Thoughts and Prayers for the Victims of the Racist Shooting in Kentucky

There was another racist shooting in Kentucky on Saturday, which got overlooked with attention focused on the mass murder of the congregation at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

In this video from The Young Turks, presenter Francis Maxwell describes what happened, and angrily denounces the anti-Black racism that has led to this story being ignored.

The shooting occurred at a Kroger supermarket in Louisville, Kentucky. The shooter was seen trying to get into the First Baptist Church of Jeffersontown. The alleged perp, Gregory Bush, had a history of racism and violence. When he couldn’t get into the church, he walked into the store and shot two Black people, Maurice Stallard and Vicki Jones. Stallard died in front of his 12 year old grandson, while Jones had recently retired from VA hospital. When the cops arrived, Bush surrendered, saying ‘Don’t shoot. Whites don’t kill Whites’.

It’s very obviously a racially motivated killing, but it didn’t make the news in what Maxwell angrily denounces as a failure of the news cycle. It took three days for the story to be noticed by the mainstream news organisations. It was drowned out by stupid conspiracy theories about Justin Bieber, or another Republican politician saying that this time, a White man needs to run for the presidency. And even when the other news media had picked it up, Fox News turned their attention elsewhere, like the migrant caravan from Honduras, which is now still a thousand miles away. And at the same time Trump’s supporters are denying that the right-wing maniac sending bombs to prominent Democrats and the MAGA truck had anything to do with Trump.

He makes the point that racism needs to be confronted, and discussion of it and racially motivated crimes should not be avoided. They aren’t rare. There are all too many of them. Not only is this policy of not mentioning shooting incidents against Blacks dangerous, but it also plays into Trump’s hands and his manipulation of the media. Maxwell here points to another, similar shooting that people also probably haven’t heard about: the shooting of two Black cops by a heavily armed White man they’d confronted. The right-wing American media ignored it, partly because it doesn’t conform to their narrative about a war on cops waged by Blacks.

Maxwell goes on to state that this is why independent media is so important in today’s hyperpolarized political climate. We need to expose these issues, so they can be confronted head on.

It’s a pity that this story was not given the prominence it deserved, and that it has been overshadowed by the synagogue shooting. Every incident of this kind is equally disgusting, regardless of the ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation of the victims. But the concentration of attention on the synagogue shooting to the exclusion of this other atrocity could confirm the anti-Semitism in parts of the American Black community.

Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam hate Jews, because they mistakenly blame them for the slave trade. I’ve dispensed with this pernicious myth several times on this blog, quoting from Hugh Thomas’ exhaustive The Slave Trade, and other works of historical scholarship. These show that Jews comprised only a vanishingly tiny minority of slave traders and owners. But Farrakhan and his ilk also resent Jews because they feel they’re not discriminated against, because they’re White. And they have a point. Despite anti-Semitic prejudice, Jews in America and Britain aren’t discriminated against and are now largely comfortably off. This wasn’t always the case. Jewish immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century did suffer enormous poverty, as well as prejudice. They got to their present position in society through extremely hard work and talent. And large sections of the Jewish community supported the Black community’s demand for Civil Rights and social and economic improvement. Jackie Walker over here is proof of that in her person. Her parents, a black American mother and a Russian Jewish father, met on a Civil Rights march.

But the resentment and prejudice against the Jews in parts of the Black American community remains. And I’m afraid that the media’s handling of this story will just confirm this prejudice.

TYT’s Francis Maxwell Tears Into Charlottesville Nazis in Less Than Five Minutes

In this short clip, The Young Turks’ Francis Maxwell uses his dulcet Scots tones to rip into the Nazis who goose-stepped into Charlottesville last week with stinging ridicule. Maxwell states that he’s mocking fun of them because they do not deserve to be taken seriously or to be given the dignity of anything but mockery and ridicule. And he also lays into those from the Right, from Donald Trump and Laura Southern on down, who condemn both sides. Because this equates anti-Nazis with Nazis, those who protest against racist violence and discrimination, with those who would perpetrate.

Amongst the Nazis and White Supremacists he attacks is the young man, who claims he wasn’t really a racist. He points out that if he seriously means that, then he should have take a trip to Las Vegas instead of joining a Nazi rally. He then posts up multiple pictures of the guy, with a paedophile moustache added so that he resembles his hero, Adolf Hitler.

He also tears bloody chunks off an older man, in T-shirt with long, greying hair, whom he calls ‘Gandalf’. This man spent years planning armed attacks against Black and Jewish businesses. He’s a career criminal, who, if they were serious about their march being all about heritage and not a campaign for racist violence, shouldn’t have been allowed in the local demonstration.

He also launches another attack on a yet another moustachio’d man, who cried that he’d better be kept a hundred feet away from a school.

He also mocks them for their lack of personal hygiene, their terrible fashion sense – deriding them as ‘neckbeards’ who have stolen their father’s khaki chinos, and their entire lack of attractiveness to women. He calls them ‘basement dwellers’, who have never ‘touched a breast’, and says that ‘Gandalf’ should have taken his crew to a brothel instead of the march, as there they would have had a 20 per cent chance of actually talking to a woman. Although this was still high estimate of their chances of success. He also accused the lad wearing the neckbeard of having grown it to hide how many times women had swiped left on him when they’d seen him on mobile phones.

The Young Turks in their blurb for the video state that this is how you rip into them, and they’ve got a very fair point. As for the Nazis’ sex appeal, or lack of it, The Young Turks have also made a video revealing that the young men, who joined their march were encouraged by the organisers, who told them that this would make them attractive to women and would get them girlfriends. Some hope of that! As the Turks themselves also pointed out, this was the same recruiting tactic ISIS uses: that if young guys join them, they’ll be inundated with jihadi brides all wanting their bodies and their children.

Counterpart also published a piece commenting on the Nazis’ sexuality as well by a female sex therapist, who has contributed a number of articles to their site. She also observed their massive lack of appeal to women, and stated that rather than confronting the fact, they simply retreated into massive misogyny and hatred towards women in order to try and explain it to themselves. She also declared that many of them were repressed gays trying to suppress their fantasies about their fellow stormtroopers, and tormented by fantasies of well-endowed Black men satisfying their wives or girlfriends.

As a general observation on the weird sexuality of Fascist groups, this is very accurate. Ludwig Theweileit, a German historian, wrote an entire book, Male Fantasies, arguing that an important psychological component in Nazism was homosexuality. 75 per cent of the SA, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, who were wiped out by the SS on Hitler’s orders during the Night of the Long Knives, were gay.

This doesn’t mean that the Nazis were at all tolerant of gays, as claimed by some supporters of the Republican party. They weren’t. Homosexuality amongst Jews was promoted before the Holocaust as a method of stopping the Jewish people from reproducing. Aryan gays were persecuted as well as the other racial, religious and political groups banned by the Nazis, and were interned in the concentration camps. If I remember correctly, there was even a play about the Nazi persecution of gays, Bent, staged in the 1980s.

And lurid fantasies and fears about the racial other preying on Aryan women is also a standard part of White racist/ Nazi psychology. Hitler had a recurring nightmare of a chained, blonde woman terrorized by a Jewish butcher. One of the anti-Semitic myths promoted by late 19th century racist ideologues is that Jews are more highly sexed than gentiles. And Blacks have also suffered from a similar racist myth – that they are more sexually motivated than Whites, and have larger genitals.

As for their lack of success with women, this reminds me of an article about a Far Right musician, who was part of the Nazi Black Metal/ Industrial scene in America in Adam Parfrey’s collection of articles on apocalyptic America, Cult Rapture. The article was entitled, ‘Where Can I Find a Girlfriend for this Nice, Young, Nazi Psycho-killer’ or something similar. This particular specimen of walking race hate had produced a book or pamphlet arguing that, rather than being prudes and puritans, the Third Reich was a sexual wonderland. The author himself was also spectacularly unsuccessful in attracting the attentions of the opposite gender. He did manage to get himself a date once with a female White supremacist, but he was too much even for her. She escaped from him by claiming out the windows of the ladies’ toilets after telling him that she needed to powder her nose.

Of course, they’re a very serious threat under all this. But the Nazis are such a bunch of twisted individuals that they deserve all the ridicule they get.