JP on Whether Gays Are Abandoning Pride

Yesterday I put up a piece wondering if gay Americans and Brits were abandoning Pride and some of the mainstream gay organisations. This followed a video on YouTube of the operations manager of the group Gays Against Groomers angrily tearing apart the gay flag. Gays Against Groomers was set up to combat the gender ideology being taught to children, which they feel is a form of indoctrination and sexual predation. Instead of the Pride flag, the man pointed to the American flag as the banner which represented gays and all Americans.

Barry Wall, the EDIJester, and Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh of the Queens’ Speech podcast, are gender critical gay YouTubers. They are extremely critical of the mainstream organisations for their focus on trans rights to the exclusion of ordinary gay men and women. They also feel that the trans ideology has become a new form of eugenics and gay conversion therapy by encouraging gender nonconforming young people, who in most cases would pass through their dysphoria to grow up to be ordinary gays, to transition, rather than accept their natal sexual identity. And many gays are also saying that they aren’t going to Pride marches because of the overt displays of kink and fetish.

JP, one of the great commenters on this blog, posted his perspective on this issue from across the Pond. He writes

‘Well yea, I haven’t been to a Pride parade in … over a decade. The weekend of events were drunk Allies and naked people walking streets. I imbibe and defend adult’s choosing to go to nude beaches and the like, but when those happen in public … where children are brought by their parents these parades?! Mardi Gras in New Orleans was more tame than Pride in Chicago, and Mardi Gras isn’t tauted as being a posterchild of family-friendly events. Pride events weren’t something to be proud about if the intention is to support family-friendly storytime.

Don’t be too surprised by LGBs in America not all supporting a liberal agenda. So-called Log Cabin gays have been politically active conservatives for decades. It was the Log Cabins who challenged President Clinton in court over his Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for the US military. The irony with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is that “liberals” went along with an anti-liberal policy. It’s another example of how liberal parties do not defend democratic freedoms. It’s good to hear that some LGBs are aware and don’t just fall in-line stereotyped gender and sexuality politics.

The problem for straights in these debates is not seeing similar politicing, like supporting so-called “family values”. Jim Crow laws defended the “family values” of banning interracial marriages in the US. Hopefully today’s straights would not fall in-line with mid-20th century politics about that.’

There’s a gay American writer and blogger, whose name escapes me at the moment, who has stated that as a demographic group, gays are largely Conservative, believe very much in fiscal responsibility and have a strong sense of loyalty to the companies that employ them. He called this ‘the Smithers Syndrome’, after Mr Burns’ intensely loyal secretary from The Simpsons. This is very different from the image of the gay milieu given by radical gay groups, such as the mock order of nuns, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who were at the centre of controversy a day or so ago when they were disinvited from appearing with the Dodgers’ sports team.

Related to this, the American chain store Target has been forced to scale down its display of trans clothing. Part of the scandal there is that the clothes were designed by a Satanist, and included messages like ‘Satan Loves You’ and ‘Satan Loves Your Pronouns’. The stores were ordered to take this merchandise to a room a third of the planned display in size. They were afraid the controversial clothing would result in them being on the receiving end of the same kind of boycott that has knocked billions of sales off Bud Light after the brewery made the mistake of choosing transwoman Dylan Mulvaney to promote it.

The Satanism here seems to come from the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple, neither of which believe in Satan as a real, personal force of supernatural evil. Instead they identify Satan with the promotion of the self and its desires, which they view as liberating. The Satanic Temple has been around for years performing stunts intended to infuriate Conservative Christians. After the community in one American town put up a stone inscribed with the 10 Commandments in front of their courthouse to symbolise justice, they put up a statue of Baphomet. When another American town put up a crib to celebrate Christmas, they put up one with a baby Satan. They come across as a radical atheist/secularist group determined to attack the Christian right and the public promotion of Christianity. I also wonder if the clothing’s Satanism was also partly inspired by the rapper Lil Nas. Nas is gay, and is another pop star who has cultivated a Satanic image. One of his videos has him twerking in front of Lucifer in hell. I did wonder if Target had launched the clothing hoping capture the market offered by young, edgy LGBTQ+ peeps who listen to him and similar pop artists. If so, all they’ve succeeded in doing, it seems to me, is provoke a reaction against the store, especially as it came after the controversy that erupted a few days earlier when it was revealed that several of the speakers at a Satanist convention were trans rights activists. I can understand some of this desire to insult and provoke. It’s a reaction to the splenetic homophobia in sections of the Christian right, though to be fair, the Republican party as a whole seems to have become quite pro-gay and now accept gay marriage.

As for Bill Clinton and his sort-of legalisation of homosexuality in the US armed forces, this was intensely controversial for the Christian right when it was passed. I can remember reading a passage in the book Mind Siege, which is all about the way left-wing ideas are taking over America. This accused Clinton of ‘sodomizing the American military’. This boggled my mind! What! All of them! Where did he get the energy? And what do Hillary and Monica Lewinsky have to say about it? Of course, they then explain that they mean it metaphorically, not literally. It is interesting hearing another perspective on this issue, and I hadn’t known he was challenged about it by the Log Cabin Republicans.

As for the family and family values, I very much believe that the traditional family needs strengthening. The statistics for Britain, like America, show that children from fatherless homes generally perform less well at school, progress as well economically or professionally and are more likely to become criminals, do drugs and engage in promiscuous sex. Of course, this is a general view – there are also any number of single mothers, who have done an excellent job of raising their kids. But I believe that it is possible to do this without promoting homophobia or prejudice or discrimination against gays. I recall that something similar was done a few years ago to a family values group in Yorkshire. This was reformed so that it genuinely worked to strengthen family after they’d kicked out the old guard, who had ‘some funny ideas’ and seemed to have used it as a tool for attacking gay rights.

The EDIJester in one of his videos also sharply criticised one of the trans rights activists, who appears on TickTock. This individual told his audience of young people, that if their families didn’t accept their gender identity, they should cancel them and having nothing more to do with them. The Jester was furious because young gays have been hurt by their parents disowning them, and considered this grossly irresponsible. There were gay organisations in Bristol that worked to help young gays left homeless after being thrown out by their parents. And some of the best stories from gay YouTubers have been about how young gay people were able to keep the love and support of their parents after coming out, or had succeeding in reconciling themselves and their families. Obviously, there should be more of this than victimisation and prejudice.

As for the stifling of civil liberties and freedom of speech, I see this as coming from both the left and the right. In Britain the Conservatives are trying to pass laws severely limiting the freedom to protest and for workers to strike. At the same time, the hate speech laws have been expanded so that they’re severely limiting what may be said in public. Today’s news has included coverage of the case of Kathleen Stock, a lesbian and a gender critical feminist academic. She lost her place at one university due to student protests that branded her transphobic, and there were similar protests when she spoke at the Oxford Union. As a result, Oxford Student Union has cut ties with the Oxford Union. And other academics and ordinary women with similar views have also suffered similar protests and harassment. James Lindsay, who is one of a group of academics alongside Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, who are particularly active fighting woke ideology, has said that this intolerance is no accident. It comes from the ‘repressive tolerance’ advocated by the ’60s radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Roughly translated, it means that freedom of speech should only be extended to those on the radical left, while their critics should be silenced. Lindsay describes himself as a liberal, by which he appears to mean someone who stands up for their traditional liberal values of freedom of speech, individualism and Enlightenment rationality. He is, however, vehemently anti-Communist, though possibly not without reason. Helen Pluckrose also describes herself as a liberal and someone who believes in those values, but also has socialist beliefs. And the other day looking through the internet I found a book by a left-wing author on how the Left can fight woke.

It therefore seems to me that countering the intolerant, extremist ideologies that have been called ‘woke’ – Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory and so on and the attempts of their supporters to silence reasoned criticism and debate isn’t either a left-wing or right-wing issue. It’s one that concerns people on both sides of the political spectrum, who are concerned about preserving Enlightenment values of free debate, rationality and the individual.

JP on How Critical Race Theory Ignores Black Achievement

I posted another piece last night attacking Critical Race Theory and the theory of White privilege as a racist attempt to redefine racism that didn’t fit reality. This used the example of the murder of seven White vagrants in Florida by the Nation of Yahweh, a new Black religious movement that combined religion with a flourishing business empire. Its leader, Yahweh Ben Yahweh, and his commanders bitterly hated Whites, and to get into the upper, governing ranks of the organisation you had to kill a White person. They did so with the murder of seven White tramps. Yahweh Ben Yahweh had been honoured by former president Bill Clinton for his organisation’s regeneration of run-down Black districts in Miami. In this instance, it was the Black religious leader who had the power and privilege, and his White victims absolutely none.

JP, one of the great commenters on this blog, also posted this comment, pointing out that the theory of White privilege also ignores or plays down Black achievement, both in modern America and in the great civilisations that have arisen in Africa throughout history. He writes:

‘>Critical Race Theory and its activists have attempted to redefine racism as prejudice + power. Blacks cannot be racist, because, according to CRT, they are powerless.

That redifinition is insulting. It does 2 things very well:

1. discredits any power that Blacks have ever achieved.

2. deprives the individual Black of self expression

African Americans have achieved power. Justice Thomas has wielded large power over the law in the US since the 1990s, Oprah dominated American society and was the 1st Black billionaire, Obama was elected (and re-elected) President of the US, on and on the list goes. I’ve heard people trying to claim that such powerful, successful people are just “Black face”. What?! That these people are traitors to real African Americans. Wow. That is how far these people will go to nullify Blacks who don’t fit their redefined racism.

Africans have achieved power and greatness. Great African societies and cultures are forgotten or just ignored. The Songhai Empire, Mali Empire, etc. The ancient Egyptian civilization is exempted from being “African” for … well whatever reason besides literally being on the same continent. Even if African achievements are acknowledged, these examples are waft aside as being ancient history; and that European white privledge and racist slavery overpowered them. Not so fast. West African, aka. “Black”, merchants were already enslaving peoples long before Europeans colonized the West Coast in the 18-19th centuries. The timeline of history doesn’t support the narrative that European white privledge caused or started slavery or racism.

This redifinition is revisionist. It’s made by people who don’t like the facts, or are ignorant of history, and who redefine words to fit a narrative of how they want to manipulate the future.’

He has also posted a video of an angry Black mother objecting to CRT being taught in schools. There are many videos like this of Black parents strenuously objecting to their children being taught it in schools. In one of these, a father stated that he had never encountered racism, and that he wanted his son to believe that he could do or be anything he chose. But CRT worked against this by telling Blacks they would always be marginalised, poorer and discriminated against. The father believed in the American Dream. This has taken a bashing through repeated depressions and the Reaganomics that have meant that the middle class – Black, White, Asian, whatever, has become impoverished. Generally speaking, Blacks are less prosperous than Whites, but this is an average. Black conservatives are worth reading in this respect, as they point out paradoxically the immense progress Black America made after the ending of slavery. Despite real oppression in the form of the Jim Crow Laws and segregation, they built up capital, opened businesses and entered the professions. Black districts like Harlem also had their commercial centres, just like their White counterparts. In the 1950s an American advertising magazine hailed Blacks as the new middle class.

Since then, things seem to have gone backward. Authors like Thomas Sowell recall how the streets of areas like Harlem were safe when they were growing up. I think Sowell says that when he lived there, he never heard a gunshot. They were less run-down, and residents had far more self-respect. This isn’t racial – the same conservatives will point to similar conditions and attitudes among the White underclass in Britain. I don’t accept that this relative decline is due to the welfare state incentivising such anti-social attitudes and behaviour. But it’s clear that something has gone seriously wrong, something that the victim narrative of Black America and Britain isn’t addressing and may actually be making worse.

Trailer for Lovecraft Country – Short Lived SF/Fantasy Hero Tackling Racism and the Monsters of Cthulhu Mythos

Lovecraft Country was a short-lived SF/Fantasy series on H.B.O. last year. Set in the era of Jim Crow, its Black hero travelled across the American south, faced with White institutional racism on one hand and creatures like H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Cthulhu on the other. I found the trailer for it on Kinocheck International’s channel on YouTube. According to their blurb for the show

Based on Matt Ruff ‘s novel of the same name, Lovecraft Country follows Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) as he meets up with his friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett) and his Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) to embark on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America in search of his missing father (Michael Kenneth Williams). This begins a struggle to survive and overcome both the racist terrors of white America and the terrifying monsters that could be ripped from a Lovecraft paperback. Lovecraft Country (2020) is the new mystery movie starring Jonathan Majors, Jurnee Smollett and Wunmi Mosaku.

I admit, I had my doubts about this show. Mr H in his review of the show said that it looked interesting, but that it wasn’t actually based on anything Lovecraft had written, although there were references to him and his monsters. I was also afraid that the series would take the opportunity for some very heavy-handed anti-racist preaching, of the type where all the White characters would be racists and all the Blacks good, decent, innocent victims. Andy Ruff, who wrote the source novel, is White, but Quinn, the Black YouTuber of the Science Fiction channel, Quinn’s Ideas, praised it and said that Ruff was exactly right in his depiction of the time. This is praise indeed, as some of the literature by White authors exploring anti-Black racism has been criticised as patronising, sometimes with good reason. Looking at the trailer, however, it seems that the series was actually quite good.

Unfortunately, we may never know. It’s been cancelled. The show’s writers and creators have said that there will not be a second series, which could be a real pity. I hope one of the other channels will repeat the series and if it’s out on DVD I’ll buy it, although that may be something of a forlorn hope given the way everything is being channelled from DVD onto the streaming channels.

Trump’s Accusations of Electoral Fraud and the Elections that Put the Fascists in Government

Yesterday Trump started flinging around accusations of voter fraud. He had already won, he declared, and so counting should stop. He also claimed that there was massive electoral fraud in states like Nevada and Georgia, where he’d lost to Biden, and stated that he was taking legal action against those states over the result and demanding recounts. These accusations seem to be utterly false, and his proposed lawsuit against Georgia has already been thrown out by the supreme court or whatever. There’s absolutely no basis to these accusations. They’re just an attempt by the megalomaniac man-baby to hang on to power any way he can. But it’s provoked demonstrations by his supporters up and down America, who are demanding that the authorities do exactly as he says.

This is all absolutely astonishing. It amazes me, because it’s less like the actions of an accomplished politician so much as a petulant child demanding that they’ve won a game and that everyone should therefore give in to them. Because. But it’s also a logical progression of Republican attitudes and policies towards voting. I put up a post a week or so ago reproducing and commenting on an article in the I, which reported that in some southern states like Mississippi Blacks and other sections of the population were being prevented from exercising their democratic rights by local legislation. Some of this dated from the era of Jim Crow, and was deliberately intended to limit the Black vote. A few years ago, The Young Turks put up a video attacking legislation the Republicans had put in place. This was ostensibly to combat voter fraud, but there was no real need for it. It’s real purpose was to exclude the poor, Blacks and students from voting. One southern Republican even gave the game away by saying that they passed these laws to stop the Democrats getting in.

It reminds me somewhat of the supposedly democratic election in Italy in the 1920s which saw Mussolini’s Fascists voted into power. At the time none of the parties in the Italian parliament had a clear majority. It had been hoped by Italy’s ruling liberal politicians that by inviting into government, they could form a coalition sufficiently strong to break this deadlock. But Mussolini didn’t want to be a junior partner. He wanted all of it. And so legislation was passed that defined Italy as a single constituency. Whichever party got the most votes nationally, would take something like three-quarters or so of the seats in parliament. The rest would be shared among the other parties. The Fascists won the election, though in many places they lost spectacularly. One of these, ironically, was Mussolini’s home town of Predappia, where he only got 2 per cent of the vote or less. Well, he had an obvious disadvantage there: they knew him.

But the result was that the Fascists became the overwhelmingly dominant party, and Italy began its journey towards dictatorship.

Mussolini had used constitutional methods, as well as brutal force, to gain power. Hitler did the same later in Germany, when the German president similarly hoped that he could break a similar political deadlock there by including the Nazis in a coalition government.

Trump’s wild, unsubstantiated accusations of electoral fraud and demands that voting should be stopped are an attack on democracy. They aren’t as flagrant or grotesque as the colossal gerrymandering that gave Mussolini control of Italy, but they’re definitely on the way there.

I don’t think Trump will get his way with his demands. But they do mark another stage in the gradual undermining of American democracy. And I’m afraid that if Trump does win, he will try to put in place legislation that will further further weaken it so that the Republicans can keep on winning unfairly. And the endpoint of all this, as in Germany and Italy, will be a right-wing dictatorship.

But it will be cloaked in the language of democracy, and protecting the will of the people.

Black Activists Plan Blacks-Only Town ‘Wakanda’ in Georgia

This comes via the Midwestly channel on YouTube. Midwestly is a White guy and his views seem to be Conservative. He’s posted criticisms of Black Lives Matter and the riots that have broken out in its name. But he also says that there’s nothing wrong in this, and gives them his support. He just feels that it’s not the way to bring people together, and that it creates division. He also makes the point that if it was done by Whites, it would be considered Alt Right.

Yes, yes, it would. and there is plenty wrong with a town founded deliberately to exclude or marginalise people simply because of their race or ethnicity.

Ashley Scott, Renee Walters, and the Foundation of the new ‘Wakanda’

According to the Insider, two Black Activists, Ashley Scott, a real estate agent from Stonecrest, Georgia, and her friend Renee Walters found 96.71 acres of land in Georgia. They then persuaded 19 Black families to purchase the land with the intention of setting up a town. Called ‘Wakanda’, presumably after the fictional African supertechnological state in the movie and comic Black Panther, it will be primarily for Blacks, although pro-Black White allies will be permitted to apply. One of the points Midwestly makes is that Georgia doesn’t have the fictional element Vibranium upon which Wakanda’s advanced technology is based. And so it ain’t gonna be Wakanda without the Vibranium.

Scott said that the year had made her feel distraught and was looking for ways to feel empowered. She also said that she envisioned ‘a place where we can all be proud and have human dignity, honour and respect, and equality amongst our Black people because we have Black talent.’

The Freedom Georgia Initiative

This produced the Freedom Georgia Initiative, which will spend the next three to five years installing everything from wi-fi and water before planning residential, retail and recreation areas. MidWestly makes the point that the amount of land purchased gives each family about five acres, which isn’t a lot, plus retail, plus recreation and plus public works. He also says it doesn’t sound like freedom.

Scott wrote an article for Blavity stating that the group saw the land as a fresh start with a city that could be a shining example of being the change they wanted to see by supporting Black families and companies. She said that they wanted to be involved in creating the lives they really want for their Black families. And maybe, just maybe, create some generational wealth for ourselves by investing in the land and their core values and beliefs. The intiative is, apparently, geared to offering a Black centric community a fresh start after the fall of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street by White supremacists and poverty enforced by Jim Crow laws.

Scott said that ‘it’s not even a Black thing. It’s a place where we can all be proud and have human dignity, honour and respect, and equality amongst our Black people because we have Black talent.’ Walter told Insider that despite major figures calling for change and speaking out in favour of Black America in recent months, the two hope the project can be an example to those that advocating for significant change can begin on an individual level.’ He comments that it’s cool they want to get out of the city, but that it sounds like they want segregation. Well, that’s the way it sounds to me!

Practical Problems

He goes on to read from a second article, which says that the planned colony is in Wilkinson County in rural Georgia, and that the group initially looked into Toomsboro, Georgia, until they were told that it wasn’t for sale. This second article calls it a ‘Black only safe haven called ‘Freedom’.’ But it also adds that pro-Black families can apply to live there. Midwestly asks what ‘pro-Black’ means. They also intend to clear the land for farming and fishing. He states that they don’t have nearly enough land for what they intend to do. Even if the 19 families only have one acre plots each, leaving 50 acres for building a lake, retail stores, it would mean that everyone would have to move into condos to make it work. He said that if it was him, he would want to have land with his home, because without land you aren’t going to create wealth.

Segregation and the Alt-Right

Midwestly says he wishes them all the best because they’re private citizens buying land to do what they want. It’s just that if White people did this, it would be called something different, like an ethnostate. Yes, because that’s what it very much looks like from here, the intended ethnicity of the settlement notwithstanding. He goes on to say that it’s what the Alt Right is talking about, and he doesn’t necessarily like all that division, after the University of Michingan launched its Whites and non-Whites separate cafes. This isn’t the way to create unity. It just creates more division. And ultimately it’s heartbreaking to see people talking about this stuff as if it’s stunning and brave.

Here’s the video:

Conservatives, Race and Property Rights

Midwestly is coming at this from the Conservative view that the private individual should be able to do whatever they like on their own land. This is, apparently, the reason Barry Goldwater opposed desegegration. He was not an opponent of Black improvement. I have seen it argued that he was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He also, supposedly, desegegrated his department store. But he thought that compulsory desegegration was an attack on individual freedom and property rights. But Midwestly is clearly troubled by the racism at the heart of this project.

Ideal Communities an American Tradition

In some ways, the project part of a long tradition of people trying to found better, more perfect communities in the New World. It was behind the Pilgrim Father’s decision to migrate, as was explained in this Sunday’s edition of the Beeb’s Christian programme, Songs of Praise. They intended their new settlement to be a shining beacon. It was the Puritan settlers who gave America its vision of itself as a uniquely more community, a shining city on a hill. It saw British nonconformists take to America ideas of democracy and religious tolerance which influenced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It should be pointed out, however, that the Founding Fathers determinedly weren’t democrats, and explicitly stated that the franchise should be restricted to elite White males to stop the poor majority oppressing the rich.

In the 19th century political radicals like the British poet Robert Southey, the Scots Utopian Socialist Robert Owen, and the followers of the French Utopian Socialist Fourier all tried to set up their own Utopian Communes in the US. These failed, though the Oneida community survived by reforming itself as a joint-stock company. A Jewish emigrant to the US also hoped to found a Jewish state there. I think this was originally going to be in the region of Niagara in New York State. And then there’s Utah, which founded by the Mormons as a theocracy for their faith before it joined the US.

Free Black Villages in the British Caribbean

In the Caribbean, radical Baptist missionaries founded free Black townships with like Sligoville, New Birmingham, Piedmont, Hoby Town, named after the British abolitionist Dr. Hoby, Unity, Refuge, which was originally named Wilberforce after the great British abolitionist, Kettering and Granville, named after another British abolitionist, Granville Sharpe, Buxton and Victoria. The radical Baptist missionary William Knibb estimated in 1840 that there were about 200 free villages with 8,000 inhabitants between them spread about Jamaica. Free Black towns were also established in Demerara and Berbice, now part of Guyana, starting with Northbrook Estate and then Den Amstel. They were also set up in Antigua. By 1842 they numbered 27 such villages with a total population of 3,600.

These villages were set up to protect Black people from re-enslavement by the planters. I don’t know if there were free Black communities established by abolitionists in the 19th century. But America’s Black community, while depressed and impoverished, is not enslaved. That came to an end with the Civil War. Nor do they have official implemented, state-sanctioned segregation. That came to an end in the late ’60s when Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act. The Black community is, generally speaking, deprived and disadvantaged. But it is not enslaved, nor legally subject to discrimination. At least, not overtly. Blacks have voting rights, and there are Black politicians and members of the judiciary and legal profession. Since at least the 1980s, various affirmative action legislation has been passed with the deliberate intention of giving Blacks greater opportunities, freedom and prosperity and giving them genuine social and economic equality with mainstream America.

Nation of Islam, American Black Nationalism and White European Communes and Colonies

The proposed establishment of this town seems more like the separatism of the Nation of Islam. This demands the creation of an independent Black nation made out of five of the states of the southern US. Elsewhere in the world, it recalls Liberia, which was founded by American abolitionists as a country for freed American slaves, just as Britain attempted to do the same with Sierra Leone in the late 18th century.

And yes, it also resembles the communes proposed by White supremacists and Nazis, like those in the Hayden Lakes area of the American Midwest. Nietzsche’s cousin, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, was a proto-Nazi. She tried to found a perfect community of racially pure Germans in South America. But rather than finding prosperity, the community instead became poor and inbred. Over on this side of the Atlantic, there was also a move by two White British Nazis to buy a farm in France to build a pure, White colony there. This was passionately attacked by British anti-Nazis. Hope Not Hate have published an article about it, and it seems that after all these long years it’s come to nothing. Except that the Nazis behind it seemed to have spent their time trying to kill each other.

Return to the Ghetto

A few years ago in the 1990s or thereabouts there was talk about a ‘return to the ghetto’ amongst American Blacks. You can understand this. As a general rule, people prefer to live among their kind. This may be members of the same religious group, race, or ethnicity. For example, San Francisco has its Chinatown and Chicago a Little Italy, which was the main location of that city’s Italian community. But there is a difference between voluntary settlements, which just happen to be areas where a particular religion or ethnicity happens to live, and those deliberately planned which consciously exclude people because of their race.

Pro-Black Apartheid and the International Third Position

Round about 1985 the British newspaper, the Observer, published a piece fearing the demand for apartheid in Britain by sections of the Black community. It was a direct attack on the Black activist and Labour MP, Paul Boateng, who had called for autonomous Black communities in Britain. Now it seems that the same drives and demands have resurfaced in America by Black radicals in the wake of Black Lives Matter.

And there’s a section of the White Nazi movements which wants the same thing. In the 1960s Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam used to hold joint rallies with the American Nazi party. They both saw a common interest in dividing America on racial grounds. The Blacks would have the eastern seaboard, while the rest of America would be reserved for Whites. In the 1990s there was a strain of British Fascism called the Third International Position. This wanted separate communities for Blacks, including their own schools. It was opposed by the majority of Nazis, like the BNP’s leader, Nick Griffin, who wanted their total repatriation. But it was also opposed by mainstream anti-racists and opponents of apartheid.

But now it appears apartheid is back, and being championed as pro-Black and anti-racist. It shouldn’t matter who’s doing it. Segregation and apartheid is always wrong, and should always be fought and combated.

Theresa May Stopped Britain Accepting EU Legislation Controlling Immigration

This is very interesting stuff, as it hints at all kinds of machinations that have gone on behind the doors of the Tory party to ramp up the controversy about immigration artificially as a way of stoking popular resentment against the EU.

On Sunday, Mike also put up an article forecasting that May’s speech on Tuesday about Brexit would be a disaster, and that it would show her absolute failure to control immigration. Mike was informed by his commenters, Wanda Lozinska and Pat Whitaker that six years ago the EU passed legislation that would limit the time EU citizens could freely circulate in a foreign country to three months. After this time, they would have to show that they either had a job, or could support themselves through their savings or insurance without relying on the host nation’s welfare services. But Britain was one of the few states that did not adopt this legislation.

This was when May was head of the Home Office, which is in charge of immigration.

Mike’s article concludes

So Theresa May has always been able to curb immigration. She simply chose not to.

One has to wonder why not.

Is there a secret aspect to this, that we haven’t been told?

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/01/15/theresa-mays-brexit-speech-on-tuesday-will-be-about-her-failure-especially-on-immigration/

It looks that way. Of course, there are distinct advantages to big business to keeping up a high immigration rate, regardless of what the Tories may say about the need to curb immigration, national sovereignty and the rest of the guff. A plentiful supply of labour means that wages can be kept low, and unions weak. If your staff start complaining about poor wages and conditions, you can simply sack them and replace them with people even more desperate for work from eastern Europe. You can also keep the working class divided by stoking up nationalistic resentments against foreign nationals. Counterpunch today has put up a very interesting article about how the Jim Crow laws in the southern American states during Segregation served to keep the working class weak and divided by pitting Black and White blue collar Americans at each other’s throats. See Kevin Carson’s article ‘Right to Work and the Apartheid State’, at http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/19/right-to-work-and-the-apartheid-state/. And quite apart from the economic aspects, the Tory party clearly also used immigration from eastern Europe and the EU to pose as the defender of the traditional British population from the threat of all those foreigners, just as its always banged the jingoistic drum against EU legislation when it served their purpose.

It seems to me absolutely certain that May and the Tories have kept immigration high despite, not because of the EU as part of their policy of grinding down the working people of all countries for the enrichment of big business.

Don’t be taken it. The Tories are not the friends of British working people. They want to stoke up insecurity and xenophobia between people of different races and nationalities, all the better to exploit them.

Reject them and their bigotry.

Marx was right: workingmen [and women] of all countries, unite!

And defend the NHS. May and Hunt must resign. Now!

Tariq Nasheed Corrects Alt-Right Fascist Lies about Black Civilisations

Yesterday I posted several pieces about Richard Spencer’s Nazi speech at the weekend, in which he celebrated Whites as a race of ‘strivers, explorers and conquerors’ whose civilisation and achievements keep improving. Spencer’s one of the founders and leaders of the Fascist Alt-Right, the Nazi nature of which was made chillingly explicit with the cries of ‘Hail Trump! Hail our race! Hail victory!’ with which he opened his vile little rant.

Spencer and his Nazi storm troopers, including another racist polemicist, Jared Tailor, claim that Blacks are inferior. Tariq Nasheed is a black blogger, who is clearly active attacking racism and pernicious claims against people of colour. In this video, he refutes Jared Taylor’s claims that Black people have invented nothing, and have a lower IQ than Whites. Taylor makes the claim that Blacks didn’t invent the wheel, and didn’t invent agriculture or domesticate animals. He also claims that Africans didn’t even have a calendar. This means that they are less intelligent than Whites. The White supremacists of the Alt-Right also maintain that Whites do not exploit Blacks and other ethnic minorities, and that they have benefited from contact with superior White civilisation.

Nasheed comprehensively trashes Taylor’s and his fellow Nazis’ claims that Blacks had no proper civilisation or achievements. He refuses to talk about the ancient Egyptian civilisation, which he feels strongly was Black, as this would be too easy. Instead, he talks about the lesser-known civilisations of West Africa. He mentions the work of Clyde Winters in documenting indigenous writing systems in the peoples of that part of Africa. Black people also very definitely had the wheel. Nasheed points to the rock pictures in the Sahara desert, which show Blacks driving chariots. The Black cultures in Africa also had agriculture and domesticated animals. They kept oxen, and their kings even had pet lions. As for buildings, they had houses and other structures that were two to three storeys tall. The Songhay empire had castles, and he rightly mentions, and ridicules, how the great fortress of Zimbabwe was so impressive, that its colonial discoverers tried to explain it as the work of space aliens. He also talks about the great university at Timbuktu, which was a centre of learning before Europe had universities. As for Black Africans lacking a calendar, he talks about how there is one monumental such device in Namibia.

He states that he’s offered to debate Taylor many times, but has never received an answer. His worry, however, is that now the Nazi Alt-Right have Donald Trump’s ear, Taylor, or an ignorant bigot like him, will get in charge of the educational system, and try to stop Black people learning about the achievements of their people in Africa.

Nasheed is also very much aware that many Whites also despise the Alt Right Fascists. He’s seen a group of White guys beat one of ’em up, and gives a shout out to Whites combating the Alt-Right.

I don’t condone unprovoked violence against the Nazis. They should have the same right not to be attacked as anybody else. But I’m well aware that they themselves are extremely violent, and have beaten and murdered people. I’m very aware that some people may have had to defend themselves, just as I’m also aware that their grotesque, vile opinions and racial insults may provoke others into violence against them, especially Blacks, Jews and others, who have been on the receiving end of their race hate and physical assault.

Nasheed is absolutely right about what he says, though I have some qualifications and additions to make. Black people certainly had the wheel. The rock paintings he mentioned are, I think, at Tassili N’Ajjer in the Sahara. They were painted when that part of the desert was green, many thousands of years ago. They show Whites from North Africa and Blacks from the south crossing and crisscrossing the desert, including people driving chariots. That said, convention historians believe that the wheel was probably invented somewhere in central Asia. So, not invented by Blacks, but arguably not invented by Whites either, or at least, not by Europeans. And yes, many Black nations and cultures certainly possessed agriculture, though again, the conventional explanation is that it spread to sub-Saharan Africa from ancient Egypt. As for the ancient Egyptians being a Black civilisation, they portrayed themselves as being lighter skinned than the peoples to their south, such as the Nubians, who are portrayed in ancient Egyptian papyri as being definitely Black. However, they were darker than their Greek and Roman conquerors. A few years ago New Scientist carried an article, which suggested that the seeds of ancient Egyptian civilisation was in a Black people from the south, whose religion centred around the worship of the cow. This was the ancestral version of Hathor, the Egyptian cow-goddess. These Black race migrated north, to what is now Egypt, as the Saharan desert dried out at the end of the last Ice Age, where they encountered and intermarried with White peoples.

The Songhay and Malinka peoples, who founded the great Muslim empire of Mali, were rich and powerful, and the university of Timbuktu was one of the major centres of Islamic learning and civilisation in West Africa. There have been documentaries exploring the priceless intellectual heritage preserved in the books from its library. Unfortunately, this has been threatened by Islamism. You may recall that a few years ago, Islamist barbarians allied to Daesh tried to set the university on fire in order to destroy its vast repository of the area’s indigenous Muslim culture. The Songhay did indeed have castles. They also had cavalry troops, who have been described in European textbooks as ‘knights of the Sahara’. And yes, in this part of Africa there are multi-storey buildings and extensive palaces. These are of mud brick, but then, so were ziggurats of ancient Babylon. The great Swahili civilisation of East Africa, however, built cities made from coral, which were coated with a lime wash made from burning the same substance. Their cities are as impressive and as richly carved as any others in Islam. The great fortress of Zimbabwe, which is also in east Africa, is also spectacular. It seemed such a contrast to the architecture of the indigenous peoples, who now live in wooden huts, that the Europeans who discovered it tried to explain it as the work of the Chinese, Arabs, or indeed, anyone other than indigenous Africans, including space aliens. In actual fact, its method of construction is very much the same type of building techniques as the mud huts of the local peoples. It seems it was built by the Razwe people, but then during some disruption in the 19th century, it was abandoned.

As for his statement that Black Africans didn’t have the calendar, he is most definitely, monumentally wrong. They definitely had the calendar, and from a very early period. There’s a piece of notched bone, found in a cave in South Africa by archaeologists, which appears to have been a counting device of some kind. The bone dates from 70,000 years ago, and it has been suggested that it may have been a portable calendar. This is about 40,000 years before modern men, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, moved out of Africa to colonise Europe. If it is true that this is a calendar, then clearly Taylor in this regard couldn’t possibly be more wrong.

Regarding Nasheed’s fears of the intellectual damage Alt-Right Fascism could do to the American educational system, I think Taylor and his squadristi will have severe problems if they true to impose a White supremacist curriculum at the universities. I think the liberal traditions of many American universities are simply too strong. No reputable historian, anthropologist or archaeologist specialising in researching African culture and heritage is going to stand for the denigration of African civilisation or the attack on their academic disciplines. I also anticipate considerable resistance from Black Studies professors and their students. And this is quite apart from professors, intellectuals and students, who wish to defend American academia as seats of genuine learning and liberal culture.

However, I recognise that there is a real danger that the Nazis will try to undermine this aspect of the American education system, either by depriving it of funding, or demanding that other courses be introduced to ‘balance’ it.

In my opinion, the real danger is much lower down the educational system, at school level. A little while ago one of the left-wing news shows I watch on YouTube reported that the state educational authority in Arizona decided that the existing school curriculum and its textbooks were too left-wing. I think they objected to them, because they didn’t just present American civilisation as absolutely wonderful, with no defects or shameful episodes. It taught students about slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, institutional racism and civil rights, as well as the other, better aspects of American history. So the right-wingers in power got rid of it.

What did they insist school students learn instead of the complexities, shame and achievements of American history? Ronald Reagan’s speeches.

I kid you not. Ronald Reagan’s speeches. Which weren’t even written by him. I think this should count as a crime against education. Mind you, I think the Tories over here would like to inflict something equally stupid and sinister on our youngsters. Remember when Michael Gove was ranting about children being taught the ‘Blackadder’ view of the Great War in history? He and his fellow Tories would like to do the same, presenting a sanitised version of British history consonant with turning our children into earnest Thatcherites. In fact, I’m surprised they aren’t demanding that school pupils aren’t learning her speeches, like the poor souls in Arizona’s classrooms.

The Alt-Right are a threat to Blacks and other people of colour, and a threat to genuine history and learning. They shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near power, or the young minds they want to poison and keep in ignorance.

Fascism, Anti-Semitism and Zionism

Dominating the news this weekend has been the controversy surrounding Naz Shah and Ken Livingstone, who have been accused of anti-Semitism. Shah has been criticised, because she retweeted a graphic about Israel becoming popular if it was relocated in America. ‘Red’ Ken has been accused after he said that the embryonic state of Israel had made a deal with the Nazis to take in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. This resulted in the Labour MP, Mann, screaming at Livingstone that he was a Nazi apologist as Livingstone went into a building and almost up there stairs. Livingstone also said that ‘everything the Nazis did was legal’.

In fact, as Mike has pointed out on his blog, ‘Red’ Ken is factually correct. The Nazis did make a deal with an Israeli organisation, Haavara, to send German Jews to Palestine. This might seem surprising to some, that the Nazis should give any support to a Jewish state, but it was part of an attitude common to many pro-Nazi, Fascist and anti-Semitic groups at the time. The anti-Semites of the European extreme Right didn’t want Jews in their countries, and were ready to use any methods to remove them. This included pogroms and their extermination. It could also involve setting up a ‘Jewish homeland’ as far away from the rest of the gentile population as possible. Richard Thurston in his book, Fascism in Britain, discusses the plans some of the Nazi and Fascist groups in Britain had in the 1920s and 1930s for setting up a Jewish homeland in Madagascar. Critics of the Christian Zionist Right in Britain and America have also pointed out that some of the Christians advocating a Jewish homeland in Palestine were not necessarily pro-Jewish. For some, it was a way of getting them out of Britain.

There was a similar movement in Stalin’s Russia. Stalin was viciously anti-Semitic and there was a similar culture of vehement anti-Semitism in the Russian Empire. Under the Tsars, Jewish settlement was only permitted within an area of territory known as the Jewish Pale. Jews were also fiercely discriminated against, and subject to terrible pogroms. After the Communist Revolution, Stalin and his lackeys decided to create an autonomous oblast (Soviet administrative region) for the Jews in Siberia, and many Jews were deported there. This was part of the old thugs general policy of deporting any Soviet nation or minority group he didn’t like further east. It’s been said that the only reason he didn’t try to do it to the Ukrainians was because there were 8 million of them. The fact that Stalin gave the Jews a nominally autonomous Soviet homeland doesn’t mean that he was pro-Jewish, although that was undoubtedly the spin he put on it at the time. Rather the opposite. It just shows that murderous anti-Semites will support Zionism and Jewish nationalism, when they believe that doing so will allow them to deport their own Jewish population.

Then there’s Ken’s statement that ‘everything Hitler did was legal’. This is also factually correct. Mike’s pointed out that this phrase first appeared in American ads against racial discrimination and the Jim Crow laws segregating Blacks and seeking to keep them in their place at just about the bottom of society. If I remember Mike’s article correctly, the point of the ad was to show that under an unjust legal system, moral acts – like White and Blacks folks helping each other, are illegal.

And there’s another, general point that needs to be made here. Everything Hitler did to seize power was legal. He, and Mussolini in Italy, achieved their ends through constitutional means. Hitler even got a nickname when he pursued this tactic – ‘Adolf Legalite’, given him by his loyal stormtroopers. This point has been made by anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist historians and political scientists. They point this out because of the danger posed by people uncritically accepted the Fascists’ own propaganda, that they seized power through a militant uprising. Both the Nazis and Italian Fascist liked to talk of their ‘revolution’. In fact neither group were in a position, at least not originally, to overthrow the state by force. So they adopted constitutional tactics, and co-operated with ruling elites and political groups, who helped them into power.

There is also the problem that Israeli nationalists also collaborated with the Nazis and Fascists in other ways. Guy Debord’s Cat has pointed out in one of his articles that during the 1920s there was a group of Israeli extremists, the Maximalists, who were deeply impressed with Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. They wanted to create a similar Fascist state in Israel, complete with a corporatist social system. This was at a time when the Italian Fascists were extreme nationalists, but before the turn to anti-Semitism after the rise of the Nazis.

Then, during the British Mandate in the Second World War, one of the sections of the Irgun also collaborated with the Nazis in waging war against the British forces in Palestine. Irgun wanted to combat what they saw as an occupying imperialist power, while the Nazis obviously also wanted to do whatever they could to cripple the British war effort.

None of this means that Jews or Israelis somehow secretly support Fascism or Nazis. Rather, it means that some committed revolutionaries will collaborate with their bitterest enemies if it means that it will help them reach a desired goal. As for the Maximalists and their attempts to copy Musso’s Italy, all this means is that Israelis are human, like everyone else, and ultra-nationalist, militaristic thugs exist in all countries.

As for Ken Livingstone, he’s been accused of anti-Semitism before because he supposedly described a Jewish reported as someone who would have served in the SS, or some such, and then tried to throw him off a wall. This was how it was reported in the press. Mike put up an article a year or so ago showing how the press reports were grossly distorted and the full truth very different. I suspect something similar is happening here.

Secular Talk: Oklahomas Bans History Course; Fox News Wants to Ban State Schools

This video from Secular Talk, the atheist news show, dates from February 2015. I’m not an atheist or secularist, and this is an American issue. Nevertheless, Murdoch is over here too, and he would just love to buy up the Beeb and replace it with his own grotty channel. And likewise, his stooges and collaborators in the Tory party want to privatise state education, just as Dirty Rupe would like to take over part of the school system. So, this needs to be put up, and discussed over here.

Kyle Kulinski, the show’s host, talks about a clip on Fox News, where one of the hosts simply says, flat out, ‘There shouldn’t be any state schools’. Why? Well, the school board in Oklahoma has taken the step of getting rid of a history course on the grounds that it contradicted the doctrine of American exceptionalism. This is the idea that America is simply far and away better than anybody else, full stop, and has never, ever done anything wrong. The course taught students about slavery, Jim Crow and Segregation, and the genocide of the Indians. This all happened, and were part of American history. As Kulinski points out, this needs to be taught along with all the good America has done for the world, like the Marshal Plan and so on. But it didn’t satisfy the Right, who have totally abolished the course and replaced it with Reagan’s speeches.

I’m surprised they got away with that, as it is political indoctrination. There’s no two ways about it. My guess is that there’s some arcane clause in the Constitution connected to states’ rights which allow them to do so. Which is probably why Kulinski recommends making state education a federal, not a state responsibility. And naturally, as an atheist he’s concerned about what would happen if the schools in Alabama and the Conservative southern states were privatised, with the introduction of religion and the probably removal of evolution. I don’t share his concerns here, having attended an Anglican Church school which did teach evolution, and actively preached against sectarianism and racial hatred. I’m more concerned about the privatisation of education and its replacement with fee-paying schools. But on a wider issue, Gove and the Tories want to do much the same over here as Oklahoma has done. Gove wanted the school curriculum here in Britain to be reformed to celebrate Britain more. He was particularly incensed at teachers for informing their students about the horrors of the First World War, rather than celebrating it. You may remember Mike over at Vox Political attacked Gove for whining about how the history taught about the War resembled Blackadder Goes Forth. Presumably, this is what Gove and Thickie Nikki Morgan would like to replace proper history with. Only instead of Reagan’s speeches, it’d be Thatcher’s.

We need proper state education, and the impartial teaching of history, which tell its students about both the good and the negative parts of their countries’ past. And we definitely need to stop propagandists like those on the Oklahoma School board, Murdoch, Gove, Morgan and the rest of the Right trying to indoctrinate young minds with their own skewed views.

Trump Goes in Search of Hitler’s Brain

Trump’s comments about banning Muslims from entering America and having them registered, as well as the rest of his viciously xenophobic agenda, has prompted an increasing number of people to attack and criticise him. His opponents are drawing the obvious parallels between Trump’s policies, and those of Nazi Germany as well as the worst aspects of American history. George Takei, who played Mr Sulu in the Classic Star Trek series, has pointed out its similarity to the shameful American internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. The news anchor Tom Brokaw has also pointed out how much like this policy Trump’s anti-Muslim stance is, as well as its resemblance to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, and the official racist discrimination against Black Americans during Segregation and Jim Crow.

And cartoonists are also using their skills to make this point. Here’s one I found on 1000 Natural Shocks (Over 18 site). It’s based on the classic bad movie, They Saved Hitler’s Brain, which is so hilariously bad that it was screened over here in the 1980s as part of Michael Medved’s ‘The Worst of Hollywood’ series of classic bad films. Here it is.