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.
It is PRECISELY because most people think of Racism as a personal flaw, a petty hatred, a weakness rather than as the social weapon system created by the Ruling Class, that Racism persists within Western Democracies.
We need to up our game.
#ToryRacism
Here's why.
MP Kim Johnson sat on the Education Select Committee, which issued it's report this week.
First Report: The forgotten: how White working-class pupils have been let down, and how to change it
"In the name of championing the white working class, the Tory-led Education Select Committee report released this week picks up the mantle of the government’s highly discredited Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities.
The report calls for public bodies – including schools and charities – to ‘seriously consider their responsibilities’ when promoting the term ‘White Privilege’.
This was watered down from the preferred recommendation from some committee members, which called for financial penalties for public bodies doing this work. It was taken off the table after legal advice that it would contravene human rights legislation by having a chilling effect on freedom of speech.
It’s a shameful attempt to limit the freedoms of ethnic minorities to articulate their experiences of racism, and to stoke the culture war by scapegoating them for the poverty endemic in ‘left behind’ communities.
The report also pushes a free schools agenda, despite plenty of evidence to suggest that academies do not reduce the attainment gap for disadvantaged children in comparison to local authority-run schools.
Since 2010 there have been 92 Education Committee reports and only two of these reports have explicitly focused on a named ethnic group – both on white pupils.
Instead of focusing on the multitude of evidence that shows that cuts, lack of investment and stark poverty has on the opportunities of so many communities, the Tories once again take the cowards way out by pointing the finger at the red herring of ethnic minority communities.
The use of data and language is highly selective in the report, allowing it to make misleading assertions that the white working class as a whole is achieving less than disadvantaged ethnic minority students."
In short, the English Government are trying to assert that efforts to address Racism and Misogyny are the root cause of the difficulties of poor white schoolchildren living in areas where unemployment, low wages and cuts to funding for social programs are contributing to poverty. The English Government are using skin tone and gender as weapons to sow social discord and prevent grass roots solidarity emerging.
They are broadcasting this via vexatious abuse of their majority in parliament and it's select committees, and they are quite deliberately targeting the alt-right amidst those impoverished by 12 years of Austerity who are on low incomes or are dependent on benefits, the poorer sector of the English population, 14 million strong and growing due to callous Conservative policy. They are saying to those people that the difficulties their children face are being caused by too much concern about Racism and Misogyny and not enough concern about them and their condition.
They omit that Austerity has harmed children of every ethnicity in England.
The recent Sewell Report which asserted that there was no such thing as Institutional Racism in England is part of this campaign. Denial and then the allegation that those who seek to address the 'non existent Institutional Racism' are creating a distraction that is harming poor white children.
This is using Race as a weapon. Which is how Racism was invented in the 1600s, by the British Colonial plantation owners and ruling class, as a device to thwart emergent worker solidarity, which they perceived as a mortal threat to their power, privilege and status. The legalisation and Institutionalisation of Racial discrimination was a grooming operation that took 4 decades to engineer, and the ill effects are with us still 400 years later.
I have written a song to articulate this. Race is a Weapon in The Class War - a brief historical outline
Australian Aboriginals - Genocidal Racism Exported by The British Empire
The Curse of Ham was taken as the basis of the definition of Race, and Superiority in Colonial America.
England's Players were booed for making a public anti-Racist symbolic gesture
A new song, fresh from the studio. As usual, a rough mix.
Race is a weapon, in the class war.
This is the story of the co-opting of Biblical myth, and the re-invention of Race and skin colour as a tool of discrimination and then the crafting of legalised Racism, in the British Colonies, in the 1600s.
Prior to this period, discrimination was largely religious or cultural, and rooted in war fare, with slavery as part of the 'booty' of war.
The conquered of the colonies would be enslaved by the conquerors, although it often turned out that native peoples were unsuited to enslavement and they mostly died out rapidly, burned out by the trauma of conquest. They did not have much to live for.
This was why the Spanish Empire started to import slaves from Africa to the Caribbean and to South America. They basically genocided the local populations through over working them as slaves.
In the British Colonies it was different : the development of indentured worker systems which included free citizens, usually too poor to pay their way, who worked for a contract that paid their passage, and convict workers, imported from Europe and from Africa, was dominant in the early period. There were also cases of Africans who had been enslaved by the Spanish, and were on board Spanish ships which were attacked by English Privateers. The English would bring the Africans to the colonies, and they would be sold as indentured workers, who would be freed at the end of their contract, and allowed to enter into society as free people, equal citizens, they could own land, develop businesses and so on.
This was a time in the British Colonies when African and European indentured workers worked side by side on plantations, and were routinely freed at the end of their indenture, and given land and tools to develop their own futures as equals. They formed villages, towns and communities, inter marriage was common enough.
It was not multicultural in as much as it was not an issue because they were all part of the same culture, a new culture growing in the colonies. Pioneers. Breaking new land together. There were various languages spoken, there were enclaves of various European ethnicities. Irish people, Dutch, Germans would live close to each other.
Life was incredibly harsh. Many, many people died during their indenture, and from time to time, the indentured 'rebelled' and took out their frustration and pain on their 'employers'.
It was this that frighted the Plantation owners - that the working class - indentured and free - might unite, and together in solidarity, undo them, take them down from their positions of absolute power as a reaction to the owners cruelty and oppression. The owners needed a plan to protect their long term prospects, a plan for many generations.
Thus the concepts of Race and then Racism were developed over time slowly, bit by bit, to divide the working class of the colonies. A political grooming operation over a 40 year period, starting from the Pulpit, concocting themes to marginalise, dehumanise and then legalise the oppression of freed black folk, culminating in the legalisation of Slavery of African people, with conversion to Christianity offered as a 'mercy' to those who were enslaved, for life.
A mercy denied the Native peoples, who were ethnically cleansed, in a multi-century genocide.
Race and Racism, Xenophobia and Religious bigotry continues to split the working class across the Earth, and all of these protects the Oligarchy, the owner class, even still, and will continue until the working class as a whole figure this out - honest history is crucial to effective political organisation and action.
From the initial back breaking toil of clearing of land by hand, through to planting, harvesting and processing sugar, tobacco. coffee, cotton and other materials that generated the first immense merchant fortunes and Oligarchy networks which became political power centers in their own right, to the first investments into factories and the development and expansion of the factory system, Racism and class continues through to the present as a thread of oppression and extraction upon which the wealth of Europe and America is founded, with European and American controlled colonial assets protected by military and political dominance. This is why England and America and France, and others, are engaged in combat operations continuously .
YOU WERE GOOD NEIGHBOURS, YOU WORKED YOUR OWN FIELDS
YOU WERE HOPING FOR A FUTURE, A FUTURE YEILD
YOU FELLED TREES, YOU DUG WELLS, YOU SHAPED STONE
YOU BUILT FARMS, VILLAGES, TOWNS, AND YOU BUILT HOMES
YOU OPENED SHOPS, BLACK SMITHS, CHURCHES AND HALLS
AFRICAN,EUROPEAN FREED WORKERS ALL
BUT IT WAS NOT ALWAYS EASY, THE LIFE WAS VERY HARSH
THE MASTERS WERE CRUEL, THEY MADE CRUELTY AN ART
MANY NEVER MADE IT THROUGH, MANY FELL, MANY DIED
THE CONDITIONS WERE AWFUL, HOW YOUR HEARTS CRIED
TREAT US LIKE PEOPLE, TREAT US WITH RESPECT
DON'T HOPE TO EXHAUST US, TO KILL US WITH NEGLECT
SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO FREE US, GIVE US OUR AWARD
LISTEN TO OUR COMPLAINT, HEAR OUR HONEST WORDS
WHEN THE MASTERS DID NOT LISTEN, TURNED THEIR HEARTS AWAY
THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT FOR THE WORKERS TO SAY
THEY TOOK UP THEIR TOOLS, THEY STOLE THE MASTERS GUNS
THEY FOUGHT FOR THEIR LIVES, THEY MADE THE MASTERS RUN
AFTER BACONS REBELLION, THE MASTERS MADE A PLAN
ELEVATE THE EUROPEAN TO OPPRESS THE AFRICAN
THIS DIVIDED THE WORKERS, THEY WOULD PROTECT THEIR PLACE
AS LORDS OF THIS LAND THAT'S WHY THEY INVENTED RACE.
THEY MISUSED THE BIBLE, SPUN THE STORY OF HAM
SET THE WHITE RACE AS SUPERIOR TO THE AFRICAN
MADE LAWS AGAINST THE FREE BLACKS, APARTHEID VERSION ONE
THEN THEY LEGALISED SLAVERY, THAT'S HOW THE JOB WAS DONE!
~~
RACE IS A WEAPON, IN THE CLASS WAR
SO WHEN YOU ARE BOOING AS THE TEAM TAKES THE KNEE
KNOW YOU ARE WAGING WAR ON BEHALF OF THE ELITE
THE OWNERS HAVE CONVINCED YOU TO TAKE THEIR SIDE
USING THE LIE THAT BLACK IS INFERIOR TO WHITE
THEY SOLD YOU A LIE
RACE IS A WEAPON, IN THE CLASS WAR
RACE IS A WEAPON, IN THE CLASS WAR
Kindest regards
Corneilius
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"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
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What is the intended impact of an education system that does not teach the true origins of White vs Black Racism nor reveal the long awful history of anti-Semitism, both of which are European origin invented weaponised hatreds?
It is precisely because most people think of Racism as a personal flaw, a petty hatred, a weakness rather than understanding Racism as the social weapon system that it is, created by the Ruling Class, that Racism persists within Western Democracies.
We need to up our game.
#ToryRacism
Racism is a weapon designed by the ruling class to divide the ruled.
Anti-Semitism has always been a scapegoating weapon, invented and used by Christian Rulers down the centuries. It too divides the ruled.
In this blog I will lay out the facts on Racism in particular as they exist.
Racism, in the form of White Supremacy, was invented.
Racism and Slavery in the British Colonies of the Americas did not happen over night. In the same way that Brexit did not happen in the few years around the Referendum. Brexit started the day the UK joined the Common Market.
Racism and Slavery in the American colonies were carefully inculcated over two generations, close to 50 years of constant effort, bit by bit, starting from a place where African and European indentured workers worked side by side, were freed at the end of their indenture, given land and integrated into the working free community as equals the bosses worked their political grooming operation to the point where European folk classed themselves as superior to all African folk, by natural and divine right and were willing to enslave African folk in the most brutal fashion, in huge numbers, simply because they were African, inferior in every way. A lie carefully nurtured to divide a working class against itself.
Racism is a weapon devised by the bosses to disunify the workers. Racism is learned. Racism is not a biological or psychological dynamic, even though there are biological and psychological dynamics at play, it is an outcome cultural conditioning. It is true that our brains and sub-conscious cognition systems are attuned or primed to notice difference and to be alert to difference, however this is a baseline function of pattern analysis that is largely determined by experience and culture.
Thus before the grooming of the workers into 'us' and 'thems', African and European worked sided by side, and saw each other as 'us' and saw the owners as their 'them'. The owners sough to change that. and by creating a different set up of us and them, with Europeans in general as 'us' and Africans in general as 'them'.
Racism is a global working class issue.
It predates the Industrial Revolution and it had a profound effect on the way the Industrial Revolution played out. Racism and Xenophobia are quite distinct. Xenophobia is much, much older. Racism is a recent invention.
THIN LIZZY: PHIL LYNOTT, BRIAN DOWNEY,GARY MOORE IN 1974.
PHOTOGRAPH: MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY
Thin Lizzy, a successful working class rock band from Dublin, Ireland : emblematic of working class folk comprised of African and European, side by side. The Human Race as one race.
Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia trial, tried for Treason by the Racists
I wrote a song about this: Racism is a Class War Weapon.
Racism is a class War Weapon
Most working class folk probably don't know that Racism (white skin good superior, black skin bad inferior aka White Supremacy) was invented by British Colonial Plantation owners, the Colonial Oligarchs, to get European indentured workers and African indentured workers to hate on each other so that they would not unite to take on the oligarch rulers in the British Colonies of the Americas in the mid to late 1600s.
The Colonies imported labour, most often as indentured workers - workers who would work for a fixed term, and be released upon completion of that term, and these would include Africans and Europeans, who often worked side by side. Freed Africans and Europeans became part of the culture of the Colonies. The turnover of labour was high, conditions were pretty tough and those who survived tougher than nails. Those that made it through were often given land on the edges of the colonies, where only the hard nailed could survive and thrive. They formed an advance guard of colonial expansion.
There were in the early decades of the British Colonial conquest, expansion and development of plantations quite a few violent uprisings of indentured workers - conditions were often brutal and profoundly unfair even in terms of indenture agreements - European and African workers joining together to attack their oppressors, sometimes with help from Native peoples. These rebellions led to the owners becoming very concerned that their grip on power was vulnerable, that they were at risk - they were the few facing the many. They needed to figure out a way to divide the workers, to set them apart as different classes. The resorted to the old strategy of favour one group at the expense of the other. And so they had to define the groups.
This led to the definition of The White Race, as the starting point.
They had to established the legal concept of Race by defining the White Race in legislation.
Race and thus Racism was invented as a weapon to to be deployed against working class Europeans and working class Africans who had previously worked side by side, as equals in the oppressive system of indentured 'employment' that supplied labour to the plantation owners. Race and Racism were invented by British Christian plantation owners, using the Bible as a foundational text to justify discrimination, as it defined one group as spiritually and morally superior to the other, by the word of God. This was followed through with incremental legislation that placed limitations on African citizens, removing various rights from them and conferring advantages to European workers, bit by bit.
Then when they had convinced enough of the European workers they were innately superior humans than Africans, they then institutionalised and legalised Slavery.
With that it followed the slaves would from time to time attempt to escape such oppressive situations, given that there was a vast wilderness into which they could go, where they could possibly find a niche.
Laws were passed to arrange for paid groups of volunteer Europeans to give chase to the fleeing slaves and bring them back to their owners, dead or alive. These posses are the very roots of grass roots policing in the colonies and in the USA.
If you didn't know that.
It is not your fault.
Now you do.
Here's some of the evidence, in just over half an hour of viewing.
Xenophobia is not Racism.
There are two other threads in the Racism discourse that need to be addressed. The first is the idea that tribalism, othering is an innate human trait, and for this modern neuroscience is routinely enrolled as evidence of innate othering at the unconscious level when subjects, usually from developed countries, are tested in various laboratory experiments that show faster than thought reactions to different skinned faces. What these tests do not do is cover egalitarian based cultures - there is no known testing of egalitarian people for these kinds of tests. So at best we can say in the modern culture where Racism and othering is common, we see hyper-fast reactions at the unconscious level to skin colour, and given the cultural background that is to be expected. We cannot assume that there is an innate behavioural dynamic that feeds into othering, racism, adverse tribalism.
The second thread is that Racism is a personal flaw, that the Racist is somehow inferior to the non-Racist. I think this is wholly inaccurate. It is another form of dehumanisation. We can so readily dismiss the other person, the 'Racist', without asking how did that person learn to be Racist?
We truly need to understand what Racism is and what othering is contextualised with awareness of egalitarian evolutionary behaviour as a dominant form of social behaviour for the human species for the past 80,000 years if not longer - I cite 80,000 years because that is the time span of Australian Aboriginal culture. It is more likely that egalitarian behaviour is much, much older than that culture.
Racism is learned behaviour.
Irish hating English is Xenophobia, not Racism. It does not emerge naturally within Irish children - we are not born at birth with such a hatred. We are taught it.
Irish wanting only Irish in Ireland is Nativism, it is not Racism. That too is not something we are born with. We are taught it.
Who plants these ideas and concepts into young minds that become adults habituated to such feelings of animosity? Why would they do such a thing?
Who created the State? Which few exercise power that influences the situation of the lives of the many?
What is the State?
The State is an institution of power, that operates a leveraged power system over a population within a defined boundary. The State as we know it, by origin, was rooted in violent hierarchy systems, within which slavery, serfdom, and other forms of coerced labour working for a ruling class were institutionalised and under which the workers have struggled for centuries to regain human dignity, the dignity removed by their violent oppression.
That is a historical truth.
That truth presents as a historical struggle, the struggle to be fully human, to be free from oppression and as Paolo Friere puts it, free from the perceived need or desire to oppress others.
The power politics of Capitalism and Neo-Liberalism, of Communism, and of the Industrial Hierarchy in general are oppressive systems where a small class of people exercise powers that affect and afflict the majority in ways the ordinary find impossible to counter. The ordinary person cannot change interest rates, determine average wages, dictate to bureaucracies how they ought be treated start or stop wars.
Modi, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Trump, Netanyahu, The Saudi Rulers, Biden, Xi, Putin, Musk, Bezos, Patel, Hancock, Murdoch (I can list a few from the polities I am most familiar with, you readers will have your own lists) and all the others, so many of them, hundreds of thousands of individuals who wield immense systems of leveraged power and who are so assured in their own minds of their entitlement to use that power and who cause harm, rather than prevent harms, are operating a system that is oppressing the majority - inequity has adverse effects on everyone within any society that maintains inequities.
To oppress and to be oppressed are both dehumanised conditions for any human to find themselves in.
We can see this all around us.
Dehumanised in different ways, oppressor and oppressed must be liberated for all to find peace.
Education needs to be honest, precise and transparent.
Race is a social or cultural construct - there is no genetic or biological delimiting dynamic that can be identified as establishing Race as a biological reality.
The question for workers, wage earners in general is why do the owners devote so much effort to get workers to disengage from solidarity? What is it that the owners fear so much that they behave so cruelly towards the entire community of workers?
Children ask "Why?" because they really want to know in order to understand.
Any kind of a lie by way of an answer is abusing their trust and it undermines their integrity, thus it is best to say "I do not know." when one does not know, rather than make up some story for the child to believe.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
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.
A few insights into the problems posed by wide spread misunderstanding of human social behavioural dynamics.
1. There are no Races, only language groups. Skin colour does not predict language, language is a local emergent phenonemon, and varies vastly acorss the planet, apart from where a language is spread by conquest or occupation.
2. There exists a pre-historical and historical material spectrum of social organisation, ranging from egalitarian through to hierarchically violent, with the varying behavioural characteristics associated with each.
3. Almost all behaviour is learned. Environment and experience modulate all body systems. Culture and experience dictates behaviour.
4. We humans thrived for millions of years because we were biologically healthy - that means secure attachment bonding, robust sense of self within strong kin relationships, co-operative effort and autonomy plus the sensory capability to read the environment, accurately, and adapt to change accordingly.
5. We, typing these words, live within an Institutionalised Hierarchy of Violence.
6. That Hierarchy has had the gall to rename the 'natural' world and it's processes as both separate from Humanity and Civilisation, (to objectify and commodify) to utilise it as a scapegoat, (onto which it projects it's own brutality, lust and position in the power chain), whilst also suggesting their hierarchical behaviour is as 'natural God given aggression', weaving into Darwins vague observations the ideology of survival of the most violent as a natural dynamic, repositing it as survival of the fittest State, Military, Corporation. This institutionalised objectifyication has a history, and no pre-history. The Warrior Gene. It's all false assumption.
7. Most of us have been educated and indoctrinated to one degree or another, by the Hierarchy, and to that extent that we have internalised that 'education' we are divorced from some of our healthiest human perceptions.
And because indoctrination is always psychologically invasive, and because infants, toddlers and small children have no defence agaiunst such invasive practices, not least if practiced and enforced at home, where the child's psyche ought be wholly safe, respected, honoured the process becomes unconsciously transmitted down the generations as 'normal behaviour'. It gains momentum, traction with each successive generation.
8. That's a lot of shit to deal with, plus the war! (the fact of war has a huge impact on social relations world wide)... I think of the billions of people who have been exploited, indoctrinated into furthering the expoloitation. I think of them, and the bullies who have the power to bully millions of people at a time. I know who I hold most responsible.
9. The problem is the industrial culture, not the people - the people are all subjected to indoctrination and to work requirements. Both are problematic, both are imposed to benefit the hierarchy. The industrial militarised hierarchy are problematic. The problem is bullies seek power, and gain it, with relative ease because they have designed the system thus.
10. The problem is technical in as much as who becomes involved in policy decision making with regards to shared communal resources of any kind.
example : Any group that has persisted on undeveloped land for unknowable times must be seen as the legal stewardsor inhabitants of that land. They must also be understood - they see and experience themselves as part of that environment, not on it, or in it.
Any entry into those lands has to be for the local societies to determine, at every level, in all apsects.
11. It is absolutely the case that White European Empire and Conquest has a long and bloody History, and has been the primary driver of extinction of human societies and culture within the past 600 years....
12. White people often object to critiques that lay out the human cost of that expansion, because they have internalised so much of the cultural identities provided via indoctrination that any critique of the culture FEELS like a personal attack.
White Elites manipulate that to the hilt.
So too, do all bullies. It is a standard bully tactic.
There are no archetypes, no Races, only living human beings, in a specturm between natural and institutionalised societal dynamics.
---
Here is what one group of pre-conquest societies offer as an insight to their needs...
Kametsa Asaike ‘Living Well’ Agenda for Development Central Asháninka del Rio Ene
1. To live like Asháninka Sanori 2. To live eating what we know. 3. To live secure and serene in the territories we have always lived in. 4. To live in peace, without suffering from Terrorism 5. To live better, producing [cash crops] in order to buy what we require. 6. To live healthily using our own medicine and also well attended by the health post and the mobile medical brigade. 7. To live with education that will help us improve and empower us as Asháninka. 8. To live well with an organisation that listens to us and defends our rights.
I came across this through a good friend, who has just finished a Masters Thesis on the issue of 'sustainable development models' being activated by Climate Conscious NGOs whose own relationships reveal contradictory behaviour...
Philanthropic behaviour that is claimed to be one thing, at face value, yet upon examination from the perspective of the 'un-developed' society and other material ecological criteria we see repeatedly failure to listen to those people, to see them as 'equals' or to engage with them as land tenure holders...
The urge to assimsilate, to Chritianise, to impose socio-economic status as a measure of well being: such help which is all invasive, no matter their claims to be for the benefit of the target groups.
---
They understand logging as Terrorism, mining as Terrorism, not least because the methodlogy of both demands disturbing the ecological balance, and clearing the land of those who inhabit it....by force or by deceit.
--
In my opinion, all areas inhabited by pre-conquest cultures, or pre-industrial cultures must be ceded to those communities that are truly native. extant, thriving...
Across the world, Aboriginal societies are at best afforded flimsy tenure of the surface, yet the subsoil and rock is 'owned' by the State.
This allows the State to legislate exploitation of the sub soil domain without referal to the native societies...
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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.
