Boris Johnson, Geoffrey Cox, Donald Trump, Bullying, death threats and a Secret Trade Deal

I witnessed deliberate, calculated bullying in Parliament.

 

 

General Attorney Geoffrey Cox,  at the despatch box, in The House of Commons, speaking for the Government

Wednesday, 25 Spetember, 11.30 onwards.

What I saw.

What I witnessed..

I watched as Attorny General Geoffrey Cox's polite deftly, and humourusly deflected questioning about the advice he gave the Prime Minister on prorogation. He was not at liberty to pass on any materials, due to a confidentiality issue...

Then, when the questions ceased, and the discussion moved on, I witnessed as Geoffry Cox launch into a polemic rage, his well fed face getting redder and redder, his voice louder and angrier, and with this intimidating behaviour towards the opposition, taking up more space, stretching his arms out, whipping up his own party, and roaring at the opposition, calling  them 'cowards'.

'Cowards'?

He is the coward - he refused to offer up his bad advice.

He refused to bow to the court, claiming to respect it and say  the court was wrong.

Not for the benefit of MPs, but for the benefit of rousing angry misled thugs (a tiny minority, most not actual Brexiteers, just idiots looking for a scrap) on our streets, of whom, as Farage said on three occasions that I am aware of he would "understand if there was violence on the streets if they didn't get Brexiy".

Really - how can that theatrical bullying be considered appropriate in a chamber where legislation, regulation and constituency representation is it's purpose?

Not good.

That was public bullying behaviour.

Tactical public bullying in office.

That needs calling out.

Big time.

Not good at all.

Death Threats

Then later on, the conversation between MP Pauline Sherrif and Prime Minister Boris Johnson concerning the use of the language of betrayal, surrender, sabotage, cowards, traitors etc.,  and it's potential to escalate tension and hatreds, and the reality of death threats being made in increasing frequency against MPs, not least in the court statement of the man who assasinated MP Jo Cox, and those convicted of conspiring to murder MP Rosie Cooper,,,,

And Boris replied "Never before ..... have I heard such Humbug!"

definition : deceptive or false talk or behaviour.

"those comments are sheer humbug"

The Prime Minister just brushed aside her concerns as 'false and deceptive'.

What was that?

That was bullying. straight up.

It was deliberate. It's all deliberate, when Boris Johnson opines in public, it's a script, a tactical weaponised wall of verbiage,  with the corpses of Latin allusion strewn across the rambling of thise Power addict.

All of this just after US President Donald J. Trump announced at the UN, on Monday :

"We are working closely with Boris Johnson on a magnificent new trade deal."

Not 'we are negotiating with the UK Government'.... a new trade deal.

Where is the UK Parliamentary scrutiny or oversight and participation in these 'negotiations'?

Boris has not been negotiating with the EU, he has been negotiating with the US Corporations represented by the US Government, in secrey, in full view.

Taking back control.

"We are working closely with PM Boris Johnson a magnificent new trade deal."

The deals, contracts and legislative package are already written up, ready to roll, bar the official signing ceremonies.

This reminds me of Chile, 1979, when after a manufactured 'crisis' - a violent military coup - a complete legislative package arrived from The Chicago School of Economics outling the internal legislation and external trade deals to NeoLiberalise the entire Chilean Economy.

https://slate.com/business/2016/01/in-chicago-boys-the-story-of-chilean-economists-who-studied-in-america-and-then-remade-their-country.html

Pinochet, Thatcher..... Thatcher entered 10 Downing Street in May 1979.

Pinochet took power on 11th September 1979...

Brexit is a manufactured 'crisis'.

Clear as a bell.

Boris has been 'negotiating' with Trump and the US State, rather than the EU.

They have plans to force through a No-Deal Brexit at any costs...

A brief background of the Chicago Boys : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys

A more detailed account of what happened following the imposition of the Chicago Boys economic plan upon Chile...

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-chicago-boys-in-chile-economic-freedoms-awful-toll/

As and when Corbyn gains office, with even a solid majority, plus support from other social progressives, we will be faced with some serious power struggles - someone will want to make the economy scream.

The Tax Havens that nest English Capital must be protected. Leveson II must not happen. War Crimes investigations and indictments must be thwarted.

There's a lot of work ahead, and we the grass roots will need to robust in defending our  democracy and expanding it.

It must be done, it can be done, and given that the media can make the small seem big, and the big seem invisible, I have a strong feeling that the invisible decent, loving majority will prevail.


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.

Childhood Maltreatment, Institutional Society and the Biology of The Brain

WE ARE NOT DESIGNED FOR CHRONIC STRESS - NO ORGANISM AND NO LIVING SYSTEM IS.

"The exquisite vulnerability of the hippocampus to the ravages of stress is one of the key neuroscience discoveries of the 20th century.

Sapolsky et al. provided early clues when they found that elevating corticosterone stress hormone levels into the high physiological range for an extended period reduced the number of hippocampal neurons in rats.

Further studies showed that the deleterious effects of glucocorticoids could occur in other regions but that the hippocampus was the primary target.

The outcomes of excessive exposure to glucocorticoids range from the reversible atrophy of dendritic processes and suppression of neurogenesis with acute exposure to frank neuronal death with chronic high-level exposure 

The sensitivity of hippocampal neurons to stress and glucocorticoids has been confirmed in a host of other species, including nonhuman primates."

This was, and remains a really important mainstream article.

Seven years old... pre-Brexit.

http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/15/how-child-abuse-primes-the-brain-for-future-mental-illness/

"Child maltreatment has been called the tobacco industry of mental health. Much the way smoking directly causes or triggers predispositions for physical disease, early abuse may contribute to virtually all types of mental illness.

  

Now, in the largest study yet to use brain scans to show the effects of child abuse, researchers have found specific changes in key regions in and around the hippocampus in the brains of young adults who were maltreated or neglected in childhood.

These changes may leave victimised children more vulnerable to depression, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as adults, the study suggests."

here is the study - https://www.pnas.org/content/109/9/E563

----

I understood over three decades ago that my experience was written into my neurology as I  developed, that my brain was and is always, always growing, and that it is growing in response to and in reaction to my social and material environment and my lived experience within those environments...

Any new practice creates a new neural network.

This is happening all the time.

Music as my practice teaches me this.

Gardening teaches me this.

Just as a state of contentment fosters healthy development, chronic stress distorts and inhibits development.

Chronic Stress.

Repeated stress creates distortions in a developing child's neural networks, and excess chronic cortisol, and other stress hormones, can kill or inhibit the growth of neural cells. 

My childhood taught me this. 
 
Our brains and indeed our bodies and minds need a generally contented background state in order to healthfully develop all our various functional skill sets - learning to walk, learning how to talk, poop in the right place at the appropriate time (becoming aware of our own bodies), moving hand and eye co-ordination, sensing and feeling others emotions and states of being, communicating, listening and hearing, to explore, investigating, understanding and relating to people and events in our lives.

There are body systems designed to deal with occasional stress, because being vulnerable in a dynamic environment, where there are dangers, is to say that unexpected accidents can happen, events can occur that demand rapid reactions, and the body has systems for such occasions.

Extended or chronic distortions of that happy state such as long term abuse, neglect, trauma, chronic stress, bullying etc at any stage from conception through to birth and infancy, and indeed at any time in life, will seriously damage the many systems within in the brain and throughout the body that are designed for short term stress management. We are designed to bounce back from the occasional stress situation.

The more incidents, the more the damage. Because we tend not to remember much of our childhoods, and because the damage is internal, as in neurological and hormonal and other physiological changes occur within the body itself, beyond our vision., a lot of the damage is invisible, in physiological terms, and it may take years, decades for symptoms of that distortion to emerge as disease states.

And because each person is of such unique nature, the outcomes will vary across a population, a family, a community...

That said we would be able to see patterns of behaviour associated with trauma and chronic stresses that are normalised emerge as characteristic of a given group, family, society, traits that would be symptomatic of  the invisible distortions,  expressed as attitudes and reactions that would be woven into their traditions, their biases, their fears and prejudices.*

(*for example, cultures that practice circumcision or female genital mutilation,  people who are taught that war brings glory, that nationalist history justifies the wars that were won because they are a form of 'progress', and those parents who are happy for their children to enlist in military combat groups - all of these characteristics can be said to be cultural, rather than personal).

The biological basis of these realities would be invisible to parents who did not know this. There are time parents do not understand their child's behaviour, and it may have causation outside their awareness.

These dynamics would be invisible to the people about their own behaviour, which they would normalise - cultures where beating and slapping children  is permitted, and is passed from generation to generation, and the adults will say 'Well, i was a bit wild, and I need that to show me to calm down!" is an example.

There are dynamics that ordinary people have no control over. Parents cannot be blamed for the stresses of poverty, war, abuse in their own lives, and in truth and all humility,  most parents are decent, loving people who want to do the best, and they often are stymied by the burden of social stressors.

Cycles of learned behaviour and chronic stress.

Behaviours emerging as a result of that socially mediated damage would be misread as the child's bad character, leading to a further compounding of the issues for both parent and child.

The very concept of Oppositional Defiance Disorder, as a diagnosis,is an obvious deliberate error in that regard, an act of unimaginable cruelty.

History

This has been happening to children in this hierarchically violent culture for thousands of years, and we have not 'adapted' to it, to that stressed situation, traumatised environment.

We are all just coping with it - adaptation to a pathology such as depression, or the desire to rape, murder, wield vast power is impossible. and utterly illogical in bio-logic terms...
Every war causes massive brain damage across the population who endure it, and that damage, being unresolved, perpetuates a stream of behavioural pathology that will inevitably feed back into the background of violence in that society. This is how the psychology of a hierarchically violent system develops.

So, the state of constant stress not a natural optimal physiological health state, it's certainly not psychologically healthy.

That children and the distressed are held responsible by society, that it is they who have something wrong with them which needs to be fixed is a huge issue.

And this is where the Religious, the Ideological and the Authoritarian exerts so much force that adversely impacts the lives of children - there is no escape ( 'no child left behind') and this, of course, causes even more damage.

Blame the child who is stabbing another on the street.

Punish this damaged child. Demand he or she 'fits in'. Do not ask what happened to this child that his or her behaviour has become so distorted.

Label the difficult child.

Provide no recognition of the child's lived experience and the kind of social setting he or she was born into, and how that afflicted the child.

An example from recent history.

The Conservative and Unionist Party and the Liberal Democrats started to close down "Kids Company", an organisation that pioneered 'trauma informed care' in front line support for seriously at risk children, for over 13 years, with 6,000 active cases of at risk children on their books at the time of closure.

Let me clarify, Kids Company reached out to the most at risk children, on the edge of total breakdown, children with no place left to go, abandoned, left to their own devices.

These are the kinds of children who are targeted by criminals for grooming into their networks, and to counter this, to offer hope they developed a trauma informed approach rather than a regulatory, sanction based approach. In providing an emotionally, non judgemental safe space as the starting point for building a relationship, Kids Company helped thousands of children that Council and State provided services could not or would not deal with.

They were funded by Government funding, a total of £48 million of 13 years.  They were funded to reach the most disturbed, wounded children who were clearly not accessing standard services State and Council Services.

They supported many thousands of children who would have been ignored until they became casualties, addicts, prostitutes, petty dealers, petty thieves or committed suicide, or just coped in psychological agony for the rest of their lives.

Kids Company was funded almost entirely by Government grant.

They tended to spend every penny, and had very little 'reserves'.

They had a staff of 650, ran 11 full time centres across London and had centres in Bristol and other cities. Kids Company spent everything on ensuring the children's immediate needs were being met, without being judgemental or using sanction reward dynamics.

It was because these 'reserves' were not maintained in sufficient value that they drew attention from Government auditors post 2010, when the Conservative and Lib Dem Coalition took office.

There was a considerable campaign of media allegations of abuse, misuse of cash, failures in duty of care and accusations that they just fed money to criminal children, allegations which have never been substantiated.

In November 2015, the Public Accounts Committee described the organisation as a failed "13 year experiment" and criticised both the Labour and Conservative governments for continuing to give public money to a private charity against civil service advice.

In 2019, 5 years later we see knife crime, youth gangsters behaviour escalating. We see other front line services becoming underfunded, understaffed with complementary services being much more difficult to access and co-ordinate, all the time whilst being privatised - 'low wages leads to better economic efficiency.'

Is there a connection?

The 'standing army' of youth offenders under 'care' runs to about 100,000 children, on average, over the past 50 years.

That tells me that the institutional denial of violence in our society is impacting children's lives within this society and that this is driving much of peoples material distress - this is a very stressful and harsh society.

I can easily extrapolate and imagine the lived experience of this  dynamic across an entire population over time leading to very, very cruel traditions.

Good news -

1. We can help people to recover, because we know that the brain is plastic, it's elastic, it's a constantly growing organ. Optimal healing requires the person who is suffering feels psychologically and materially safe.

One cannot recover when one is insecure, frightened, impoverished, and it is obvious that healing and recovery is less likely where any chronic stress is induced by external demands.

The cure for homelessness is to give the person a clean home, and to support them rebuilding relationships in their lives..

People in distress need kindness, they need material and emotional support more than they need prescribed diagnostic treatment protocols, mote than they need sanctions, regulatory systems and judgemental judicial approaches.

If we  to do the job correctly, as the biology  indicates, then we can help most people.

And for those who are unable to recover, those who are, for whatever reason too broken, then with a trauma informed approach we can care for them with greater compassion and understanding.

2. We can prevent this from happening in the first place, by giving all parents the time and support to chill with and bond/attach to their children in the biologically optimal manner. Supporting parenting more completely, especially during the first four years, will have a huge impact on life long health.

This will have a grounded healthful impact on society, and will save significant amounts of state resources into the future, and it will revolutionise Health Care Systems and Education systems

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.

War and the Climate - some rough ideas, an outline.

I am attempting to formulate some policy suggestions on ceasing war as part of the work to cease environmental degradation, pollution, genocide of 'un-developed' cultures and deal with Climate Change...

 

Where I stand: Industrial Hierarchically Violent culture is the problem, CO2 is a symptom, pollution is a symptom, corruption is a symptom.

Humanity is not the problem.

Institutional inhumanity is the problem.

Humanity is the solution.

These two are juxtaposed in this one photo op.

Thus the matter has psycho-social elements, as much as practical, technical and material elements.

My suggestions at this early stage:

1. War Crimes indictments in the all countries engaging in war, supported by the vast bulk of the home tax paying population, their judiciaries, Faiths, the UN and the ICC.

Confront the war makers, hold them to account will prevent future politicians from war making.

1.a Reparations - support all the countries and communities damaged by war. If the war making states indict their war criminals it will send a solid proof of our willingness to be peaceful. Thus punitive reparations would be un-necessary, as the wrong doers in chief have been held to account. We should still make reparation, or restorative justice a key element in our response to war making damage.

For example, Europe could repurpose, send and budget for housing building operations, as support for those Syrian and Libyan communities afflicted by Western sponsored violence, so that they can return as soon as is feasible to a safe social and economic environment. (see 2 below).

2. Dismantling the Military Industrial Financial Political complex, and coverting all military into land workers and rescue/support services for anywhere adversely affected by intense storms, droughts, sea rises...Nurturing Heroes who build and make safe, rather than destroy.

3. Permaculture everywhere, especially in urban areas. Organic clean foods as the standard. Transition from where we are to clean food futures must be managed carefully, always bearing in mind the food security of the people, locally and nationally.

Remove all combustion engines (particulates end up in food, in foetus blood and in food products grown around frequent combustion use) - thus to grow food in urban areas demands removal of combustion engines...

3.b Put people back onto the land to nurture it - Permaculture is human labour intensive in the initial stages.

Once established, the management of that land, and the harvesting of food products will be need to be done by hand, rather than by machines. We can wholly avoid plastics in the food industry. We can shorten distance travelled by food, from growing areas to consumers.

We will need people on the land who are intimate with it's dynamics and who can spot trends and take appropriate action in advance. We will need those people to be forming happy communities, geared to producing clean food as the primary 'profit'

We will find a cohort willing to leave cities to do all of this. We do not have to 'impose' it, or order folk to move. There are in many places sound peasant cultures who would take up this project....

Local and National Food System Resilience...

3.c Protect all indignenous, aboriginal, pre-development lands from any further incursions, and listen to their relational wisdom, and learn from them. 

Drop the hubris of Industrial Civilisation and GDP as a measure of human progress - it does not represent human relational progress. It represents the acquisition and concentration of wealth as a politicial hegemon.

3.d Reforestation, rather than mono species plantation systems, although there will be areas where that can work, we need natural diverse forests to return...

4. End holiday flights, cruise ships etc - all energy intense long distance consumer leisure travel to be eliminated until we have clearly clean methods to support such activity...

4.a Shorten working hours, give more time for holidays so that people can have extended time with family and community in their home places.... meet new people, relax and enjoy free time in their own communities...

5. Cradle to Cradle roll out on ALL industrial processes.

This means redesigning all industrial processes such that the materials and resources are resourced sustainably, and are turned into products that can be recycled, re-used, bio-degraded to become nutrients for further use, or to be returned to ecosystems as nutrient, and that there are no toxic outputs, or 'externalised costs' borne by the ecosystem..

In addition, 100% reuse of all metals, woods, etc... once a product has reached end of life, it must be recycled. There are billions of tons of scrap metal...

6. All profits from industry to be ploughed back into making the changes, rather than feeding shareholders income portfolios, until such time as a balanced system has emerged an is well established..

7. Making indoctrination of children a Crime against Humanity.

7.a Abolishing poverty,

Indoctrination is a huge driver in war making, as is poverty - both condition youth in different ways to volunteering in Military Combat Units as a 'good idea'.

8. Reuniting age split communities.... we need to take care of each other, not put each other into care.... rebuild multigenerational community everywhere... again time within our communities nurturing each other..

9. Universal Basic Income as part of abolishing poverty worldwide...

10. Trauma Informed care and preventative practice to be established in all services, all education systems, all policing and all regulatory systems that interface between institutional power and the individual.

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. 

Epsteins Death: Fetishisation, Drama and Evidence.

Most of the people I know fetishizing about Jefferey Epstein's death have very little to say that is of any use to Survivors.  Sexual exploitation and grooming are quite common activities. Industrial scale activities. Globally sex trafficking is valued at $150 billion.

Global statistics on human trafficking are on the rise: every day thousands of women, men and children are trafficked worldwide for various exploitative purposes. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that there are currently 25 million victims of human trafficking around the world.

Human trafficking is an issue for all countries and communities. Importantly (and surprising for many), human trafficking does not necessarily involve the crossing of international borders. Moving from town to town, within a single country, the people victimised are shunted around like cattle to the market. 

image source: here

Most people I see obsessing about Epstein and other famous abusers appear to have not engaged with current study, research or writings on the prevalence of sexual exploitation, the psychology of sexual abuse, the dynamics of deliberate traumatisation, on the nature of learned behaviour in a toxic environment, on inter-generational behaviour patterning associated with poverty, warfare, deprivation or discrimination, or on the psychology of hierarchically violent cultures, let alone the psychology of egalitarian cultures or even the biology of behaviour.

All of which help inform a grounded understanding of the realities of sexual exploitation as a global cultural problem.

Many of the people I see with this fetish are using a few incidences of sexual exploitation to have a go at selected politicians rather than explore the full meaning of sexual exploitation as a characteristic of this culture we are living within. It's not just the rich and powerful who behave in such awful manner. The problem is cultural. Misogyny is everywhere. Sexual harassment is ubiquitous. If you're a women, you meet it everywhere you go.

What does not happen much is decent men talking seriously to other men, saying "enough of this already - it stops here!" and taking deliberate, informed action to confront the attitudes that enable the stream of sexualised harassment, that feed the culture of male entitlement and accepted 'natural' misogyny - men are more powerful than women, naturally - that is the toxic sea within which sexual exploitation industry floats it's boat.

Many of those people I am writing about have taken no viable action to support Survivors, even though the Survivors have been the very people who have been working so hard to bring cases forward. People make memes about Andrew Windsor, they take aim at Andrew Windsor, yet they do not want to talk about the lives of the survivors who challenged Mr. Windsor. What they lived through and why they were forced to live through all of that by a careless society. Too much work, me thinks. If we look at it honestly, we cannot ignore, we have to take action.

When Survivors step forward and place witness testimony and evidence in the public domain, when they take up that exhausting work that has been carried out for decades, and has been bringing proven offenders to justice, they are serving all of us.

The conviction rate for Rape in the UK is less than 2% of cases reported, and we know that reported cases are way below the real world incidence. 

No.

It seems to me that there is a pattern of people who prefer their 'beliefs', their fetishes, their drama and their lack of knowledge over the hard, courageous work of confronting abuse directly, the work that so many Survivors are engaged in.

We all had so much to say about Jimmy Savile, and yet nothing to say to the Survivors, let alone the desire to listen to them and to learn from them. Savile is still more famous than the people he harmed. Hitler is more famous than the people his Government harmed. Johnson is more famous than the people his regime has harmed. Blair is more famous than the people his wars have harmed.

What support do the Elite Pedo-ring Conspiracy Freaks offer to the millions of ordinary Survivors dealing with their abuse every day?

Where are the go-fund-me crowd funding efforts to support their legal teams?

Where were the Marches for Justice when men and women who had been victimised, abused and harmed were taking the Vatican to court? Why was the bulk of society absent to that effort?

Where are the press writers writing about cultural abuse dynamics, with a view to examining this culture and it's abuse dynamic, honestly?

Who truly supports Survivors of Sexual Abuse by going to the Survivors and asking, in all humility, "What can we do to help you?" and "What do you think needs to be done to prevent this from happening again?"

None of us would know anything of Epstein's activities if it were not for the courage of Survivors - those women who decided it was time to confront the powerful, knowing full well the power disadvantage they were facing. What courage does that take? 

Courage to speak truth to power, honestly, fearlessly even though they were likely petrified.

And note that he was indicted, and was able to use his power and connections to evade the appropriate sanction, and was able to continue to cause harm. Reminds me of some Catholic Priests, and others, abusers who were allowed to evade sanction in order to preserve the good name of others.

None of us would know anything of what went on in elite Catholic boarding schools, and many other forms of institutional residential care systems worldwide were it not for the Survivors who took direct action, via the courts.

Support Survivors in their work, please.

Do not fall for the drama, the feverish drama, the speculation.

If you don't know enough to understand the problems, then please, be humble enough to learn.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

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

Political Grooming Gangs and Racism - Taboo must be broken.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is this form of Racism so common?

Where did this come from?

Who benefits from this skewed portrayal?

Political Grooming: inventing Race as a social weapon. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Hierarchy ordained by God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

American Police Brutality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Floyd

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

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

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

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

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

Justice was not forthcoming. Tensions flared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Race, Policing and history.

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

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

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

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

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

Khalil Muhammad  is an American historian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 13th Amendment 

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

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

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