Showing posts with label slavery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label slavery. Show all posts

Racism is not Xenophobia, it is not Anti-Semitism: all three are global working class issues.

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
"You'll never kill our will to be free!"

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."

Slavery, Independence, Myth and Racism

If one's own relationship with one's partner is toxic, and one does nothing to confront that,  or is unable to see that toxicity for what it is, then it seems to me that pointing out the toxicity of others relationships and then suggesting one knows how to help them deal with that activity is a deliberate active ignoring of what is. It goes beyond not knowing.  



Truly ignorant.


Ignorance and not knowing.
For me these are two different qualities.
Ignorance is the deliberate action of ignoring something.
Not knowing is not knowing.
Tony Blair was ignorant with regards to Iraq. He deliberately ignored the fact that an invasion would lead to mass civilian deaths. David Cameron was ignorant with regards to Libya. He deliberately ignored the fact that supporting a violent 'revolution' by bombing Libyan infrastructure, and supporting violent militia would lead to mass civilian deaths.
Both knew what they were doing, and both deserve the derogatory implication of 'ignorant'.
If someone does not know about something, that is merely not knowing. Indeed not knowing is a core quality of Science, it is what drives good Science.
The problems of Power are best dealt with locally, then nationally, then internationally. We are in a toxic relationship with whoever Rules us. Being ruled over is a toxic state.

As David Smail writes:

"Hardly any of the 'symptoms' of psychological distress may correctly be seen as medical matters. The so-called psychiatric 'disorders' are nothing to do with faulty biology, nor indeed are they the outcome of individual moral weakness or other personal failing. They are the creation of the social world in which we live, and that world is structured bypower.
    Social power may be defined as the means of obtaining security or advantage, and it will be exercised within any given society in a variety of forms: coercive (force), economic (money power) and ideological (the control of meaning). Power is the dynamic which keeps the social world in motion. It may be used for good or for ill.
    One cannot hope to understand the phenomena of psychological distress, nor begin to think what can be done about them, without an analysis of how power is distributed and exercised within society."

Genuine healthy self governance is something a people must actively participate in. Voting, on it's own, is not that. But that cannot happen until a people understands the toxicity of their situation, by reflecting on the evidence before them.

We all need to grasp that our income taxes and sales taxes are the basic funding mechanism for Government, and that these are the collateral States use to guarantee their lenders that they will pay the lenders back. That this tax revenue belongs to the people not the Government, who merely hold that money in trust. That has implications. Not least that policy must be evidence based, must serve the peoples real needs and must not be subject to ideology, belief or religion.
Start at home, folks!
Let the people of America confront the abuse of Power they are funding. That way they can prevent sending their military out all over the world to interfere in other peoples lives.
Likewise the people of Britain. Similarily for each and every juridstriction. Deal with the issues at home, first. Demonstrate that it can be done, and is practical.
If they succeed in that enterprise, then they can turn attention to other states where oppression exists, and encourage the people there to follow suit. Because they have proven it can be done. Because they can provide meaningful material support in that enterprise.
Power does all it can to manipulate the people over whom they have that power to ensure that that NEVER happens. Power is bullying.

Kitty Jones has written a really useful blog piece on this. The dynamics will be easily recognised from inter-personal behaviour we have all experienced. The same dynamics apply to any Political Power system that is a dominating system, a hierarchy of power,  that exercise power over the people.

The truth about the promise of African 'Independence' after WWII, as an example.

Slavery was a separate matter. Slavery was almost an accident. The first colonies used white slaves and white indentured workers, who died in the hot climates of the Carribean and Southern parts of the colonies, from heat exhaustion and malaria. The drive to bring in slaves from areas of West Africa where immunity to malaria was common emerged as a response to the weakness of the white slaves. They had no such immunity. Nor were they acclimatised to the heat of the tropics. There was an existing slave trade in North Africa, and it was to this trade that the British and others turned. They could have taken slaves from South America, or North Africa, or Asia. But the trip across the Atlantic from West Africa was by their estimation more efficient. 
In North America, Racism was institutionalised in order to ensure slaves and poor whites did not unite, locally, to challenge their oppressors. The abolition of slavery 150 years later was not about the welfare of the slaves, it was about the Industrialists need to put a stop to ultra cheap labour, to push more and more people into the factory wage work system, which they were busy building as an international empire. If another state had used slave labour in factories, they would have been able to compete and win against the factory wage work system. That potential is what really drove the American Civil War, and the Abolition of Slavery by the British some years later, not the welfare of the slaves. But they could not come out and say that. So they used Christians and Liberals as cover for the plot.
The Betrayal of African Independence, post WWII, is the primary driver of oppression across Africa since WWII.. It had nothing to do with slavery per se. And yet it had.

School history texts claim it happened, and that it was a reward for support in both the European World Wars, but that the Africans fell into conflict with each other, (because they have always been 'uncivilised', primitive, is the standard unspoken, implication) and because of African conflict in many cases it failed.

What actually happened was that every time an African government sought to take control of the resoources of it's lands, above and below, the Europeans murdered the principals, installed their own proxies and maintained their control of 'strategic resources'. They hired in what ever local African thugs would submit to them, and put them to work.
Gaddafi understood that.
Patrice Lumumba understood that.
The ANC reneged on that, and the white liberals who supported them did not understand that.
And had nothing to do with Slavery. Which has been the primary driver of white consciousness concerning black Africans.....
It had much more to do with control of wealth creating raw materials and economic hegemony.
What is implicitly Racist is suggesting the those Black Africans who took the Crowns shilling - the ones the Europeans powers installed, after they murdered the ones who sought to claim African Raw Materials for African Wealth creation - are part of 'Africans savagery towards each other'.

And that ties into the institutionalisation of Racism in the colonies. We are back full circle, where clever lies are used to mask the reality. Gaddafi was murdered, and the State that the Libyan people  created together with the wealth of their oil revenues was destroyed because the example of an African state managing it's own resources to nurture it's own people could not be permitted to continue, and could not be allowed to inspire other states to take similar measures.

Venezuela is on the same trajectory.

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.