Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 30
June 23, 2020
Uprising On Main Street
“It really doesn’t matter who gets into office it’s all going to come down to the response of the people.”
----------Black Panther Aaron Dixon
Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown recently wrote that “defund the police” is an ill-advised slogan that will hurt Democrats come November, as though the ongoing mass mobilizations around police brutality weren’t fueled by popular rage at the failure of voting or anything else to offer a path to change. “[If] you take away people’s feelings of personal safety,” warned Brown, “you lose voters.” Ah, feelings! A better word would be illusions. The people for whom the police are a constant predatory menace don’t have any personal safety to lose, and they are in a position to burn the country to the ground, as recent events have shown. If they strike the match, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men will not be able to put “personal safety” together again.
Could this alarming prospect be the reason for so much bizarre behavior from those who have long enjoyed the illusion of physical security? Like white protesters in Houston kneeling and praying to black residents to be forgiven their racial sins. Like white police officers in Cary, North Carolina washing the feet of black pastors. Like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling down dressed in African kentecloth scarves. Like self-flagellating white people all over the country allegedly sickened by a legacy of slavery they know little about, expressing boundless revulsion over their skin color and earnestly demonstrating their utter unfitness to be or do anything. As convincing as their apparent uselessness is, where is the intended benefit?
On the other hand, the Black Lives Matter advice that whites become “allies” of blacks sounds good but lacks clear meaning. Which black people are whites supposed to make themselves allies of? Barack Obama, who recently helped torpedo a promising social democratic revival that could have put real $20 bills in the pockets of the George Floyds of this world, sparing them the horror of fatal police stops over petty or imaginary offenses triggered by poverty? Candace Owens, who dismisses Floyd as a common criminal and drug addict entirely unworthy of our sympathy? The Congressional Black Caucus, which recently voted unanimously to award trillions of dollars in aid to plundering corporations, thus guaranteeing increased suffering for a large majority of African Americans, who had little enough to start with and now must somehow survive with capital consolidating its already massive holdings in the midst of economic collapse and galloping pandemic?
In short, not all blacks are worthy of support, and many whites are so crippled by self-accusation that they are incapable of providing any. Dilemmas like these should make it clear that solving our racial nightmare will demand more than hashtags and sound bites.
One thing that would help everyone is broad popular understanding of the problem. African-Americans are endangered by police, not because of anything they have done, but because of slavery, which was never entirely abolished. The 13th Amendment declares slavery prohibited “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” which allows it to continue under the aegis of the criminal justice system. The state, as opposed to the individual capitalist, has the authority to perpetuate the slave codes, which criminalize black life and masquerade as impartial justice. As a result, our prisons are jammed with black prisoners, many of whom are dispatched to the chain gang, a form of exploitation that proved a boon to rapid industrial development in the late 19thcentury, and has been enjoying a revival in the era of the “war on drugs.”
Any mention of slavery tends to evoke defensive and dismissive responses from white people, most commonly that slavery is ancient history and hardly an American invention. But in fact slavery was only abolished a century-and-a-half ago, not long in historical time, and was succeeded by Jim Crow, which viciously perpetuated something very much like slavery for another century. And the informal apartheid that exists to this day achieves the same effect as legal segregation did under Jim Crow. Even lynching has not been entirely done away with, as the George Floyd killing attests. The only notable difference between Floyd’s murder and the ritual executions of thousands of African Americans during the Jim Crow era was the people on the sidewalk calling out for mercy: during segregation they would have been cheering the murderer on.
As for slavery in other lands, it carries with it no implications for Americans, and it is Americans we are talking about. In any case, why the constant attempt to evade moral responsibility for slavery? If your child stood accused of burning down the school cafeteria, would you really try to complain that she was being singled out unfairly, since arson has existed all over the world since forever? Probably not.
Discussions of slavery naturally raise the related topic of reparations, some form of which is definitely owed. After all, the industrial revolution was based on cotton, which was produced primarily by slave labor in the United States. Wealth accrued not just to the planter aristocracy of the old South, but also to textile manufacturers in the North and Great Britain, among other commercial and financial beneficiaries forming the core of modern capitalism. As for the slaves, they were not given their “forty acres and a mule” upon their (partial) liberation, which carried severely destructive consequences for the entire society down to the present day.
We can no longer accept refusals to discuss redistribution of the wealth from rich to poor on the grounds that we can’t “just throw money” at problems. Aren’t we doing precisely that right now to shore up capital markets? And aren’t they crashing anyway? It was always ridiculous to claim that the best way to help the poor was to throw money at the rich, but in the midst of an outright depression it’s frankly suicidal. To make a long story short, we cannot confront systemic racism without reversing the gift of trillions of dollars of unearned wealth showered on large corporations in response to the coronavirus crisis. That money should go to areas of popular need, not narrow centers of private greed. Only then can consumption rise, jobs return, and a modicum of justice reign. What are we waiting for?
Equally absurd is the racist ideology underpinning slavery, which posited that Africans needed white guidance to advance on their journey from savagery to civilization. This and other perverse notions took hold of even the most “enlightened” minds. Thomas Jefferson, for example, a child of the Enlightenment and author of the Declaration of Independence, dismissed Indians as "savages" and patronizingly saw blacks as almost equal to whites. They had tolerable memories, he thought, but lacked sufficient intellect to understand Euclid, and were entirely bereft of imagination in his view. Interestingly, brown women attracted Jefferson more than white women, but he was terrified at the prospect of losing racial purity, and looked forward to the day when blacks would be shipped to the Caribbean or returned to Africa, leaving the U.S. “without blot or mixture.”
Elite thought didn’t improve over the next century. At the turn of the 20th century anthropologists placed African Americans somewhere between the great apes and the hominids on the evolutionary scale. Biologists reported that their average brain weight was less than that of Caucasians, and substantially less than that of English-speaking Protestants. Psychologists claimed they were possessed of a primal sexuality and prone to irrationality, especially under stress or in situations of intimacy. Criminologists and eugenicists warned of their allegedly innate brutality and hyper-fertility. Race experts believed they had no mental or physical energy, lacked volition, and worked as little as possible, preferring indolence and sunshine to developing civilized artifacts like architecture or literature. One of the most important books published in 1900 was entitled, “The Mystery Solved: The Negro a Beast.”
Doctors predicted they would die out from disease and perversion.
Today, we see the persistence of such prejudicial attitudes, though now the alleged deficiencies of African Americans are believed to reside in their history or culture, rather than in their very nature. But such explanations “might as well be called genetic,” writes educator Jonathan Kozol, based as they are on presumptions of degradation “imprinted on black people.” Those who continue to disdain them “see a slipshod, deviant nature – violence, lassitude, a reckless sexuality, a feverish need to over-reproduce” as being what they unavoidably are.
But in fact this is not at all what they are, but what a racist society believes them to be. That society, now riven by tribal warfare and in a state of accelerating collapse, will not survive if racism is not rooted out once and for all.
Fortunately, there are signs of a general awakening to this fact. The popular uprising that greeted the murder of George Floyd has been of unprecedented scope and breadth. Protests more than 100,000 strong broke out in dozens of U.S. cities, with parallel solidarity demonstrations around the world. Unlike police brutality protests of the 1960s, recent demonstrations have included a large number of whites, as well as Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans, and people of all ages, along with a large swath of the middle class. A coalition this broad cannot be ignored, especially its central demand: an end to the militarized American police state, which means a change in the very structure of the capitalist state in the United States.
For the first time in a long time popular forces have seized the initiative and ruling elites are forced to play defense.
Sources:
On racist views of African Americans at the turn of the 20th century, see Noel J. Kent – America In 1900, (M. E. Sharpe, 2000); also Willard B. Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898-1903, (University of Illinois, 1975)
On recent racist stereotypes see Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities, (Harper, 1991) p. 192
On Thomas Jefferson's views of Africans, see Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, Vol. 2. (Pantheon, 1987) p. 48
On Jefferson's "without blot or mixture" comment, see Noam Chomsky, "Year 501 - The Conquest Continues," (South End, 1993) p, 22
On possible electoral consequences of protesters' rhetoric, see Willie Brown, "'Defund the police' is bad policy, terrible politics," San Francisco Chronicle, June 13, 2020
On recent bizarre behavior from white people, see Matt Taibbi, "The American Press is Destroying Itself," June 12, 2020 https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself
On the economic roots and benefits of slavery see George Yancy and Noam Chomsky, "Noam Chomsky on the Roots of American Racism," March 18, 2015 https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/18/noam-chomsky-on-the-roots-of-american-racism/
On the Aaron Dixon quote, see Yoav Litvin, "Living the Panther Dream - An Interview with Black Panther Party Veteran Member Aaron Dixon," Counterpunch, June 19, 2020
----------Black Panther Aaron Dixon
Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown recently wrote that “defund the police” is an ill-advised slogan that will hurt Democrats come November, as though the ongoing mass mobilizations around police brutality weren’t fueled by popular rage at the failure of voting or anything else to offer a path to change. “[If] you take away people’s feelings of personal safety,” warned Brown, “you lose voters.” Ah, feelings! A better word would be illusions. The people for whom the police are a constant predatory menace don’t have any personal safety to lose, and they are in a position to burn the country to the ground, as recent events have shown. If they strike the match, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men will not be able to put “personal safety” together again.
Could this alarming prospect be the reason for so much bizarre behavior from those who have long enjoyed the illusion of physical security? Like white protesters in Houston kneeling and praying to black residents to be forgiven their racial sins. Like white police officers in Cary, North Carolina washing the feet of black pastors. Like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling down dressed in African kentecloth scarves. Like self-flagellating white people all over the country allegedly sickened by a legacy of slavery they know little about, expressing boundless revulsion over their skin color and earnestly demonstrating their utter unfitness to be or do anything. As convincing as their apparent uselessness is, where is the intended benefit?
On the other hand, the Black Lives Matter advice that whites become “allies” of blacks sounds good but lacks clear meaning. Which black people are whites supposed to make themselves allies of? Barack Obama, who recently helped torpedo a promising social democratic revival that could have put real $20 bills in the pockets of the George Floyds of this world, sparing them the horror of fatal police stops over petty or imaginary offenses triggered by poverty? Candace Owens, who dismisses Floyd as a common criminal and drug addict entirely unworthy of our sympathy? The Congressional Black Caucus, which recently voted unanimously to award trillions of dollars in aid to plundering corporations, thus guaranteeing increased suffering for a large majority of African Americans, who had little enough to start with and now must somehow survive with capital consolidating its already massive holdings in the midst of economic collapse and galloping pandemic?
In short, not all blacks are worthy of support, and many whites are so crippled by self-accusation that they are incapable of providing any. Dilemmas like these should make it clear that solving our racial nightmare will demand more than hashtags and sound bites.
One thing that would help everyone is broad popular understanding of the problem. African-Americans are endangered by police, not because of anything they have done, but because of slavery, which was never entirely abolished. The 13th Amendment declares slavery prohibited “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” which allows it to continue under the aegis of the criminal justice system. The state, as opposed to the individual capitalist, has the authority to perpetuate the slave codes, which criminalize black life and masquerade as impartial justice. As a result, our prisons are jammed with black prisoners, many of whom are dispatched to the chain gang, a form of exploitation that proved a boon to rapid industrial development in the late 19thcentury, and has been enjoying a revival in the era of the “war on drugs.”
Any mention of slavery tends to evoke defensive and dismissive responses from white people, most commonly that slavery is ancient history and hardly an American invention. But in fact slavery was only abolished a century-and-a-half ago, not long in historical time, and was succeeded by Jim Crow, which viciously perpetuated something very much like slavery for another century. And the informal apartheid that exists to this day achieves the same effect as legal segregation did under Jim Crow. Even lynching has not been entirely done away with, as the George Floyd killing attests. The only notable difference between Floyd’s murder and the ritual executions of thousands of African Americans during the Jim Crow era was the people on the sidewalk calling out for mercy: during segregation they would have been cheering the murderer on.
As for slavery in other lands, it carries with it no implications for Americans, and it is Americans we are talking about. In any case, why the constant attempt to evade moral responsibility for slavery? If your child stood accused of burning down the school cafeteria, would you really try to complain that she was being singled out unfairly, since arson has existed all over the world since forever? Probably not.
Discussions of slavery naturally raise the related topic of reparations, some form of which is definitely owed. After all, the industrial revolution was based on cotton, which was produced primarily by slave labor in the United States. Wealth accrued not just to the planter aristocracy of the old South, but also to textile manufacturers in the North and Great Britain, among other commercial and financial beneficiaries forming the core of modern capitalism. As for the slaves, they were not given their “forty acres and a mule” upon their (partial) liberation, which carried severely destructive consequences for the entire society down to the present day.
We can no longer accept refusals to discuss redistribution of the wealth from rich to poor on the grounds that we can’t “just throw money” at problems. Aren’t we doing precisely that right now to shore up capital markets? And aren’t they crashing anyway? It was always ridiculous to claim that the best way to help the poor was to throw money at the rich, but in the midst of an outright depression it’s frankly suicidal. To make a long story short, we cannot confront systemic racism without reversing the gift of trillions of dollars of unearned wealth showered on large corporations in response to the coronavirus crisis. That money should go to areas of popular need, not narrow centers of private greed. Only then can consumption rise, jobs return, and a modicum of justice reign. What are we waiting for?
Equally absurd is the racist ideology underpinning slavery, which posited that Africans needed white guidance to advance on their journey from savagery to civilization. This and other perverse notions took hold of even the most “enlightened” minds. Thomas Jefferson, for example, a child of the Enlightenment and author of the Declaration of Independence, dismissed Indians as "savages" and patronizingly saw blacks as almost equal to whites. They had tolerable memories, he thought, but lacked sufficient intellect to understand Euclid, and were entirely bereft of imagination in his view. Interestingly, brown women attracted Jefferson more than white women, but he was terrified at the prospect of losing racial purity, and looked forward to the day when blacks would be shipped to the Caribbean or returned to Africa, leaving the U.S. “without blot or mixture.”
Elite thought didn’t improve over the next century. At the turn of the 20th century anthropologists placed African Americans somewhere between the great apes and the hominids on the evolutionary scale. Biologists reported that their average brain weight was less than that of Caucasians, and substantially less than that of English-speaking Protestants. Psychologists claimed they were possessed of a primal sexuality and prone to irrationality, especially under stress or in situations of intimacy. Criminologists and eugenicists warned of their allegedly innate brutality and hyper-fertility. Race experts believed they had no mental or physical energy, lacked volition, and worked as little as possible, preferring indolence and sunshine to developing civilized artifacts like architecture or literature. One of the most important books published in 1900 was entitled, “The Mystery Solved: The Negro a Beast.”
Doctors predicted they would die out from disease and perversion.
Today, we see the persistence of such prejudicial attitudes, though now the alleged deficiencies of African Americans are believed to reside in their history or culture, rather than in their very nature. But such explanations “might as well be called genetic,” writes educator Jonathan Kozol, based as they are on presumptions of degradation “imprinted on black people.” Those who continue to disdain them “see a slipshod, deviant nature – violence, lassitude, a reckless sexuality, a feverish need to over-reproduce” as being what they unavoidably are.
But in fact this is not at all what they are, but what a racist society believes them to be. That society, now riven by tribal warfare and in a state of accelerating collapse, will not survive if racism is not rooted out once and for all.
Fortunately, there are signs of a general awakening to this fact. The popular uprising that greeted the murder of George Floyd has been of unprecedented scope and breadth. Protests more than 100,000 strong broke out in dozens of U.S. cities, with parallel solidarity demonstrations around the world. Unlike police brutality protests of the 1960s, recent demonstrations have included a large number of whites, as well as Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans, and people of all ages, along with a large swath of the middle class. A coalition this broad cannot be ignored, especially its central demand: an end to the militarized American police state, which means a change in the very structure of the capitalist state in the United States.
For the first time in a long time popular forces have seized the initiative and ruling elites are forced to play defense.
Sources:
On racist views of African Americans at the turn of the 20th century, see Noel J. Kent – America In 1900, (M. E. Sharpe, 2000); also Willard B. Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898-1903, (University of Illinois, 1975)
On recent racist stereotypes see Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities, (Harper, 1991) p. 192
On Thomas Jefferson's views of Africans, see Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, Vol. 2. (Pantheon, 1987) p. 48
On Jefferson's "without blot or mixture" comment, see Noam Chomsky, "Year 501 - The Conquest Continues," (South End, 1993) p, 22
On possible electoral consequences of protesters' rhetoric, see Willie Brown, "'Defund the police' is bad policy, terrible politics," San Francisco Chronicle, June 13, 2020
On recent bizarre behavior from white people, see Matt Taibbi, "The American Press is Destroying Itself," June 12, 2020 https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself
On the economic roots and benefits of slavery see George Yancy and Noam Chomsky, "Noam Chomsky on the Roots of American Racism," March 18, 2015 https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/18/noam-chomsky-on-the-roots-of-american-racism/
On the Aaron Dixon quote, see Yoav Litvin, "Living the Panther Dream - An Interview with Black Panther Party Veteran Member Aaron Dixon," Counterpunch, June 19, 2020
June 22, 2020
Do Any Lives Matter?
“It really doesn’t matter who gets into office it’s all going to come down to the response of the people.”
----------Black Panther Aaron Dixon
For the first time in a long time popular forces have seized the initiative and ruling elites are forced to play defense.
The popular uprising that greeted the murder of George Floyd has been of unprecedented scope and breadth. More than 100,000 people publicly protested in dozens of U.S. cities, with parallel solidarity demonstrations around the world. Unlike police brutality protests of the 1960s, recent demonstrations have included a large number of whites, as well as Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans, and people of all ages, along with a large swath of the middle class. A coalition this broad cannot be ignored, especially its central demand: an end to the militarized American police state, which means a change in the very structure of the capitalist state in the United States.
Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown recently wrote that “defund the police” is an ill-advised slogan that will hurt Democrats come November, as though the ongoing mass mobilizations around police brutality weren’t fueled by popular rage at the failure of voting or anything else to offer a path to change. “[If] you take away people’s feelings of personal safety,” warned Brown, “you lose voters.” Ah, feelings! A better word would be illusions. The people for whom the police are a constant predatory menace don’t have any personal safety to lose, and they are in a position to burn the country to the ground, as recent events have shown. If they strike the match, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men will not be able to put “personal safety” together again.
Could this alarming prospect be the reason for so much bizarre behavior from those who have long enjoyed the illusion of physical security? Like white protesters in Houston kneeling and praying to black residents to be forgiven their racial sins. Like white police officers in Cary, North Carolina washing the feet of black pastors. Like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling down dressed in African kentecloth scarves. Like self-flagellating white people all over the country allegedly sickened by a legacy of slavery they know little about, expressing boundless revulsion over their skin color and earnestly demonstrating their utter unfitness to be or do anything. As convincing as their apparent uselessness is, where is the intended benefit?
On the other hand, the Black Lives Matter advice that whites become “allies” of blacks sounds good but lacks clear meaning. Which black people are whites supposed to make themselves allies of? Barack Obama, who recently helped torpedo a promising social democratic revival that could have put real $20 bills in the pockets of the George Floyds of this world, sparing them the horror of fatal police stops over petty or imaginary offenses triggered by poverty? Candace Owens, who dismisses Floyd as a common criminal and drug addict entirely unworthy of our sympathy? The Congressional Black Caucus, which recently voted unanimously to award trillions of dollars in aid to plundering corporations, thus guaranteeing increased suffering for a large majority of African Americans, who had little enough to start with and now must somehow survive with capital consolidating its already massive holdings in the midst of economic collapse and galloping pandemic?
In short, not all blacks are worthy of support, and many whites are so crippled by self-accusation that they are incapable of providing any. Dilemmas like these should make it clear that solving our racial nightmare will demand more than hashtags and sound bites.
One thing that would help everyone is broad popular understanding of the problem. African-Americans are endangered by police, not because of anything they have done, but because of slavery, which was never entirely abolished. The 13th Amendment declares slavery prohibited “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” which allows it to continue under the aegis of the criminal justice system. The state, as opposed to the individual capitalist, has the authority to perpetuate the slave codes, which criminalize black life and masquerade as impartial justice. As a result, our prisons are jammed with black prisoners, many of whom are dispatched to the chain gang, a form of exploitation that proved a boon to rapid industrial development in the late 19thcentury, and has been enjoying a revival in the era of the “war on drugs.”
Any mention of slavery tends to evoke defensive and dismissive responses from white people, most commonly that slavery is ancient history and hardly an American invention. But in fact slavery was only abolished a century-and-a-half ago, not long in historical time, and was succeeded by Jim Crow, which viciously perpetuated something very much like slavery for another century. And the informal apartheid that exists to this day achieves the same effect as legal segregation did under Jim Crow. Even lynching has not been entirely done away with, as the George Floyd killing attests. The only notable difference between Floyd’s murder and the ritual executions of thousands of African Americans during the Jim Crow era was the people on the sidewalk calling out for mercy: during segregation they would have been cheering the murderer on.
As for slavery in other lands, it carries with it no implications for Americans, and it is Americans we are talking about. In any case, why the constant attempt to evade moral responsibility for slavery? If your child stood accused of burning down the school cafeteria, would you really try to complain that she was being singled out unfairly, since arson has existed all over the world since forever? Probably not.
Discussions of slavery naturally raise the related topic of reparations, some form of which is definitely owed. After all, the industrial revolution was based on cotton, which was produced primarily by slave labor in the United States. Wealth accrued not just to the planter aristocracy of the old South, but also to textile manufacturers in the North and Great Britain, among other commercial and financial beneficiaries forming the core of modern capitalism. As for the slaves, they were not given their “forty acres and a mule” upon their (partial) liberation, which carried severely destructive consequences for the entire society down to the present day.
We can no longer accept refusals to discuss redistribution of the wealth from rich to poor on the grounds that we can’t “just throw money” at problems. Aren’t we doing precisely that right now to shore up capital markets? And aren’t they crashing anyway? It was always ridiculous to claim that the best way to help the poor was to throw money at the rich, but in the midst of an outright depression it’s frankly suicidal. To make a long story short, we cannot confront systemic racism without reversing the gift of trillions of dollars of unearned wealth showered on large corporations in response to the coronavirus crisis. That money should go to areas of popular need, not narrow centers of private greed. Only then can consumption rise, jobs return, and a modicum of justice reign. What are we waiting for?
Equally absurd is the racist ideology underpinning slavery, which posited that Africans needed white guidance to advance on their journey from savagery to civilization. This and other perverse notions took hold of even the most “enlightened” minds. Thomas Jefferson, for example, a child of the Enlightenment and author of the Declaration of Independence, dismissed Indians as "savages" and patronizingly saw blacks as almost equal to whites. They had tolerable memories, he thought, but lacked sufficient intellect to understand Euclid, and were entirely bereft of imagination in his view. Interestingly, brown women attracted Jefferson more than white women, but he was terrified at the prospect of losing racial purity, and looked forward to the day when blacks would be shipped to the Caribbean or returned to Africa, leaving the U.S. “without blot or mixture.”
Elite thought didn’t improve over the next century. At the turn of the 20th century anthropologists placed African Americans somewhere between the great apes and the hominids on the evolutionary scale. Biologists reported that their average brain weight was less than that of Caucasians, and substantially less than that of English-speaking Protestants. Psychologists claimed they were possessed of a primal sexuality and prone to irrationality, especially under stress or in situations of intimacy. Criminologists and eugenicists warned of their allegedly innate brutality and hyper-fertility. Race experts believed they had no mental or physical energy, lacked volition, and worked as little as possible, preferring indolence and sunshine to developing civilized artifacts like architecture or literature. One of the most important books published in 1900 was entitled, “The Mystery Solved: The Negro a Beast.”
Doctors predicted they would die out from disease and perversion.
Today, we see the persistence of such prejudicial attitudes, though now the alleged deficiencies of African Americans are believed to reside in their history or culture, rather than in their very nature. But such explanations “might as well be called genetic,” writes educator Jonathan Kozol, based as they are on presumptions of degradation “imprinted on black people.” Those who continue to disdain them “see a slipshod, deviant nature – violence, lassitude, a reckless sexuality, a feverish need to over-reproduce” as being what they unavoidably are.
But in fact this is not at all what they are, but what a racist society believes them to be. That society, now riven by tribal warfare and in a state of accelerating collapse, will not survive if racism is not rooted out once and for all.
In other words, if black lives don’t start mattering to everyone, nobody’s life will matter.
Sources:
On racist views of African Americans at the turn of the 20th century, see Noel J. Kent – America In 1900, (M. E. Sharpe, 2000); also Willard B. Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898-1903, (University of Illinois, 1975)
On recent racist stereotypes see Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities, (Harper, 1991) p. 192
On Thomas Jefferson's views of Africans, see Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, Vol. 2. (Pantheon, 1987) p. 48
On Jefferson's "without blot or mixture" comment, see Noam Chomsky, "Year 501 - The Conquest Continues," (South End, 1993) p, 22
On possible electoral consequences of protesters' rhetoric, see Willie Brown, "'Defund the police' is bad policy, terrible politics," San Francisco Chronicle, June 13, 2020
On recent bizarre behavior from white people, see Matt Taibbi, "The American Press is Destroying Itself," June 12, 2020 https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself
On the economic roots and benefits of slavery see George Yancy and Noam Chomsky, "Noam Chomsky on the Roots of American Racism," March 18, 2015 https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/18/noam-chomsky-on-the-roots-of-american-racism/
On the Aaron Dixon quote, see Yoav Litvin, "Living the Panther Dream - An Interview with Black Panther Party Veteran Member Aaron Dixon," Counterpunch, June 19, 2020
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----------Black Panther Aaron Dixon
For the first time in a long time popular forces have seized the initiative and ruling elites are forced to play defense.
The popular uprising that greeted the murder of George Floyd has been of unprecedented scope and breadth. More than 100,000 people publicly protested in dozens of U.S. cities, with parallel solidarity demonstrations around the world. Unlike police brutality protests of the 1960s, recent demonstrations have included a large number of whites, as well as Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans, and people of all ages, along with a large swath of the middle class. A coalition this broad cannot be ignored, especially its central demand: an end to the militarized American police state, which means a change in the very structure of the capitalist state in the United States.
Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown recently wrote that “defund the police” is an ill-advised slogan that will hurt Democrats come November, as though the ongoing mass mobilizations around police brutality weren’t fueled by popular rage at the failure of voting or anything else to offer a path to change. “[If] you take away people’s feelings of personal safety,” warned Brown, “you lose voters.” Ah, feelings! A better word would be illusions. The people for whom the police are a constant predatory menace don’t have any personal safety to lose, and they are in a position to burn the country to the ground, as recent events have shown. If they strike the match, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men will not be able to put “personal safety” together again.
Could this alarming prospect be the reason for so much bizarre behavior from those who have long enjoyed the illusion of physical security? Like white protesters in Houston kneeling and praying to black residents to be forgiven their racial sins. Like white police officers in Cary, North Carolina washing the feet of black pastors. Like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling down dressed in African kentecloth scarves. Like self-flagellating white people all over the country allegedly sickened by a legacy of slavery they know little about, expressing boundless revulsion over their skin color and earnestly demonstrating their utter unfitness to be or do anything. As convincing as their apparent uselessness is, where is the intended benefit?
On the other hand, the Black Lives Matter advice that whites become “allies” of blacks sounds good but lacks clear meaning. Which black people are whites supposed to make themselves allies of? Barack Obama, who recently helped torpedo a promising social democratic revival that could have put real $20 bills in the pockets of the George Floyds of this world, sparing them the horror of fatal police stops over petty or imaginary offenses triggered by poverty? Candace Owens, who dismisses Floyd as a common criminal and drug addict entirely unworthy of our sympathy? The Congressional Black Caucus, which recently voted unanimously to award trillions of dollars in aid to plundering corporations, thus guaranteeing increased suffering for a large majority of African Americans, who had little enough to start with and now must somehow survive with capital consolidating its already massive holdings in the midst of economic collapse and galloping pandemic?
In short, not all blacks are worthy of support, and many whites are so crippled by self-accusation that they are incapable of providing any. Dilemmas like these should make it clear that solving our racial nightmare will demand more than hashtags and sound bites.
One thing that would help everyone is broad popular understanding of the problem. African-Americans are endangered by police, not because of anything they have done, but because of slavery, which was never entirely abolished. The 13th Amendment declares slavery prohibited “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” which allows it to continue under the aegis of the criminal justice system. The state, as opposed to the individual capitalist, has the authority to perpetuate the slave codes, which criminalize black life and masquerade as impartial justice. As a result, our prisons are jammed with black prisoners, many of whom are dispatched to the chain gang, a form of exploitation that proved a boon to rapid industrial development in the late 19thcentury, and has been enjoying a revival in the era of the “war on drugs.”
Any mention of slavery tends to evoke defensive and dismissive responses from white people, most commonly that slavery is ancient history and hardly an American invention. But in fact slavery was only abolished a century-and-a-half ago, not long in historical time, and was succeeded by Jim Crow, which viciously perpetuated something very much like slavery for another century. And the informal apartheid that exists to this day achieves the same effect as legal segregation did under Jim Crow. Even lynching has not been entirely done away with, as the George Floyd killing attests. The only notable difference between Floyd’s murder and the ritual executions of thousands of African Americans during the Jim Crow era was the people on the sidewalk calling out for mercy: during segregation they would have been cheering the murderer on.
As for slavery in other lands, it carries with it no implications for Americans, and it is Americans we are talking about. In any case, why the constant attempt to evade moral responsibility for slavery? If your child stood accused of burning down the school cafeteria, would you really try to complain that she was being singled out unfairly, since arson has existed all over the world since forever? Probably not.
Discussions of slavery naturally raise the related topic of reparations, some form of which is definitely owed. After all, the industrial revolution was based on cotton, which was produced primarily by slave labor in the United States. Wealth accrued not just to the planter aristocracy of the old South, but also to textile manufacturers in the North and Great Britain, among other commercial and financial beneficiaries forming the core of modern capitalism. As for the slaves, they were not given their “forty acres and a mule” upon their (partial) liberation, which carried severely destructive consequences for the entire society down to the present day.
We can no longer accept refusals to discuss redistribution of the wealth from rich to poor on the grounds that we can’t “just throw money” at problems. Aren’t we doing precisely that right now to shore up capital markets? And aren’t they crashing anyway? It was always ridiculous to claim that the best way to help the poor was to throw money at the rich, but in the midst of an outright depression it’s frankly suicidal. To make a long story short, we cannot confront systemic racism without reversing the gift of trillions of dollars of unearned wealth showered on large corporations in response to the coronavirus crisis. That money should go to areas of popular need, not narrow centers of private greed. Only then can consumption rise, jobs return, and a modicum of justice reign. What are we waiting for?
Equally absurd is the racist ideology underpinning slavery, which posited that Africans needed white guidance to advance on their journey from savagery to civilization. This and other perverse notions took hold of even the most “enlightened” minds. Thomas Jefferson, for example, a child of the Enlightenment and author of the Declaration of Independence, dismissed Indians as "savages" and patronizingly saw blacks as almost equal to whites. They had tolerable memories, he thought, but lacked sufficient intellect to understand Euclid, and were entirely bereft of imagination in his view. Interestingly, brown women attracted Jefferson more than white women, but he was terrified at the prospect of losing racial purity, and looked forward to the day when blacks would be shipped to the Caribbean or returned to Africa, leaving the U.S. “without blot or mixture.”
Elite thought didn’t improve over the next century. At the turn of the 20th century anthropologists placed African Americans somewhere between the great apes and the hominids on the evolutionary scale. Biologists reported that their average brain weight was less than that of Caucasians, and substantially less than that of English-speaking Protestants. Psychologists claimed they were possessed of a primal sexuality and prone to irrationality, especially under stress or in situations of intimacy. Criminologists and eugenicists warned of their allegedly innate brutality and hyper-fertility. Race experts believed they had no mental or physical energy, lacked volition, and worked as little as possible, preferring indolence and sunshine to developing civilized artifacts like architecture or literature. One of the most important books published in 1900 was entitled, “The Mystery Solved: The Negro a Beast.”
Doctors predicted they would die out from disease and perversion.
Today, we see the persistence of such prejudicial attitudes, though now the alleged deficiencies of African Americans are believed to reside in their history or culture, rather than in their very nature. But such explanations “might as well be called genetic,” writes educator Jonathan Kozol, based as they are on presumptions of degradation “imprinted on black people.” Those who continue to disdain them “see a slipshod, deviant nature – violence, lassitude, a reckless sexuality, a feverish need to over-reproduce” as being what they unavoidably are.
But in fact this is not at all what they are, but what a racist society believes them to be. That society, now riven by tribal warfare and in a state of accelerating collapse, will not survive if racism is not rooted out once and for all.
In other words, if black lives don’t start mattering to everyone, nobody’s life will matter.
Sources:
On racist views of African Americans at the turn of the 20th century, see Noel J. Kent – America In 1900, (M. E. Sharpe, 2000); also Willard B. Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898-1903, (University of Illinois, 1975)
On recent racist stereotypes see Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities, (Harper, 1991) p. 192
On Thomas Jefferson's views of Africans, see Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, Vol. 2. (Pantheon, 1987) p. 48
On Jefferson's "without blot or mixture" comment, see Noam Chomsky, "Year 501 - The Conquest Continues," (South End, 1993) p, 22
On possible electoral consequences of protesters' rhetoric, see Willie Brown, "'Defund the police' is bad policy, terrible politics," San Francisco Chronicle, June 13, 2020
On recent bizarre behavior from white people, see Matt Taibbi, "The American Press is Destroying Itself," June 12, 2020 https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself
On the economic roots and benefits of slavery see George Yancy and Noam Chomsky, "Noam Chomsky on the Roots of American Racism," March 18, 2015 https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/18/noam-chomsky-on-the-roots-of-american-racism/
On the Aaron Dixon quote, see Yoav Litvin, "Living the Panther Dream - An Interview with Black Panther Party Veteran Member Aaron Dixon," Counterpunch, June 19, 2020
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June 21, 2020
Adventures In White Supremacy
1900: San Francisco The ChinesePolice harass them. Employers boycott them. Unions shun them. Widely identified with “gambling dens and slave pens...coolie labor and bloodthirsty tongs,” their civilization is labeled “queer.” The men are said to carry leprosy and the women VD. Whites refuse to have anything to do with them, disdaining “Mongolian coolies” willing to work for the most desperate of wages. Segregated in school and refused service in barbershops and restaurants, the Chinese find work in sweatshops, seasonal agriculture, hand laundries, restaurants, and Chinatown groceries. To honor their work as cooks and servants for affluent whites, Harper’s Bazaar praises them as “a yellow blessing.” In the 1880s anti-Chinese riots drove the yellow blessing from Seattle, Tacoma, Rock Springs, Wyoming, and other cities. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Treaty banned their immigration to the United States. Those already living in the states were denied citizenship. Chinese fathers were separated from their families and if they couldn’t prove their residency pre-dated passage of the treaty they lived in fear of deportation. Now with treaty renewal pending politicians and newspapers whip up fear of the “yellow peril.” Whites warn that a failure to renew will swamp the West Coast with 400 million “heathen Chinee” and their backward traditions. Alfred Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt decry “race degeneracy” and warn of “race war.” No respectable person can doubt that the Chinese are incapable of citizenship in a democracy. Bubonic plague breaks out in the City. Mayor James Phelan blames the Chinese. A local labor paper warns of racial conspiracy: “The almond eyed Mongolian is waiting for his opportunity, waiting to assassinate you and your children with one of his many maladies.”17 1900: San Francisco The JapaneseSince the annexation of Hawaii they have flocked to California’s agricultural valleys, where they work on sugar beet, bean, and hops farms, leasing and sometimes buying cropland for truck farms. Labor leaders complain they are taking what belongs to whites. Whites see them as greedy, sneaky, and calculating, more energetic and entrepreneurial than the Chinese, which makes them seem even more of a threat to white living standards. According to one labor newspaper, the Chinese are merely a “menace to the country,” whereas “the sniveling Japanese, who swarm along the streets, is a far greater danger to the laboring portion of society than all the opium smoked pigtails.” The U.S. Industrial Commission is of the opinion that “the Japanese...have most of the vices of the Chinese and none of the virtues.” Speaking at a large anti-Asian rally Mayor Phelan warns that social equality must not be entertained: “The Chinese and Japanese are not bonafide citizens. They are not the stuff of which American citizens can be made.” He insists that drastic action be taken, for the “Asiatic laborers will undermine our civilization.”Stanford Professor Edward Alsworth Ross adds that “it would be better for us to turn our guns upon every vessel bringing Japanese to our shore rather than permit them to land.”The audience passes a resolution to extend the exclusion treaty to the Japanese.18
1901: Washington Teddy RooseveltWar thrills him more than life itself, especially when the “joy of battle” arrives and “the wolf begins to rise in [one’s] heart.” Long will he boast of the Spaniard he killed with his bare hands—“like a jackrabbit”—in 1898. A passionate devotee of Nordic supremacy, he celebrates settler colonialism in the West as “the spread of the English speaking peoples over the world’s waste of space.” Never has he doubted that the indigenous peoples deserved extermination: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” In his popular book series, “The Winning of the West,” he argued against respecting Indian sovereignty on the pretext that “this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages...The man who puts the soil to use must of right dispossess the man who does not, or the world will come to a standstill.”He has no greater fondness for other non-Nordic peoples. He deems “coloreds” degenerate and looks on Latin peoples as little more than children. When a New Orleans mob lynched a number of Italian immigrants, Teddy told his sister that the lynchings were “rather a good thing,”an opinion he aired at a dinner with “various dago diplomats...all wrought up by the lynching.” He thinks women exist to give birth, which Nordic mothers should do as often and for as many years as possible. Of serious concern is “the diminishing birth rate among the old native American stock,” so much so that Teddy expresses delight at campaign stops when proud fathers and their depleted wives show up with a huge brood of children in tow. “Did I write you of my delight,” he asked Henry Cabot Lodge the year before last, “at meeting one Hiram Tower, his wife and his seventeen children?” In his eyes socialism is intrinsically evil and the subjugation of workers by corporations entirely legitimate, although it is “incumbent upon the man with whom things have prospered to be in a certain sense the keeper of his brother with whom life has gone hard.” Between the captains of industry who starve workers and the unionists who insist they have a right to eat, Teddy recommends government seek a middle ground.24 1901: Washington The March of ProgressWith the U.S. Army converting the Filipino independence movement to mounds of skulls, President Roosevelt delivers the State of the Union address to Congress. Anglo-Saxons are entitled to direct the affairs of “savages” and “bandits,” he says, because they have evolved to a more advanced state than any other human group. “Our people are now successfully governing themselves because for more than a thousand years they have been slowly fitting themselves...toward this end.”In contrast, not much can be expected of Filipinos because they are starting “very far behind the point which our ancestors had reached even thirty generations ago . . .” Nevertheless, with proper instruction they might become useful in spite of themselves. “We hope to do for them what has never before been done for any people of the tropics—to make them fit for self-government after the fashion of the really free nations.” The boundless generosity characteristic of such an endeavor, says TR, marks white America as the most selfless race ever: “History may safely be challenged to show a single instance in which a masterful race such as ours, having been forced by the exigencies of war to take possession of an alien land, has behaved to its inhabitants with the disinterested zeal for their progress that our people have shown in the Philippines.”25
1901: Nationwide Negroes: A White Fantasy
One of the most important books published last year was, “The Mystery Solved: The Negro a Beast.” Anthropologists place them somewhere between the great apes and the hominids. Biologists report their average brain weight is less than Caucasians’ and substantially less than English-speaking Protestants’. Psychologists claim they are possessed of a primal sexuality and prone to irrationality, especially under stress or in situations of intimacy. Criminologists and eugenicists warn of their allegedly innate brutality and hyper-fertility. Doctors predict they will die out from disease and perversion. The expert consensus says blacks have no mental or physical energy, lack volition, and work the least they can get away with. They are bereft of civilized artifacts like architecture or literature and regard indolence and sunshine as the earthly paradise. Their capacity for thought is brutally rudimentary, though exposing them to higher learning somehow threatens to “spoil” their appetite for menial labor. Summing up the problem Teddy Roosevelt says: “A perfectly stupid race can never rise to a very high plane...” No one thinks he is talking about white people.27<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:50331651 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;}</style> </span></sup></div><style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:50331651 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;}</style>
June 18, 2020
The Aryan Myth - The Origin of "White" People
This is the key racist myth underpinning conquest and domination in the West. The basic story begins in 15th century England, but in fact it ultimately traces back to Tacitus. The Aryan race just suddenly appears in history roughly around where Iran is today. Allegedly unique, Aryans were described as tall and blonde, with rounder heads than other “races,” such characteristics assumed to be evidence of superiority. They had an unparalleled commitment to law and freedom, and conquered everything in their path as they moved continually westward - west being the direction of greatness – and ended up in the Black Forest region of what we know of today as Germany. There they became the Teutons, a perfect race. But difficulties set in because some of them inter-married with nearby peoples who were not Teutonic, so they lost blood purity and the race degenerated. That’s how the “dirty” and “dark-haired” people of the Mediterranean came to be. Meanwhile, the good Teutons (i.e., the racially pure ones) just exterminated everyone, thus preserving their superior blood-line. The good Teutons became the Angles and the Saxons and went to the English channel, crossed it, and exterminated everyone on the other side, although they didn’t manage to kill all of the Celts, some of whom remained around Ireland, but apart from that they did a pretty thorough job of wiping out race competitors. After that, the colonists came to America, continuing the journey West, and that’s how “we the people,” founded the finest, freest country the world has ever seen, with slaves to do the work. “We” refers to Anglo Saxons (at least the wealthy ones), a world conquering race. This appears in Thomas Jefferson’s writings, and is universal in the 19th century. Jefferson and others thought we ought to go back to the 8th century, when they had the perfect system of law and justice, before the race was poisoned by immigration to England from elsewhere than the Norman Conquest. The supposed superior racial characteristics of the Aryans/Teutons were quite precisely defined, so much so that Benjamin Franklin didn’t think that the Germans qualified. He said they were a little too swarthy, and they didn’t pick up “our” customs properly. And he saw the Native Americans as an obviously inferior race, which meant that it was right to exterminate them. Teddy Roosevelt claimed that they were actually the beneficiaries of being exterminated, just like the Filipinos had been when the U.S. invaded and conquered the Philippines in 1898, killing some 200,000 inhabitants of the islands. In Roosevelt’s view, these were sacrifices embraced in the glorious cause of producing a superior race. (Roosevelt's favorite term was "English-speaking race," not Anglo-Saxons, as he could not count himself among the Anglo-Saxons).
So racism in the U.S. is not just anti-black racism, it goes far deeper than that. That’s why every wave of immigrants has been treated with vicious racial abuse. The Irish were considered like dogs when they first arrived. Restaurants had signs saying “No Dogs or Irish.” The average life span of an Irish man was under 20 years old. Jews and Hungarians (“Huns”) were treated the same way, everyone from Southeastern Europe was. The worst case was that of the Chinese, who suffered total racial exclusion under the Racial Exclusion Act. But then came the move to the West, “we” conquered the national territory and later Mexico, fulfilling our “Manifest Destiny” as a superior race. Then came 1898, and we stole Spain’s colonies, which were in revolt, conquering the Philippines and then moving on to China. At that point Teddy Roosevelt made one of his important contributions to racist theory, which laid the basis for the later Pacific War with Japan. He designated the Japanese “honorary Aryans.” They looked yellow, but they really weren’t, he said, so they could be “civilized,” and they could sort of pave the U.S. way into China and the East, and the empire would keep going until it circled the Earth and got Aryans back to their original homeland, that is, Iran, or wherever it allegedly was. This fantastic tale is the ideological justification for white supremacy, and it’s widely believed, especially in ruling circles.
Sources: Noam Chomsky, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10155578524082282
On TR and he phrase "English-speaking race," see Thomas G. Dyer, "Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race," (Louisiana State University Press, 1980), pps. 28-9 <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;}</style>
June 14, 2020
Bigotry, Racism and Capitalist Class Privilege " The ulti...
Bigotry, Racism and Capitalist Class Privilege
" The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being." -- Emma Goldman
Class divisions are prime factors in all systems, governing where, how and if people live, work, eat, dress, school and survive. All members of a class share its privileges, not just some few, as in the case of what is called “white” privilege, as though it was experienced by all humans characterized in racist society as “white”. No matter the skin tone, sexual preference or ethnicity of the persons, class status governs whether they live in some degree of physical comfort, are educated, make investments and are able to plan for the future, or live in relative and often severe discomfort, in debt, in low cost housing, ghettos, jails or on the street, with their only future plan being able to survive another day, let alone another week.
Class privileges come before and count for more than sexual privileges, which are very real but are at least based on the organic nature of humanity, while race differences are a filthy lie under which we live in the promotion of capitalist class society, along with all other separations used to divide humans from our commonality.
The lawyer reduced to ambulance chasing still enjoys a more comfortable material standard of living than the driver of the ambulance, no matter the lawyer’s sex or skin tone or the driver’s religion or sexual preference. Those able to graduate from college enjoy privilege by comparison to the majority who have no such luck and those with enough money or program access to get them into the “better” schools enjoy more privilege than those who go to ordinary colleges, but both groups enjoy a class status beyond that of the majority, of all shapes, sizes, beliefs and skin tones, who haven’t a prayer of attending college unless making deliveries, cleaning its toilets or building a wing on the chem lab or art studio. And a less formally educated class of majority Americans owe what education they have to their teachers, all of whom are and were college graduates who enabled them to become, according to some political bigots, unsophisticated, ignorant, and even “deplorable” members of a working class.
Being born into an educated and materially comfortable family does not guarantee a person wont wind up a miserable and suffering human, but that suffering is much less likely to be physical and may at least have the assistance of therapists and legal drugs, rather than reduce them to seeing a parole or probation officer for therapy after consuming the only drugs they can get, illegally.
These aspects of material class reality should be understood by all but are still buried by consciousness controllers who sell us the prevailing mythology that sees all social ills as the result of individual problems or blamed on those most visible as members of lower economic classes, frequently and most malevolently but not exclusively called “people of color”, as though they were blue or purple, but in fact covering for a racist history that reduced some of us to even lower economic status by virtue of skin pigmentation.
The horrid story of chattel slavery, in which hundreds of thousands of Africans were transplanted to the western world in chains as the cheapest form of labor, serving as the back bone of capitalist profits for a long period of history, is still almost a secret to many Americans. But while that treatment was uniquely cruel it was a continuation of the inhumanity and abuse of first, the indigenous people who lived here centuries before European colonization, and later, immigrant labor from Europe and Asia which sometimes suffered miserable conditions even beyond some slaves who happened to be owned by benign masters. While the squalor and bigotry encountered by millions of immigrants may not have been as disgraceful as the suffering of slaves, the lesser evilism implicit in such comparisons serves as an example of what passes for our democracy, when voters are frequently reduced to selecting someone who sickens them less than the opposition candidate after an alleged political debate that often amounts to pimps arguing about which one represents true love.
In a system dependent on individual consumption at the market as the be all end all of human relations that finds a majority of humans the world over relating to life in poverty and misery, class divisions are used by rulers to keep democracy from ever happening. The result can be as ridiculous as people with cancer seeing people with polio as being privileged, with lesser evilism carried to a point very close to current conditions of working people so divided by ethnicity, sex and skin tones that they keep minorities in power by allowing themselves to be so humanly reduced.
Our ruling billionaire class, smaller in number and richer than any in history, hires and rents a professional class to maintain its rule while those professionals hire, rent, administer and educate the working class to maintain everyone’s status as members of separate classes but all somehow democratically equal. During slavery, the upper class House Negroes sometimes organized and led rebellions when they saw how their people suffered while the masters lived on what they slaved to produce. But most went along to get along, often hoping to bring change about by slowly working to bring understanding to all concerned, or maybe just making life better for themselves, as most of us do. Their behavior was the same as any other group trying to survive as best it can under circumstances seemingly beyond its personal control. Welcome to 21st century capitalism, the time when the system has never been as unjust but has more people thinking and acting beyond imposed and taught differences but as united humans whose experience is far beyond past expressions of change, though with the same opponents, problems and with even more serious calamities for the future if humanity is not successful.
When there are social breakdowns, as are currently being experienced in possibly the most severe and communicated way in capitalist history, class differences become bolder and clearer than ever. The latest political economic crisis in America is due to a possibly overdone but still deadly virus compounded by another in a long series of killings of Black Americans by white police, highlighted as never before in the age of instant communication, as well as instant mis-communication. Long dominance by major media over citizen consciousness is often countered now by what is called social media –though it is still at times very anti-social – but the views of a dreadful and at its roots social crime is, as too often, treated as the act of a bigoted individual, or group of individuals who perform state services in maintenance of American class society.
The horrid scene of a victim with a police officer’s knee on his neck causing his death even though he offered no resistance has ignited outbursts of understandable pain and rage but also sometimes cynical manipulation mostly directed at the police as though they are individually acting out racist behavior in some social vacuum in which the formidable economic barriers between communities originate because of servants of the state, rather than the owners and operators of that state: the ruling class.
A relatively comfortable sector of the population has suddenly been confronted by a nearly shut down society under assault by a seemingly new virus and simultaneously seen the most vile aspects of racism for the first time, which the collapsing system has spread in its lust for private profit at public expense, but still clouded by mind management into placing blame for increasing horrors on evil individuals or “identity groups” deemed guilty of perpetuating injustice all by themselves.
Blaming police for the wretched social reality of communities segregated by economics and alleged racial difference is like blaming the military for the wars that destroy nations and kill hundreds of thousands of foreigners while most of us go to work, school, shop, watch TV, feed pets, eat taco-pizza-burgers or health food, buy guns and demonstrate against wars. The political economic realities that treat some humans as lesser commodities in a diseased culture that reduces everything to a market item to be bought and sold are rarely dealt with let alone confronted. The forces of the market exclusively under minority control can no longer be tolerated by any of us wishing or claiming to be working on behalf of humanity and not just a sector of it.
The present moment of a virus which may get worse with demonstrating crowds breathing on one another may end with more deaths and social division but as long as it pits people against the police it will be just what our rulers want. Sincere comments offered by politicians and celebrities are nice but in substance they amount to the usual speeches about hearts going out to the sufferers of whatever tragedy of the moment is being discussed. They are very much like the hordes of us who demonstrate against a war or another injustice, and then go home for diner while the war and the injustice continue after we vote for another candidate who supports the system of war and injustice.
Our rulers have made even more billions during this pandemic phase of a crumbling system which may yet fall on all our heads if we don’t stop lashing out simply at those employed by them and paid for by us and aim our rebelliousness at the top where it resides.
Capitalism will continue pouring billions into the accounts of the fraction of 1% at the top while millions lose their jobs, hundreds of thousands lose their homes and businesses, and well meaning if often misled manipulated “rebels” lash out at working class state servants or a handful of shaved headed bikers or other selected by their manipulators enemies, while the real problems ride around in chauffeured limousines, private jets and soon, even space ships. As we continue pouring wealth into the coffers of Wall Street, the Pentagon and Israel, reducing more Americans to crippling debt and poverty while killing more people in foreign countries, the current resident of subsidized presidential housing and some “white” cops are still seen by too many of us as the source of all our woes.
Many of us are reduced to thinking the poor, the homeless and those on the dole are great problems because we not only hear that from our mind managers but frequently see them on the street and under the freeways, while our rulers are never seen unless on major media and might as well be gods. Their upper class servants live in gated communities while they are in walled estates less accessible to common people than the royalty of feudal days were in their castles with moats and drawbridges to keep the common people out and under control. The police certainly serve in the same capacity in some communities but attacking them as the source of our problems would be like feudal rebels attacking the moat or drawbridge while remaining ignorant of the people and wealth they protected.
We share a material social reality no matter what our personal comfort level may be for the moment and it grows more dangerous to our future the longer we allow ourselves to be ruled by an unelected tiny minority running a system that works against all our interests. We do not need to simply end poverty and injustice in one or another community: we need to end poverty and injustice for all by insisting on jobs, healthcare and housing for all people. We do not need to simply stop killing people in the Middle East or in American ghettos: we need to cut military budgets, work for global peace and disarmament, and stop killing people everywhere. That calls for a radically different system than the one under which we live, one that puts the public good before - way before - private profit, and that needed transformation can only come about when we of the majority class unite to bring it about.
June 13, 2020
"There Is a Transformation In The Content, Character, and Operation of the Capitalist State in the United States"
Interview with Sociologist James Petras
Centennial Radio Uruguay
June 8, 2020
(Translation from Spanish by Michael K. Smith)
Hernán Salina: The ongoing protests have completely displaced the topic of coronavirus, which has not decreased in the United States, right?
Petras: Yes, the mobilizations and protests have changed their nature. The protests began against the repression of victims of racism, but now there are some social, political, and legal demands, among others, which could have an impact on the structure of power.
With more than 100,000 people demonstrating in various cities and with great mobilizations throughout the United States, hundreds of cities are on the march, and they are demanding among other things a transformation of the police, including the elimination of the police in some large cities, changes in the law, application of civil authority against the police, and some mayors who used to support the police are now requesting that they be removed and replaced.
In other words there is a transformation in the content, character, and operation of the capitalist state in the United States, still embryonic, but it is beginning to show itself.
The second important thing is the fact that the participants in these mobilizations are multi-ethnic, not just African Americans, there are whites, blacks, young people, members of the middle class, Latinos. It's not like the protests in the 1960s when the composition was much more African American.
And the third important point is the breadth of the coalition. There is a lot more to say, but the protest marches and confrontations represent a broad sector of the population. Whites, African Americans, Hispanics, and other groups, too. We have a broad coalition that could develop a political character. It already has a political character, but a lot is being channeled into the mobilizations, which have not taken on a partisan nature.
HS: There was a conflict or clash within the government, with the head of the Pentagon declaring himself opposed to the use of the U.S. military to repress this.
Petras: Yes, that's another important factor, there are divisions in the state. Many ex-generals are attacking the Trump government and the use of soldiers against civilians, that's an important change.
HS: Will this check Trump a little on the matter of repression, having to continue managing with just police forces?
Petras: Well, he's in a bind now. Trump wants to use the military to occupy cities and repress civilians, activists, and the political organizations that are taking action. But the military leaders don't want to meddle in this political conflict of Trump's, who is very unpopular among military leaders, at least among the generals.
Two things are possible. One is that Trump acts against the retired generals and tries to use active military leaders. The other is that the active military leaders begin to distance themselves from Trump and act jointly with the retired generals. In any case we have to see what the military leaders do in the face of permanent threats by Trump to mobilize the army and repress the population.
HS: What political changes could this movement end up generating?
Petras: Well, at a minimum there are going to be commissions that try to implement some measures giving more power to mayors and governors. That's very limited, because the present governors have a lot of sympathy for the police, or are at least subjected to their power.
What is clear is that the U.S. is a police state, the police have enormous autonomy and they can dictate what the civil leaders can do. There are police strikes, we must understand that the police union is a form of encouraging and justifying repression, and is not a union that defends the people. It's a union that privileges the police, justifies whatever crimes they commit, whatever murder they commit. Like we've seen in Minneapolis, the police justify everything, when they knocked a 75-year-old man to the ground (and left him bleeding from the ear), the police union protected them against any legal action.
HS: A movement of Black Panthers has been seen, young men and women with military arms in the front row of some mobilizations. Does this mean that organized armed groups are participating in the protests?
Petras: It's completely symbolic, it doesn't mean anything. The millions that are in the streets don't have arms, they're seeking a political struggle, the arms are symbolic.
HS: But then they aren't allowed to use arms like right wing protesters have done in the states that allow them to?
Petras: Yes, the right is using arms secretly, they don't have the capacity to mobilize militias in this situation. Trump sympathizers are still keeping their assumptions, they are awaiting a decision by Trump about whether to use the army and not form militias. But the popular force isn't disposed to use arms either.
In addition, on Facebook Mark Zuckerberg has used Trump's Twitter to denounce the movements. And the opposition is attacking Facebook now, saying that they should not give freedom to a president who is destroying the Constitution and all civil rights.
HS: Other topics from outside the US that you want to highlight this week?
JP: Yes, several things. First, in Venezuela they have defeated Trump's efforts to block Iran's oil ships. It is a great victory because Venezuela receives gasoline and now its economy can function.
Mexico has been in a situation of great difficulty with the coronavirus, it is another problem. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is not responding adequately to the challenge of the disease.
Finally we have Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro is hiding the data on the number of infected and total deaths. The death toll figure is growing and democracy is under attack. I don't know what is going on among civilians right now but Bolsonaro is very discredited. And Washington continues to support Bolsonaro, Trump is Bolsonaro's best ally. It is a combination of tyrants on both sides.
Centennial Radio Uruguay
June 8, 2020
(Translation from Spanish by Michael K. Smith)
Hernán Salina: The ongoing protests have completely displaced the topic of coronavirus, which has not decreased in the United States, right?
Petras: Yes, the mobilizations and protests have changed their nature. The protests began against the repression of victims of racism, but now there are some social, political, and legal demands, among others, which could have an impact on the structure of power.
With more than 100,000 people demonstrating in various cities and with great mobilizations throughout the United States, hundreds of cities are on the march, and they are demanding among other things a transformation of the police, including the elimination of the police in some large cities, changes in the law, application of civil authority against the police, and some mayors who used to support the police are now requesting that they be removed and replaced.
In other words there is a transformation in the content, character, and operation of the capitalist state in the United States, still embryonic, but it is beginning to show itself.
The second important thing is the fact that the participants in these mobilizations are multi-ethnic, not just African Americans, there are whites, blacks, young people, members of the middle class, Latinos. It's not like the protests in the 1960s when the composition was much more African American.
And the third important point is the breadth of the coalition. There is a lot more to say, but the protest marches and confrontations represent a broad sector of the population. Whites, African Americans, Hispanics, and other groups, too. We have a broad coalition that could develop a political character. It already has a political character, but a lot is being channeled into the mobilizations, which have not taken on a partisan nature.
HS: There was a conflict or clash within the government, with the head of the Pentagon declaring himself opposed to the use of the U.S. military to repress this.
Petras: Yes, that's another important factor, there are divisions in the state. Many ex-generals are attacking the Trump government and the use of soldiers against civilians, that's an important change.
HS: Will this check Trump a little on the matter of repression, having to continue managing with just police forces?
Petras: Well, he's in a bind now. Trump wants to use the military to occupy cities and repress civilians, activists, and the political organizations that are taking action. But the military leaders don't want to meddle in this political conflict of Trump's, who is very unpopular among military leaders, at least among the generals.
Two things are possible. One is that Trump acts against the retired generals and tries to use active military leaders. The other is that the active military leaders begin to distance themselves from Trump and act jointly with the retired generals. In any case we have to see what the military leaders do in the face of permanent threats by Trump to mobilize the army and repress the population.
HS: What political changes could this movement end up generating?
Petras: Well, at a minimum there are going to be commissions that try to implement some measures giving more power to mayors and governors. That's very limited, because the present governors have a lot of sympathy for the police, or are at least subjected to their power.
What is clear is that the U.S. is a police state, the police have enormous autonomy and they can dictate what the civil leaders can do. There are police strikes, we must understand that the police union is a form of encouraging and justifying repression, and is not a union that defends the people. It's a union that privileges the police, justifies whatever crimes they commit, whatever murder they commit. Like we've seen in Minneapolis, the police justify everything, when they knocked a 75-year-old man to the ground (and left him bleeding from the ear), the police union protected them against any legal action.
HS: A movement of Black Panthers has been seen, young men and women with military arms in the front row of some mobilizations. Does this mean that organized armed groups are participating in the protests?
Petras: It's completely symbolic, it doesn't mean anything. The millions that are in the streets don't have arms, they're seeking a political struggle, the arms are symbolic.
HS: But then they aren't allowed to use arms like right wing protesters have done in the states that allow them to?
Petras: Yes, the right is using arms secretly, they don't have the capacity to mobilize militias in this situation. Trump sympathizers are still keeping their assumptions, they are awaiting a decision by Trump about whether to use the army and not form militias. But the popular force isn't disposed to use arms either.
In addition, on Facebook Mark Zuckerberg has used Trump's Twitter to denounce the movements. And the opposition is attacking Facebook now, saying that they should not give freedom to a president who is destroying the Constitution and all civil rights.
HS: Other topics from outside the US that you want to highlight this week?
JP: Yes, several things. First, in Venezuela they have defeated Trump's efforts to block Iran's oil ships. It is a great victory because Venezuela receives gasoline and now its economy can function.
Mexico has been in a situation of great difficulty with the coronavirus, it is another problem. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is not responding adequately to the challenge of the disease.
Finally we have Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro is hiding the data on the number of infected and total deaths. The death toll figure is growing and democracy is under attack. I don't know what is going on among civilians right now but Bolsonaro is very discredited. And Washington continues to support Bolsonaro, Trump is Bolsonaro's best ally. It is a combination of tyrants on both sides.
June 6, 2020
"If There Are No Structural Alterations In The Economy, Politics, and Society, Nothing Will Change"
There is a new context where a mass of white people is also participating in these protests
Interview with James Petras
June 1, 2020
(Translation from Spanish by Michael K. Smith)
Hermán Salina: Profesor, what is different about these protests set off by a single case of police brutality? What differentiates this episode from all the previous ones?
Petras: Well, it has a lot of similarity with the 1960s and 1970s because of the act of violence against African Americans, Latin Americans, but what one has to analyze is the new context where a large mass of whites is participating also in these protests. And second, that the police can't eliminate them, can't diminish the protest, it has no capacity to control them. Notice that there are 40 cities under curfew, the National Guard is active in 15 cities, it's a militarization of the important city centers.
And the other thing we should take into account, at this moment there are more than 25% unemployed, (so) this protest is not occurring just because of racism and the killing of African American George Floyd. That was the detonator, but the important thing is that we have more than 30 million Americans unemployed, they have no economic future, there are millions of young people that have finished high school and university and they can't find work. These economic and social factors together with the problem of racism, is a detonator that didn't exist before with other demonstrations.
I think that the hot summer in the next span of time - June, July, August, is going to have enormous consequences for the country. In addition, we have a very reactionary president who has said that vicious dogs should attack protesters. They had to hide President Trump in a bunker beneath the White House because protesters from the demonstrations occurring across the street tried to enter in order to make demands of Trump. They had to call special security forces to hide and protect him.
So now we have a super-reactionary president, a shattered economy, a widening pandemic, assassination of African Americans, and police out of control of civil authorities. Now there are many voices that are going to try to make the police more palatable, but the police here have an independent power from the (judicial) authorities. Only when there is a case like in Minneapolis where on video a police officer has his knee on the neck of an African American do they have to face a judicial process.
HS: Can a change in the law be expected? That there be heavier sanctions or controls on the police, or is it the case that the only thing the protests do is accelerate the legal process a little bit against this particular officer?
Petras: I think we are in a phase where with so many demonstrations, protests, and outbreaks of violence, that it's difficult to go back to normal and continue without holding the police responsible for the killing of civilians.
I think we're going to pass through a phase now of self-accusation by the police, by government officials. They're going to condemn the abuses that occur and now they are going to call for an investigation committee. They're going to discover that the police need more supervision and control, that a new code of conduct needs to be put forth.
All that is going to happen now in the face of a great confrontation with more than 100 cities in protest, that's a very unusual thing. We could say that this context is going to demand that government take some action.
Besides the extreme right of Trump, who demands more repression, more dogs to attack demonstrators, I think that in this context we are going to have a prolonged process of meetings, of discussions, of forming a commission that can prepare a document of 100 or 1000 pages about what is happening and what has happened in this conflict.
They are going to recruit some African Americans in order to improve the government's image, recruit more black police, plan a form of conduct more in accord with the law, but over time it's going to come to nothing just like in the past. But before, if we study the history, in other years of protest against racism, the same police repression took place, the same commissions were formed, but nothing changed because the structure of power is against African Americans, Latin Americans and others.
So, I think that if there aren't alterations in the economy, politics, and society, nothing will change, we're only going to have a bit of turbulence, but no answer to our needs will be given.
Right now nearly 50% of African Americans under 35 have no work. So first, we have to confront the problem of coronavirus, where African Americans and Latinos are suffering more cases. Next we have the problem of unemployment, which is extremely high among those same groups. There are structural problems, housing, health, education, employment, all that together creates situations of extraordinary urgency.
HS: Are there other items you would like to touch on at the end of the column for this week, (Mr.) Petras?
Petras: Yes, we could go down to Latin America, to Argentina, supposedly it's near an agreement with its creditors, but they still haven't signed. And if they sign an agreement, President Fernandez is apparently going to capitulate on some important points for the Argentinians. That means that they have to transfer millions of dollars to bankers and creditors.
So, seeing that in Argentina problems are multiplying with the coronavirus, with unemployment, and now with the agreement with the creditors, that could also provoke uprisings in that country like those currently in the United States, or like those in 2001 (in Argentina).
And finally we have Hong Kong, where Washington wanted to exaggerate the importance of those opposed to China. And those opponents are losing influence when the bankers and the businessmen, the multinational companies, have to choose between (investment) opportunities with China and Trump's rhetoric: they are going massively in favor of China. In a little while Hong Kong is going to be a Chinese city integral to Beijing's policy.
HS: And what can we say about Brazil, where the political crisis continues and everything points to ever greater isolation of President Bolsonaro? Can this be accelerating the end of his administration, (Mr.) Petras?
Well, the number of deaths is accelerating, yes, the numbers affected by the coronavirus are accelerating, discontent is growing. I think Bolsonaro will stay in the government only until the end of this year, he can't maintain himself, he can't endure longer.
In summary, we could say that this summer is going to be very hot politically in the United States. These days are only the opening towards a year of great violence, many conflicts, and great polarization between Trump and the neo-fascists against a mass of African Americans, unemployed whites, Hispanics and others
Interview with James Petras
June 1, 2020
(Translation from Spanish by Michael K. Smith)
Hermán Salina: Profesor, what is different about these protests set off by a single case of police brutality? What differentiates this episode from all the previous ones?
Petras: Well, it has a lot of similarity with the 1960s and 1970s because of the act of violence against African Americans, Latin Americans, but what one has to analyze is the new context where a large mass of whites is participating also in these protests. And second, that the police can't eliminate them, can't diminish the protest, it has no capacity to control them. Notice that there are 40 cities under curfew, the National Guard is active in 15 cities, it's a militarization of the important city centers.
And the other thing we should take into account, at this moment there are more than 25% unemployed, (so) this protest is not occurring just because of racism and the killing of African American George Floyd. That was the detonator, but the important thing is that we have more than 30 million Americans unemployed, they have no economic future, there are millions of young people that have finished high school and university and they can't find work. These economic and social factors together with the problem of racism, is a detonator that didn't exist before with other demonstrations.
I think that the hot summer in the next span of time - June, July, August, is going to have enormous consequences for the country. In addition, we have a very reactionary president who has said that vicious dogs should attack protesters. They had to hide President Trump in a bunker beneath the White House because protesters from the demonstrations occurring across the street tried to enter in order to make demands of Trump. They had to call special security forces to hide and protect him.
So now we have a super-reactionary president, a shattered economy, a widening pandemic, assassination of African Americans, and police out of control of civil authorities. Now there are many voices that are going to try to make the police more palatable, but the police here have an independent power from the (judicial) authorities. Only when there is a case like in Minneapolis where on video a police officer has his knee on the neck of an African American do they have to face a judicial process.
HS: Can a change in the law be expected? That there be heavier sanctions or controls on the police, or is it the case that the only thing the protests do is accelerate the legal process a little bit against this particular officer?
Petras: I think we are in a phase where with so many demonstrations, protests, and outbreaks of violence, that it's difficult to go back to normal and continue without holding the police responsible for the killing of civilians.
I think we're going to pass through a phase now of self-accusation by the police, by government officials. They're going to condemn the abuses that occur and now they are going to call for an investigation committee. They're going to discover that the police need more supervision and control, that a new code of conduct needs to be put forth.
All that is going to happen now in the face of a great confrontation with more than 100 cities in protest, that's a very unusual thing. We could say that this context is going to demand that government take some action.
Besides the extreme right of Trump, who demands more repression, more dogs to attack demonstrators, I think that in this context we are going to have a prolonged process of meetings, of discussions, of forming a commission that can prepare a document of 100 or 1000 pages about what is happening and what has happened in this conflict.
They are going to recruit some African Americans in order to improve the government's image, recruit more black police, plan a form of conduct more in accord with the law, but over time it's going to come to nothing just like in the past. But before, if we study the history, in other years of protest against racism, the same police repression took place, the same commissions were formed, but nothing changed because the structure of power is against African Americans, Latin Americans and others.
So, I think that if there aren't alterations in the economy, politics, and society, nothing will change, we're only going to have a bit of turbulence, but no answer to our needs will be given.
Right now nearly 50% of African Americans under 35 have no work. So first, we have to confront the problem of coronavirus, where African Americans and Latinos are suffering more cases. Next we have the problem of unemployment, which is extremely high among those same groups. There are structural problems, housing, health, education, employment, all that together creates situations of extraordinary urgency.
HS: Are there other items you would like to touch on at the end of the column for this week, (Mr.) Petras?
Petras: Yes, we could go down to Latin America, to Argentina, supposedly it's near an agreement with its creditors, but they still haven't signed. And if they sign an agreement, President Fernandez is apparently going to capitulate on some important points for the Argentinians. That means that they have to transfer millions of dollars to bankers and creditors.
So, seeing that in Argentina problems are multiplying with the coronavirus, with unemployment, and now with the agreement with the creditors, that could also provoke uprisings in that country like those currently in the United States, or like those in 2001 (in Argentina).
And finally we have Hong Kong, where Washington wanted to exaggerate the importance of those opposed to China. And those opponents are losing influence when the bankers and the businessmen, the multinational companies, have to choose between (investment) opportunities with China and Trump's rhetoric: they are going massively in favor of China. In a little while Hong Kong is going to be a Chinese city integral to Beijing's policy.
HS: And what can we say about Brazil, where the political crisis continues and everything points to ever greater isolation of President Bolsonaro? Can this be accelerating the end of his administration, (Mr.) Petras?
Well, the number of deaths is accelerating, yes, the numbers affected by the coronavirus are accelerating, discontent is growing. I think Bolsonaro will stay in the government only until the end of this year, he can't maintain himself, he can't endure longer.
In summary, we could say that this summer is going to be very hot politically in the United States. These days are only the opening towards a year of great violence, many conflicts, and great polarization between Trump and the neo-fascists against a mass of African Americans, unemployed whites, Hispanics and others
June 5, 2020
An Attack Against Iranian Oil Would Have Had Multiple Repercussions
The U.S. Blockade Has Robbed A Lot of Money From Venezuela
Memorial Day Interview with Sociologist James Petras
Centennial Radio Uruguay
(Translation from Spanish by Michael K. Smith)
Hernán Salina: Memorial Day, (Mr.) Petras?
Petras: Well, it's a day that has various dimensions. For the majority of people it's a day to visit the cemetery and put flowers on the graves of family members who died.
For others, which is more and more the direction the media takes, it's a day to celebrate war veterans. That means that all the news are about the soldiers who fought in Vietnam, Korea, WWII, and other related matters. So it's a day of militarism, a day in which the soldiers of the past (are celebrated), whatever their views may be, because many who served in Vietnam were anti-war. It's a mix of veterans who died without a (military) cause and veterans who died fighting in imperialist wars.
So there's a lot of (national) chauvinism today, normally there are ceremonies, but since coronavirus is now here, they can't gather in big marches through the streets. It's one of the consequences of the contradictions of capitalism that the very diseases generated are the product of political-military policy. . . . It's a reactionary day, validating imperialist wars from the Conquest of Mexico to today.
HS: Speaking of war-mongering in the U.S., what can be expected from the U.S. government against Venezuela with the arrival of Iranian oil tankers? What is being said in the United States, (Mr.) Petras?
Petras: Well, in the first place Trump threatened to attack the ships, blocking the entrance to Venezuela. But once Venezuela showed determination, that it was going to resist militarily if they blocked the ships, Washington backed down.
So, for now, the fact that the ships have entered Venezuelan territory and the U.S. hasn't attacked is good, but it's an extremely tense and threatening situation. One never knows from one minute to the next what Trump is going to do, threats on one hand, and then retreats.
HS: Venezuela, a country so rich in petroleum that it has had to receive help from Iran no less. How far has the attack on its primary industry gone, the primary wealth that Venezuela has?
Petras: Yes, it's become difficult because the American blockade has robbed Venezuela of a lot of income, the blockades, the intervention, the Venezuelan bank accounts in British banks, they lost $200 million in gold reserves that were in Britain. Citgo, a Venezuelan company in the United States, has been taken by the U.S.
So all the American piracy has caused a lot of damage to the oil industry and Venezuela's capacity to convert petroleum into gasoline that can be used in cars.
HS: It's also a very important signal from Iran, the gamble it's taking on sending ships from there and the warning it has made that it would consider any interference on the part of the United States an act of war.
Petras: Yes, it's one of the repercussions that we must take into account. Venezuela has allies, principally Iran, and to a lesser extent China and Russia, but in any case, Iran has said that if they start to attack its ships or destroy them, they would be able to take reprisals against the U.S. in Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Persian Gulf.
For this reason the consequences of a military attack against Iranian oil has multiple repercussions, as much in the Caribbean as in the Gulf. Trump has to have calculated extensively in order to launch an attack with so many repercussions at a time of economic depression. It could be very costly.
HS: And about the ex-Marine mercenaries detained in Venezuela, U.S. spokespersons came out saying they demanded they be returned. Is something being said about this in the U.S. or will this be a quieter negotiation that can be done with Venezuela?
Petras: I don't know, there is no indication right now, but it could be that something may be happening behind the scenes. For the moment Washington is simply demanding, not offering anything by negotiation. In order to negotiate Washington has to make concessions and right now Trump doesn't want to make any concession, he simply wants to dictate policy that Venezuela and Iran submit to, but this is not going to happen.
HS: With respect to Covid-19, what's the latest, (Mr.) Petras?
Petras: They've opened a lot of avenues for people to leave the house, go walking, but it's a disaster because people go out without taking precautions to maintain social distance, nor are they wearing masks when they go out to enjoy themselves or take a walk.
The beaches are full in New Jersey, in Florida, in Miami, almost everywhere. In California many people walk without consideration for taking precautions, they go together to taverns, bars, downing drinks, and everyone goes together contaminating one another.
The beauty salons, for example, in some cases that we know of, there are hundreds of people infected because the worker or the employee of the salon has been infected with the virus. So the opening up could be a disaster.
HS: The other day we were saying that a good portion of the affected are immigrants, Latinos, poor whites. Is there an organized reaction to this scene, (Mr.) Petras?
Petras: There are, there are local protests, there are protests at the national level, but apparently the investigations and denunciations of the inequalities in treatment haven't had much effect. An increase in neighborhood testing, but there is no strategy that could improve the vulnerable position of minorities, who are actually the majority in many places like Texas, California and New York. That seems to me a form of genocide against minorities.
HS: President Trump continues with accusatory rhetoric against China: now in an interview he has said that, whether it be due to incompetence or refusal, China didn't prevent that the coronavirus spread throughout the world, and he has been pressuring so that the origin of the virus be investigated inside China.
Petras: There is an economic-political war against China, and now it has increased with Washington's failures; today (virus) deaths have surpassed 100,000. Trump confronts a political-electoral threat, for that reason he's beginning to make declarations blaming China, Russia, anyone except himself. And he uses thugs in Hong Kong to attack China, he uses the virus to blame China. China is recovering frm the virus, peple are beginning to go out in the streets with safeguards and controls.
And since Washington has failed in its fight against the virus, blaming China is part of aggression against it, because China has recovered sufficiently to re-launch its manufacturing industry and technology.
HS: How does life go on in the United States? I was reading a report about the situation in Detroit, for example, that once had great industrial activity but which has now been badly battered, an emblematic city in that sense.
Petras: Yes, they're beginning to increase production at Ford for a week and suddenly there's another coronavirus case and they have to back off. The American economy is in full depression, unemployment has risen to more than 40 million people. It's a very grave situation, the unemployment, the hunger, the lack of resources, the loss of homes, the crisis is growing and one can't avoid it. Trump says they're going to continue with everything opened up, cost what it may, however many deaths it costs doesn't matter. Trump says that never again will we shut the economy in order to save lives.
HS: Is there something else you want to mention as we wrap up, (Mr.) Petras?
Petras: Well, what we have more information about is Israel, where President Netanyahu confronts a political judgement for bribery, fraud, and corruption. Finally, after so many years of robbing the Palestinians and Jews themselves, now Netanyahu faces a judgement and we hope they finally put him in jail. But I have doubts that he will be punished, especially with the corruption that exists in Israeli courts and also in general.
In the United States there is little information about the crimes of Netanyahu because of the influence of the Israel lobby, they can influence what the media are going to publish and not publish. A Netanyahu crime that goes beyond bribery and fraud are the crimes against the Palestinians, but about that the judges have nothing to say.
Memorial Day Interview with Sociologist James Petras
Centennial Radio Uruguay
(Translation from Spanish by Michael K. Smith)
Hernán Salina: Memorial Day, (Mr.) Petras?
Petras: Well, it's a day that has various dimensions. For the majority of people it's a day to visit the cemetery and put flowers on the graves of family members who died.
For others, which is more and more the direction the media takes, it's a day to celebrate war veterans. That means that all the news are about the soldiers who fought in Vietnam, Korea, WWII, and other related matters. So it's a day of militarism, a day in which the soldiers of the past (are celebrated), whatever their views may be, because many who served in Vietnam were anti-war. It's a mix of veterans who died without a (military) cause and veterans who died fighting in imperialist wars.
So there's a lot of (national) chauvinism today, normally there are ceremonies, but since coronavirus is now here, they can't gather in big marches through the streets. It's one of the consequences of the contradictions of capitalism that the very diseases generated are the product of political-military policy. . . . It's a reactionary day, validating imperialist wars from the Conquest of Mexico to today.
HS: Speaking of war-mongering in the U.S., what can be expected from the U.S. government against Venezuela with the arrival of Iranian oil tankers? What is being said in the United States, (Mr.) Petras?
Petras: Well, in the first place Trump threatened to attack the ships, blocking the entrance to Venezuela. But once Venezuela showed determination, that it was going to resist militarily if they blocked the ships, Washington backed down.
So, for now, the fact that the ships have entered Venezuelan territory and the U.S. hasn't attacked is good, but it's an extremely tense and threatening situation. One never knows from one minute to the next what Trump is going to do, threats on one hand, and then retreats.
HS: Venezuela, a country so rich in petroleum that it has had to receive help from Iran no less. How far has the attack on its primary industry gone, the primary wealth that Venezuela has?
Petras: Yes, it's become difficult because the American blockade has robbed Venezuela of a lot of income, the blockades, the intervention, the Venezuelan bank accounts in British banks, they lost $200 million in gold reserves that were in Britain. Citgo, a Venezuelan company in the United States, has been taken by the U.S.
So all the American piracy has caused a lot of damage to the oil industry and Venezuela's capacity to convert petroleum into gasoline that can be used in cars.
HS: It's also a very important signal from Iran, the gamble it's taking on sending ships from there and the warning it has made that it would consider any interference on the part of the United States an act of war.
Petras: Yes, it's one of the repercussions that we must take into account. Venezuela has allies, principally Iran, and to a lesser extent China and Russia, but in any case, Iran has said that if they start to attack its ships or destroy them, they would be able to take reprisals against the U.S. in Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Persian Gulf.
For this reason the consequences of a military attack against Iranian oil has multiple repercussions, as much in the Caribbean as in the Gulf. Trump has to have calculated extensively in order to launch an attack with so many repercussions at a time of economic depression. It could be very costly.
HS: And about the ex-Marine mercenaries detained in Venezuela, U.S. spokespersons came out saying they demanded they be returned. Is something being said about this in the U.S. or will this be a quieter negotiation that can be done with Venezuela?
Petras: I don't know, there is no indication right now, but it could be that something may be happening behind the scenes. For the moment Washington is simply demanding, not offering anything by negotiation. In order to negotiate Washington has to make concessions and right now Trump doesn't want to make any concession, he simply wants to dictate policy that Venezuela and Iran submit to, but this is not going to happen.
HS: With respect to Covid-19, what's the latest, (Mr.) Petras?
Petras: They've opened a lot of avenues for people to leave the house, go walking, but it's a disaster because people go out without taking precautions to maintain social distance, nor are they wearing masks when they go out to enjoy themselves or take a walk.
The beaches are full in New Jersey, in Florida, in Miami, almost everywhere. In California many people walk without consideration for taking precautions, they go together to taverns, bars, downing drinks, and everyone goes together contaminating one another.
The beauty salons, for example, in some cases that we know of, there are hundreds of people infected because the worker or the employee of the salon has been infected with the virus. So the opening up could be a disaster.
HS: The other day we were saying that a good portion of the affected are immigrants, Latinos, poor whites. Is there an organized reaction to this scene, (Mr.) Petras?
Petras: There are, there are local protests, there are protests at the national level, but apparently the investigations and denunciations of the inequalities in treatment haven't had much effect. An increase in neighborhood testing, but there is no strategy that could improve the vulnerable position of minorities, who are actually the majority in many places like Texas, California and New York. That seems to me a form of genocide against minorities.
HS: President Trump continues with accusatory rhetoric against China: now in an interview he has said that, whether it be due to incompetence or refusal, China didn't prevent that the coronavirus spread throughout the world, and he has been pressuring so that the origin of the virus be investigated inside China.
Petras: There is an economic-political war against China, and now it has increased with Washington's failures; today (virus) deaths have surpassed 100,000. Trump confronts a political-electoral threat, for that reason he's beginning to make declarations blaming China, Russia, anyone except himself. And he uses thugs in Hong Kong to attack China, he uses the virus to blame China. China is recovering frm the virus, peple are beginning to go out in the streets with safeguards and controls.
And since Washington has failed in its fight against the virus, blaming China is part of aggression against it, because China has recovered sufficiently to re-launch its manufacturing industry and technology.
HS: How does life go on in the United States? I was reading a report about the situation in Detroit, for example, that once had great industrial activity but which has now been badly battered, an emblematic city in that sense.
Petras: Yes, they're beginning to increase production at Ford for a week and suddenly there's another coronavirus case and they have to back off. The American economy is in full depression, unemployment has risen to more than 40 million people. It's a very grave situation, the unemployment, the hunger, the lack of resources, the loss of homes, the crisis is growing and one can't avoid it. Trump says they're going to continue with everything opened up, cost what it may, however many deaths it costs doesn't matter. Trump says that never again will we shut the economy in order to save lives.
HS: Is there something else you want to mention as we wrap up, (Mr.) Petras?
Petras: Well, what we have more information about is Israel, where President Netanyahu confronts a political judgement for bribery, fraud, and corruption. Finally, after so many years of robbing the Palestinians and Jews themselves, now Netanyahu faces a judgement and we hope they finally put him in jail. But I have doubts that he will be punished, especially with the corruption that exists in Israeli courts and also in general.
In the United States there is little information about the crimes of Netanyahu because of the influence of the Israel lobby, they can influence what the media are going to publish and not publish. A Netanyahu crime that goes beyond bribery and fraud are the crimes against the Palestinians, but about that the judges have nothing to say.
May 30, 2020
Why Police Torture and Kill
"What I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco - is true of every Northern city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests and they have no other function. They are, moreover - even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity - quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty."
-----James Baldwin, A Report From Occupied Territory
-----James Baldwin, A Report From Occupied Territory
May 23, 2020
Democrats Finally Do Self-Critique! Oh, Wait, It's Someone Else
"Crazy Bernie Sanders is not a fighter. He gives up too easy! The Dem establishment gets Alfred E. Newman (Mayor Pete) and Amy Klobuchar to quit and endorse Sleepy Joe BEFORE Super Tuesday, and gets Pocahontas to stay in the race, taking thousands of votes from Bernie. He would have beaten Sleepy Joe in a LANDSLIDE, every State, if these events didn't happen. Even if Warren just dropped out, he would easily have won. Dems did it to him with Crooked Hillary, and now, even more so. . . and Bernie doesn't even complain."
-------------Donald Trump May 20, 2020
-------------Donald Trump May 20, 2020
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