentured workers,convicts, free labourer, farmers, small land owners and other assorted working folk by a factor of many, many times and then there were the locals, the Native peoples. In terms of a numbers game, the owners were a vulnerable minority.
The Minority Rules
The Colonial economy was based on taking land by force or scam, by importing labour to develop that land, using indentured workers and convicts, and then slaves, to do all the backbreaking work, so that cash crops could be planted and processed, and sent to Europe. Tobacco, Cotton, Sugar and others. It was backbreaking work, the living conditions were harsh and therefore the attrition rate of the workforce was high.
For that reason the Owners had to have a steady supply of indentured workers, who worked for a set number of years to pay off their sea fare and lodgings, or convicts who worked to pay off sentences and fines for petty offences, for periods of 5, 10, 15 years as labourers and some few as skilled workers.
17th Century 'interns'.
They needed compliant, cheap labour for everything from plantation work to building roads, infrastructure, housing, extracting raw materials, processing those into product, trading commodities, and of course, the potential of the workforce as consumers, as indentured workers earned their freedom, and gain plots of land to become a compliant lower middle class.
Some land owners had been taking on bonded labourers from West Africa, as well as Irish Slaves and English convicts, and English and European indentured skilled workers. Many of those black people, while they were badly treated, and lived effectively as slaves for the duration of their bond time, managed to survive their bonded time, and were freed and became homesteaders, labourers and artisans.
Once freed, those indentured or bonded workers were most often given a plot of land, some tools, feed, seed, basic shelter, some cash and let at it.
These suffering people had to go through quite a lot of pretty dreadful abuse, to eventually end up with land, and a chance for a better life - the American dream. They were, of course, very tough people. Hardened, seasoned, robust.
They were most often given land on the edges of 'civilisation', and the buffer zone they created between native tenure and the European establishment became a regular friction point. Tension between the Native peoples and the new homesteaders was a constant theme.
That attrition rate for cheap labour was the impetus to start institutionalised slavery as a replacement source of cheap labour. Slavery was an answer to a cheap labour shortage. Freeing indentured workers to be a buffer was an answer to the tension at the fringes.
We are all in this together, sometimes.
The first case of African slaves in the Colonies is recorded as happening in 1619. They were booty from an English pirate attack on a Portuguese slaver. Though they were enslaved by the Portuguese, in the Colonies they were sold on as indentured workers, and in time became free men.
Spain and Portugal had been operating slavery in their colonies since the 1400s. Their first targets were the indigenous peoples they conquered, and when those peoples were destroyed they sought slaves from Africa, for their colonies in the Caribbean, in South and Central America, and in Mexico. Slavery was an old practice in Spain, dating back to Roman times.
Slavery was not indigenous to the American colonies.
As colonial Capitalism expanded, slavery expanded with it.
There were frequent incidents when the the native folk and the indentured worked together or worked around each other, respectfully.
At different times it was in their best interests, in many cases to work together, to co-operate, to trade, to be civil in their approach to one another.
There are quite a few documented incidents, where groups of the oppressed labourers ran away together, and either ran away as far as they could go into native lands, and sought to hunker down, and get by, to integrate to a degree, and some succeeded for a while.
Sometimes they resisted, they rioted, they organised armed rebellions and tore the owners homes apart and held sway for short few weeks, until a military response could be mustered by the ruling elite to quell the disturbance.
Bacon's rebellion is a famous example of how the different oppressed groups - in this case landless ex-indentured labourers and slaves banded together, albeit lead by a landowner, to target the owning, ruling class.
The owners, bankers, industrialists, urban affluent working class and the troops, and others, clerks, doctors, lawyers, farmers etc were outnumbered, by slaves, indentured workers and free labourers and they obviously felt those were dreadful odds.
They felt that vulnerability keenly.
They did not trust the British Crown, so far away, to be able to secure their position.
And so they devised a plan.
A political grooming exercise that would play out over decades, and into centuries.
Racism was a Capitalist solution to the twin problems of cheap labour, and a restive labour force.
The owners, naturally enough engaged with the compliant churches they funded, (remember the colonies were deeply religious, and they believed status was ordained by God, and in that civic spirit, they set up new media, they had printed pamphlets, broadsheets, news papers and sent agent provocateurs to stir the story among the people, and as the brew started to ferment, the media portrayal of African and Native American was steadily becoming more dehumanised.
A familiar pattern, we note.
The starting point was the Biblical narrative of The Tribe of Ham.
The Native peoples were Heathens, beyond redemption, whereas the Africans were descended from the 12 tribes of Israel, and could therefore be Christianized, and this was promoted as a way of saving their souls, as an act of mercy.
In other words, slavery was a way to save their souls. Very clever.
The Native people's were categorised as Heathen, Pagan, hardly human and that meant they were already condemned to Hell.
Murdering them could be religiously rationalised, seen as a 'kindness'.
Putting them out of their misery.
Taking their lands and making the land Christian and 'fruitful' was God's work,
"When Virginia decreed in 1667 that converted slaves could be kept in bondage, not because they were actual heathens but because they had heathen ancestry, the justification for black servitude was thus changed from religious status to something approaching race.
Beginning in the late seventeenth century laws were also passed in English North America forbidding marriage between whites and blacks and discriminating against the mixed offspring of informal liaisons.
Without clearly saying so, such laws implied that blacks were unalterably alien and inferior. "
It is worth noting that we know much of this because, in the spirit of civic democracy, the oligarchy funded the Free Press, the News Papers of the time. They operated legislative assemblies, and therefore they made laws, and recorded proceedings, and they kept records of births, deaths, marriages, land ownership, slave ownership, fines, criminal cases, executions and so forth. A bureaucracy of control.
From the pulpit, and on the media of the times, we find caricatures, grooming, fake news. We find that the tactics we are so familiar with in the 21st Century are old hat. A deliberate propaganda campaign over decades to entrench racial superiority as a normal Christian thought form, leading to the legal definitions of black and white race.
And in this manner a racial hierarchy was being normalised, socialised, habituated.
White ex-convicts were invited into the new club of reformed, hard working land working Christians.
Indentured workers were promoted.
Artisans, and urban working class were invited.
They were no longer just above the lowest of the low.
Convicts themselves, even in goal, were still above African people and the Native peoples.
Two new 'inferior' dehumanised societal enemies, sanctioned by the Bible, promoted through the media. A clash between The Civilised and The Barbarian.
Thus the Native peoples of The Americas, were recast as existential to threats the newly liberated, newly defined White People, God;s people, ordinary folk who, having earned their freedom by enduring years of hardship, were now working and living the American Dream, intent upon improving their own socio-economic positions.
And the politicians, the corrupt churches and the media kept it up, and it became 'common knowledge' that 'Heathens' and 'Africans' were un-human, un-Christ-like, unGodly, dangerous and uncivilised, and deserved to be extirpated or enslaved to work.
Enslavement was even touted as a mercy, if they could convert them to Christianity, in what ever idiom was locally prevalent that was compliant.
God makes an invisible whip.
And that is the true story of the origins of Racism in the USA, and across the Industrialised Earth.
When folks understand that, it all looks very different.
Honesty in History would be a superb preventative..
The claims of an evolutionary basis for racism is false.
Healthy human beings notice difference, and are ready to explore it to see what it is before making any judgement, and the healthy human does not bully anyone.
Casting different groups of people is a socio-behavioural dynamic of Hierarchically Violent Cultures.
Sadly, the fact that they can still play this game so well, that so many fall for it, through wide ranging socially mediated factors, rather than solely a matter of personal flaws, it is not good news.
However more and more people are working it out, and seeking ways to not play that game.
It's not good. Nobody is happy.
Just ensuring that state schooling taught an honest history would reduce further expansion of racist ideology.
It is that easy...
However, an honest history would lead, inevitably, rapidly to multiple, posthumous and living indictments for War Crimes, Slavery, Conquest and Corruption in practically every Judiciary extant - if the sordid nature of the bully domain be revealed as it really is, and understood then it will be reduced to a pathetic fetish that cannot cause any actual harm, and becomes them an object of public remorse.
Baggage we have let go of, but cannot until we unpack it.
Three years of honesty in history, for one key group - secondary schools.
Honesty in Universities, and in Government - evidence above opinion or belief, when making decisions that have an effect on the commons, as a matter of duty of care would help deal with Racism.
Democratic schooling where children assume responsibilities for the site, their resources, the content and the implementation of their own education collectively, retaining autonomy and responsibility and with support from adults as mentors, - we know this works for the children who get this kind of education.
They are never satisfied with merely voting - democracy is a collective exercise, voting is a tiny part, which of itself alone does never confer democratic power, merely the illusion of agreeing.
The resolution of Racism has many elements, and the more radical response is to look to a much deeper analysis than integrating all peoples into the industrial militarised hierarchy of violence culture as an example of equality and equity.
Racism was an evil solution to a requirement for cheap labour.
Racism is not a personal flaw. It is much, much mote than that.
We must also end the concept of cheap labour, and all that it stands for.
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 calmly honest, responsive to the evidence we find, and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is made easier, though no less difficult.
Bullies seek to co-opt the decent.
In practice it is both a behaviour pattern (unconscious), and a deliberate tactic (conscious).
If the bully cannot co-opt, the bully will denigrate the target in the eyes of others, the on-lookers, the bystanders, the target population.
'Corbyn is a Marxist', 'Corbyn is un-electable' , 'Corbyn is an anti-Semite' are all untrue, and the reason these untruths are spoke is because he would not press the Nuke trigger.
That's the real reason the established power networks hate him so much.
It has nothing to do with Socialism. The issue is with being willing to follow orders. to be willing to press the trigger, to launch mass death upon an innocent population,
Because when he is stating that he would not press it, and would in fact seek to disarm it, that is publicly rejecting their co-opting of the job of Prime Minister into that of a Warlord.
However the bullies cannot speak the truth, they cannot say "We will never let a pacifist have the power to stop War!" Instead they lay allegations against him, with ad hominem twist for spice, and then associate him with a hate figure. It is when one understands this behaviour, that one tends to look more closely, and observing the precise moment of co-option, then immediately defusing that trigger, that this kind of bullying is disabled.
You knock it on the head there and then. You name it.
You say 'This Emperor is Naked!'
This is the only way to activate the will of the people, the energy and engagement of the people with what is happening. People will only respond if they can see that there is ruthless honesty and it is clearly felt, absolutely understood.
When that practice is common amongst the electorate, we will see progressive change, because we will be driving it.
The Bullies will not, obviously, volunteer in this effort, and will resist any such efforts by every tool of disruption.
Hence the need for active engagement with understanding grooming, manipulating people through studied vulnerabilities.
Hence the active divisive marketing machine going over drive.
Corbyn, Gaza and marketing propaganda
Where ever we see a military force arranged against a civilian population, we see oppression, organised, institutionalised oppression.
We see the combined efforts of millions of workers, hundreds of thousands of troops, thousands of officers and many hundreds of civil officials, the logistical, industrial supply lines, the collection and expenditure of taxation and State policy all geared to that military operation.
That's a lot of people, that's entire cities, whole economies of regions devoted to oppression, rather than nurturance.
Today is a 15th anniversary day of so many needless deaths and maiming's in Iraq in the first weeks of the War Against Iraq. Every day is an anniversary of some horror perpetrated upon innocent people by States and their proxies in the international arena of competing militarised powers. Every day.
'Department of 'Defence'.
Yeah, whatever
ISIS. The IDF. The Burmese Army. The US Marine Corps in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Russian Army, Al-Nusra Front, Argentinian Troops in The Falklands, The IRA, FARC, Nazi War Machine, Nuclear Weapons, Bio-Weapons, covert and overt support for militia - it's all the same psycho-social dynamic. Sides are an illusion. Taking sides is a delusion, and insane delusion.
None of their justifications or rationales for political or economic violence stand the test of honesty, evidence and justice. None.
Not even WWI or WWII.
Taking sides within this culture of hierarchically organised violence merely perpetuates it.
Debt is political leverage, and the narrative of the property ladder is merely a grooming operation for debt creation as a hobble.
New Labour continued the deregulation of the banking sector, they broke the separation between high street retail and investment banking, flooding the retail sector with electronic credit, to make it easier for workers to buy property - the credit was then converted into real earned revenues by the workers, as they paid pack the mortgages, and that real wealth was transferred to the lenders.
The property remains, is perhaps redecorated, and renovated.
The material value does not fundamentally change, it is still a property, but it's nominal land price does change, because the market pushes the prices up to attract investors in debt, and so the cost of fitting in and participating in property ownership as an investment model has an entirely fictitious 'market driven' price.
It ceases being a home, part of a community of homes, it becomes an investment vehicle ofr an individual and the village dies.
The lenders convert imaginary assets into wealth.
They set the market, and politicians legislate for that need.
The home owner is politically inert, reduced to a cog in a machine.
Debt clouds the debtors horizon.
The Tories are continuing the process.
Load debt onto the electorate through credit, load the State with debt to a similar degree, and the entire country is on hock to the money men.
This is but one of many scams.
Sold as upwards social mobility.
Sold as aspirations.
Thatcher birthed some of it's recent spawn, but it started long, long before she emerged.
It's less Left vs Right any more, than it is Scam vs Honesty.
Scamservatives and ScamLabour vs Honservatives and Honest Labour
Scam vs The Honest People.
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.
