I found this vicious little piece of bitter satire on YouTube yesterday. It’s produced by Aamon Animations, whose brief description on the platforms states that he makes animations ranging from political memes to comic horror. Yedolf is obviously a combination Kanye West’s preferred epithet, ‘Ye’, and Hitler’s first name. West, as you’ll remember, effectively torpedoed his career and lost something like a hundred million after ranting about the Jews controlling the music industry. The dialogue in the animation appears to genuine, which is combined with computer generated caricatures of West, Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro and some other right-wing American pundits that are truly grotesque. Especially when West develops snail’s horns after eating one of the molluscs.
The video includes American right-wing media hacks talking about the threat of Secular Humanists with Jewish last names – which obvious means atheist Jews, raising the old canard about banking at its top levels being run by people with Jewish last names. In other words, the old Jewish banking conspiracy. Then Ben Shapiro appears to endorse West, stating that he’s not mad and states the issues clearly. I don’t think you can call Shapiro anti-Semitic, because I think he’s Jewish. But assuming that he’s talking about West’s anti-Semitic rant, he has shown that he’s prepared to endorse a conspiracist nutter for political expediency, and in the instance throw Jews under the bus.
And then there’s the interview between West and Jones. West goes really anti-Semitic in this one, declaring that Hitler had his good points when Jones tells him he sounds like the Nazi leader. West really, really needs to do some proper reading about Hitler and the Third Reich, and not crap that comes from White Supremacists and Black anti-Semites like the Nation of Islam. I really do wonder if he’d say that if he knew that among the groups the Nazis persecuted were the mixed-race children of Black American squaddies and White German women when the country was occupied by the Allies after the First World War. They organised a programme of sterilisation against them. As a self-respecting man of colour I would hope that this would help disabuse him of the notion that there was anything positive about Nazism.
West’s opinions were too much for Jones, who splutters that his channel believes in freedom of speech, but nevertheless what West has said is unacceptable. Or words to that effect. And when Jones declares that West has gone too far, the man who has absolutely no regard for any kind of libel he can throw at his opponents, then several red lines have clearly been crossed.
I was unaware just how noxious West’s comments were. The impression I got was that he said little more than that the Jews controlled the music industry, but kept Blacks down – vile stuff, but unfortunately held by a number of Black artists who have similarly sabotaged their careers uttering this nonsense. I wasn’t prepared for how really unpleasant it was. I don’t like cancel culture, but if this is right, West deserves to be well and truly cancelled.
But one of the most revealing aspects is that there were too many American conservatives prepared to support him, even though parts of the Republican party are claiming to be the true friends of the Jews and staunch supporters of Israel.
This needs watching. Despite the allegations against the left, anti-Semitism is still present on the right.
Mark Pattie, one of the great commenters on this channel, asked me if I’d seen the video in which Webb debates Mark Collett, the current fuehrer of Patriotic Alternative. I hadn’t, so he kindly provided the link. And now I have. It’s not a long video, just over five and a half minutes long, and isn’t actually a debate, despite its title. It’s Webb’s review of another debate between Collett and two Black YouTubers. And to be fair, Webb actually comes out of it quite well, almost appearing like a normal person of moderate, non-racist views.
The video is a response by him to continued calls by his commenters to debate Collett. They’ve also called on him several times to join the party. Webb begins by saying that he got one of their election leaflets through the post. Patriotic Alternative were planning to stand as a political party and put in candidates to fight seats at the last election. In the event, they neglected to register as a party with the electoral commission, and so couldn’t stand any candidates. But Londoners got their literature anyway. Webb states that it horrified the liberals and papers, but he read their pamphlet and couldn’t see anything outrageous in it. This is probably because Webb shares many of their views and prejudices, and so wouldn’t. I’m reminded of something Millennial Woes posted on his YouTube channel a few years ago. Millennial Woes is a Scots extreme rightist. His videos tend to consist of him sitting in a bathrobe in a darkened room, smoking, reflecting on the decline of the west due to non-White immigration. When the Alt-Right were in vogue a decade or so ago, Woes was one of the speakers at their conference. During it he told the assembled White supremacists that he realised how far he’d left the mainstream when talking to a young man on the train. The guy was intelligent and articulate, and it was a shock to Woes that he still believed the conventional narrative about the Holocaust! This comes from the man, who said his most extreme view was wanting to bring back slavery. It shows how people at the political extremes see their views as normal and inoffensive until suddenly shaken by talking to normal folks.
Webb said that there would be absolutely no chance of Patriotic Alternative winning seats in his area. The BNP tried a few years ago and got absolutely nowhere. And when they did win, they didn’t know anything about the practical business of politics in the council, and so were out at the next election. This is true, and it’s hilarious. According to Private Eye, Derek Beacon and his massive fascist legion elected to Tower Hamlets, all seven of them, didn’t realise that as well as proposing motions before the council, you also had to vote for them. Thus, when surprisingly the council accepted one of their motions for discussion, they didn’t vote for it, assuming it would automatically pass or something. The motion then failed. We are, fortunately, not dealing with men of the calibre of Oswald Mosley. Webb notes that in his area the BNP fielded several candidates, one of which was a Jewish woman. He found this surprising. Unfortunately, it isn’t, not if you read the articles on this by the excellent Tony Greenstein. Greenstein has blogged about how the Board of Deputies of British Jews got very upset with the very respected historian of the Jewish community, Geoffrey Alderman, for including in his study of the community’s history the fact that 2 per cent of the Jewish population had voted for the wretched NF. In London this was because they didn’t want their kids going to school with Blacks. He also notes that one Conservative politico, despite being Jewish himself, used to hobnob at elections with the BNP moaning that it was a pit that the nationalist vote was split between the two parties. There are fascist Jews around, and none of them were supporters of Corbyn, as Starmer and the Jewish Labour Movement would like us all to believe.
Webb goes on to comment that the Black YouTubers were perfectly reasonable, but they had weird, high voices so he found it difficult to listen to them. He doesn’t like Collett, and says that he refuses to debate or have anything to do with him because he blames the Jews for everything, and there are enough people on his site who already think he, Webb, is Jewish. This is because Webb has attacked the various anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, lived in Israel at one point and supports the country, and occasionally wears a necklace with a Hebrew inscription. He states that Collett made quick, chopping motions that reminded him of a little Austrian dictator in the ’30s, and said he could imagine him on a podium screaming ‘Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Fuehrer!’ (One Race/People! One Reich! One Fuehrer), imitating Adolf himself as he did so.
And that’s about it. He describes the electoral incompetence of Patriotic Alternative and the fact that the BNP got absolutely nowhere in his neck of London, doesn’t say anything unpleasant about the Black YouTubers except for the personal comment about squeaky voices, and compares Collett to Hitler, as no doubt many others have done before him. He rejects Collett’s anti-Semitism, and so could even sound an anti-racist liberal. That’s if you weren’t aware of his views on race, and a video he posted today in which he asks if democracy has had its day, and that Britain, and Europe, need a strong leader who will rally them against the threat of militant Islam.
If you want to check the video to see what Webb says for yourself, here it is.
My discipline, archaeology, has been massively going after Graham Hancock this week. Hancock’s ah, um,, ‘maverick thinker’, I suppose you’d say, who’s been presenting a series on Netflix arguing that thousands of years ago there was a highly advanced civilisation that perished in a cataclysm, but passed on its secrets to other ancient civilisations around the world. This has understandably annoyed archaeologists and a number have put up videos, some of them lengthy and quite detailed, disproving him. Hancock’s been promoting this idea for some time now. Going back two decades and more, he had a series on Channel 4 with the title ‘Water World’ or something like it, also arguing that there was a global advanced civilisation, whose monuments have been covered up by a flood, as recorded in the Bible and other ancient religions. Now I’m sure that Hancock is wrong, and the criticisms of his dodgy history and archaeology are right. But I take exception to one of the other accusations levelled at him, which is that he is racist.
This accusation is partly based on his false ascription of the achievements of indigenous cultures around the world to this putative prehistoric civilisation. It denies those people the credit for their achievements. But the accusation is also that it’s similar to the ideas of some bonkers White supremacist groups, who are using Hancock’s ideas to promote themselves. One archaeologist posted a video saying that Hancock should have disavowed the use of his ideas by these fascists. It also criticised him for being friends with Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. There are fair criticisms to be made of both of these men. Peterson’s an arch-conservative and anti-feminist, but hardly a Nazi. Rogan was pushing anti-vax nonsense and is an advocate for some mind-expanding drugs. A few years ago people were accusing him of being a ‘gateway to the Alt-Right’. Possibly, but he also talks to people from the left, who are otherwise denied a platform by the lamestream media. Journalists like Abbie Martin, who talked about Israeli propaganda against the Palestinians and how she found, when she visited the beleaguered Arab nation, that the reality was nothing like the picture painted by the Israeli state. He’s also talked to biologists and journalists exposing the lies of the trans ideology. This is not Alt-Right, no matter what groups like Mermaids, Stonewall, Antifa and the rest say. The people criticising the gender ideology tend to be radical feminists, many from the socialist left. Part of their opposition against it is that it reduces masculinity and femininity to traditional, stereotypical sex roles. One of the feminist vloggers interviewed one of the leading activists against the trans ideology, who was furious that people like her were being presented as right-wing. Another feminist activist criticised Matt Walsh for misrepresenting feminists as uniformly in favour of trans ideology, and then criticising them for it. Rogan gives a voice to people outside the mainstream. Sometimes it’s rubbish, and sometimes it’s immensely valuable. He has also interviewed a number of Black celebs, so again, not a Nazi.
The White supremacist ideas being referred to seem to me to be the Traditionalist ideology of Giulio Evola. Evola was an Italian Fascist and occultist, who was a major ideological influence on the scumbuckets behind the Bologna railway bombing in the 1970s. A fascist group bombed the station, killing and maiming over a hundred people. Evola believed that there was a strongly hierarchical, ‘Aryan’ civilisation in Hyperborea in the arctic, which was responsible for all the subsequent cultural achievements of the civilisations around the world. This is twaddle. But Hancock’s ideas are also similar to those of others, which don’t come from people in the fascist fringe. A couple of years ago I picked up an old book, Colony Earth, which had been published in the 1970s. This claimed that Earth may have been an extraterrestrial colony, whose advanced civilisation was destroyed in a nuclear war. The pyramids may have been fall-out shelters, as were the megalithic tumuli in Britain. It’s an interesting read, but certainly wrong. I think Charles Berlitz, who started the Bermuda Triangle myth, also believed in this, supporting it in one of his books with artefacts from Aztec tombs that look like aircraft. Berlitz is someone else, who I’m fairly certain has absolutely no connection to fascism whatsoever.
And I don’t believe Hancock is either.
When he was travelling the world on his Channel 4 series he was accompanied by his wife, who is Sri Lankan. Now, White supremacists do not, as a rule, marry dark-skinned people from outside Europe. If they do, they’re angrily denounced as ‘race traitors’. In one edition of this earlier series, Hancock reported on the mysterious ruins of ancient city found off the coast of the Bay of Bengal. He was shown talking respectfully to an Indian gent, who told him how such findings tie in with Hindu ideas of the antiquity of civilisation and ancient Indian legends of flooded cities. Again, this isn’t quite behaviour you’d expect from a genuine White supremacist. He also travelled to South and Central America, where he proposed the old theory that the Mayans, Aztecs and other ancient Amerindian civilisations must have learned how to build their pyramids from someone else. I think this was once again ancient Egypt. But who brought that knowledge to the New World? Black Africans. He pointed to an Olmec bas relief of a warrior’s head, and declared its features to be ‘proudly African’. If this is racism, then its Afrocentrism rather than White supremacy. As for the ancient race behind these monuments, Hancock doesn’t say what colour they are. In this, he breaks with some of his predecessors, who say they must have been White because the legends of numerous Amerindian peoples state that vital parts of their culture were brought to them by White gods. Hancock is therefore less racialised in what he says than his predecessors.
I disagree profoundly with Hancock’s ideas, but he has a right to say them like everyone else. And if it piques people interest in these ancient cultures so that they want to find out what they were really like, that’s all to the good. But I do think it’s profoundly wrong to accuse him of racism. That just further cheapens the word and weakens it as a weapon against the real thing.
Tony Greenstein’s latest piece and reposting of an article by mixed-race Black British author discussing institutional anti-Black racism in Israel also raises a few awkward questions about one of the Israeli’s states staunchest defenders, the actor and broadcaster Tracy Anne Oberman. Oberman appears as a passionate opponent of anti-Semitism, but like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and her friend, Rachel Riley, it appears that the anti-Semitism she is most determined to root out is simply criticism of Israel and its abominable maltreatment and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Hence her determined attacks on Twitter and elsewhere with supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and the socialist left in the Labour party as a whole.
Back in 2019 she got into a Twitter spat with the awesome Ash Sarkar of Novara Media, whom she also accused of anti-Semitism. Sarkar is Asian, and so responded by pointing out that she was Black woman being abused by a White woman who was a favourite of the blue tick brigade. Oberman responded by stating that she was as White as Sarkar. This is quite a claim, as Oberman at least in her photos very definitely has White skin and light brown or blonde hair. Sarkar, on the other hand, has the rich brown colouring of many people of South Asian descent. Of course, Oberman wasn’t saying she wasn’t physically White, but that she wasn’t considered as such by White supremacists like the Klan, the Nazis and the various other Fascist parties. Sarkar ably rebutted this by stating that she was very away of the racist persecution of the Jews.
But Jews weren’t always considered to be non-Whites. Ludwig Blumenbach, the 19th century German scientist responsible for modern racial classification, placed Jews among the Caucasian race. He believed they had some ‘negro’ features, and so considered them the ‘negroes’ of the White race. He was almost certainly speaking about European Jews, rather than the non-White Jewish communities of Africa, India and even China. I think most, severely normal Americans and European would consider Jews of traditional European origin to be White. The only people who don’t are Nazis and Fascists, who are wrong as well as monstrously vile. Nevertheless because of their similar histories of persecution, many Jewish Americans joined forced with Black to attack segregation and racial injustice in America.
Oberman clearly believed she had a right to claim to be non-White based on this common persecution by White supremacists. But Greenstein’s and Lewis’ articles, as well as Abbie Martin’s coverage of the issue for The Empire Files, shows that Israeli society is also marred by deep anti-Black racism.
This casts real doubt on Oberman’s ability to draw on her people’s persecution by White supremacists to claim that she is somehow not White, when the country she passionately supports and whose critics she tries to silence permits and legitimises systematic, institutional racism against Black Jews.
In this video from RT America of just over eight minutes in length, posted in 2015, Priya Reddy, one of the broadcaster’s own producers, talks to the news anchor about Max Blumenthal and his book, Ruin and Resistance in Gaza: The 21 Day War. Blumenthal had been speaking about the book at an event the previous evening, which Reddy had attended and interviewed him.
Reddy begins by describing how well attended the event was, and how many Jewish people were there, talking and being very critical of Israel. Blumenthal made it very clear that Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing, not every Jew identifies as a Zionist, and that there’s a whole new generation of young Jewish people, who are very critical of Israel.
The news anchor asks her how she would compare Blumenthal’s approach to that of the general US media. Reddy states that what she respects about Blumenthal’s work is that, rather than doing Israel’s PR, he went to Gaza, interviewed the victims and extensively documented some of the most horrific war crimes in modern history. Which is what a real journalist does. Blumenthal stated that the standard US media coverage of Gaza was simply to take talking points from Netanyahu’s right-wing government and repeating them.
This is followed by a clip of Blumenthal saying that he wanted to honour the resistance of the Gaza strip by telling their own stories and presenting their testimonies in their own words. And most importantly he wanted to identify and expose the criminals, who devastated Gaza, who killed over 2,200 people, including 550 children.
Blumenthal described the incident when the Israeli navy fired on small Palestinian boys playing soccer, the kids were aged 9 to 11 years old. Israel routinely targets children, but what was different this time is that it occurred right in front of an hotel where foreign journalists were staying, and so they couldn’t ignore it, and it was reported with more accuracy than the rest of the war.
There’s then another clip of Blumenthal, in which he says that there’s still a fear here in DC among the media and political elites, among the influential people in Washington of taking on Israel as it is, as an apartheid state that doesn’t want peace, which intends to occupy permanently Palestinian land and hold Gaza under siege. To do that is just a bridge to far, not because people don’t realise that here. They realise it. You could see at his talk people knew something was wrong and it was resonating. But there is a pressure machine, there is a lobby that can still destroy your political career. For Blumenthal personally, he was able to do it because he’s an independent journalist, and he really has nothing to lose by telling the truth.
Reddy goes on to state that Blumenthal’s book exposes some of these extremely horrific war crimes. There’s a long-standing pattern in the US media of downplaying these crimes, which has been extensively documented by groups like Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting and many others. She also states that it was interesting to learn from Blumenthal that Sheldon Adelson and Haim Habad – who supports Hillary Clinton – actually discussed buying the New York Times and LA Times outright. Controlling the narrative is a top priority for the Israel lobby. Israel has not only banned journalists from covering Gaza, but has actually bombed media buildings and shot and fatally killed a number of journalists.
The news anchor continues, saying that Sheldon Adelson is a big heavyweight when it comes to buying, or as they would put it, contributing or donating to campaigns, typically to the Republicans. Reddy then interrupts, saying the buy both Republicans and Democrats.
The news anchor then goes on to describe a recent incident where Israeli settlers set fire to a Palestinian home, burning the family alive, killing an 18-month old baby. Reddy had asked Blumenthal, who he thought was responsible for inciting that kind of violence. Reddy replies that it is not unusual for settlers to target Palestinians, and there is almost never any legal penalties, which sends the message that it’s no big deal if you murder a Palestinian. Reddy says she asked Blumenthal specifically about inflammatory statements made by top level officials, like Netanyahu, Eilet Shaked that not only sanction but encourage this type of barbaric behaviour.
This is followed by a clip of Blumenthal stating that incitement to genocide and incitement to killing children is legitimate when it’s inciting the citizens of Israel to do it in army uniform, and that’s what Eilet Shaked did when she called for the killing of mothers in the Gaza strip, their extermination in order to prevent them giving birth, in her words, to ‘little snakes’. This was the Justice Minister, the person in charge of the court system. Moshe Alon, the Defence Minister, recently pledged to hurt children in airstrikes in Lebanon, in April 2015. That was considered legitimate. What is not considered legitimate is a fanatical settler like Moshe Orbach, who wrote a manual, which isn’t even in wide-publication, for burning Palestinians alive in their homes. He wasn’t calling for that in army uniform, he called for it in vigilante fashion and so was pulled in for interrogation. So the state, which has killed 550 children, many of whom were burned alive, uses the settlers as moral cover for its own crimes.
The news anchor says that this is a difficult situation, and many people will be asking what they can do to change it. Reddy says that there is international law, but there is a massive failure of international institutions to hold Israel accountable, such as the UN or the ICC, that’s why grassroots movements are so important and individual actions are so important. Blumenthal talked about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Reddy therefore asked him why the BDS movement, which is explicitly anti-racist and pro-human rights, is so aggressively attacked by well-funded Israel lobbyists as anti-Semitic.
There’s then a clip of Blumenthal saying that it’s the same thing people hear from White supremacists here in the US: that when African-Americans talk about racism, they’re being racist, or when they talk about White violence against African-Americans, racially inspired violence, they’re being racist. It’s the language we hear from Zionists when they complain that the BDS movement is a movement of hatred, when all they’re doing is supporting international law.
This is another fascinating video from Telesur English. It’s from an edition of the Empire Files, in which the host, Abby Martin, interviews Dr. Gerald Horne, the chair of History and African American Studies at the University Houston. Dr. Horne is the author of 20 books on slavery and black liberation movements. The blurb for the video on YouTube states that his most recent work is The Counterrevolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States.
The video is just over half an hour long, and it completely overturns the entire myth of the founding of the United States, in which the Founding Fathers were noble idealists, intent on bringing about a truly democratic state in which all men would be free. In fact the opposite was true. The Founding Fathers were either slave-owners, or else otherwise deeply connected to slavery and slave trade through their business interests. Instead of noble liberators for everyone, they were deeply opposed to granting Black Americans their freedom.
Dr. Horne argues that they were the products of British imperialism and its slave trade, which was first introduced into the Caribbean and then shifted north to the English colonies in North America. He traces the history of Black enslavement and anti-Black racist movements from the American Revolution to the American Civil War, and thence to the formation of successive waves of the Klan. His intention is to show that Trump is not an historical aberration, a strange historical throwback on America’s long progress to freedom and liberty, but a product of America’s racist history and the mass support anti-Black movements have enjoyed and exploited throughout it.
The programme begins by explaining the background to the Confederate monuments, which the Unite the Right stormtroopers marched to defend in Charlottesville the week before last. These were not simply memorials to great generals or valiant soldiers, as the myth around them says. Most of the Confederate monuments in the US were erected in two periods – the period of Jim Crow in the 1920s and ’30s, when the segregation laws were being introduced, and the 1950s when the Civil Rights movement was beginning. They were set up to convey a very specific message: that while Black Americans were technically free, the ‘Negro’ had better know his place beneath the White man. Or else.
He then goes on to describe the emergence of slavery in the US. He states that Britain at the end of the 16th century was ‘a failed state’. The British Civil War of the 1640s between Charles I and parliament was a quasi-bourgeois revolution, which gave some rights to the British merchant and middle classes. The real bourgeois revolution was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which allowed the middle classes to exert more political control, and allowed British merchants to wrest control of the slave trade away from the Crown as a royal monopoly.
The most important part of the British empire in the New World at the time was the Caribbean, and particularly Jamaica. These colonies became immensely profitable due to sugar. However, in the 1720s there was an economic crisis in Caribbean slavery, so some of the major Caribbean slaveowners moved north, to Carolina and other parts of the US. It was from these slave-owning families that the Founding Fathers were descended.
Horne also briefly discusses the role north American slavery played in the definition of White identity. Back in Europe, the different European peoples saw themselves as members of separate nations – English, Irish, Scots, French, Germans and so on. it was only when they crossed the Atlantic to America that they created an overarching racial identity to differentiate them from their Black slaves.
Horne then goes on to argue that the major catalyst for the American Revolution was the American colonists’ frustration at the British governments attempts to limit slavery and stop further colonial expansion beyond the Alleghenies. One of the critical moments in this was the Somerset Case, which ruled that slavery was illegal in England. The ruling was expanded to Scotland a year later. The taxes against which the Boston Tea Party was staged included those levied on slaves. They had been imposed by the British government as a deliberate anti-slavery measure. The British government was also tired of expending men and treasure in the various wars against the continent’s indigenous peoples. This angered the colonists, who longed to expand and seize native American land to the west. One of those, who stood to make a profit from this, was George Washington, who was a land speculator. As indeed, in a curious historical parallel, is Donald Trump. The Founding Fathers also feared and hated Black Americans, because the British had given their freedom to all Black Americans, who remained loyal. As a result, the Black Americans were solidly behind the British against the emerging independence movement.
Dr. Horne then goes on to talk about the American Civil War, and Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves held by the Southern states. Horne points out that it was felt at the time that Lincoln had somehow broken the rules of war, and done the unthinkable by arming the slaves. As for Lincoln himself, he didn’t have much sympathy with them, and was considering deporting them after the end of the war. Horne goes on to discuss how the deportation of Americans of African descent continued to be discussed and planned at various periods in American history afterwards. It was yet again discussed in the 1920s, when there was a movement to deport them back to Africa.
After the ending of slavery in American following the defeat of the South, many of the American slave-owners and traders fled abroad, to continue their business overseas. Several went to South America, including Brazil, while others went to Cuba.
After the Civil War came the period of reconstruction, and the foundation of the Ku Klux Klan in the late 19th century. Horne also talks about the lynching movement during this period of American history, which continued into the early 20th centuries. Not only were these intended to terrorise Black Americans to keep them in their place, but at the time they also were also almost like picnics. Photographs were taken and sold of them, and White spectators and participants would cut the fingers off the body and keep them as souvenirs. Dr. Horne remarks that, sadly, some White homes still have these digits even today.
He also talks about the massive influence D.W. Griffith’s viciously racist Birth of a Nation had on the Klan, boosting its membership. Klan groups began to proliferate. In Michigan, one branch of the Klan concentrated on fighting and breaking trade unions. Later, in the 1950s, the Klan entered another period of resurgence as a backlash against the Civil Rights campaign.
Horne makes the point that in this period, the Klan was by no means a marginal organization. It had a membership in the millions, including highly influential people in several states. And the Klan and similar racist organisations were not just popular in the South. The various pro-slavery and anti-Black movements also had their supporters in the North since the time of the Civil War. He also argues that the campaign against segregation was extremely long, and there was considerable resistance to Black Americans being given equality with Whites.
He also states that one of the influences behind the emergence of the Alt-Right and the revival of these latest Fascist and White supremacist movements was the election of Barak Obama as the first Black president of the US. Obama was subject to rumours that he was really Kenyan, with the whole ‘birther’ conspiracy theories about his passport, because he was Black, and so couldn’t be a proper American. And it is this bitter hostility to Obama, and the perceived threat to White America which he represents, that has produced Trump.
Watching this video, I was reminded of Frederick Douglas’ great speech, What To the Slave is the Fourth of July? Douglas was a former slave and a major voice for abolition in America. His speech noted how hollow the rhetoric about the Founding Fathers protecting Americans from slavery under the British, when they themselves remained slaves in reality.
He’s right about the rule of the sugar economy in saving the British colonies in the Caribbean, though from my own reading about slavery in the British Empire, what saved these colonies first was tobacco. It was the first cash crop, which could easily be grown there.
The role opposition to the British government’s refusal to allow further colonial expansion in provoking the American Revolution has also been discussed by a number of historians. One book I read stated that British colonial governors were encouraged to intermarry with the indigenous peoples. Thus, one of the governors on the British side actually had cousins amongst one of the Amerindian nations. The same book also described how the British granted their freedom to Black loyalists. After their defeat, the British took them to Canada. Unfortunately, racism and the bleak climate led them to being deported yet again to Sierra Leone. There were also Black loyalists settled in the British Caribbean colonies. One report on the state of colony instituted by its new governor in the early 19th century reported that the former Black squaddies were settled in several towns, governed by their own N.C.O.s under military discipline. These Black Americans were orderly and peaceful, according to the report.
As for the former American slave traders, who emigrated to Latin America, this is confirmed by the presence of one of the witnesses, who appeared before the British parliament in the 1840s, Jose Estebano Cliffe, who was indeed one of the émigré merchants.
Cenk Uygur and The Young Turks have also described the horrors of the lynchings in the Deep South, including the picnic, celebratory aspect to these atrocities. They made the point that if news reports today said that similar lynchings had been carried out by Arabs in the Middle East, Americans would vilify them as savages. But that attitude doesn’t extend to those savages in the US, who carried out these atrocities against Blacks.
It’s worth mentioning here that Blacks weren’t the only victims of lynching. Tariq Ali in an interview in the book Confronting the New Conservatism about the Neocons states that in Louisiana in the 1920, more Italians were lynched than Blacks.
The video’s also worth watching for some of the images illustrating Dr. Horne’s narrative. These include not only paintings, but also contemporary photograph. Several of these are of the slaves themselves, and there is a fascinating picture of a group of Black squaddies in uniform from the Civil War. I found this particularly interesting, as the photographer had captured the character of the soldiers, who had different expressions on their faces. Some appear cheerful, others more suspicious and pessimistic.
There’s also a very chilling photograph of people at a lynching, and it’s exactly as Dr. Horne says. The picture shows people sat on the grass, having a picnic, while a body hangs from a tree in the background. This is so monstrous, it’s almost incredible – that people should calmly use the murder of another human being as the occasion of a nice day out.
This is the history the Republican Party and the Libertarians very definitely do not want people to read about. Indeed, I put up a piece a little while ago at a report on one of the progressive left-wing news programmes on YouTube that Arizona was deliberately suppressing materials about racism, slavery and segregation in its schools, and making students read the speeches of Ronald Reagan instead. As for the removal of Confederate monuments, right-wing blowhard and sexual harasser Bill O’Reilly, formerly of Fox News, has already started making jokes about how ‘they’ want to take down statues of George Washington. Nobody does, and the joke shows how little O’Reilly really understands, let alone cares about the proper historical background behind them. I’ve no doubt that Dr. Horne’s interpretation of history would be considered by some an extreme view, but it is grounded in very accurate historical scholarship. Which makes it an important counterbalance to the lies that the Republicans and Libertarians want people to believe about the country and its history.
This is another, very chilling step towards genuine Fascism by Trump, who’s surrounded himself with Fascists and White Supremacists. In this piece from the David Pakman Show, the host and his producer, Louis, reveal how Trump introduced legislation that would permit employers to demand their employees take genetic tests and hand over information about the DNA. This was slipped past Congress when the public had their attention on the colossal mess that is Trumpcare. This overturns previous legislation which prevented employers from demanding such information, not least under US privacy laws. The legislation permits US employers to do this if they are running ‘wellness’ programmes. Pakman states that this is all about employers having the ability to charge people more for their healthcare, if they find out they have certain genetic conditions.
This is exactly what the authors Ruth Hubbard and Elijah Wald wished to expose and counter in their book, Exploding the Gene Myth (Boston: Beacon Press 1997).
The book is subtitled ‘How Genetic Information Is Produced and Manipulated by Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies, Educators and Law Enforcers’. It’s about the way the above have tried to link illness and criminality to heredity since the 19th century, and how this has led to eugenics legislation in which the ‘genetically unfit’ were sterilised and institutionalised in order to prevent them breeding. Or else it was used as pretext to prevent the passage of welfare legislation. The argument here was that it would be a waste of resources supporting those, who were unable to work as their illness was down to their own faulty biological heredity, not the terrible working conditions and industrial hazards of the time.
Eugenics was a favourite topic amongst the European and American chattering classes from the late 19th century until it was discredited by the horrors of the Nazi regime during World War II. But Hubbard and Wald warned that it was coming back with the drive to find a genetic basis for illnesses like schizophrenia and other traits. The book has the following chapters
1. Of Genes and People
The Role of Genetics in Our Lives
Genes for Deafness, Genes for Being Raped
A Word about Scientists
Heredity and Environment
What Are Genes?
2. Genetic Labelling and Old Eugenics
The Birth of Eugenics
Genetic Labelling
Involuntary Sterilisation
Eugenic Immigration Policies.
3. The New Eugenics: Testing, Screening and Choice
Overt and Subtle Eugenics
Parenting, Disabilities and Selective Abortion
Genetic Screening
Fallacies of Genetic Prediction.
4. A Brief Look at Genetics
Heredity and Genes
The Beginning: Gregor Mendel, “Traits” and “Factors”
From Mendel to the Double Helix
Genes and Proteins
How Chromosomes and Genes Are Duplicated
X and Y: The Sex Chromosome
From DNA to RNA to Proteins
How Genes Function
Sequencing the Human Genome
RFLPs: Linking DNA with Traits
5. Genes in Context
Definitions of Health and Disease
Individualisation of Health and Illness
Genes as Blueprints
Geneticisation
Diagnostic Labeling
6. “Inherited Tendencies”: Chronic Conditions
Some Underlying Assumptions
Conditions that Run in Families
Diabetes
High Blood Pressure, Heart Disease, and Strokes
Cancer Oncogenes and Anti-Oncogenes
Cancer Prevention and Cancer Screening
Breast Cancer
Cancer Prevention versus Cancer Therapy
7. “Inherited Tendencies”: Behaviours
Which Behaviours?
Homosexuality
Alcoholism
Problems of Linking Genes to Behaviour
Pitfalls of Behavioural Research: The XYY Fallacy
9. Genes for Sale
Funds for Research, Profits for Biotechnology
Commercialisation and Conflicts of Interest
Owning the Genome
What to Do?
10. Genetic Discrimination:
Education, Employment and Insurance
Genetic Testing and the Schools
Genetic Discrimination in the Workplace
Measures in Counter Employment-Related Discrimination
Genetic Discrimination in Insurance
11. DNA-Based Identification Systems, Privacy, and Civil Liberties
DNA and the Criminal Justice System
Scientific Problems with DNA Profiles
Genetic Privacy and Civil Liberties
Employment- and Health-Related Issues
Controlling Genetic Information.
There is also a preface, in which they give their reasons and aims for writing the book, a conclusion and afterword, as well as an appendix on mitochondrial DNA, notes, glossary and a bibliography and list of other resources.
There were a series of scandals regarding the enforced genetic testing of employees in the ’80s and ’90s, one of which was compulsory genetic testing of a set of recruits in the US army. They also make it very clear that the insurance companies wanted to introduce it as a way of charging those with ‘faulty’ genes higher premiums.
And from that, it’s a very short step to eugenics and then the mass slaughter of the congenitally disabled under the Third Reich’s Aktion T4.
The forcible genetic testing of US recruits is mentioned in one of the books that came out on the X-Files, as an example of how the paranoid fantasies of the show nevertheless had a factual basis in this instance. To be fair to the Christian Right in the America, they are very hostile to sterilisation and eugenics. However, it’ll be interesting to see if they oppose this noxious piece of legislation. In much of the rhetoric of the religious right, such legislation is linked to oppressive, totalitarian states, like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. It’ll be interesting to see if they oppose it when it’s introduced by an ostensibly democratic government (yeah, I know, it ain’t really), dominated by big business and which is bitterly hostile to any kind of Socialism.
I don’t think you’ll see a word against it. As Pakman explains, when it came to voting, all the Republicans voted for it, all the Democrats against. And I doubt the right-wing Conspiracy fringe will oppose it either. Alex Jones on Infowars has been pumping out pro-Trump propaganda since the Orange Nazi’s election campaign. He wants Americans to believe that Trump is somehow ‘anti-globalist’, despite the fact that he’s stuffed his cabinet full of globalists and monopoly capitalists.
This is truly terrifying, as it does bring us once step closer to the genetic dystopia of the film Gattaca.
And it’s yet more proof of the Nazism at the core of Trump’s administration.
There’s a very interesting article in today’s Counterpunch by Andrew Stewart, ‘Down With Obamacare, Up With Single-Payer’, which examines the various problems behind Obama’s affordable care act, and discusses the real reason the various private health insurance companies support it. And it ain’t pretty. In his article, he discusses how Ted Kennedy argued for a single-payer healthcare scheme, which would provide uninsured Americans with proper healthcare coverage while still involving the insurance companies. Stewart writes
At the end of his life, Edward Kennedy laid out in his book America Back on Track his logic and reasoning for creating a single-payer healthcare system. His argument was that Medicare could merely reduce the enrollment age to birth and almost instantaneously a federal program that is highly lauded would be able to provide healthcare for millions of uninsured Americans. As it stands right now, the insurance companies already make out fine with Medicare, they act as facilitators for payment of taxpayer funds and have booming business providing primary payer care for the elderly. Health insurance scholar and retired medical school professor Dr. John Geyman recently wrote (http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/39570-how-the-gop-can-avoid-the-trap-of-repealing-the-aca) “If the GOP pursues its claimed conservative principles, such as maximizing efficiency and choice, enhancing value, lowering costs, and reining in excess bureaucracy, another alternative is in plain sight, which supports these principles — single-payer national health insurance (NHI).”
So why don’t Conservatives and the insurance companies support single-payer? Because the private healthcare industry is a fundamental element in keeping workers in their place, subservient and dependent on their employers.
The issue is simple, healthcare is a major impediment to wider labor mobility in the job market. Under the ACA, people are restricted by large income caps. If they go over the income cap, they are slammed with huge copays and deductibles. As such, the law incentivizes living below the poverty line until one finds a full-time employer with a decent benefits package. This gives the employer the upper hand in any instance when they sit across the table from the workers. The ACA is nothing more than part and parcel of a larger system of control, created in collaboration between the private and public sectors, to restrict workers in their demands for higher wages and better quality of life. A single payer health plan would enable the type of labor mobility that would be a genuine benefit for working people nationwide. Even the desirable anti-discrimination clauses in the ACA, which quite admirably ended decades of industrial practices that targeted women and those with pre-existing conditions, are nothing but band-aids on a massive gash in the social safety net. The fact Bernie Sanders continues to support this diabolical system is nothing but wretched.
He then argues that neo-liberalism is as racist in its control of the poor as the various Nazis and White supremacists with whom Trump has stuffed his cabinet. The neoliberals’ war on the White working class has led directly to the rise of right-wing Fascism and populism under Trump. He argues strongly and persuasively that the Left needs to purge itself of the neoliberals, and concludes
The cancer of neo-fascism, neoliberalism, and accommodation is only going to be eradicated finally with a full-throated set of demands that includes single-payer healthcare. Anything less will only enable a further slide in our socio-political discourse towards reaction.
This is another video from The Young Turks, and it’s part two of a continuing series in which their reporter, Eric Byler, examines Trump’s attempts to reach out to Black Americans. The blurb for this on YouTube notes that only two per cent of Black Americans support him. Given the massive way he’s appealed to White Supremacists and the disparaging way he refers to non-Whites, like Mexicans and Muslims, I’m not remotely surprised that Afro-Americans dislike him. In this piece, Byler talks to the students at North Carolina A & T State University. This is an historic Black college, which is credited, according to the blurb, with being the place that launched the sit-in movement that ended segregation.
Trump has asked Black Americans ‘What do you have to lose?’ by voting for him, promising that he’ll improve their educational opportunities through Charter schools. Those are the American equivalent of our Academies, and they’re about as popular. Like some of the Academies on this side of the Pond, they’ve been forced on communities, despite protests and demonstrations by teachers, parents, clergy and other members of their communities. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the oldest civil rights movement in America, recently demanded a moratorium on their establishment. Several of the pupils state very clearly that they don’t want state education to be disparaged and run down, but to be built up.
And what is most interesting of all is why so many Black Americans resent and are suspicious of Charter schools: they were first launched in the Deep South with the voucher system in the wake of desegregation, so Whites could take their children out of the now officially colour-blind public schools, so that they wouldn’t have to mix with Blacks.
Here’s the video:
I’m posting this as we have the same problems with the promotion of Academies in Britain, although that seems to have gone by the wayside with May’s announcement that all schools will be able to apply to become grammar schools. The experience of Black Americans with voucher schools in the US adds an extra dimension to some of the fears articulated by the critics of Academies and faith schools over here that such schools are divisive and will cause greater disruption to communities.
My sympathies are solidly with those of the students interviewed by Byler in this video. The state system in this country has been deliberately trashed and run down by successive administrations ever since Thatcher. Academies, by and large, are no better than state schools. Where they have succeeded, it’s because they’ve had an enormous amount of money thrown at them, often far more than the budget of the Local Education Authority for all the schools in its care. Any school would include, if they had that kind of money thrown at them. Far from demonstrating the superior results of private sponsorship and investment, they simply show the need for a properly funded state system.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 