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.
Violence and the trauma it causes cannot be treated without also treating the setting within which violence has occurred. It is not just about the individual and the assailant, it is also about the culture.
"The study of trauma is an inherently political exercise in that it brings attention to the experience of the oppressed." Judith Herman, writing about trauma and the aftermath, from domestic violence to state terror.
It is quite clear that the culture not as safe as it could be. What I mean is that the UN Declaration of Human Rights is a ratified treaty incorporated in to statute Law in a majority of States.
The meaning of the UNDHR is that part of resolving population level trauma is making the culture we live in a much safer culture than it is. Making an effort.
Arresting Derek Chauvin, and putting him on trial as a lone individual whilst ignoring the culture within which he lived and operated is inadequate to the task of addressing the issue of police violence and the issue of Racism, two issues that are intertwined in American policing and American culture and it's history.
Racism was invented. Misogyny was invented. Neither of these are naturally emergent behavioural characteristics. Some people claim that 'othering' is a natural enough behaviour. Their evidence is flimsy. Just because it can happen does not imply that it is naturally emergent.
Statistics do not tell the full story. Less people die as a result of lynching by an angry racist mob, whipped up locally in a fever of hatred and rage than in previous times, nonetheless Racism persists, the teachings of White Supremacy remain active, and there is no attempt made to counter that at it's root and so, for many people whose skin is dark, whose ancestral and ethnic roots are African, Racism today has a traumatic impact upon their lives.
That same can be said of Misogyny.
To be a political radical is to look at the very roots of any subject and from there start to confront it's inequities from their origins, with as much honesty and clarity as one can gather. Blowing up a bridge or a parliament is not inherently radical - indeed both actions are a continuation of the cycles of violence inherent in a violent hierarchy culture, and thus they are, to my mind at least, the opposite to radical.
They are not looking at the roots of violence in order to resolve the behaviours of violence. Jihadi's are not radical at all. White Supremacists are not radical. Both the Jihadist and White Supremacist deliberately avoid the roots of the problems of the world. Political English is replete with misused language. Radicalisation? It is indoctrination, it is political grooming. It is not radicalisation.
Racism.
It is the task of white people who understand the meaning, the history of systemic and personal Racism to confront it, to challenge it and to dismantle it among other white people. This is not a task for the targets of Racism alone. Personal Racism is not a personal flaw. It is the internalisation of a weapons system thought form. Racism was invented. Racism had a purpose. To counter than, to in-invent it demands that we are honest as to how and why Racism was invented.
Racism was invented to protect the interests of a violent hierarchy - the plantation owners and the rulers of colonial America, while it was still a British colony and it's citizens British subjects. The Plantation owners were a minority who faced a majority they oppressed - indentured European and African workers, and the indigenous peoples. Racism was invented to set the European indentured workers as superior humans to the Africans, and the native peoples, and to set them as antagonists, one against the other.
At the time there was a substantial indentured worker population from Africa. British Privateers had been raiding Spanish Slavers for decades, capturing the enslaved Africans as booty, bringing them to the colonies, where they were indentured as workers. There was also some movement of free Africans who took up indentured work by choice. There was therefore significant population of free Africans who had worked their indentures and were considered citizens. There was a significant inter marriage between European and African, and a significant demographic of African farmers, artisans and other trades.
The creation of the legal category White Race, or White People, in 1681, was a critical step in that process. There is no such thing in biology, morality or historical precedent where skin colour denoted superiority or inferiority that was legalised. It is a cultural definition. designed by an oppressor class to incite lateral violence among those they oppressed.
Then slowly bit by bit the Oligarchs passed laws limiting African's freedoms and rights, even banning inter marriage between Europeans and Africans. Slavery was introduced on the back of these new laws.
That is British and American History.
Misogyny.
It's the task of men who understand the meaning and history of systemic and personal Misogyny to confront it, to challenge it and to dismantle it among other men. This is not a task for women alone. Personal Misogyny is not a personal flaw. It is the internalisation of a weapons system thought form.
Misogyny is invented as part of a cultural belief set of Patriarchy. The anger of misogyny is that women do not submit. Patriarchy held that women were the chattels of men, that women should submit to the whims of men, that women were tools of patrilineal inheritance, breeders of dynasty. Greek Democracy was rooted in Patriarchy. The British Empire likewise. The American Constitution was a document drawn up by and for men of property.
System approved Feminism runs like this - if you are willing to operate the existing power system as it stands, as one of us, you are welcome. Join us. We call this 'equality'.
Genuine Feminism: we see and understand the violent hierarchy cult and we see it's inequity and we will, holding hands with one another, men and women, dismantle that violent hierarchy. we call this equity, justice, peace more than the absence of war.
Poverty.
It's the task of working class, middle class and wealthy people who understand poverty as imposed, as a structural pillar of the violent hierarchy system, to confront it, to challenge it and to dismantle all support for it among other working class, middle class and wealthy people. And then to organise together to abolish poverty. This is not a task for the impoverished. Personal poverty or hatred of the poor are not personal flaws. They are the internalisations of a weapons system thought form.
Wealth is God smiling on you, poverty is His disfavour. That is a lie.
Peace
It's the task of working class, middle class and wealthy people who understand that war is tool of a violent hierarchy, that it is imposed, structurally, and that our task is to confront war mongers, to challenge them at every turn and to dismantle the systemic use of war as a tool of a violent power, where ever we find it, starting with our immediate, local and national Governments.
Monarchy, Aristocracy, Rulers.
Monarchy is an evil. Monarchy is an invention. Monarchy is the original knife crime syndicate. The 'Stablishment. The history of Kings and Queens is a bloody mess.
Abolish Monarchy, abolish all titles. Remove all privileges. Hand the land and wealth back to the people from whom it was taken, as it was always taken at the point of a blade. Let the concept of a noble class fade into the mists. We are all noble, if any one is.
I say this and I say too that we must not make the error of personalising this.
It is not about the person who is Queen, it is not about the individual Lord, Lady or Prince, Duke or Earl - it's not about them as people, since mostly they are people trapped by accident of birth. They did not choose their parents. They were born into that position. .
It is about the institution and the systems of Hierarchy, Power and Violence.
The whole edifice of Monarchy is deeply rooted in Violent Abuse.
To praise or celebrate monarchs of the past is similar to praising or celebrating Jimmy Savile, after it has been disclosed he is a sexual predator, on the basis of his charity work. Henry the 8th was a psycho. most of the Kings and Queens have been dysfunctional, violent and abusive characters. Goes with the territory, I reckon.
"The knights were robbers, the Kings were crooks, see through the lies of our History books."
Monarchy is the original knife crime syndicate.
The Stablishment.
Monarchy is the original knife crime syndicate.
Stab you front, stab you back, stab you left, stab you right, stab you waking, stab you sleeping, in the night. Stab, stab, 'Stablishment. Just look at the history. Just look at the myriad movies that have celebrity actors cast as the Kings and Queens, and look at how the movies draw a veil over the psychopathy of monarchy.
Political Grooming Gangs undermine everybody's Freedom and Liberty by pretending to stand for Freedom and Liberty. They ask you to fight for Queen and Country, They ask you to fight for God and Country.
Why 'all lives matter' doesn't matter.
And why it matters that we know and understand that it does not mean anything.
It is merely a marketing tactic - a manipulative, reactionary, childish and ultimately feeble attempt at a come-back. It is empty, void, dull and inept.
'All lives matter' is nothing more than 'nah-nah nah-nah-naaah' - it is a childish, immature reaction to a genuine banner, a feeble riposte to a global movement that is precise, that is clear in it's origin and purpose.
The 'all lives matter' banner is not emerging from the thinking and concern of ordinary folk - it does not reflect any genuine emergent grass roots organising phenomenon that has been created to confront some real and serious abuse of power or any systemic oppression.
Oppression of ordinary white folk does exist, of course. But it has nothing to do with skin colour or physiology.
Poverty is a common structural oppression that afflicts all of us.
All Lives Matter is a scam.
ALM was created as a way to attack 'Black Lives Matter', to cast confusion about the messaging of BLM, to gaslight a portion of the white population, who are distressed, angry, who feel their genuine concerns are not being represented within the political system, whose pain is being exploited by the ruling classes in order to obscure the conversation. The conversation should be about hierarchies of power and violence, it ought to be about structural poverty and class, rather than Race. Race does not exist other than as a concept and a prejudice. In a video interview with Laura Flanders, Black Lives Matter movement co-founder Alicia Garza said that "changing Black Lives Matter to All Lives Matter is a demonstration of how we don't actually understand structural racism in this country". She went on to say that "other lives are valued more than black lives, and that to take blackness out of this equation is inappropriate".
ALM therefore functions as a reactionary counter-punch to a genuine movement that emerged in 2013 in response to the 2012 killing of an innocent teenager, Trayvon Martin, who was only 17.
Black Lives Matter and Trayvon Martin Trayvon was killed by an armed Neighbourhood Watch volunteer. Trayvon was innocent of any crime at the time of the killing, and he had no record of any criminality or other evidence of bad behaviour.
The killer was acquitted in a trial, in 2013, under a vague piece of legislation, 'stand your ground'. The movement 'Black Lives Matter' began as a hashtag - #BlackLivesMatter - that coalesced online response to that acquittal, because it was not the first time this had happened, and many felt it was unlikely to be the last. The feeling was that because Trayvon was black therefore his life did not matter, that his death was yet another crime that was not being accounted for, and this was felt and understood as an injustice by many, many people.
The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter became a media focus around other cases of race related police brutality that occurred in the years that followed.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is today an organized movement dedicated to non-violent civil disobedience in protest to police brutality. "Black Lives Matter" exists as a decentralized network with over 30 chapters worldwide. The broader movement and its related organizations typically advocate against police violence towards black people, as well as for various other policy changes considered to be related to Racist and associated inter-sectional oppressions.
Racism is both a falsified logic and a real problem. Racism was invented, it did not emerge as a natural social phenomenon. There are no racist genes. The White Race as a concept, was invented by the White European Christians who were the wealthy owners of plantations, the elite of the early colonies of Virginia and Maryland, while they were still British Colonies, under British Rule, protected by British Troops. Racial superiority was a Protestant invention. It was invented to divide the working population within the colonies, and to prepare the legal ground for a massive expansion of institutionalised slavery in order to generate vast wealth. The superiority of the white race over the black race was based on a false interpretation of Biblical scripture to give it weight. Laws were passed to institutionalise that superiority, bit by bit, over a 40 year period. The false interpretation of Biblical scripture has led to many other inequities and atrocities. Thus the invention of the White Race and their supposed superiority over black and native peoples was a political, social and economic commercially oriented invention. False prophets for profits, if you will allow the pun.
400 years later and it is still the case that White on Black Racism, or White Supremacy, is still very much alive and active within the USA and the UK, and in many other countries. There is a problem, and it does revolve around the issue of whether or not the lives on non-Caucasian people's matter to the ruling classes of Caucasian origin, and it is a matter of structural Racism and of grass roots Racism. Leading members of the ruling classes might not be individually actively Racist, (Obama, for example) yet they do permit Racism to persist in order to more easily divide the working people of the population among ourselves, where we might otherwise find political solidarity and act in coordinated democratic ways to elect officials who would change the legislation that keeps the Established Hierarchy in place.
Rulers lives matter?
It is also true that the lives of all ordinary folk matter less to the ruling classes than the sense of the Rulers assumed entitlement to rule, The Rulers desire to retain, maintain and enhance their artificial power over the majority of the population supersedes all other concerns. This is what Rulers do. Rulers lives matter, and their power as a class matters more.
Virus Spread
The fact that the UK Conservative government are planning to return homeless people to the streets by de-funding programs for their temporary housing during the corona virus epidemic, or that they were going to cease funding free meals for 1.3 million vulnerable children during summer holidays, until a public campaign by a footballer pushed back, whilst at the same time paying for the Prime Ministers military operated jet to be painted with the Union Jack as a £900,000 PR stunt, gives a topical account of that lack of care for the lives of ordinary folk.
Another pertinent example is the disgraceful behaviour of setting up a contact trace app that the Government knew was not going to be trusted (they were warned, and went ahead).
They then set up a person to person contact chasing system that could not be effective, run by an un-elected official with no public health experience.
Given that effective apps already existed (Germany had them) and were offered, for free, to the UK Government who rejected the offer, this translates into millions of pounds given to friends of the Government being wasted.
Importantly, this diversion has wasted precious time and guaranteed more spread of the virus infection. Clearly, vulnerable peoples lives do not matter to the Rulers of the UK. The policy of allowing the infectious virus SARSCOV2 to spread across the population, rather than do as new Zealand has done, and stop the spread, eliminate community transmission to protect the vulnerable portion of their population, and their economy is deliberate.
Whose lives matter?
In addition to all the other work being done to address this issue of Racism - and I think Black Lives Matter is doing this work really well and that they need much wider support - I think that a ruthlessly honest history curriculum in all schools and libraries within all former colonial States and their former colonies is essential. The truth will set us free. A lot of people who are racist do not really understand why they are racist, they do not know how they became racist.
Honest educative exposure could liberate a lot of those people from their prejudice. Honesty in education could eradicate Racism, Misogyny, Xenophobia and Homophobia from our grass roots communities within a generation.
Police brutality and Race.Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police. Risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for men and women and for all racial and ethnic groups.
There are similar patterns in other countries, not least the UK.
Black Lives Matter has developed into a global activist organisation, with solid, serious work being done to seek justice for cases of police brutality against black citizens, globally and to confront the history of Racism where it is not being addressed. Black Lives Matter has grown and developed many campaigns, and is dedicated and active.
There is no 'All Lives Matter' activism, anywhere
There is no known organised 'all lives matter' activism anywhere on Earth that is focused on all oppression that causes death and harm to any people, by one group onto another.
There is no 'all lives matter' organisation or movement in any nation seeking to draw attention to oppression against any and all people - nada, diddly squat, zilch, zero, a void, empty space, nothing,
Not a single cent or penny is being spent on such activism under the banner 'all lives matter'.
Nobody is funding and organising a grass roots movement 'all lives matter' that is actively confronting for example anti-Gypsy or anti-Roma abuse, or confronting lethal homophobia or seeking to stop the invasion of Indigenous inhabited undeveloped lands by miners, loggers, prospectors, or confronting genocides, or protesting global poverty or confronting child trafficking.
There is no activist group under the banner 'all lives matter' seeking justice through the court systems in any state or country to protect the lives of any group.
The entire impetus of the slogan ALM is coming from groups who have plenty of power - white supremacist ruling class - who want ordinary folk to fight among ourselves, who want to undermine the message of Black Lives Matter and use it as a weapon among us - and they are using every technique and every platform available to spread this puerile reactionary slogan, including massive micro-targeting on-line.
Micro-targeting“user data is feeding artificial intelligences whose objective is to manipulate the attention and behavior of users without their knowledge or approval.”
and
"Microtargeting in political advertising: Facebook, in particular, enables advertisers to identify an emotional hot button for individuals that can be pressed for electoral advantage, irrespective of its relevance to the election.
Candidates no longer have to search for voters who share their values.
Instead they can invert the model, using microtargeting to identify whatever issue motivates each voter and play to that.
If a campaign knows a voter believes strongly in protecting the environment, it can craft a personalized message blaming the other candidate for not doing enough, even if that is not true. In theory, each voter could be attracted to a candidate for a different reason. In combination with the platforms’ persuasive technologies, microtargeting becomes another tool for dividing us. Microtargeting transforms the public square of politics into the psychological mugging of every voter.”
and
“Zeynep Tufekci, the UNC scholar who is one of the world’s foremost experts on the impact of emerging technology in politics, has observed that internet platforms enable the powerful to affect a new kind of censorship. Instead of denying access to communications and information, bad actors can now use internet platforms to confuse a population, drowning them in nonsense.
In her book, Twitter and Tear Gas, she asserts that “inundating audiences with information, producing distractions to dilute their attention and focus, delegitimizing media that provide accurate information (whether credible mass media or online media), deliberately sowing confusion, fear, and doubt by aggressively questioning credibility (with or without evidence, since what matters is creating doubt, not proving a point), creating or claiming hoaxes, or generating harassment campaigns designed to make it harder for credible conduits of information to operate, especially on social media which tends to be harder for a government to control like mass media.” Use of internet platforms in this manner undermines democracy in a way that cannot be fixed by moderators searching for fake news or hate speech.”
― Roger McNamee, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
The pattern of use of All Lives Matter falls into this category, as a distraction, a means to confuse, distort, shout down, drown out and thus counter genuine voices seeking justice and an end to racist violence, and an end to Structural Racism.
'ALM' is being worked in conjunction with white supremacist political grooming operations.
Questions to ask
So if anyone cries 'all lives matter' you might want to ask them these questions:
"What are you doing to stop the oppression of all and any lives anywhere?
What funds are you donating to what 'all lives matter' activist organisations or campaigns and what are they doing to prevent abuse, and what are they doing to protect the lives of any group of people under threat?
What charities or NGOs operating under the 'all lives matter' banner are you supporting that are directly confronting lethal abuse by any party against another?
If 'all lives matter' to you, are you actively working to abolish poverty, everywhere?
Do you support the immediate abolishing of poverty for all people, everywhere, without exception?"
Because if 'all lives matter', and then they do not support these aims, then clearly, they do not really mean that 'all lives matter'.
It could also mean that they have not thought this through - it may mean they have been misled, and thus by posing the questions one might offer them a pathway towards helping them work that out for themselves. This is a task for white people, a white in white non-violent action.
Either way, Black Lives most certainly do matter - Racism is disgusting invention and a dysfunctional behaviour at every level; it is based on falsehoods that can only be sustained by indoctrination and dishonesty within the social structures around us.
We must deal with both, and we must with the violence inherent in one group claiming superiority over another.
Aboriginal people, the oldest living culture on Earth then, and now, in chains, in Australia.
Estimates suggest that a total of 2 billion Aboriginal people have lived in that time span, and until the white Christian Europeans arrived, they were a stable, diverse, egalitarian culture, with 500 language groups, spread all over Australia. The last uncontacted group emerged from the bush in the 1960s. They have suffered horror upon horror, and are still profoundly oppressed by the invading culture.
Black Lives Matter.
Racism and White Supremacy was well established, as an international phenomenon, by the time the European Christians arrived. It remains a serious problem within Australia to this day.
It is one of the English speaking worlds most shameful situations.
It is one few speak honestly about.
It is a crime against Humanity.
What to do, a thought exercise.
1. Acknowledge that all Hierarchy of Violence Cultures are toxic, abuse ridden cultures. Just admit it. Say it out loud, now. Get it off your chest. Be honest.
2. The monuments and structures such cultures construct are therefore monuments to pathological abusive behaviour. They may be very well made, beautifully crafted. But being stabbed by a kitchen knife or a bejewelled, golden blade made by superior Japanese craftsman makes no difference. It is still being stabbed. Harm is harm.
3. Take them down, all of them. Dis-establish them.
4. For example, take the stone of the Pyramids, or the Norman Castles, and re-purpose it to build social housing to last centuries. These are both monuments to Power Disparity that was built to enable, justify and rationalise atrocity and abuse. They do not deserve to stand.
5. Create scale models of these monuments for museums, so that we can look back on the odious history and understand the crimes committed, the harms caused, the realities of the lives lived under such duress. And we can say 'never again' and mean it.
6. Be aware of all and every Artificial Power Disparity that permits abuse to occur, and dismantle all of them. A police man with gun, and a bad attitude. Not a healthy social entity.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
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Learning all the time, learning through honesty, learning because we care.
If we use a metaphor and suggest that Racism is a Mental, Social, Economic and Political Virus, then Honesty across all History Education Curricula, and in all Universities and Museums, is part of the vaccine and we, we the healthy, evidence based decent people who reach out to ensure that Racism and other similar oppressions are confronted and then excised from our culture, we are the Medics.
Poverty is also key to this, as is kindness. Kindness is political. Poverty is oppression, because it is a structured part of the existing economic system. Poverty also causes profound chronic stress. Kindness as a political dynamic alleviates both. Abolishing poverty is a crucial political act of kindness, above and beyond all charitable action.
Jacinda Ardern, as New Zealand's current Prime Minister articulates what that means in practice.
On June 8th, 2020, the New Zealand Government announces that they had eliminated community transmission of COVID19 within New Zealand.
In this video New Zealand government lays out that they have no new cases of SARSCOV2 infection or COVID19 disease, and that to all intents an purposes they are ready to return to 'normal' life, to restart normal economic and social activity within New Zealand. They will of course remain vigilant.
In this presentation, Jacinda Ardern lays out the time line for New Zealand's action taken, starting from their very first confirmed case of COVID19.
The New Zealand Government and the people, together, took action immediately after WHO issued global notifications and it was clear that a global pandemic was under way.
On 28 January, the Ministry of Health set up the National Health Coordination Centre (NHCC) in response to the outbreak. An Infectious and Notifiable Diseases Order was issued to take effect from 30 January,which required health practitioners to report any suspected cases.
From that point forwards, they paid close attention to what was happening around them, they drew on the experience of the Chinese, the Taiwanese, The South Koreans and others and they moved with clarity to stop any importation of the virus, to limit the community transmission of the virus within New Zealand and to work towards eradicating it from the population.
They have achieved that in 11 weeks.
I have posted previously about the efficacy of this kind of protocol, within a time line of 12 weeks, to achieve the same result, in any population, anywhere.
I have posted my thoughts about the British government's quite different approach.
In essence it boils down to this : The UK Government chose to allow the spread, the community transmission of the infection in order to game the situation, to exploit the emerging vulnerability so that they could re-rig the economy in classic neoLiberal fashion, as outlined in detail in Naomi Klein's 2006 study of this pattern of political, economic and ideological anti-democratic policy enforcement, Shock Doctrine. The exact opposite of kindness, the exact opposite of the policy chosen and implemented by New Zealand's government.
In choosing this policy direction this they have caused 60,000 excess deaths, most due to COVDI19, and many due to loss of NHS normal service as it was converted to COVID19 status en masse, which was a dreadful policy - it ignored everything that is known and proven practice in managing and controlling an infectious disease that is at community transmission stage.
I wrote about that wilful ignoring the evidence, with focus on the utility of Fever Hospitals as a key element in controlling and stopping community transmission.
The UK Government have lied repeatedly about their actions, when challenged. They claim they are following the Science. That is a blatant lie.
The UK Government have also co-opted every push back by epidemiologists, public health professionals, health care professionals, social care professional,.teachers and many others who have challenged them and demanded changes to policy, based on the science.
Every action the Government has taken has led to continued transmission, rather than suppressing and stopping community transmission.
The ordinary people are the ones who have slowed the transmission - by staying home, by observing physical distancing, by their discipline. By enduring the limitations of a Government declared shut-down that was inadequately resourced. By putting up with the disruption to daily life, to family life, by staying home and by that means alone was the community transmission reduced.
The NHS staff have been forced to work with inadequate support across the country, care workers in residential care settings have been forced to work with inadequate support across the 11,500 care homes and other settings across the country.
So the question raised today, by New Zealand's present status is this - can this country, The United Kingdom, it's Government and it's people, learn from the present, in the present, in order to create a safe and healthy and prosperous future?
What is the answer to this question?
The answer is the UK Government has no intention of learning from New Zealand, or China, or from the WHO. Their policy on Corona Virus is deliberate, and they have no intention of stopping the spread, eradicating the virus within the islands of Britain. They are causing harm to the citizens of the UK in pursuit of ideological political economic profits and power grabbing.
They should be arrested, for misfeasance, misconduct in public office and for manslaughter.
The people have been abandoned by their Government, their press and are divided and in danger.
Statues and the past.
image source : "being colour-blind isn't good enough."
This weekend, people demonstrating their feeling, and their understanding of the situation, past and present, concerning Racism, Slavery and Empire took to the streets across Britain.
Some people took direct action in Bristol, within the context of Global Anti-Racist Violence movement, Black Lives Matter and the international response to the widely published video of the 8 and a half minute murder of George Floyd by 4 Minneapolis Police Officers.
A gathering of demonstrators toppled a statue of a Bristol based slaver trader, Sir Edward Colston, off it's plinth, and dragged it to the harbour, where his ships had berthed, where the bodies of slaves who had died on his ships, in chains and utter misery were often thrown, more than 300 years ago, and they pushed the statue over the rails, and into the waters, where it sank to beneath the waterline, to huge cheers.
An iconic moment, generated by genuine popular action.
It has since been retrieved. It will be place in a Museum. The people of Bristol have spent many, many years working through the various democratic processes afforded them to have the statue of this notorious slaver removed. Time and time again promises have been made, and time and time again delays and obstruction by local right wing politicians have stymied their best efforts.
Direct action was what remained. The toppling of the statue was filmed, the event has become an educational focal point, and no doubt the press will move on - however hundreds of thousands if not millions of people have restarted their education on slavery and racism history within the UK.
Public Education.
The toppling of this one statue stands in contrast to the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein, orchestrated by the invading American Army, in Baghdad in 2003, and the dreadful slaughter that followed that propaganda moment.
The widespread publication of video from US air gunships shooting a crowd of unarmed civilians in Baghdad stimulated a similar reaction, of horror and revulsion among decent people world wide. Julian Assange is in jail, Chelsea Manning is under constant oppression. Tony Blair and George Bush walk free, and receive vat pensions from the tax payers.
We are learning about our shared past in ways that the Establishment of the UK, the USA and other places have resisted, and are still resisting.
Priti Patel's threat's of 'justice', and Johnson's claim of 'thuggery subverting' the Black Lives Matter demonstrations' are typical of this continued 'refusal to learn', this determined refusal to address long standing and present abuses of Power. They do not want to learn. They know enough already.
Corona Virus and BAME communities within the UK.
And there is the learning that we need with regards to Corona Virus and BAME communities within the UK, where the experience and evidence of the past four dreadful months,as outlined in a recent report on how long standing experience of racism underlies what the data is revealing : there is a proportionally greater lethal impact of the disease COVID19 across BAME communities. And there are genuine concerns that the UK Government is limiting the discussion of those factors related to structural racism and social and economic inequity, by excluding them from discussion.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the MP for Streatham, said the fact the review overlooked factors arising from structural racism and wrongly focused on comorbidities including obesity and diabetes sent a message that “we don’t matter”.
Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, the MP for Slough, who has lost three relatives to coronavirus, said: “It’s all very well saying black lives matter but if you’re not going to be taking any action to make sure that, yes, those lives do matter, then those are just hollow words.
What does the UK Government fear the public might learn that they already know?
A friend pointed out that the rulers of the UK, the Establishment, probably know as much as they want to know - which is mostly what ever they need to know to be able to retain their power and status, their established position of occupying an artificial power disparity which they can exploit to garner more wealth to service ever greater power.
They do not want us to learn what a callous, cruel and nasty hierarchy they really are. They certainly do not want that knowledge publicised, discussed in public, in an open and transparent manner.
They are interested in learning better the skills of manipulation, deceit, grooming, psychometric analysis - and they study us very closely indeed in order to be in the best position to undermine any movements that might 'threaten' their ability to hold on to power, as a class.
Learning from history to avoid causing harms in the future is not on their curriculum. They will justify and rationalise the harms they cause, as they have always done, as long as they occupy positions of power in our society, in this culture.
Past and Present, and learning.
Here, with regards to COVID19, and infectious diseases, we have an example of the Establishment appearing to 'refuse to learn' in the present, with regards to China, Taiwan and New Zealand, and how to manage an epidemic, and refusing to learn from the past, with regards to Racism, and institutionalised Racist violence by police and others.
I would suggest that they are not refusing to learn rather that those 'mistakes' are essential tools of their continued oppression, and they have no desire to not have those tools at hand.
Thus we can see that using the phrase 'refusal to learn' in relation to the UK Government and Establishment is a fig leaf, it is a way of avoiding facing the truth - it holds out the hope that the rulers might, if we plead enough, if we vote in the right politicians, if we protest and demonstrate and remain loyal to the ideal of a democratic system, that they might choose to learn the lessons and change their behaviour.
In both cases the 'refusal to learn' leaves an injustice unresolved, and causes great and lasting harm to many, many innocent people.
This refusal to learn is deliberate.
They really do not care for our lives.
Ordinary peoples lives do not matter.
That is what COVID19 has revealed in stark detail in the UK and USA.
New Zealand's Government embarrasses them both.
The British Establishment, and the British Government, Civil Service and the Press are not fit and proper people to be the most powerful actors in this country. They are abusing us all through their established power, which was artificially created, through conquest, though slavery and oppression, and it is a power which is artificially maintained, through political grooming, corruption and bullying.
They must be held to account, before more harm is caused.
But how? That is the most pressing question we face today.
Total non compliance, rent and mortgage strike might be enough to call them to the table.
Who knows?
I don't.
Democratic learning.
How can anyone be expected to exercise Democracy without having any practice?
Why do our schools eschew Democracy as an organisational methodology that students, staff and parents engage in?
Why do we permit the Secretary of Education the powers over all students, in relative terms, of a King?
How can 12 years of habituation to hierarchy and authority prepare our youth for active engagement as democratically active citizens?
"Imagine a school where children and teenagers are accorded all the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship; where students truly practice, rather than just read about, the principles of free speech, free association, and freedom to choose their own activities; where students vote on the rules that affect them, and serve on juries to try those accused of violating those rules. What better training than this to prepare students for democratic citizenship?"
Take these thoughts home with you, and muse upon the difference this approach might make to our current situation.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"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.
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.
