On MALIK RAHIM: Yesterday's Radicals Devolve into Today's (feelgood-checkbook) Liberalism

Former Panther turning liberal-do-gooder.

(Also says that San Francisco is "A GREAT CITY" -- even as Blacks have been physically and ecomically moved out of there for decades to the point where Black people, except those penned up in projects, have become a residential endangered species in San Francisco.)

Many damn fine points. Especially about the extortion of tax monies by terrorist states.

And it was a Nixon appointee, Justice Blackman, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade guaranteeing a safe and legal abortion in the US in 1973, when Nixon was president, while a Kennedy appointee, Justice White, dissented.

As to the mass movements of the 1940s-1960s that were the civil rights movement, the 1960s and 1970s that were the anti-US war in Vietnam movement, the 1970s disabled people, women's and gay liberation movements and the environmental movement, they are all now bigger and better than ever. To the extent that they are weak, it is because labor is weak as we have not seen a labor movement in 55 years in this country. It was the labor movement of the 1930s-1940s that made possible sufficient wealth for the existence of the civil rights movements of the 1940s through the 1970s and beyond, and it was that same organizing experience that made possible the peace movement of 1945 to the present.

To the younger generation, there was simply no such thing as a gay liberation movement, serious women's liberation movement, any disabled people's movement, a serious environmental movement, or much of a civil rights movement before 1970. The idea that blacks should be treated equally in every aspect with whites was extremely radical before 1970, and the same was true regarding men and women. You may think things are backward today, but they were much worse 35 years ago. Of course, a case could be made that they should be better by now, 35 years later, and you are right. What we need is a labor movement.

We are in a labor era now and only if and when any sector of the labor movement moves forward can we all advance. The increase in the number of strikes is one sign of that labor movement. Another sign is the effort to put universal pre-school for 4 year olds on the California ballot in 2006, paid for by taxing the rich who make over $400,000 a year. Much more labor activity, the related promotion of free and adequate public school education for all from age 3 through and including university, the related promotion of free, universal and adequate health and dental care to all upon demand, the related promotion of free and adequate public transportation and the related promotion of free and adequate housing for all are all desperately needed.

This is all political, that is, class struggle, as is the existence of a US military base in the Middle East to protect US oil profits, namely the hellhole called Israel. The $4 billion a year spent on Israel will cease to be spent as labor becomes stronger in this country, sufficient to put an end to the private profit system.

We all can contribute something to this effort to help the workingclass of Louisiana and by now, probably have done so, but beyond that, we must demand that our tax dollars be transferred from the military budget to all the health and human services budgets as we cannot possibly match the national treasury, and it is that national treasury that must be spent to guarantee decent and affordable housing, decent paying jobs, free and universal healthcare and all else that is needed for the workingclass of Louisiana to live decently.

As to the Black Panther Party, far too much is being made of it. Its short-lived existence, from 1966 to 1974, was ended not only by the government attacks on it, but also by the weakness of its nationalist rather than class-based program. For example, it demanded that all blacks be exempted from military service when it should have demanded that not only should the entire workingclass be exempt from military service but that the military should be abolished. The Black Panther Party was part of the peace movement against the Vietnam War, as were all progressive movements and organizations of the 1960s and 1970s. The BPP did provide some assistance to the black community in terms of food, medical care and exposing the police brutality and terrible living conditions in the ghettos in its newspaper. However, they were not a labor based organization and thus had no means of attacking the problem, namely the private profit system.

It was certainly outrageous that Larry Bensky was allowed to take over all of the daytime programs on KPFA for at least 2 days for the confirmation hearings of an outright fascist judge, Judge Roberts, whose confirmation was admittedly guaranteed as 22 Democrats verified when they joined the 55 Republicans in voting for Roberts. There was no need for a hearing with that kind of rubber stamp vote. There is never any need to broadcast any government hearings on KPFA. These hearings, if at all important, are summarized on the 6 p.m. news, and that is enough. We pay KPFA for local programs; not for government hearings, which occur in the hundreds (and if you include trials and other coutroom hearings, the thousands) daily. Please make that clear when you pledge this month.

I don't have any sophisticated analysis to add, just want to say that this is good to know. I've heard Malik hear and there on indybay and other radio venues (and it's my boyfriend, among others, who did some of the phone interviews for indybay), and I figured "ok, this is one of the authentic voices of the beleaguered black community there (and here, since he was and now still is active in SF/EB), and deserves money that folks give him." I haven't, I've been waiting til the inevitable opportunist dust clears to donate to local based groups on the ground there. Food Not Bombs has chapters there that have been gathering good food to feed people. There's also some group that has Harvest in its' name, I've heard they're supposed to be a good group. But the larger issue of the land grab, to make black folk flee and stay fled, a la San Francisco Redevelopment Agency's scheme, St. Louis, and elsewhere, worries me even more. JR from the SF Bayview and others have been reporting on this (I'm a different jr - hi Joseph!). For those who aren't aware, the SF Bayview newspaper exposed SF Redevelopment documents from the 1960's that spelled out pretty plainly how the black community was to be carved up and dispersed from the Fillmore and out of the city entirely. And then they did it. This is not high-flown hyberbole, google it at the sfbayview's website http://www.sfbayview.com and read for yourself. Travel to other cities, like say Chicago, and notice you see a lot more prosperous middle class black folks around. It didn't hit me until I went to Chicago how we are lacking this in SF, something is severely wrong and it's down to that SFRA policy, and it's not unique. Note how Century 21 and other major realty companies held an emergency convention in New Orleans (or nearby? I forget exactly where) within a couple of weeks of Katrina. Black land and homeowners are being pressured to sell at bottom dollar, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the dispersed black population are going to be kept from returning. The slogan of the right of return is one I agree with, but how's that going to happen without an organized response to the land grab already under way? (which goes as much for the Palestinians as it does for the Katrina/Rita survivors).
Thank you for opening our eyes to this, Joseph.

I appreciate your words, jr.

And check out my friend Tracey James' radio show, archives, and *excellent* website (with lots of video and audio documentaries resources, as well as interviews with people like Ward Churchill or Peter Duesberg)!

The easiest way is to just google:

"SLAVE REVOLT RADIO" with TRACEY JAMES

(it'll be the first hit on google)

http://mysite.verizon.net/res7dhyg/


You can currently hear SRV over the air in parts of Berkeley and Oakland (and later on over a larger part of the two cities as transmission improvements are made) on Berkeley Liberation Radio from approximately 5:00-6:30pm at 104.1fm.

You can also hear it at Free Radio Santa Cruz, 101.1 FM, or at http://freakradio.org/ online, on Tuesdays from 3:00-5:00pm.

And you can also catch the show or its archives at http://luver.com/, Thursday 11pm-12:30am, and Fri 2am-3:30am.


Check out Tracey's continuing mulitpart radio series called

"HURRICANE SAM"

http://mysite.verizon.net/res7dhyg/slaverevoltradio.html

All these programs are downloadable too.


SLAVE REVOLT RADIO IS THE STRAIGHT UP *REAL* DEAL.

YOU WON'T HEAR ANY KERRYCRATS OR OTHER LIBERAL PABLUM.

"SLAVE REVOLT RADIO" WAS NOTED IN THE "PROJECT CENSORED" BOOK.

(And you won't hear "SLAVE" abandoning coverage of the victims in New Orleans, like KPFA did, to cover the rubberstamp John Roberts Supreme Court hearings -- and listen WHY in PART 3, the criticism of KPFA.)


Next week he *might* be talking about Malik.

You're practically a one-man community service here -- droppin' science and keepin' the fools at bay.


Cross-posted:

well, JA . . .
by RWF Tuesday, Oct. 04, 2005 at 2:57 PM
restes60 [at] earthlink.net

maybe, Malik Rahim had something for lunch that was disagreeable

after all, I interviewed two people involved in the Common Ground relief effort in Algiers on KDVS last Friday, and, believe me, neither of them had any problem talking very directly about the political context of the hurricane

especially, this hard left guy from DC who was volunteering down there, who concluded with a forceful commentary

anyone who wants to listen, go here, and download (through Friday, 10/7 at 5pm only) from the links at the top center of the page

http://www.asucd.ucdavis.edu/radio/showme.cfm?show=114&title=SpeakinginTongues&back_grid

so, I wouldn't take what Malik said in Berkeley quite so seriously

--Richard

This is how I feel about the "radical youth" of the 1960s, almost all of whom have "tuned back in" (to the coddled privilege-seeking mentality programmed into them by their '50s parents) "grown up" (so THEY call it) and SOLD OUT

Back in the day they did really well emerging collectively from middle-class complacence, but now they've fallen back into it deeper than ever. These people are the captains of commerce and government now, which are more interlocked and corrupt then ever.

Of course none of this stops them from IMAGINING they're still cutting edge ultra-enlightened hipsters. A relative of mine, for example, who now strip-mines beautiful forests and old fallow farms for a living, converting them into lovely monotonous tracts of yuppie palaces. He has millions. He'll carry on all day about how LSD cosmically opened his mind and how cool Timmy Leary was -- except he's always forgetting about the man's MESSAGE. Ego, all ego.

These people are traitors to their own dreams. They're disgusting. My gut tells me they never truly believed any of it, were just riding a fun party-wagon with their peers, staying high, copping that sweet free love, etc. When the time came to make an adult choice -- do I stay with these ideals and pursue a conscientious spartan life, or do I cut and run back to the easy thing Mommy and Daddy taught me -- they mostly cut and ran.

Those days filled me with hope. I miss them so much. If that generation had had the depth and strength to stay the course, the American scene today would be closer to utopian and further from Hitlerian. I will never forgive them.

There are movements on the left that seek to unify people across all social/political boundaries, e.g. anti-imperialism, universal suffrage. In the case of radical environmentalism, this ethic even reaches beyond the human species

Movements like this have been / are being gutted

Then there are the movements on the "left" that pit all sorts of groups against each other and exacerbate divisions that may not even exist prior to their emergence. I don't know how you're going to take this, but I put all forms of 'identity politics' into this category. Judging from his final days (when he began planning to expand the movement across color lines) I think MLK would have agreed. This of course is why he needed to catch a bullet

This second category is divide-and-conquer games. I don't think they're really emerging from the left at all, and this would also explain why they're thriving.

your article here has a lot of merit, even discounting the need for people to survive in a difficult political environment

I mean, even if you have to economically trim your sails, nothing says that you have to verbally do it, too . . .

listening to those volunteers in Algiers describe the devastation and the way people are living, people inside moldy houses, people in rural areas still abandoned, even today, it's really stops you in your tracks

--Richard

RE [Byootiful, JA!
by A thing people definitely need to hear Wednesday, Oct. 05, 2005 at 5:43 PM.]

Thanks for the props.

And props to you too. Your comments speak with much incisiveness and much eloquence.

As for your point on "identity politics". My heart agrees with you that it could be a source of divisions (divide and conquer), but I've realized that I have to ask people *what they mean* by "identity politics". For example, I scorn whatever Todd Gitlin's (and other semi-neoconservatives' and conservatives') definition of it is -- as a white male backlash epithet -- because, to me, it obviously means that he's upset that it means that white men, like him, weren't all going to be leading (in all the leadership positions) 'the revolution' anymore -- not that Gitlin ever was a revolutionary or even a true leftist, but at the time, he was probably fronting like he was. (As, when he was an egotistical self-touting leader of Berkeley's SDS. In its earliest days, SDS, as I understand it, really hadn't yet become all that left/radical then: it was probably more of a liberal white student group who didn't want their or their friends' asses shot off in a far away jungle and rice paddy land in a country that most nobody had ever heard of, and that was clearly no threat to the U.S..)

And sometimes it bothers me how, often, privileged/affluent gay white males, and sometimes too often lesbians, want to verbally take over every event dealing with the Black civil rights struggle (riding on its back) and verbally commandeer it to a white gay/lesbian focussed event. Not that gay males, and especially lesbians, haven't often faced strong discrimination, but let's face it: gay males, in particular, have occupied just about every postion in American society (including, what, about 40 years as head of the FBI). Or, many white socioeconomically and educationally privileged gays/lesbians often seem to only care about issues to the extent that it affects white gays/lesbians, particularly those who are socioeconomically privileged.

So, when Ralph Nader was running for president, white liberals, usually condemning him, said that he was going to ruin it for Kerry and the Democrats. But, when Gavin Newsom wanted to marry thousands of gays/lesbians, nobody said that Newsom was going to ruin it for Kerry and the Democrats -- which he arguably *DID*! Plus, how many of those gays/lesbians took Newsom to task (they should have condemned *him*) for turning Bay View Hunters Point into what I then called "Black Fallujah". This, when Newsom sent in hundreds of cops to terrorize, occupy and put the Black community there under seige for weeks -- literally stopping every Black male in the community, impounding cars, etc. -- *collective punishment* against the Black community is what it was -- after a cop got shot. This was exactly similar to Fallujah when four mercenaries got killed and Bush sent in the military to rampage through and terrorize the entire city. So, that's the kind of self-interested-only "identity politics" I don't like.

One of my more recent major bugaboos has been white gays -- and their own version of the 'zionist' lobby -- pillorying South African president Thebo Mbeki over the AIDS issue. White people treat him like the jungle bunny president -- no matter how educated he is. First off all, as ostracized UC Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg has pointed out, many more Black Africans die from *POVERTY* (and other diseases) than from AIDS. But white gays have been trying -- just like apartheid whites -- to tell this black president -- and black Africans -- WHAT TO DEBATE, HOW TO THINK, AND EVEN WHAT TO HEAR!! Mbeki correctly pointed out that, "This was JUST LIKE DURING APARTHEID!" Before Mbeki embarked on a medical program that would have bankrupted South Africa -- and one that would greatly enrich the huge pharmaceutical corporations -- he was *supposed* to hear all points of view by legtimately accredited (let alone world class) scientists. AIDS is a disease that Western white people prominently worry about, because white people can catch it and die -- African *poverty*, and Africa's other diseases, aren't. Google SLAVE REVOLT RADIO and hear what Tracey James has to say about *that*.

But, if "identity politics" means that if I have the personal experience of growing up as a Black male in a poor or working-class underprivileged community -- or even middle-class community (whose members, after all, still face *plenty* of discrimination) -- but I don't have any personal experience growing up in a poor or working-class Latino or Asian American community or on the Native American reservation -- in a still racist society (even if denial of access to public accomodations have been mostly eliminated) -- or any experience growing up as a low-self-esteem socialized female in a sexist, often misogynst, patriarchal society -- AND THEREFORE I *might* and *should* know better how to help solve the disparate problems in the Black community (at least the male part of that community). But I'm certainly *not* going to know better how to solve the disparate problems in those other communities (whether as a geographical community or a social/gender group). Then so-called "identity politics" (which, again, began as a white male epithet) is useful.

If "identity politics" means that I proudly *identify* with my culture as an oppressed minority whose culture has historically been not only denied but typically *erased*, and that I identify with the predicament of the masses of the people in my community, then that's a good thing (I would think) -- as opposed to my turning my back on my own community when it has often been largely ignored by white society. People asserting their rights in a racist, sexist, and classist society is often a cause of division. So-called "Identity politics" is, at root, claiming the right for your group to not be discriminated against, or reclaiming the cultural pride that has historically been denied to one's own group. So, if we want to eliminate "identity politics", then we have to help fight the social and institutionnal discrimination that produces "identity politics".

But, "identity politics" is a *white* *male* **backlash** created word -- by those like Todd Gitlin: it meant, we previoudly "liberal" privileged white university educated guys (now often supported by conservative 'think tanks', institutions, presses and publications) -- RESENT that we're not leading everything (especially social movements) anymore. (Do you know that until the early 1960's the successive heads of the *NAACP* used to be WHITE!? Most people, even Blacks, don't know this.)

Furthermore, I certainly *couldn't* claim to socioculturally *represent* any of those other groups -- and it would be highly presumptuous of me to try to do so. Plus, those groups need to see their own leaders in order to raise their own -- and their childrens' -- self-esteem and (especially educational, let alone vocational and professional) self-expectations. Plus, different minority-Americans will never TRULY be accepted as "Americans" (so to speak) or as truly equal members of society -- let alone as even TRULY human (with whites, even most white liberals, traditionally considering themselves "the norm" and "the universal standard") -- if minorities are not first accepted as Black, Latino, Asian, Arab, etc., *EQUALS* (moral, mental, and cultural equals, at least collectively, to whites, at least collectively -- and of course in many cases individually). And once that realization is achieved we can move *BEYOND* white, Black, Latino, Asian, Arab, etc. We can start moving beyond race -- and then beyond borders and beyond nationalities (an historical contrivance by the respective ruling elites to set up geographical trade monopolies -- nation-states).

What did the Black Panthers say: Black power to Black people, Brown power to Brown people, Red power to Red people, Yellow power to Yellow people, white power to white people -- ALL power to THE people [*collectively*]!

(Capitalism has certainly moved beyond race, nationalities and borders for its goals of moving capital, more freely moving the means of production around, searching the globe for exploitable poverty, and installing comprador puppets -- while capitalists still have working people trippin' out on being "American", or "British", etc., like being one nationality is inherently better and inherently makes you a better human being than being another. Bush & Co. have found a 'rainbow coalition' of the worst bald-faced lyin', warmongering, pro-torture muthafuckas in the country in the current administration -- and America has always reached beyond borders to find an aggregate rainbow coalition of despots abroad.)

Now, I'm not like Malik: so you feel quite free to disagree with me here (I'm not going to try to run anyone outta town merely for intellectually disagreeing with me). This is just my intellectual opinion. Maybe you've got a better analysis or concept!

Now getting back to MLK: I agree entirely with you there. But, it was Malcolm X -- who King politically grew closer to, especially in King's last two or three years of his life -- and I think that Malcolm had to catch a bullet for the same reason, only much sooner - who reconceptualized 'identity politics' -- and *after* he had gone to the Middle East. Malcolm saw that a *civil* rights struggle -- Black people merely gaining legal access to white suburbs and white society -- on merely the same immoral basis of exploiting other poor people elsewhere -- what MLK later called "MERELY INTEGRATING INTO A BURNING HOUSE" -- a politically and environmentally nonsustainable white-American lifestyle and mentality -- was too politically, morally, and ethnically stunted: that the struggle had to be moved up to the *highest* level as AN *INTERNATIONALIZED* *HUMAN* RIGHTS AND LIBERATION STRUGGLE, NOT ONLY FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS, BUT FOR *ALL* PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD!!

And Malcolm came up with this concept of an internationalized *human rights and liberation struggle* in the *early* 1960's, while King came up with this in the later 1960's -- or if King realized it any earlier he kept his mouth shut (no doubt then fearing sociopolitical assassination, like Paul Robeson, or physical assassination, like Malcolm X) until he most eloquently and powerfully articulated his realization in his Vietnam War speech. King calling the U.S. govt the most violent entitiy in the world today: Malcolm realized that in the *early* '60's. Malcolm also publicly came out against the Vietnam war in the *early* '60's. He's the one who schooled Muhammed Ali to come out against it in Ali's famous statement.

Anyway, that's where I stand on *my* concept of "identity politics". Otherwise -- and beyond that -- I'm with you all the way.

[As for your point on "identity politics". My heart agrees with you that it could be a source of divisions (divide and conquer), but I've realized that I have to ask people *what they mean* by "identity politics". For example, I scorn whatever Todd Gitlin's (and other semi-neoconservatives' and conservatives') definition of it is -- as a white male backlash epithet -- because, to me, it obviously means that he's upset that it means that white men, like him, weren't all going to be leading (in all the leadership positions) 'the revolution' anymore -- not that Gitlin ever was a revolutionary or even a true leftist, but at the time, he was probably fronting like he was . . . . . . ]

. . . . the most basic, fundamental conflict in the world today is between rich and poor, and the divide is growing day by day

neoliberalism has destroyed the hopes of those in the mid-20th Century that either communism or liberalism could bring security and prosperity to much of the world as the colonial empires collapsed

in its place, there is an increasingly ruthless, brutal Hobbesian world of gross exploitation, where people and their children work in economic processing zones from El Salvador to the Phillippines to Bangladesh, where they are often punished for things are essential to human existence as eating and going to the bathroom

all, so that those of us in Europe and the United States can buy cheap clothes, electronics and even cars

this is why the targets of the Bush Administration invariably are countries with the capacity to become not only economically independent of the US, but additionally capable of assisting others to escape the US imposed IMF/World Bank world of debt, debt restructuring and structural adjustment that results in the destruction of a country's public sector and the acquisition of a country's resources that would facilitate economic development, creating the 'failed states' that people like Robert Kaplan use to justify US intervention around the world

in other words, resource rich countries like Iraq, Iran and Venezuela, countries that, if they successfully exploited their natural resources, could modernize and invest in their neighbors to help them modernize as well, free of the constraints of the US

(which is why you will never see the US taking action against a populous, resource scarce country like Egypt)

thus, Iraq must be broken into 3 pieces, Shia, Kurd and Sunni, as openly advocated by people like Thomas Friedman (who extends the concept, and its underlying principle of rendering Iraqis economically prostrate, by stating that we should promote a civil war between these new states as well), Iran should be subject to sanctions (and military attack if it should try to escape the US trap by developing the ability process and sell nuclear fuel internationally, which it is entitled to do, or nuclear weapons, like its neighbors Pakistan, India and Israel), and, in Venezuela, Chavez should be killed

the people of lesser developed countries understand what this is really about, and they support the Iranians, they support the end of the US occupation of Iraq, and they support the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, because the unifying political philosophy is self-determination and independent economic development, outside the diktats of international finance capital

and, the more vehement the US opposition, the more unwilling the US is about relinquishing its global and economic control, the greater the likelihood that we have only just seen the beginning of the conflict in Iraq

so, ten years from now, the "identity politics" question may be front and center: are you with the rich? or are you with the poor? because, there is no liberal, Keynesian type alternative to avoid the conflict that is plausible

--Richard

[As for your point on "identity politics". My heart agrees with you that it could be a source of divisions (divide and conquer), but I've realized that I have to ask people *what they mean* by "identity politics". For example, I scorn whatever Todd Gitlin's (and other semi-neoconservatives' and conservatives') definition of it is -- as a white male backlash epithet -- because, to me, it obviously means that he's upset that it means that white men, like him, weren't all going to be leading (in all the leadership positions) 'the revolution' anymore -- not that Gitlin ever was a revolutionary or even a true leftist, but at the time, he was probably fronting like he was . . . . . . ]

. . . . the most basic, fundamental conflict in the world today is between rich and poor, and the divide is growing day by day

neoliberalism has destroyed the hopes of those in the mid-20th Century that either communism or liberalism could bring security and prosperity to much of the world as the colonial empires collapsed

in its place, there is an increasingly ruthless, brutal Hobbesian world of gross exploitation, where people and their children work in economic processing zones from El Salvador to the Phillippines to Bangladesh, where they are often punished for things are essential to human existence as eating and going to the bathroom

all, so that those of us in Europe and the United States can buy cheap clothes, electronics and even cars

this is why the targets of the Bush Administration invariably are countries with the capacity to become not only economically independent of the US, but additionally capable of assisting others to escape the US imposed IMF/World Bank world of debt, debt restructuring and structural adjustment that results in the destruction of a country's public sector and the acquisition of a country's resources that would facilitate economic development, creating the 'failed states' that people like Robert Kaplan use to justify US intervention around the world

in other words, resource rich countries like Iraq, Iran and Venezuela, countries that, if they successfully exploited their natural resources, could modernize and invest in their neighbors to help them modernize as well, free of the constraints of the US

(which is why you will never see the US taking action against a populous, resource scarce country like Egypt)

thus, Iraq must be broken into 3 pieces, Shia, Kurd and Sunni, as openly advocated by people like Thomas Friedman (who extends the concept, and its underlying principle of rendering Iraqis economically prostrate, by stating that we should promote a civil war between these new states as well), Iran should be subject to sanctions (and military attack if it should try to escape the US trap by developing the ability process and sell nuclear fuel internationally, which it is entitled to do, or nuclear weapons, like its neighbors Pakistan, India and Israel), and, in Venezuela, Chavez should be killed

the people of lesser developed countries understand what this is really about, and they support the Iranians, they support the end of the US occupation of Iraq, and they support the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, because the unifying political philosophy is self-determination and independent economic development, outside the diktats of international finance capital

and, the more vehement the US opposition, the more unwilling the US is about relinquishing its global and economic control, the greater the likelihood that we have only just seen the beginning of the conflict in Iraq

so, ten years from now, the "identity politics" question may be front and center: are you with the rich? or are you with the poor? because, there is no liberal, Keynesian type alternative to avoid the conflict that is plausible

--Richard

Class is THE identity that should preoccupy us, all others distract.

JA: my beef with the 15 flavors of identity politics (please suggest another term if this one bothers you) is that I see them mostly only producing new types of bigots instead of actually solving problems. Zionism (the current rage in Jewish identity politics) is an extremely clear example. Everything we both object to there is a perfect example of what I mean. Militant feminists can be the most virulent open sexists out there. There's nothing 'structural' about it, they're just flat-out right in your face with what's clearly pure plain resentment of men for being male. The black reaction to history has taken on this flavor also. In the post-slavery, post-Holocaust, post-civil rights world, whites tend to censure each others' racism. It is considered very uncool to be an open bigot. I see signs that this ethic is not as strong among many blacks, often nonexistent, and it needs to be every bit as strong. When either side is openly demonstrative, it aggravates and perpetuates BOTH sides of the problem. Our common enemies know this...

JA: "...poor or working-class underprivileged [black] community -- or even middle-class community (whose members, after all, still face *plenty* of discrimination)...
a poor or working-class Latino or Asian American community or on the Native American reservation...
a low-self-esteem socialized female in a sexist, often misogynst, patriarchal society -- AND THEREFORE I *might* and *should* know better how to help solve the disparate problems in the Black community..."

Well, Joseph, as a white male who grew up in a rural desperately poor broken family, got into a prestigious university, discovered what a heartless nest of clawing class climbers that was, turned my back on it to save my soul and have been paying the price for it ever since (no regrets), I can tell you inequality goes WAY beyond these people you've listed. I'm an outsider too; to the extent that I've excluded myself, that's because as a person of conscience I think the white American class mainstream is corrupt and despicable. I want no part of it

Bringing all these varied experiences to the table is all good. What I'm objecting to is when individuals allow the blackness or the latino-ness or the Jewish-ness or the indian-ness or the gay-ness or the woman-ness to eclipse their sense of larger commonalities, and it happens all the time. Everyone understands this is a problem when it happens with "whiteness." I'm saying it's a problem when it happens with ANY of them. It destroys the ability to build a universal movement and to realize our ultimate strength of numbers, and if we don't do that we are all SCa-REWED. Our common enemies (the billionaires) understand this with perfect clarity

Considering how she was supposed to be some sort of "radical," Gloria Steinem sure kept strange bedfellows

http://www.umsl.edu/~skthoma/pfp.htm

The common understanding of the idea of 'bigotry' is ridiculously narrow, one side of one dimension out of 50, some of which are larger than race. Class bigotry, for example, is the most destructive most structural most entrenched and institutionalized intraspecies bigotry of all, and too many people are totally oblivious to it. Human supremacism is the **MUTHA**, the one that will kill ALL of us. It's a thing people are even less aware of. You have to get WAAAY outside "the box" (the thinking programmed into you when you're four)

Let me finally suggest that you might be too reactionary about the phrase "identity politics." The term is objectively useful - it captures a generic way of thinking - and you may be tying excessive baggage to it (don't pull a gehrig)

I hope this article isn't a distraction to this thread. I don't think it is. I think embedded in Adolph Reed's article is a critique of identity politics.

Class-ifying the Hurricane
Adolph Reed Jr.

I was in New Orleans visiting my mother and other relatives less than a week before Katrina hit. Even though we already had an eye on the approaching hurricane, I had no thought, when I boarded the plane to leave, that the city I've known all my life would never be the same again.

I don't have space or words to catalogue the horrors and outrages associated with the plight of New Orleans and its people. In any event, the basic story is now well-known, and we're entering the stage at which further details mainly feed the voyeuristic sentimentalism that will help the momentarily startled corporate news media retreat gracefully to their more familiar role as court heralds. The bigger picture will disappear in the minutiae of timelines and discrete actions.

What will be lost is the central point that the destruction was not an "act of God." Nor was it simply the product of incompetence, lack of empathy or cronyism. Those exist in abundance, to be sure, but they are symptoms, not ultimate causes. What happened in New Orleans is the culmination of twenty-five years of disparagement of any idea of public responsibility; of a concerted effort--led by the right but as part of a bipartisan consensus--to reduce government's functions to enhancing plunder by corporations and the wealthy and punishing everyone else, undermining any notion of social solidarity.





I know that some progressives believe this incident will mark a turning point in American politics. Perhaps, especially if gas prices continue to rise. I suspect, however, that this belief is only another version of the cargo cult that has pervaded the American left in different ways for a century: the wish for some magical intervention or technical fix that will substitute for organizing a broad popular base around a clearly articulated, alternative vision that responds to most people's pressing concerns. The greater likelihood is that within a month Democratic liberals will have smothered the political moment just as they've smothered every other opportunity we've had since Ronald Reagan's election. True, Nancy Pelosi and others finally began to bark at the Bush Administration's persisting homicidal negligence. But my hunch is that, as with Iran/contra, the theft of the 2000 election and the torrent of obvious lies that justified the war on Iraq, liberals' fear of seeming irresponsibly combative and their commitment to the primacy of corporate and investor-class interests will lead them to aid and abet the short-circuiting of whatever transformative potential this moment has.

This will also obscure the deeper reality that lies beneath the manifest racial disparities in vulnerability, treatment and outcome. The abstract, moralizing patter about how and whether "race matters" or "the role of race" is appealing partly because it doesn't confront the roots of the bipartisan neoliberal policy regime. It's certainly true that George W. Bush and his minions are indifferent to, or contemptuous of, black Americans in general. They're contemptuous of anyone who is not part of the ruling class. Although Bush and his pals are no doubt small-minded bigots in many ways, the racial dimension stands out so strikingly in part because race is now the most familiar--and apparently for many progressives the most powerful--language of social justice. For roughly a generation it seemed reasonable to expect that defining inequalities in racial terms would provoke some remedial response from the federal government. But for quite some time race's force in national politics has been as a vehicle for reassuring whites that "public" equals some combination of "black," "poor" and "loser"; that cutting public spending is aimed at weaning a lazy black underclass off the dole or--in the supposedly benign, liberal Democratic version--teaching blacks "personal responsibility."

To paraphrase historian Barbara Fields, race is a language through which American capitalism's class contradictions are commonly expressed. Class will almost certainly turn out to be a better predictor than race of who was able to evacuate, who drowned, who was left to fester in the Superdome or on overpasses, who is stuck in shelters in Houston or Baton Rouge, or who is randomly dispersed to the four winds. I'm certain that class is also a better predictor than race of whose emotional attachments to place will be factored into plans for reconstructing the city.

Of course, in a case of devastation so vast as this, class position provides imperfect insulation. All my very well connected, petit-bourgeois family in New Orleans are now spread across Mississippi and south Louisiana with no hint of when they will return home or what they'll have to return to. Some may have lost their homes and all their belongings. But most of them evacuated before the storm. No one died or was in grave danger of dying; no one was left on an overpass, in the Superdome or at the convention center. They were fortunate but hardly unique among the city's black population, and class had everything to do with the terms of their survival.

Natural disasters can magnify existing patterns of inequality. The people who were swept aside or simply overlooked in this catastrophe were the same ones who were already swept aside in a model of urban revitalization that, in New Orleans as everywhere else, is predicated on their removal. Their presence is treated as an eyesore, a retardant of property values, proof by definition that the spaces they occupy are underutilized. And it's not simply because they're black. They embody another, more specific category, the equivalent of what used to be known, in the heyday of racial taxonomy, as a "sub-race." They are a population against which others--blacks as well as whites--measure their own civic worth. Those who were the greatest victims of the disaster were invisible in preparation and response, just as they were the largely invisible, low-wage props supporting the tourism industry's mythos of New Orleans as the city of constant carnival. They enter public discussion only as a problem to be rectified or contained, never as subjects of political action with their own voices and needs. White elites fret about how best to move them out of the way; black elites ventriloquize them and smooth their removal.

Race is too blunt an analytical tool even when inequality is expressed in glaring racial disparities. Its meanings are too vague. We can see already that the charges of racial insensitivity and neglect threaten to divert the focus of the Katrina outrage to a secondary debate about how Bush feels about blacks and whether the sources of the travesty visited upon poor New Orleanians were "color blind" or racist. Beyond that, a racial critique can lead nowhere except to demands for black participation in decision-making around reconstruction. But which black people? What plans? Reconstruction on what terms? I've seen too many black- and Latino-led municipal governments and housing authorities fuel real estate speculation with tax giveaways and zoning variances, rationalizing massive displacement of poor and other working-class people with sleight-of-hand about mixed-income occupancy and appeals to the sanctity of market forces.

The only hope we have for turning back the tide of this thuggish Administration's commitment to destroy every bit of social protection that's been won in the past century lies in finding ways to build a broad movement of the vast majority of us who are not part of the investor class. We have to be clear that what happened in New Orleans is an extreme and criminally tragic coming home to roost of the con that cutting public spending makes for a better society. It is a shocking foretaste of a future that many more of us will experience less dramatically, often quietly as individuals, as we lose pensions, union protection, access to healthcare and public education, Social Security, bankruptcy and tort protection, and as we are called upon to feed an endless war machine.

is one of the most under-rated radical writers not just radical *black* writers) in America.

his relative obscurity is due in good part I think to the fact that he has been willing to caustically criticize "progressive" black celebrities like Cornel West, bell hooks, and Jessie Jackson. he isn't any less acerbic in his criticism of white progressive fakes and flakes either.

it's typical of Reed that he wouldn't jump on the bandwagon or repeat cliches about the horror in New Orleans. his subtle but unmistakeable rebuke of Kanyes West's framing of events--that New Orleans shows that George Bush doesn't "like" black people--is notable in this regard.

anyway, it's a great piece and thanks to whoever posted it.

. . . but, the important point is that a class based, anti-imperialist politics is not antithetical to recognizing the profound racial and cultural conflicts that have shaped our society and others

and, Reed obviously understands this (as reflected in this article), with the perniciousness of "identity group" politics residing in the way that liberals have exploited it to create a false polarity, a false opposition that does not exist between the two

hence, speaking about poverty in a way that creates the impression that it is exclusively tied to race, furthers this false opposition, as Reed astutely recognizes

or, to select another example that reveals the class bias of "identity group" politics, how many women's rights and reproductive rights groups, like NOW and NARAL openly opposed Proposition 187, and dedicated people and resources to defeat it?

by and large, they were on the sidelines (at least, where I lived), even though, 187, if implemented, would have had a devastating impact upon women of color and their families, separating them, depriving them of medical care (and, thus, reproductive rights information), education and law enforcement protection

187 was one of the worst 'anti-woman' measures ever proposed in the last 30 years, yet these groups played a marginal role at best in the opposition campaign, at least where I lived, revealing their internalized bias that women's rights and reproductive rights are an identity group issue, with the group primarily defined as educated, middle and upper class women

even though, as a race, class and policy issue, the interests of these groups, and that those that worked to defeat it, both electorally and legally, were congruent, not divergent

--Richard

You're missing the point. Progressives who fight to keep issues of race and gender on the left's agenda and who -- yes -- *identify* as Black or female or Latino, or anything else that is not white male, are not denying the importance of class. What these progressives are saying is that you cannot understand, much less affect, American society without looking at *all* of these things: class, race, gender, etc. Dismissing "identity politics" and focusing on class as the most legitimate issue is myopic and ineffectual.

Adolph Reed's article about New Orleans provides an example of this. He claims that class was a better predictor of who "got out" of New Orleans safely than race because all of the Black middle class people he knows did so. But he's missing half the story. Race *alone* may not have been an adequate predictor. But *neither was class*. White working class people lost their homes in some of the flooded-out suburbs, but they were not left behind in the Superdome or the Convention Center. They "got out," for the most part, and indeed the National Guard even blocked bridges so that Black hurricane victims could not escape the city limits on foot and enter white communities. Those whites (affluent and poor) who were still in the city (or its inland suburbs) were allowed to loot with impunity (did you see the famous news photo jusxtapositions sent around on the internet: white people "find", Black people "loot"), curfews were not enforced on even poor whites, and even poor whites were allowed to openly ride around with and carry rifles and handguns without the military/police/National Guard/mercenaries shooting at them the way they did to Blacks.

The fact is, even though it's as invisible to them as the privileges unbelievable and inexplicably are to middle-class and affluent whites -- and I realize that poor whites don't want to hear that they are in any way privileged on their respective level -- even poor whites from broken homes in desperately poor rural areas are in fact privileged over poor Blacks -- and certainly over poor Blacks from broken homes in desperately poor rural area. As Bill Clinton will evidence, even a poor white person from a broken and alcoholic/co-dependent home in a rural area can become PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED SATES when not even a rich Black person with a Harvard law degree -- as yet -- hasn't had even a chance in hell of ever becoming one.

Poor whites are not going to be just randomly stopped by the police on the highways -- like even middle-class and affluent Blacks are -- and ordered out of the car and humiliated by being ordered to even lay face down on the ground in their dress clothes; when poor whites commit crimes they usually get lighter sentences than poor and even middle-class/affluent Blacks, and poor whites are generally able to get jobs gaurding those Blacks in the poor white rural communities where those prisons are purposely built; even if poor whites live in lower-income housing, they will still often have access to better neighborhoods and schools than even Blacks of working-class incomes; unlike for poor whites, there are still entire towns and even counties in the Midwest and South today, and "parishes" in New Orleans, where Blacks are unofficially banned, certainly from living there and are wary to even drive through; poor whites don't have to go through every single day not knowing what random white person is going to give them some petty harrassment (from purposely bad restuarant service, to following them around in stores, to the likes of not even letting *Oprah Winfrey* into an upscale jewerly store in Chicago, and in Britain, poor or working-class whites periodically, purposely, and specifically target Blacks, regardless of education and income, to MURDER them); that even if poor whites have a bad credit record they have better access to loans as long as they live in a zip code that's considered a white neighborhood; poor whites have lower home and car insurance rates than poor and even working-class Blacks; even degreed Black professionals are often turned away from renting in many apartment buildings and if even a university-degreed professional, affluent Black family buys a home in a middle-class white neighborhood in most parts of the country, the white neighbors' homes take an immediate *DROP* in price, whereas if a hard-working, long-saving working-class white person (or a poor person who becomes working-class) manages to do the same thing, then that doesn't happen.

Feel free to present evidence to the contrary -- unlike Malik Rahim, I ain't gonna run anyone outta town. But, based on that Adolph Reed post, he just hasn't thought it through. I usually find that if a Black person (who is not Republican) has a disposition against a racial analysis -- I don't know if he's some kind of intellectually weirdo Marxist -- he has some other hidden purely personal disposition (as when Reed apparently attacked Conye West) against such a casual or formal analysis.

MLK came from a high-status, relatively upper-middle class background within Black community standards, won numerous academic awards including valedictorian, entered college at 15, studied at Moorehouse and Harvard among other institutions, received numerous national and international honorary degrees, including nationally from Yale, won hundreds of awards, gave many of the most iconic speeches of the *century*, giving the keynote address at history's largest demonstration at that point AND won the Nobel Peace prize, yet he wouldn't have had a chance in hell of ever becoming president -- but Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, who came from poor or working-class communities did.

You cannot deal with class without dealing with race, and in fact, without dealing with race *first*. Why? Because the biggest obstacle to working class solidarity isn't the "identity politics" of Blacks or Latinos or Asians -- it's the identity politics of *white* working class people who think of themselves as white, first and foremost. Until that kind of identity politics is eradicated, minority "identity politics" will be a necessary part of survival.

I read the Reed piece differently, as my earlier post indicates

I see him saying that race is being used to evade any serious recognition of the importance of class as well

and, I tend to agree, that it is being incorporated within a liberal mindset that enables them see it as strictly, or at least, predominately racial, and thus, propose limited solutions (some Section 8 certificates, transportation assistance, and pseudo-educational and job training opportunities) to enable them to keep the interrelationship between race and class suppressed

neoliberalism within the Democratic Party has no problem exploiting racial issues (note that I used the word "exploiting"), but avoids class like plague, and that should tell you something, something that Reed seems to recognize

(and, by the way, enable them to let Bush gentrify and ethnically cleanse New Orleans, while undertaking token resistance to create the appearance that they fought it)

perhaps, I see the whole concept of "identity group" politics differently than you do, as my earlier post indicates, with my 187 example, where I see the "identity group" as middle and upper middle class, disproportionately white women, who, by and large, disregarded the catastrophic consequences of 187 upon immigrant women, children and their families

meanwhile, the immigrants themselves, and their communities, fell completely outside the framework of "identity group" politics, despite the fact that they needed it more than just about anyone, even so, they bordered on invisibility

from past posts in recent months, you are undoubtedly aware that I agree with comments that there is a necessity about confronting the unspoken white "identity group" politics that runs the country

(and, in the broader international context, with my belief that the American working class benefits from imperialism (as it did from segregation), as it appears that the British, French and German working classes did in the period before World War I, you know that, paradoxically, I am a pessimist about this endeavor in many ways)

so, I'm not sure that there is as much of an argument here as appears to be the case

--Richard

(A rare Saturday night when I'm actually in for part of the night.)


[ TW: "JA: my beef with the 15 flavors of identity politics (please suggest another term if this one bothers you) is that I see them mostly only producing new types of bigots instead of actually solving problems. Zionism (the current rage in Jewish identity politics) is an extremely clear example. Everything we both object to there is a perfect example of what I mean."

... [I'm leaving out 'men-hating' feminist women because I have never experienced that kind of "bigotry" from women of any color, but if you feel that you have, then I won't contradict your claim. And I have never experienced any women that can discriminate against me in a meaningful way simply based on my being male, whether they might hate men or not. But I have come across *plenty* of "liberal racists" white women who can and have discriminated against me as a Black male. As for Blacks, for clarification you'll have to give me an example of how they don't censure each others "bigotry".] ...

Bringing all these varied experiences to the table is all good. What I'm objecting to is when individuals allow the blackness or the latino-ness or the Jewish-ness or the indian-ness or the gay-ness or the woman-ness to eclipse their sense of larger commonalities, and it happens all the time. Everyone understands this is a problem when it happens with "whiteness." I'm saying it's a problem when it happens with ANY of them. It destroys the ability to build a universal movement and to realize our ultimate strength of numbers, and if we don't do that we are all SCa-REWED. Our common enemies (the billionaires) understand this with perfect clarity " ]


The Zionist type of identity politics -- and that doesn't even have to be put in quotation marks -- and the white identity politics constitute the SAME type of identity politics. (Not so incidentally, Gitlin and the like never rail against Zionist Jewish identity politics, nor do, in fact, most non-Jewish white people.) That is, Zionist and white identity politics are aimed at creating and maintaining, respectively, Zionist Jews and, in general, white privilege over another oppressed and exploited group. These are privileges *SUPPORTED*, *FINANCED* and *MAINTAINED* by the *STATE* (in the case of Zionists, at least *two* states; the U.S. being Israel's cash cow and political defender and enabler). And yes, Zionists are in their own category of bigots (and I would say outright -- even if, of course, in denial -- racists for/in a STATE that even politically, legally and ideologically *DEFINES* itself on the very basis of race/ethnicity, even though 20% of its population within its *recognized* borders is non-Jewish and almost 40-50% is non-Jewish in "greater/effective/semi-annexed Israel").

The other kinds of "identity politics" that have been mentioned are essentially self-defensive reactions to the first kind. The existence of the first kind forces groups into the second kind -- and until you get rid of the *first* kind, it's unfair to ask oppressed groups to give up the second kind, because that's their method of defense against the first kind.

Furthermore, I might stop thinking of myself as primarily Black (in the U.S. or UK, etc.) when white society stops *treating* me as primarily Black. (And if, by any chance, you might think that society is colorblind, then that's because you have not experienced living as a non-white male.)


TW: "In the post-slavery, post-Holocaust, post-civil rights world, whites tend to censure each others' racism. It is considered very uncool to be an open bigot."

Well, it might be very uncool to be an openly bigotted white guy -- and white liberals might confront someone on explicitly open racist words -- but I almost *never* see whites in general -- when I, as a Black guy -- am around -- censure each other's racism: so whites don't appear to being doing it, if you claim that they do, when at times it's most important.

I was at some touchy-feely New Age group at OneTaste cafe, South of Market St in San Francisco, where white women were -- yes -- *OPENLY* talking about how their breasts and even "pussies" were tingly or -- yes -- even *moist*, and white guys were -- yes -- *OPENLY* talking about how they admired women's breats and nipples poking through some women's apparel tops, as well as freely (though nonsexually) touching the women; and white guys were openly talking about how they could sexually satisfy white women in the group: but you can bet that *I* -- as a *Black* guy -- didn't!!: I already *know* that some often or nearly lone Black guy cannot get away with that kind of behavior. Yet the lead white women coordinator of the group sharply accused *ME*, one evening and thus the last time I was there, of being there as "a sexual predator"!

NOT *ONE* WHITE PERSON IN THE ENTIRE GROUP OF ABOUT 40, including other OneTaste group coordinators present, OF SAN FRANCISCO'S MOST NEW AGE LIBERAL AND SEXUALLY DARING WHITE 'URBAN HIPSTERS' CONFRONTED THE WHITE FEMALE LEAD COORDINATOR, or any of the other coordinators, ON HER EVIDENT RACISM. Not one *single* person tried to contact me later and express sympathy, let alone outrage. INDEED, SOME OF THE WHITES -- AND AN ASIAN WOMAN -- TRIED TO **EXPLAIN AWAY** THE ATTACK (AS THE LEAD COORDINATOR MERELY "PUSHING BOUNDARIES") AGAINST ME!! Well, I never saw her "pushing boundaries" that way against any *white* male!

A long time ago, I used to work at the Musical Offering Cafe and classical CD music store across from UC Berkeley on Bancroft Avenue. About a year later, flash forward, when I was no longer working there, I came across several former white co-workers who openly -- to my surprised -- recalled how I was differentially treated from all the other workers, who were white. Those former co-workers expressed sympathy to me, but thought that the owners' petty racism, in particular, was *humorous*. Yet, not a single one of those white co-workers confronted the proprietor-managers on their differential treatment of me as the only Black male employee at the time. Had a sole *white* employee at a Black business been habitually, differentially and negatively treated by a Black owner-manager, I *KNOW* that any number of the Black employees would have brought up to the owner's behavior to the owner: 'Kip's alright! Why you keep treating him so bad like that?'

And, of course, perhaps the number *ONE* thing -- that I *somehow*(!!) forgot to mention in my prior post -- that differentiates and privileges even poor white males from many Blacks is that even poor white males will not be racially harassed in major or petty ways every day by their white boss and negatively, differentially treated or discriminated against on the job because of their color. I envy white friends who get to go to work, do a good job, and *never* have to worry about some insecure, snotty, uptight or jealous boss messin' with them, or constantly scrutinizing them, or constantly trying to fault-find their work, or applying double standards and constantly 'moving back the goal posts', because of their color: to just be able to do a good day's work and collect a paycheck in (at least relative) peace. And most of my worst experiences have been with "liberal" white women bosses and co-workers.

So, TW, do you think that such resentment from Blacks who have to face those kinds of attitudes far more often -- and far worse -- than I do might become (if you are saying that Blacks do) anti-white "bigots"? There are whites who go to therapy even twice a week for far less reasons than most Blacks have to endure regularly, if not daily/weekly.

I was once at a pubic lecture where an author referred to his collection of "Jap[anese] Art". I was the only person -- and I was the only Black person at all -- there who publicly confronted the author on his use of the word "Jap".


TW: "Considering how she was supposed to be some sort of "radical," Gloria Steinem sure kept strange bedfellows "

You mean, "radical" Gloria who supported Gore and Kerry ('If I knew before that all of Bush's lies were lies, I would have *still* supported the war') and who said that "the *CIA* used to do good work back in the early '60's"!? -- and who to my knowledge never *condemned* Clinton for his plan to use the "nuts & sluts" smear against Monica Lewinsky, to call her a crazy liar, until she produced "the dress"?


TW: "Human supremacism is the **MUTHA**, the one that will kill ALL of us. It's a thing people are even less aware of."

I'm in *FULL AGREEMENT* with you there!

just Put a sock in it, as we say up in god's country.

just what the hell is your damn problem? did the batterys die out on your date tonight?

Zionist Jews aren't dangerous because they have any *brains*!

They can't even impersonate others very well: well, they *certainly can't* impersonate highly *INTELLIGENT* people like Angie!

JA: (My 'bad' sore throat is your good luck Richard, as far as my Indybay comment thread exchanges this Saturday night that's kept me in, but I'm headed off to sleep after this one.)


RWF: "I read the Reed piece differently, as my earlier post indicates

I see him saying that race is being used to evade any serious recognition of the importance of class as well"

JA: We'll have to disagree in our interpretation of the points made in his article, then, because I do not see him saying that. To me he was saying that class was/is much more important, not that race in the U.S. was/is *also* very important -- and I've never seen any, especially, educated Black intellectual person (other than Republicans or some weird sectarian and rigid Marxists, which I suspect Adolph Reed might be) do that (say that class was much more important than race) -- and certainly not any Black progressive/leftist intellectual (because the daily life experience of Black people in the U.S. [or UK] contradict that).

Can you name any Black intellectuals who do (say that class, in the U.S. or UK, is much more important than race)???


RWF: "and, I tend to agree, that it is being incorporated within a liberal mindset that enables them see it as strictly, or at least, predominately racial, and thus, propose limited solutions (some Section 8 certificates, transportation assistance, and pseudo-educational and job training opportunities) to enable them to keep the interrelationship between race and class suppressed "

JA: *ALL* of these programs, including welfare, are offered to poor whites as well -- and *numerically* there are more poor whites than there are even the total population of Black people in America. So, then, how are these programs race-based and *not* class-based?


RWF: "neoliberalism within the Democratic Party has no problem exploiting racial issues (note that I used the word "exploiting"), but avoids class like plague, and that should tell you something, something that Reed seems to recognize"

JA: But, in fact, the Democratic Party tries to avoid both issues. How many white Democrats have publicly said that what happened in New Orleans after Katrina was because most of the victims were Black?


RWF: "(and, by the way, enable them to let Bush gentrify and ethnically cleanse New Orleans, while undertaking token resistance to create the appearance that they fought it)"

JA: The Democratic Party these days does nothing but engage in token resistance on ALL issues related to ordinary working people. How is this any different? (In fact, the Democrats have *attacked* poor Black people: i.e., Clinton's "welfare [de]/reform" program. Or as I put it on the radio before, the DLC has practically become the GOP!)


RWF: "perhaps, I see the whole concept of "identity group" politics differently than you do, as my earlier post indicates, with my 187 example, where I see the "identity group" as middle and upper middle class, disproportionately white women, who, by and large, disregarded the catastrophic consequences of 187 upon immigrant women, children and their families"

JA: In this society, when it comes to taking positions on issues, race almost always trumps gender, just as race usually trumps class. Thus, Latino groups opposed 187, but groups dominated by white females did not see it as "their issue."


RWF: "meanwhile, the immigrants themselves, and their communities, fell completely outside the framework of "identity group" politics, despite the fact that they needed it more than just about anyone, even so, they bordered on invisibility"

JA: What, you're saying that because *WHITE* people, women, didn't recognize Latino immigrants as an "their own", those immigrants "fell completely outside the framework of 'identity group' politics"? -- despite the fact that Latino groups most certainly *did* recognize them? Again, you seem to miss the hard reality that in this country, race *TRUMPS* everything else -- not that nothing else (class) exists.

JA: (And I remind you again, the modern economy of the United States was primarily built and established on the backs of pennyless *Blacks* -- 350 years of literally or financially stolen Black labor from generations upon generations of millions upon millions of Blacks -- not poor whites -- and on stolen Native American land.)


RWF: " from past posts in recent months, you are undoubtedly aware that I agree with comments that there is a necessity about confronting the unspoken white "identity group" politics that runs the country

(and, in the broader international context, with my belief that the American working class benefits from imperialism (as it did from segregation), as it appears that the British, French and German working classes did in the period before World War I, you know that, paradoxically, I am a pessimist about this endeavor in many ways)

so, I'm not sure that there is as much of an argument here as appears to be the case "

JA: I do share your pessmism. Of course, most whites (especially white males like even the formally "educated" Todd Gitlin) don't even realize that they too even *have* an "identity politics" -- and the *first* identity politics in this country. As I said before, whites -- and especially white males -- tend to see themselves as "the norm", "the universal standard". Perhaps we reach a similar end point -- a continued pessimistic outlook -- via a differently interpreted road. But, I don't think that -- short of some external, impending and thus imposing major exigency, crisis or catastrophe -- you can get to the solution (otherwise eventually forced upon our country) unless you can correctly interpret/diagnose the problem.

And white guys might generally like Adolph Reed's article, because it would permit whites to evade the issue of race in favor of purely class, but his article will NOT bring us any closer or any faster to a solution. Like Pilger said that "Palestine is still the issue"..., I say that "race (just like DuBois said that "the number one issue of the 20th century is the color line") is *still* the issue".


I only hesitate to recommend an *EXCELLENT* book by a friend of mine, only because I won't have time to carry out a detailed discussion about it online, a book that addresses perhaps nearly all of these issues -- especially from my perspective, but often even more incisively and even more profoundly articulated, is:


"THE RULES OF RACIALIZATION: CLASS, IDENTITY, GOVERNANCE"

by STEVE MARTINOT


As far as I'm concerned, this is one of the *must read books* on the issue of white racialized identity and *white* identify politics. I know that you can get it at Black Oak Books in Berkeley. It's published by Temple University Press, 2003 -- 240pgs. ISBN 1-56639-982-3

Richard, you should interview Steve (who's an intellectual from the dyed-in-the-wool white working-class) on your show sometime. If you are able to fit him into your radio show schedule one day, I can put you in touch with him. (He lives in the Bay Area.)

I listened to Pacifica's extended coverage of the Hurricane Katrina debacle a few weeks ago. Did Slave Revolt Radio do any programming for that broadcast? Someone mentioned that the people shooting at the emergency vehicles were only doing it to "get their attention". Do you know who that was?

"I listened to Pacifica's extended coverage of the Hurricane Katrina debacle a few weeks ago."

You mean when KPFA took fours days off from New Orleans coverage at a critical time -- abandoning the Black and the poor just like Bush did -- so that we could hear one egotistical white guy, Bensky, cover another white guy who was being rubber stamped into the Supreme Court by a bunch of still other white guys (only a lot richer)?

Well, at least those of us with internet access at the office/home could *skip* Bensky and listen to Amy Goodman for at least some daily vital coverage of the Katrina victims.

(Bensky & Co., who claim that they know better what the listeners want to hear -- without any pesky listener input -- on a station that those listeners are regularly called on to support 4 or 5 times a year .)

This, when KALW-FM, KQED-FM, CNN and probably C-SPAN, among other establishment stations were broadcasting the same dog-&-pony show? And then one of those KPFA station liberals (obviously one of the anti-democracy types) had her mouth poked out when I criticized KPFA at the Malik "I'm'o run you out" Rahim event!


"Did Slave Revolt Radio do any programming for that broadcast?"

You may have missed this post (it's got all the information you need)?:

THANKS for the props, jr. And check out "SLAVE REVOLT RADIO"!
by JA Wednesday, Oct. 05, 2005 at 3:54 PM

Hint: check out the links.

Slave Revolt used to be carried on the Houston Pacifica station -- before the station mgr (new?) cleared out a bunch of public affairs programs and replaced them with *MUSIC*. But Slave Revolt is *way* too incisive -- at least with a Black guy hosting -- to be carried in its own home town (or the city right next door) by KPFA. Besides, you won't hear any Democrats on Slave Revolt -- unless they're being *BLOWN UP*!!

And, unlike KPFA, Tracey James of Slave Revolt was helping Blacks in New Orleans set up their own community microradio station.

Can you name any Black intellectuals who do (say that class, in the U.S. or UK, is much more important than race)???

Yeah, Slave Revolt. The show you keep pumping -- puts class before race. If you don't believe me-- ask em. Other "weirdo black marxists" (besides slave revolt) might include Dubois himself and the Black Panthers though that is a somewhat nuanced and longer discussion.

anon: "Yeah, Slave Revolt. The show you keep pumping -- puts class before race. If you don't believe me-- ask em."

Yeah, maybe you're *not* listening TO THE *CONTEXT*. Actually, Tracey and I spoke for a couple of hours on this (well, yesterday) afternoon. And Tracey certainly doesn't deny the centrality of *RACE* in America. And he shows how it's played out in different countries. He certainly doesn't say that, "it's class and *NOT* race". And Tracey was as critical of the Adolph Reed article as I was. In fact, it was Tracey who reminded me of something I lasped on: something *PROFOUNDLY* *PROFOUND* (oh, Tracey's mind is razor sharp)!!:

"Poor and working-class whites have had the privilege of being **TERRORISTS** in America -- like the KKK -- often protected by and, indeed, at least previously, from the end of the 1860's through at least the 1960's, an apparatus of, the *STATE*!!"

Yet, it's too often whites who want people of color to set aside *their* (people of color's) identity -- while not talking about DISAVOWING and ABOLISHING *WHITENESS* and white identify politics. If whites like Todd Gitlin -- and you "anon" -- spent JUST *HALF* the time fighting white privilege as they do "(people of color" identify politics" -- and thinking that you can play "gotcha games" with me (a losing proposition from 'the get' on your part) -- this country would be a **LOT** further along.

There is a t-shirt that says: "I USED TO BE WHITE, BUT I ABANDONED THAT TO SAVE THE WORLD!"

I haven't seen a white person say that or wear that t-shirt yet.


Tracey is one of the people I *think* with.


anon: "Other "weirdo black marxists" (besides slave revolt) _might_ [?????] include Dubois himself and the Black Panthers though that is a _somewhat nuanced_ [?????] and _longer_ [NOT WITH *ME*!!] discussion."

I don't engage in duals with unarmed men.


(I'll encourage Steve Martinot to do a class based on his book at Niebyll-Proctor Library. You can let *him* school you.)

Race divides class.

JA: getting back to one of your post a couple of days ago

to some extent, I think we are talking past each other, and it may be because we perceive the concept of "identity group" politics differently

I see it as a construct created by certain moderates and liberals within the Democratic Party to delegitimize people from various backgrounds with historic grievances to either downplay them or avoiding addressing them altogether

accordingly, it has no existence when it does not serve this purpose, and to incorporate African American experience within this framework, which, it seems to me, you have implicitly done, strikes me as an error

indeed, my sense is, that to the extent that one does use the "identity group" politics label to describe the predominately middle class people of color who are active within the Democratic Party (an erroneous label, in my view, but's let's play along with it), it conflates the social experience of these people with the social experience of the racial (or in the case women, gays and lesbians, the gender or sexual orientation) group that they purportedly "represent", creating a whole new set of contradictions

thus, in regard to my 187 example, it is arguable whether the interests of the Latino organizations and the immigrants that they defended (and, likewise, groups from other backgrounds, such as Southeast Asians, who also opposed the initiative) are congruent, and perhaps, this is inherent in the nature of American politics, but even so, we should acknowledge the lack of social inclusion that the use of the term "identity group" politics is designed to conceal

and, as I said, the racial, xenophobic and class implications of 187 as revealed by the response of organizations composed of predominately white, middle to upper class women were quite revealing, as, in this instance, feminist solidarity, which one would expect if the concept of "identity group" politics had any validity in the real world, was eaten away by the distance between them and their immigrant sisters by race, class and xenophobia, creating an "identity group" composed of the values of white, middle to upper class women, and, of course, we don't really need the term "identity group" to describe that phenomenon

hence, it is better, in my opinion, to focus on issues of race and class as they relate to people generally, outside of the political language created by the Democratic Party and the interests associated with it

I share your concern that some white leftists may use class to dismiss the historic experience of people of color, and some may read Reed as reinforcing the legitimacy of this perspective, but the fault lies with the subjective belief of the person reading the article, and not with Reed's actual views, which are mores sophisticated than that

and, it is evident to me, as we argued here on indybay several months ago, that there is minimal class solidarity between the white working class and the working class of color, much less between the white working class and global workers and peasants, and, it is hard for me to see what would create it

or, to put it another way, the American elite exploits the white working class on a class basis, and people of color on a class and racial one

the left should confront both, which I what I read Reed to be saying

more generally, I posted a response to one of your other posts about Malik, stating the coming conflict will be between rich and poor, there is an obvious racial dimension to it, and, unfortunately, the white working class (perhaps, more accurately described as low income and lower middle class) will undoubtedly participate in the struggle on the side of the empire

--Richard

Going all the way back to the late 17th century, and in particular starting in the years after Bacon's Rebellion (when poor whites, blacks and native americans burned down Jamestown), working class whites, as whites, have been given relative advantages over blacks as a means of keeping all working class people in check. The ruling class has always feared trans-"racial" solidarity and class affinity and the surest way of keeping such impulses at bay is to recompose class feelings into racial ones, and dispensing justice and apparent privileges along racial lines is the best way of doing this. In a racist society racial nationalism may appear--or *feel*--radical and transgressive, but in itself it poses no threat to our rulers because it feeds divisions that capital must always kindle if it is to survive. The Nation of Islam may make some whites uneasy but you can be assured that the exploiting class fears them not. Indeed, it has contracted them to do security in the housing projects across America, not to mention kill Malcolm X (who was rightly viewed as an increasing threat as he moved away from a racial/nationalist perspective).

I agree with a good deal of what JA said above, but I believe his race centered perspective is strategically bereft.

What is it about the correlation between brainless terrorist fellators and moving pianos?

You want I should give you a hum job in the key of G, bin Laden?

To JA-- Let me say I think Race is central of any analysis of American society. However I choose to look at it within a class framework, which is what I like about Reed. That's probably may main disagreement with you. Otherwise I liked your critique of Malik Rahim-- I heard him on KPFA and he kept on refering to the fact that god was behind everything that was happening in New Orleans.

As far as Slave Revolt. I've heard it a few times and I would just say that they seemed to deal with race from a "class struggle" or anti-capitalist point of view. Maybe I'm wrong but that's what I thought I heard. They seem to be fairly close to Adolph Reed IMHO but I guess T. James thinks otherwise. No "gotcha" intended.

RWF seems to being saying that identity politics are manipulated well by the democratic party. I would agree. I believe that movements without a class framework of race are always going to end up in the dead end of the democratic party.

And finally Aaron brings up Farrakhan which I would just add that he goes beyond a "race analysis" but to a racial conspiracy analysis of what happened in New Orleans. He's promoting the idea (from what I read in the Final Call) that somebody blew up the levees. His main source seems to be repeating what a white supemacist talk show host named Hal Turner has been saying. Talk about sowing confusion.

JA: "Zionist and white identity politics are aimed at creating and maintaining [Jewish] and white privilege over other oppressed and exploited groups."
"The other kinds of "identity politics" ... are essentially self-defensive reactions to the [Zionist / white brand of identity politics]"
"The existence of the first kind [of identity politics] forces groups into the second kind -- and until you get rid of the *first* kind, it's unfair to ask oppressed groups to give up the second kind, because that's their method of defense against the first kind."

I understand how you feel and I don't minimize it, but I ask you to entertain a different way of seeing it:

The real distinction between your 'first' and 'second' groups is not what's going on inside their heads. That stuff is completely reciprocal. What sorts them into predators and prey is which group objectively has the socio-economic upper hand over the other. You already said it yourself. I can not overstress the importance of this distinction. For everybody in the prey category, it's crucial to not get distracted into thinking about themselves or the predators too simplistically, e.g. "all whites" or "all blacks" or "all republicans." We have to think about it in this disciplined ecologic relational way. The predators are the people trying to feed on us in the socio-economic-class context, period. For blacks in the prey category, equating white skin with predators is NOT a good idea. Most whites are also prey, while Condoleeza Rice is definitely a predator. If certain white persons treat you like shit because you're black, it doesn't mean they're predators, it just means they're jerks. If you let them steal your attention and draw you into combat you're going to be running around tilting with jerky windmills all the time and meanwhile you're never going to deal with the sneaky quiet beast that's truly out to hurt you

I'm tellin ya, if all us prey animals could get together and shake off our delusional differences, we'd make quick work of isolating the small predatory set that's been riding on all our backs all along, and just by doing this we'd put them in a spot where they'd have to yield to us. It's the only thing that will work for any of us.

Rise like lions after slumber
in unvanquishable number

Shake your chains to earth like dew
which in sleep had fallen on you

- ye are many
- they are few.

Like I said above-- identity politics leads right to the democratic party.

Van Jones supporting Dellums run for mayor.
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/10/1774115.php

Okay, sorry to take so long to get back to y'all. For the first one:

*************

>>JA: getting back to one of your post a couple of days ago<<

>>to some extent, I think we are talking past each other,

Well, to be honest, some other readers of this thread have told me that it seemed like you guys were avoiding addressing the points of my arguments, but were often only just bringing up other points of your own. Now, you seem to actually be responding to my main argument.


>>and it may be because we perceive the concept of "identity group" politics differently<<

>>I see it as a construct created by certain moderates and liberals within the Democratic Party to delegitimize people from various backgrounds with historic grievances to either downplay them or avoiding addressing them altogether<<

While I certainly agree with you to a certain extent, we do apparently see it somewhat differently. At any rate, even you (meaning aside from me) seem to realize that it's term not created by -- but foisted upon primarily -- people of color. The primary way the term "identity politics" was *CLASSICALLY* used was not first by moderates or liberals, but by conservatives, and soon adopted by semi-neoconservatives like Todd Gitlin (again, fearful of losing their 'natural' white male 'superior' leadership roles in "the revolution" that they were, of course, supposedly meant to lead). They tut-tut about "identity politics" *every time* anyone nonwhite ever raises the issue of race (or anyone female ever raises the issue of gender) as a legitimate problem in society that either still has or has yet to be dealt with: what you said above about historic grievances.

As classically used by conservatives, the "identity politics" label is thus employed to belittle and minimize valid racially-based critiques of American society. And as used by liberals/progressives, I see it as used to *avoid* discussion of race as theee central problem to class and almost every other sociolotical problem in American society, because at some level even they would have to examine their own assumptions, beliefs, behaviors, and even at times arrogance, when it comes to minorities.

Thus whenever I hear any white person bemoaning the existence of so-called "identity politics" (a term of which I have repeatedly stated on this forum that I am suspicious), I recognize that as, from conservative, of course, code for "we really don't want to hear any complaints from you Black people about anything" -- and from "liberals" as, "we don't really want to deal with critiques of society from a racial perspective: we're not *comfortable* with that ['because we might have to deal with *our* own role/place/prejudices/misconceptions/behavior/dodges in that']". Otherwise, when so-called liberals/progressives start using the term, I see it as their having fallen into the trap of allowing conservatives to classically define the parameters of discussion -- or, indeed, for liberals/progressives to try to define the parameters of sociological and sociopolitical -- and even the class role of -- examination of discussion themselves. This is because the first thing that white liberals/progressives would have to face is that it is *not*, after all, the racism of minorities (or even their "identity politics"), but the racism (or at least the often subconsciously racist assumptions or the, alternately, expedient subconscious assumptions of white privilege) of other *whites* (and even liberals'/progressives' own friends, family members, relatives and neighbors) that prevents class solidarity in America. The so-called "identity politics" of minorities has never meant that they, in their hearts, don't want to work together or with whites to improve society -- indeed, minorities have no other choice. Or, as one of my friends said, if whites spent half as much time dealing with white racism as they do bemoaning the "identity politics" of people of *color* (because this to me is central), then we'd be a lot further along.

Or as Tracey James has put it, among white conservatives Blacks aren't really wanted at all -- and among too many white liberals/progressives, Blacks are often really only accepted within the parameters of how even such whites themselves want to view and articulate the world: either way, white privilege is imposed or triumphs.


>>accordingly, it has no existence when it does not serve this purpose, <<

JUST AS RACE AND RACISM HAS NO PURPOSE OTHER THAN ECONOMIC: TO DETERMINE HOW THE WEALTH AND RESOURCES OF THE LAND/NATION ARE TO BE DIVIDED UP AND APPORTIONED AND TO CREATE WORKER'S CLASS DIVISION SO THAT THE RULING CLASS AND THEIR ELITE MANAGERS CAN EXCEEDINGLY RETAIN THE VAST MAJORITY OF THAT WEALTH TO THEMSELVES.


>>and to incorporate African American experience within this framework, which, it seems to me, you have implicitly done, strikes me as an error<<

I have repeatedly stated that I basically reject this term, and have only used it because most others in this forum don't *racially* seem to be willing to give it up. I mean, this seems to be a kind of 'blaming the victim' sleight: first the term is foisted upon people of color by *whites* and then people of color are blamed by *whites* for being class-divisive for engaging in what the term *purports*.


>>indeed, my sense is, that to the extent that one does use the "identity group" politics label to describe the predominately middle class people of color who are active within the Democratic Party (an erroneous label, in my view, but's let's play along with it), <<

This is why "identity politics" is, in reality, such a squiggly term -- it's a subliminal term that anyone white can denote or connote any way they want to: I've never heard this (your) definition before. It's a term -- whatever someone white believes or wants it to idiosyncratically mean -- in the mind of the beholder! It's a term that can be bandied about -- usually to one degree or another (but obviously not always intended) nefariously (and typically as a way to *blame* the *victim* for society's shortfalls) with *NO* STANDARD DEFINITION!!

Now, according to you, 'the politics of middle class people of color in the Democrat party'. Not that I pay much attention to this term, as I find it linguistically evasive, but I've never heard the term defined this way. Before, it was, 'the politics of unruly people of color college students'. And before, it was 'the politics of the teamingly-unrested, every-agitated, ever-demanding minorites about to swamp white people in 'their own' country.' The term is completely maleable to whatever one's beliefs or prejudices. And again, it's a term invented and sustained by *WHITES*.


>>it conflates the social experience of these people with the social experience of the racial (or in the case women, gays and lesbians, the gender or sexual orientation) group that they purportedly "represent", creating a whole new set of contradictions<<

However, middle and working-class people of color *do* have some significant commonalities of interest. To fail to recognize these common interests as well as the (also significant) differences is making a fundamental error. Furthermore, to fail to recognize the significant differences in interests between the white and nonwhite working class is perpetuating this error.


>>thus, in regard to my 187 example, it is arguable whether the interests of the Latino organizations and the immigrants that they defended (and, likewise, groups from other backgrounds, such as Southeast Asians, who also
opposed the initiative) are congruent, and perhaps, this is inherent in the nature of American politics, but even so, we should acknowledge the lack of social inclusion that the use of the term "identity group" politics is designed to conceal<<

It may be arguable whether their interests are 100% congruent at all times, but then I never posited that argument in the first place. However, I do believe that in many instances, their interests *are* congruent in valid and meaningful ways. If you are saying that there may be class divisions within so-called races (note Bill Cosby's attack against poor Blacks in the U.S.), that ain't nothing new to me (but Bill Cosby was coming from a *white* perspective anyway! -- in part, his shame over 'Black' names reveals this).


>>and, as I said, the racial, xenophobic and class implications of 187 as revealed by the response of organizations composed of predominately white, middle to upper class women were quite revealing, as, in this instance,
feminist solidarity, which one would expect if the concept of "identity group" politics had any validity in the real world, was eaten away by the distance between them and their immigrant sisters by race, class and xenophobia, creating an "identity group" composed of the values of white, middle to upper class women, and, of course, we don't really need the term "identity group" to describe that phenomenon<<

You certainly don't: As I mentioned before, racial interest -- if not outright racism -- generally trumps gender when the two are in conflict in this society.


>>hence, it is better, in my opinion, to focus on issues of race and class as they relate to people generally, outside of the political language created by the Democratic Party and the interests associated with it<<

I'm not sure what you mean by "as they relate to people generally." And again, I reject that originally right-wing/conservative political language in the first place.


>>I share your concern that some white leftists may use class to dismiss the historic experience of people of color, and some may read Reed as reinforcing the legitimacy of this perspective,<<

And to evade their own prejudices or prejudicial assumptions or an honest examination about how, after all, *their* racist society works and, like it or not, the role -- and even *privileges* and *benefits* (which they usually don't pass up) -- that they accrue. Or, when *they* decide to be silent, as the white liberal touchy-feely 'New Age' group attendees at OneTaste Cafe ("Urban Spa") did or former white Musical Offering coworkers did, even when they hardly have anything at stake! Whites seem to almost always have a preferential psychological tendency to avoid or ignore issues of race -- especially when they themselves *personally* intersect it.

And if whites avoid or downplay the issue with me or Tracey, who can speak their language, who is conversant with their sociopolitical and author heroes (like Chomsky), where they know none of Black society's, who is nominally at ease around them, who is seen as superficially welcomable in white environments (like upscale/chic Bay Area coffeeshops where we know expresso lexicon too), who can present thoughtful intellectual analyses, incisive iconic quotes, and compelling examples, then can you imagine how those whites would ever communicate with, indeed, the dye-in-the-wool Black working-class or poor, let alone join hands with them, who they claim to want class solidarity with?


>>but the fault lies with the subjective belief of the person reading the article, and not with Reed's actual views, which are mores sophisticated than that<<

They may be more sophisticated than that, but if so, they were not reflected in the article.

I started to do some web investigation of Adolph Reed. I didn't get very far yet (I have a few pages open on my computer, but I haven't had time to read them yet), but I did find out, if my so-far scant perusal is correct, that he is apparently in the British Labor Party (you know, Tony *Blair's* party); so he is coming from some (more purely) Marxist *class* view/interpretation -- and as you know, Marx had no experience with any significantly multiracial societies when he was observing working-class industrial societies and formulating his theories. So, of course, everything to Marx, understandably, looked like *class*.


>>and, it is evident to me, as we argued here on indybay several months ago, that there is minimal class solidarity between the white working class and the working class of color, much less between the white working class and global workers and peasants, and, it is hard for me to see what would create it<<

Here, sadly, I'm in absolute agreement with you.

And, furthermore, their is going to be class divisions as long as or to the extent that even liberals/progressives continue to want to ignore or play down race in the U.S., because it's a way of ignoring or playing down the bitter experiences of, in particular, Black people. It's a way of, for example, of ignoring or playing down all those police beatings and homicides against Black people that we see at least month after month on American TV. When was the last time you saw any *white* 'Rodney Kings' or 'Amadou Diallos' on TV? It's a way of ignoring all those poor and working-class Black men warehoused in prison on inordinately long sentences for nonviolent or essentailly victimless crimes (like drug offenses). It's a way of ignoring the likes of ghetto schools funded on the local tax base. It's a way of ignoring employment discrimination and the lack of meaningful grievance recourse for legitimate claims of discrimination in the workplace. It's a way of saying that only the *class* grievances that we whites share matter or really count; not the *racial* grievances that you minorities have. Now how does that contribute to any true even class solidarity, as far as minorities are concerned?: 'you minorites only matter to the extent that we whites count'.


>>or, to put it another way, the American elite exploits the white working class on a class basis, and people of color on a class and racial one<<

This is *precisely* the point I have been trying to make throughout this entire discussion. I, of course, do no ignore the importance of class; rather, I argue against substituting *CLASS* for race: excluding or downplaying the central importance of race in the U.S. (and in countries similarly practicing social, legal, and/or institutional racism).

One of my pet bugaboos with many white Marxist/Trotsyist/Maoist groups -- and why I *never* buy any of their "it's class and not race" papers -- is that they are always saying that it's really *class*, not race; but then saying that even in Israel "we have to get the Israeli Jewish working class to join hands with the Palestinian working class to over throw the capitalist bosses" in Israel!! -- which implicitly recognizes that 'race' does indeed divides class -- *formostly in Israel* (a settler-colonialist *ideologically* *apartheid* *explicitly-defined* "Jewish state") -- and the sheer ridiculousness that the Jewish working-class (let alone the American working-class) -- anymore that any other Jewish class in Israel -- has *any* intentions *whatsoever* of giving up their, by comparison, immeasurable privileges over the Palestinians to willingly (obviously for the vast majority of Israeli Jews) join hands with *any* of them. I *laugh* when I hear those Marxists/Trotsyist/Maoist groups spout that *sheer nonsense* as the way to end Zionism! -- and I realize that it's a way for those groups to actually advocate and do *nothing* *practical* -- at least international sanctions against, divestment from, or an international economic and cultural boycott of Israel (just like with apartheid South Africa) -- to end Zionism.


>>the left should confront both, which I what I read Reed to be saying<<

I entirely agree with you here on the former, but I didn't see Reed as saying that.

* WHERE DID YOU SEE ADOLPH REED SAYING THAT? *



>>more generally, I posted a response to one of your other posts about Malik, stating the coming conflict will be between rich and poor, there is an obvious racial dimension to it, and, unfortunately, the white working class (perhaps, more accurately described as low income and lower middle class)
will undoubtedly participate in the struggle on the side of the empire<<

I agree with you. The choice is theirs, but I'm not optimistic that most of them will ever make the right one until and perhaps things get much worse in this country (at least, for example, a steadily deeper Iraq/Mideast quagmire, more global warming related natural disasters and the war continuing to drain away money, like the billions per month, and resources, like national guard troops, to deal with them).

Thanks, I appreciate your thoughts.


*********************

I'll get back to TW and anon and aaron as soon as I can; probably later this afternoon (maybe over lunch, depending on how long it takes, or at the end of, or after, work hours) or by this weekend at the latest.

. . . you might find this interesting, as it touches upon some of the issues in play here:

from COUNTERPUNCH: http://www.counterpunch.org

[A Real Racial Democracy?
Hugo Chávez and the Politics of Race
By NIKOLAS KOZLOFF

As the war of words heats up between the Bush White House and Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, the firebrand South American leader has boldly sought to forge ties with poor communities of color in the United States. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Chávez provided relief assistance to the poverty stricken and largely African American victims of the disaster. The head of Citgo, the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela's state owned oil company, set up disaster relief centers in Louisiana and Texas in the wake of the hurricane and provided humanitarian to thousands of victims. Volunteers based at Citgo refineries in Lake Charles, Louisiana and Corpus Christi, Texas, provided medical care, food and water to approximately 5,000 people. In Houston, volunteers from Citgo headquarters provided similar assistance to 40,000 victims. What is more, Venezuela has provided hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil in energy assistance to the United States. Chávez followed up his bold initiative by announcing that he would soon begin to ship heating and diesel oil at rock bottom prices to schools, nursing homes, hospitals and poor communities within the U.S. The Venezuelan president has also offered to provide free eye surgery for poor Americans suffering from certain eye conditions. The firebrand South American leader, who proclaimed the plan during a recent visit to New York, will begin his oil program through an October pilot project in Chicago. There, the Venezuelan government will target poor Mexican Americans for assistance.

In November, Chávez intends to expand the program to the South Bronx and Boston. Chávez has even offered to ship low cost gasoline to Native American tribal communities in the United States. "There is a lot of poverty in the U.S. and I don't believe that reflects the American Way of Life. Many people die of cold in the winter. Many die of heat in the summer," Chávez recently remarked during his weekly TV show. "We could have an impact on seven to eight million persons," he added. During his time in New York, Chávez toured the largely African American and Latino populated Bronx and was treated like a veritable rock star. Democratic Congress member Jose Serrano, who invited the Venezuelan president to the Bronx, remarked, "Chávez went to the poorest congressional district in the nation's richest city, and people on the street there just went crazy. A lot of people told me they were really mesmerized by him. He made quite an impression." Chávez's trip is reminiscent of similar moves by Cuban leader Fidel Castro, a figure who Chávez frankly admires. In a celebrated trip in 1960, Castro stayed at a cheap hotel in Harlem where he met with important political figures of the day such as Malcolm X.

Chávez's moves are sure to play well in the inner city. In light of the high price of oil this year, which has reached $70 a barrel, it is expected that the price of heating oil will skyrocket and become unaffordable to many poor people of color. By providing cheap oil to marginalized communities fed up with price gouging, Chávez shrewdly overshadows George Bush. The U.S. president, along with the Republican party, have long ignored the social needs of America's inner cities as evidenced by the botched hurricane relief operation in New Orleans. Unlike the U.S. government, which was hobbled by Hurricane Katrina and which had to redirect much of the winter's energy assistance program to hurricane victims, Chávez is ideally positioned to help poor communities of color. Venezuela owns 14,000 gas stations and eight refineries in the United States through Citgo, none of whose oil infrastructure was damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Chávez has stated he will reserve 10% of the 800,000 barrels of Citgo oil and ship the petroleum directly to poor communities. Unnamed Venezuelan officials claimed that their country would not lose money through the deal, as the idea was to "cut the middle man" out of the deal. Rafael Ramirez, Venezuela's Minister of Energy and Petroleum, says the move will relieve urban suffering as beneficiaries could see price reductions of up to 30%. Chávez's moves are sure to play well in the Bronx, but unlikely to be received with any sign of gratitude in Washington. "Cutting oil prices must seem like the worst sort of radicalism to the Big Oil companies and their buddies at the Bush-Cheney White House," writes Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News.



Forging Ties With Communities of Color: Chávez's Political Imperative

Chávez's moves seem to form part of a larger, long term strategy of building alliances with racial minorities such as African Americans. By aiding the poor, Chávez will certainly do much to reverse the negative media onslaught that has taken its cue from the White House and which has sought to portray him as "totalitarian" and a threat to this country (see for example my earlier Counterpunch piece, "Fair and Balanced or US Govt. Propaganda? Fox News vs. Hugo Chávez," April 30-May 1, 2005). Julia Buxton, a scholar at Bradford University who has written extensively on Venezuela, remarked that Chávez's gambit reflects ideological as well as pragmatic considerations. "He's been deeply, deeply frustrated by coverage in the U.S. media and the attitude of the U.S. government, and he's trying to counter a very Republican-directed vendetta," she said. That vendetta has included, most recently, calls by U.S. evangelist Pat Robertson for Chávez's assassination (see my earlier Counterpunch article, "Demeaner of the Faith, Rev. Pat Robertson and Gen. Rios Montt," September 17-18, 2005). "He clearly needed to build constructive alliances with more liberal sections of American society," Buxton added, "and open a way to insulate himself against his Washington enemies."

For Chávez, the task of recruiting domestic support within the United States has become a political imperative. The Venezuelan president has fallen afoul of the White House for his criticism of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. supported drug war in the Andean region, and the U.S. sponsored Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. What is more, Chávez has increased royalty taxes on U.S. oil companies doing business in Venezuela, and even shipped petroleum to the island nation of Cuba in exchange for Cuban medical assistance. With the added oil money Chávez has funded ambitious social programs in health and education. The Bush White House chose to confront Chávez: in April 2002 the U.S. government provided taxpayer funds to the Venezuelan opposition through the National Endowment For Democracy. Bush and the neo-conservatives nearly succeeded in removing Chávez from power when the opposition staged a short-lived coup d'etat. Since then however, Chávez has consolidated his position and emerged as the most charismatic leader in South America. Chávez's calls for greater regional unity, including the formation of Petrosur, a South American oil company, and Telesur, a South American satellite TV station, have further enraged the Bush White House. Not surprisingly, the U.S. has forged ahead in seeking to isolate Chávez, as evidenced by the recent strong statements coming from the likes of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. In a meeting with the New York Times editorial board, Rice remarked that oil was "warping" international politics and "It [oil] gives certain power and leverage to certain countries and not to others. We're experiencing it with Venezuela, for instance, where the oil profits are being put to use across the region to, you know, push forward Chávez's particular view of the world." Chávez has struck back by threatening to cut off oil shipments to the United States if he is assassinated. Venezuela is the United States' fourth largest oil supplier currently accounting for 12% of imports. As such, a cut off of oil supplies could exert a significant impact on the U.S. energy supply (see my earlier Counterpunch column: "Chávez's Gambit 'Oil is a Geopolitical Weapon;" April 6, 2005). Chávez's recent oil for the poor idea, closely following on the heels of the hostile war of words, will most certainly fan the flames yet further and lead the Bush White House to continue its bellicose strategy in Venezuela.



"I was a farm kid from the plains of South Venezuela"

While Chávez's strategy of appealing to racial minorities is certainly bold, it is hardly surprising given the history. Chávez himself was born in the Venezuelan plain or llano, and has a provincial accent. A forbidding area with a harsh tropical climate, the area has had a long history of racial conflict going back centuries. During the Spanish colonial period, rebellious black slaves managed to escape from plantations and haciendas, fled to the llano and became a problem for the authorities. Slaves started to live in cumbes or escaped communities where collective forms of work were practiced. The blacks mixed with the Indian population and carried out daring raids on cattle ranches. The whites grew alarmed by inter-racial mixing: escaped slaves, they feared, might have a radicalizing effect on the Indian population. Accordingly, in 1785 the authorities drafted laws prohibiting blacks from living with Indians "because they only corrupt them with the bad customs which they generally acquire in their breedingand they sow discord among the same Indians."

Physically, Hugo Chávez is a pardo, a term used in the colonial period to denote someone of mixed racial roots. "Chávez's features," writes a magazine columnist, "are a dark-copper color and as thick as clay; he has protruding, sensuous lips and deep-set eyes under a heavy brow. His hair is black and kinky. He is a burly man of medium height, with a long, hatchet-shaped nose and a massive chin and jaw." In an interview, Chávez remarked that when he first applied to the military academy he had an Afro. From an ethno-racial standpoint, Chávez is similar to many of his fellow Venezuelans. Indeed, today 67 per cent of the population is mestizo, 10 per cent black and 23 per cent white. Chávez himself has not sought to distance himself from his ethnic heritage. "My Indian roots are from my father's side," he remarked. "He [my father] is mixed Indian and black, which makes me very proud." What is more, Chávez has boasted of his grandmother, who he says was a Pumé Indian. Like many other Venezuelans of mixed race, Chávez grew up in poverty. One of six children, Chávez was born in extremely humbling conditions in the llano. "I was a farm kid from the plains of South Venezuela," he remarked to Ted Koppel on ABC's Nightline. "I grew up in a palm tree house with an earthen floor," he added. Chávez entered the military, which historically has been one of the few paths towards social advancement for men of mixed race. While on duty with the military he toured the country and became aware of economic exploitation and racial discrimination.



Venezuela: A "Racial Democracy"?

Unlike the United States, Venezuela has not experienced poisonous anti black racism. But the idea of racial democracy does not stand up under scrutiny: the caste like divisions of the colonial period are still latent in society. "Venezuelan elites," one scholar has remarked, "judged people by their appearances. Accordingly, individuals with 'anxious hair' or 'hair like springs' lived in the shadow of their black slave ancestors. The elites considered respectable the whiter Venezuelans who had 'hair flat as rainwater, of an indefinite light brown color which is neither fair nor dark.'" Though some blacks were able to enter white society through marriage and miscegenation, "in the long run, such individuals provided the exceptions that proved the rule." Blacks who sought social acceptance had to adopt the clothing, education, and language of the white elite. In present day Venezuelan society, notes respected commentator Gregory Wilpert, "The correspondence between skin color and class membershipis quite stunning at times. To confirm this observation, all one has to do is compare middle to upper class neighborhoods, where predominantly lighter colored folks live, with the barrios, which are clearly predominantly inhabited by darker skinned Venezuelans." Meanwhile, journalist Greg Palast noted that rich whites had "command of the oil wealth, the best jobs, the English-language lessons, the imported clothes, the vacations in Miami, the plantations."



Chávez and Indigenous Peoples

In 1998 while campaigning for president, Chávez made a commitment to champion the rights of Venezuela's half-million indigenous peoples. After he was elected, Chávez put the issue of indigenous rights front and center by addressing it on his weekly call-in program, Aló Presidente. But actions speak greater than words, and Chávez made good on his promises by working to codify the rights of indigenous people in the new 1999 constitution. Article 9 proclaims that while Spanish is the official language of Venezuela, "Indigenous languages are also for official use for Indigenous peoples and must be respected throughout the Republic's territory for being part of the nation's and humanity's patrimonial culture." In chapter eight of the constitution, the state recognizes the social, political, and economic organization within indigenous communities, in addition to their cultures, languages, rights, and lands. What is more, in a critical provision the government recognizes land rights as collective, inalienable, and non-transferable. Later articles declare the government's pledge not to engage in extraction of natural resources without prior consultation with indigenous groups. Three long time indigenous activists have been elected to the Venezuelan National Assembly, and prominent leaders hold positions in government. In a novel move, Chávez has even had the constitution translated into all of Venezuela's languages.

Chávez has lived up to the constitution by awarding communal land titles to six Kariña indigenous communities. The land titles will be handed out to 4,000 people and encompass 317,000 acres in the Venezuelan states of Monagas and Anzoategui. The land transfers form part of Mission Guaicaipuro, a plan to provide land titles to all of Venezuela's 28 indigenous peoples. Chávez awarded the communal titles to the Kariña in August during the 16th World Festival of Students and Youth. The conference, which was attended by 40,000 people, was held in Caracas. During the opening procession of nations Chávez gave a "thumbs up" to a banner which displayed the words "Leonard Peltier." An indigenous woman speaker at the conference, one of three indigenous representatives in the Venezuela Assembly, praised recent advances for indigenous people. One conference participant reported, "Chávez hugged all the indigenous leaders in front of the world and gave deeds of territory to the tribes." By the end of 2006, Chávez' Mission Guaicaipuro plans to award land titles to 15 more indigenous groups. Participants at the conference were also pleased by Chávez's moves to halt the celebration of Columbus Day, which he has replaced with "Indigenous Resistance Day."



Chávez and Afro-Venezuelans

On the other hand, while the new constitution recognizes indigenous rights, it mentions nothing about blacks in Venezuela, leading Bill Fletcher of the Washington-based TransAfrica Forum to comment, "I feel that black issues need to be injected into politics." On the other hand, there are signs that Chávez government is at least aware of the problem. From March to May 2004, Afro Venezuelan groups celebrated the 150th anniversary of the end of slavery in Caracas. At the end of the conference Chávez made an appearance and the audience heard a lecture from Afro-Venezuelan historian José Marcial Ramos Guedez. Some participants expressed optimism that racial progress would be made under the Chávez government. "Representatives of Venezuela's Afro-descendants are so positive about the current reforms in government [under Chávez]," said Máryori Márquez, assistant to the director of culture in the city of Sucre, "that we are now also trying to have legislation drafted that will mandate the acceptance and the recognition of the traditional and current human rights of Black Venezuelans." Máryori added that Chávez was "completely open to this initiative, we just have to work to make this come true, we have to develop this. Because this won't just benefit a few people, it would be to everyone's benefit."



The White Elite Strikes Back

The white elite has not been amused by Chávez's recent moves. For them, the new president was an outsider. In contrast to previous leaders in Venezuela and throughout the region who identified with the outside European world, Chávez loudly proclaimed his indigenous and African roots. Chávez himself seems well aware of the race issue. According to the Venezuelan president, racial tensions have increased since his election. "There is racism here," Chávez remarked. "It used to be more hidden and now it is more open." Chávez's opponents, who argue that racism does not exist in the country, charged that the president exploits the race card for political gain. According to Fletcher, the Chávez opposition "has attacked him [Chávez] using racist language and imagery which would be totally unacceptable in public discourse in the USA." The Venezuelan elite has used racial slurs to taint Chávez, denouncing him as a black monkey. According to author Tariq Ali, "A puppet show to this effect with a monkey playing Chávez was even organized at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas. But Colin Powell was not amused and the Ambassador was compelled to issue an apology." The attacks continued when Venezuelan media commentators referred to the Minister of Education, Aristobulo Isturiz, who is black, as "a monkey" and "an ape." Meanwhile, analysts have remarked upon the racial undertones of political conflict in Chávez's Venezuela. "Class and skin color differences," remarks Wilpert, "clearly correlate very highly at demonstrations, such that the darker skinned (and presumably lower class) support the Chávez government and the lighter skinned (and presumably middle and upper class) oppose the Chávez government."



Race and the Venezuelan Media

This difference in skin color was clearly evident during the demonstrations both for and against Chávez in the days preceding the April 2002 coup, and during an oil lock out in December 2002-January 2003. What is more, the Venezuelan TV media, which is dominated by whites or light skinned individuals, and which relegates blacks or dark skinned people to play roles as criminals or servants in soap operas, played a significant role in the April 2002 coup. In the days leading up to Chávez's ouster, Venevisión, RCTV, Globovisión and Televen substituted their regular programming with non-stop vitriolic anti-Chávez propaganda, which some of their staff later acknowledged as unprofessional behavior. This relentless barrage was interrupted by commercials urging TV viewers to go into the streets. Inflammatory ads blaring, "Not one step backward. Out! Leave now!" were carried by the stations as public service announcements. Later on the day of the coup, Gustavo Cisneros allowed his television station Venevision to serve as the meeting place for anti-Chávez coup plotters. Reportedly, interim coup president Pedro Carmona was present.

Chávez has struck back against the established media through Vive TV, a state sponsored station. In contrast to TV stations like RCTV, which airs shows such as "Quien Quiere Ser Millionario" ("Who Wants To Be A Millionaire"), Vive TV shuns American-style consumerism. According to its website, Vive TV promotes "the common citizen, the millions of Venezuelans and Latin Americans who have been made invisible by imperialism and its cultural domination." Through Vive's programming, claim the station's managers, "it is possible to acquaint oneself with the reality, lives and struggle of people of African descent [and] indigenous peoples." As Blanca Eekhout, the former manager of Vive explains, people of color previously "have appeared in the media but in a stigmatized way; they are shown as marginal people, criminals. They are not shown building, constructing, which is part of the struggle for the development of the country. That's one thing we are trying to change." The result of that changed attitude was plain to see during Vive TV's extended coverage of the Social Forum of the Americas in Ecuador. According to Eekhout, Venezuelan Indians attended the event and "The [Venezuelan] indigenous movement was excited; they could see not only movements there, but also their own Venezuelan delegates." Chávez has also increased the visibility of Latin America's indigenous peoples through the launching of the government-sponsored Televisora del Sur (Telesur). The network, which offers news and opinion programming, has hired Ati Kiwa as a presenter, an indigenous Colombian woman who wears traditional dress. The station provides a stark contrast to Univisión celebrity anchor Jorge Ramos, who wears a jacket and tie.



Chávez, Glover, and Martin Luther King

Even as he forges ahead with his media initiatives, the indefatigable Chávez has also moved to increase his political ties with the African American community. In January, 2004 TransAfrica Forum sent a delegation of influential artists, actors, activists and scholars to Caracas to meet with government officials. The group included the likes of screen actor Danny Glover ("Lethal Weapon," "The Color Purple"), who expressed his excitement at the social changes taking place in Venezuela. Glover remarked that the U.S. media's portrayal of Venezuela "has nothing to do with reality." Glover stated that his presence in Venezuela was "to listen and learn, not only from government and opposition politicians, but to share with the people, those who are promoting the changes in this country and we want to be in contact with those who benefit from those changes." Glover and others later presided over the inauguration of a new "Martin Luther King., Jr." school in the coastal town of Naiguata. The area is home to large numbers of Afro-Venezuelans. The school inauguration was the first official Venezuelan recognition of the importance of the slain civil rights leader. What is more, the government launched a photo exposition to honor Dr. King. Speaking at the event, the Venezuelan Ambassador to the United States, Bernardo Alvarez, declared that "The visit by members of the TransAfrica Forum represents a struggle that goes beyond the figure of Martin Luther King; his struggle, his ideas and the African-American social movements inspired by him. This is a struggle aimed at defending people's rights, not only in the United States, but in the hemisphere and the world." Glover, clearly touched by the occasion, commented, ""This isn't Danny Glover the artist. I'm here as a citizen, not only of the US, but a citizen of the world. We understand fully the importance of this historical moment." Chávez later honored the late Dr. King during his radio and TV show Alo Presidente; Glover and others were invited on air to participate.

Predictably, the TransAfrica Forum delegates came under heavy attack from the Venezuelan opposition. "In the Opposition-oriented media, racist language and imagery wereused to characterize, if not caricaturize, our visit," Fletcher remarked. According to him, the delegation received racist e mail, and newspaper editorials and cartoons depicted the delegation in a racist manner. During a press conference, however, TransAfrica participants held their own against the media. James Early, Director of Cultural Studies and Communication at the Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies at the Smithsonian Institution, expressed dismay with Venezuelan journalists. Early said he was surprised that none of the journalist's questions had to do with issues of cultural or racial diversity. "What are you journalists doing to educate the Venezuelan people about racial and cultural diversity? Democracy in the hemisphere relies heavily on the social responsibility of journalists, and asking questions only about the government or the opposition isn't going to help reach that goal. Democracy is not the government or the opposition, it is the people, being the people of Venezuela or the people of the United States," he said. Sitting in the audience was Education and Sports Minister Aristobulo Isturiz, the same black man who had been described by opposition reporters as "a monkey" in the past. Reportedly, Isturiz couldn't hide his satisfaction at the way the delegation handled the combative journalists.



Jackson, Glover, Belafonte: Chávez's New Friends

Chávez has maintained his close relationships with prominent black entertainers in the United States. In July 2005, Danny Glover and singer Harry Belafonte were invited to the ceremonial launching of Chávez's new TV station Telesur. Glover was impressed with the new media initiative, but criticized the station for not having any people of African or indigenous descent on its advisory board. Chávez himself called in to the inauguration shortly after and said to Glover, in English, "Danny, I am with you."

Meanwhile, Chávez has cultivated ties with civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. During a visit to Caracas, the veteran African American activist condemned Pat Robertson's call for Chávez's assassination. Coinciding with Jackson's stay in the country, the Venezuelan National Assembly declared a special session to commemorate Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech. National Assembly member Nohelí Pocaterra, an indigenous woman of Wayuú descent, addressed parliament in her native language and later in Spanish. Pocaterra compared Chávez's struggle for equality in Venezuela with Dr. King's civil rights work. Speaking later at the National Assembly, Jackson discussed the role of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights struggle. Jackson praised Venezuela for making slavery illegal prior to the United States. "You in Venezuela ended the system of slavery in 1854," he remarked. At the end of his speech Jackson was cheered with thunderous applause from Venezuelan lawmakers.



The Future of Hemispheric Racial Politics

Chávez's international diplomacy and his warm ties with prominent African Americans will surely enrage the Bush White House yet further. Just at the time when Bush's popularity is flagging over the war in Iraq and botched relief efforts at home, Chávez has emerged as the most charismatic South American leader in recent times. For Bush, who tried and failed to dislodge Chávez in 2002, it is hardly a promising picture. Meanwhile, Chávez has inspired not only oppressed minorities within his own country but also blacks living outside Venezuela. "Advanced by individuals such as President Chávez," Fletcher remarks, "the recognition of the on-going reality of racism, and the struggles against it by the African descendant and Indigenous populations, could have a momentous impact on the politics and future of Latin America, let alone the entire Western Hemisphere."

Nikolas Kozloff received his doctorate in Latin American history from Oxford University in 2002. His book, South America In Revolt: Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and The Politics of Hemispheric Unity, is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press.]

"Hugo Chávez and the Politics of Race"

Looks like Chavez could become the 2nd Fidel Castro in this hemisphere -- but with plenty of oil! -- and thus economically self-sufficient. I'm sure Washington is getting very nervous. Every progressive/leftists should buy their gas at Citgo if they can.

Good reading.

I don't have time to respond to JA's post right now, but it should be said that Adolph Reed is an African-American with no affiliation with the British Labor Party (which, btw, is not a marxist institution). He teaches at Northwestern if my memory serves and identifies as a socialist.

re: Check back and follow-up
by TW Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2005 at 3:27 AM

JA: "Zionist and white identity politics are aimed at creating and maintaining [Jewish] and white privilege over other oppressed and exploited groups."
"The other kinds of "identity politics" ... are essentially self-defensive reactions to the [Zionist / white brand of identity politics]"
"The existence of the first kind [of identity politics] forces groups into the second kind -- and until you get rid of the *first* kind, it's unfair to ask oppressed groups to give up the second kind, because that's their method of defense against the first kind."


>>I understand how you feel and I don't minimize it, but I ask you to entertain a different way of seeing it:<<

Okay..., sure...


>> The real distinction between your 'first' and 'second' groups is not what's going on inside their heads. That stuff is completely reciprocal. What sorts them into predators and prey is which group objectively has the socio-economic upper hand over the other. You already said it yourself. <<

Did I say that? I don't believe -- and I certainly hope not -- that if, for example, Black-Americans or Palestinians had the socio-economic upper hand over their oppressors that they -- like racist whites or Zionist Jews -- would start oppressing in reverse. (Although as consciousness of guilt, Zionist Jews certainly believe that.) Even many Jews say that Palestinian Arabs didn't oppress Jews before the Zionist project came to a head. And if Palestinian Arabs hated Jews, those Palestinians could have completely driven off or wiped out the Palestinian Jews when Palestinian Arabs were the *overwhelming* majority (94-97% Arab) in Palestine. And as I have pointed out before, Armenian refugees fled to Palestine to escape their holocaust, but without the intention of displacing the indigenous people and taking the place over, so they were welcomed: in fact, their is, as you may know, an historical Armenian quarter in Jerusalem.

Now, Zionist European Jews (who, after all, are white) expressed their racism before (just like other European settler colonialists to the non-European world): well before WWII they had already planned on displacing the indigenous population of Palestine and they said that God, among other things, gave them the natural, *superior*, "Chosen" right to do so. I.e., Zionist Jews were racist long before they experienced the Jewish holocaust or went to Palestine for the purpose of displacing the indigenous population and imposing a nation-state. Black-Americans have no history, and no record of discourse claiming God-given or biological superiority over anyone. Quite to the contrary, the Black-American civil rights and liberation movement always stressed and morally reaffirmed the principle that ALL people were created equal (in the eyes of the Lord, expressed religiously) with inaleinable moral and human rights.

And Martin Luther King said that Black-Americans were God's "Chosen People" too. But, unlike Zionist Jews, King didn't say that God "chose" Black-Americans because they were supposed to be *superior* to anyone else, either before, during, after, or because of their special suffering. King said that Black-Americans too [like supposedly, in their Biblical stories and interpretation, the Hebrews of the Old Testament] were "chosen" by God as a special test of faith in their special suffering (disruptive abject brutal chattel slavery, a sociocultural/religious test I could have done without, and suffering lasting much longer than the Jewish holocaust, which lasted 3 or 4 years, compared to 3 or 4 *centuries* for Blacks in American slavery). But King said that *because* of God's test of faith, enduring the suffering, and the struggle and emergence from it, Black-Americans were to be the special moral conscience of American society and had the obligation to be the representation of that special moral consciousness to the world. That's why King said that "The Promised Land" was *not* some piece of real estate, but the establishment of A Just Society -- and that The Promised Land started in the heart. Well, I'm not religious, but I appreciate the moral story and believe in its moral essence. And not even the Black Power movement of the '60's & '70's claimed that we were superior. Anyway, that's *our* record.

The great moral historical lesson that Zionist Jews showed was that even the brutally oppressed *could* become the brutal oppressor if they did not derive and retain a moral consciousness from their special suffering.

Anyway, I hope that I didn't go on too long about something you may not have meant, when you said "reciprocal".


>> I can not overstress the importance of this distinction. For everybody in the prey category, it's crucial to not get distracted into thinking about themselves or the predators too simplistically, e.g. "all whites" or "all blacks" or "all republicans." We have to think about it in this disciplined ecologic relational way. The predators are the people trying to feed on us in the socio-economic-class context, period. <<

Well, I think that this is what Tracey James points out: that not all Blacks or Arabs or whatever are good (he's given numerous examples of that in Africa itself) -- and certainly not all whites by virtue of skin color are evil. But Tracey doesn't say "*period*" -- that goes back to saying that it's "class" and not "race". I think that would be way too simplistic. Tracey also speaks of "white supremacy". Did you listen to any of his "Hurricane Sam" series? And why can't it be *BOTH* anyway? Why do we have to think simplistically in terms of *either* one or the other?

I've said that ultimately "my people", "my sisters & brothers", are anyone who wants to live in a world of peace and equality with dignity for everyone: anyone who fights for what King called "a just society". Condoleeza Rice is not my sister -- except perhaps borrowing King's phraseology, "my *sick* Black sister".


>> For blacks in the prey category, equating white skin with predators is NOT a good idea. <<

But *WHEN* have Blacks ever equated white skin per se as predators? The Civil Rights movement didn't; the Black Power movement didn't. Our political theorists don't. Our literary and artistic tradition doesn't. (*I* don't. I've *LIVED* with too many white friends, including *now* -- for *yyyearrrs*. I grew up with one white family, friendly and treated as friendly as anyone else, in my childhood middle-class Black neighborhood and nobody ever bothered them.) So *WHEN*?


>> Most whites are also prey, while Condoleeza Rice is definitely a predator. <<

And that's the *class* aspect Tracey has discoursed on.


>> If certain white persons treat you like shit because you're black, it doesn't mean they're predators, it just means they're jerks. <<

What if it's a lot more than "certain white persons": what if it's a SOCIOLOGICAL *PATTERN*. Saying "certain white persons" diminishes and even denies the fact of racism. Is that what you want to do?


>> If you let them steal your attention and draw you into combat you're going to be running around tilting with jerky windmills all the time and meanwhile you're never going to deal with the sneaky quiet beast that's truly out to hurt you <<

Well, my attention can't be so stolen/combative that I haven't *LIVED* with (among other ethnicities) white roommates/housemates for *years* (and once with even a friend's white family) and not so stolen/combative that I haven't live in predominantly white (university community, proximate or extended) neighborhoods (like Elmwood-Rockridge) for *years*.

To me, you seem to be employing those categories much more simplistically than even the thinking you criticize. You're not recognizing that the "food chain," to employ your metaphor, has *multiple* levels, and that someone who is prey in one instance (e.g., the masses of African American or Latino people) can also be predator (ethnically represented by Condaleeza Rice or U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or UC Berkeley Law Professor and Presidential legal consultant John Yoo or even a corrupt Black African or Arab regime) in another.

(But we know that Rice, Gonzales, Powell, and even Yoo are just grand, if thoroughly willling, whores for the white ruling class in this country. We know that they all answer to -- and indeed shamelssly lie for -- the white ruling elite in this country. They're the hunting dogs, but their white masters always hold the leash and tell them when to heel -- and, however well-fed, they always eat 2nd.)

The white working class, at least when seen from the perspective of Black-American working class people, often behaves as -- and certainly *has* been in most, though quite exemplified and instructively not all, historical episodes -- "a predator", to use your metaphor. When a white person treats a Black person "like shit" it *isn't* just a matter of the white person "being a jerk": in fact, that white person, by virtue of his racial status in society, has the power to cause all sorts of rather dire consesequences for the Black person in question, like job loss, denial of housing, trumped-up criminal charges, being called/labelled, indeed, a sexual predator, etc. -- INDEED, *READILY* ACCESSING THE POWER OF THE *STATE*!!

As a black person, I am in more day-to-day and immediate danger from random working-or-middle class white people than I am from the true socioeconomic white elite with whom I rarely rub elbows. To call Black people's justifiable focus on *issues of immediate survival* "tilting with jerky windmills" would be insulting (and, my *white* housemate wants me to tell you, unbelievably ignorant).

First, walk in our shoes for a while before you decide who is and isn't a predator. (Or find a good working-class Black friend -- *meaning* one you socialize with on a *personal* and independent basis, *meaning* outside of the confines of work or school or some other institutional setting, *meaning* one where just the two of you often hang out together drinking coffee or beer -- otherwise it's just "a work friend" or "a school friend" or just someone friendly or a friendly acquaintance you see around the building -- because then you at least get not a perfect, but a fairly good view.) And just because one predator might fall victim to an even bigger meat-eater doesn't make the first predator harmless.


>> I'm tellin ya, if all us prey animals could get together and shake off our delusional differences,

I like your phrase "delusional differences".


>> we'd make quick work of isolating the small predatory set that's been riding on all our backs all along, <<

Yyyyep.


>>and just by doing this we'd put them in a spot where they'd have to yield to us. It's the only thing that will work for any of us. <<

You're absolutely right, here.

But non-ruling class whites will have to stop behaving as predators themselves -- instead of thinking of, treating, and/or even ("liberal", formally "educated", "hip" whites) calling Blacks, especially Black males (even Tracey James or myself!), predators -- before such whites as a group will ever be able to unite with other prey.

Otherwise, my heart is with you all the way and, fundamentally, I think you're right.

But, whites as a group have to do some psychological and practical *work* first -- with their own. *That's* the identity politics that's holding everyone up! *That's* the kind of identity politics that doesn't want to work with the others. And sociological work on this issue (at least just any white person's meaningful fair share -- I'm not asking for anyone to do *all* the necessary work) is what most white Americans try to avoid; because most have been too busy seeking the differential benefits -- so far -- of not being on the end of the boat that's been in the water, listing or sinking.



Take care.

[ hmm,
by aaron Friday, Oct. 14, 2005 at 4:27 PM

I don't have time to respond to JA's post right now, but it should be said that Adolph Reed is an African-American with no affiliation with the British Labor Party (which, btw, is not a marxist institution). He teaches at Northwestern if my memory serves and identifies as a socialist. ]


As I said, I haven't had time to read anything but a scant perusal, and I saw a webpage (among a few others left open on my computer for a later reading) that said he was a member of the Labor Party.

JA: "I don't believe that if Black-Americans or Palestinians had the socio-economic upper hand over their oppressors that they would start oppressing in reverse."

The alternative belief you seem to be holding forth is that Whites and Jews are just innately evil and that any other group placed in their shoes just couldn't possibly be as nasty. Doesn't this smell familiar? Black-on-black racism has been going on forever. Look at the Hutu/Tutsi thing. Since it's a transaction between tribes and not races this may not satisfy the most picayune technical definition of racism, but in psychological terms there's absolutely no distinction there.

JA: "Saying "certain white persons" diminishes and even denies the fact of racism. Is that what you want to do?"

And again the alternative you're holding up is "ALL white persons," as in 'ALL white persons are racists.' Is that what YOU really believe?? Why even play along with all this talk of reconciliation, then? You're pretty much ruling it out in advance.

The message I'm getting from you loud and clear is that the really damnable kind of racism is a thing only whites do. When other categories do something identical, like the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s, it's just not the same. Look, that shit is racist, and like I said starting out, that attitude just whips the flames higher on all sides. Down in your gut it may feel like what you have to do, and I know there's no negotiating that, but just don't kid yourself you're not cutting off your nose to spite your face. Already you're on the shit end of the power balance.

Believe it or not, I know how you feel about whites and Jews. White Europeans are exceptional in many ways, and exceptionally racist is definitely way up that list. As white European racists go, Ashkenazi supremacists are nothing special EXCEPT for the way they place other white Europeans squarely into the untermenschen category. So therefore it is only from a fanatical zionist that another white European like myself can get a full taste of what European racism is like, and it is incredibly distasteful stuff, no doubt -- get's me going wild on them every time.

So fine then, here you are stuck under the thumb of this ruling order of white European psycho-racists, so WTF are you going to do about it? Flip them off and call them names until they lynch you by the light of the cross burning in your front yard, cuz now you get to triumphantly tell the non-witnesses "See! See! I told ya what they're like!!"? Yeah, you showed them.

All I've been saying all along is that we have to meet each other half-way, and that I AM WILLING TO DO THAT. This message only seems to anger you. When I said 'delusional differences' I meant that a white factory worker and a black factory worker grunting and sweating side by side have way more in common with each other than either does with the investor-class family that OWNS both of them. The thing that holds them back from each other is recieved wisdom and social programming and a lot of that shit IS delusional, dammit! They're BOTH racists, and they're both STUPID for being racists, and as long as one or the other persists in that stupidity it's a no-win deal for the other to break out of it. It's such an easy thing for a third party to keep going! And I know absolutely what I'm talking about because I've lived that scene, and having lived it I've been on the recieving end of black racist resentment day-in and day-out. What makes it racist is *I* never did anything to those people.

You keep invoking all this high doctrine of black politics and culture to show how black racism doesn't exist. What does that have to do with anything? When a white racist offends you is it because of some high and mighty doctrine he/she represents? Please. Since you keep pushing this point, here are JUST A FEW examples of what I meant in the first place

1) Not long ago I visited the offices of a major hip-hop publication. I was there in work clothes to do a job, big kinda slobby white guy hanging out in the waiting area. Two black men, very much part of the hip hop scene, were also in the waiting area. I wanted to yack with them to pass the time, and they responded by making a cat-and-mouse game out of the situation. It was like they were playing a 'diss the white boy' game with each other. Something similar happened to me on a passenger train not long ago

2) Movies have come out over the years that have taken an unapologetic angry black viewpoint. The Kings of Comedy is a good example. I've sat in predominantly black audiences watching this stuff, so I know first-hand about the enthusiastic response it gets. If a white audience were to watch a movie that took the counterposition, i.e who the f-- do these blacks think they are?, there would be stunned embarrassed silences even if only whites were present. You'll just have to trust me on this. In point of fact no such movies ever get made. The creators would wake up the next morning on a nationwide all-industry blacklist. Even the worst blacksploitation stuff from the '70s doesn't get so bold. Caricature is usually at least one step below outright hostility

3) Years ago I had a job in a textile mill in the Southeast. The workforce was 100% working class, 80% black. Most of the blacks were open-minded and fair but there was a faction that was openly racist. They were not unpopular. In addition, the hiring and advancement practices of this place discriminated wildly in favor of blacks. This was a Fortune 500 company, and this policy bias came down from corporate HQ; I'm pretty sure it was just liability control. This place was a breeding ground for racism on all sides. Without fail, it threw gasoline on the fire of any tendency in anyone to be racist. As a white person, the thing that inflamed me was the blatant pro-black bias of the entire social and management structure. Openly racist blacks were okay, but an open white racist would ride out of there on a slab. Now I know from discussing it with black friends that this inversion of the usual race game is not seen as a bad thing, but as tit-for-tat and an important lesson for whites. Having been away from there for some years, I have come to see the truth of that second point, but as to tit-for-tat I think this is nothing but destructive. It inflames every dimension of The Problem. The best thing is NO such game, and my final thought on this point is that it may be impossible for blacks and whites to relate this way. Humans are not robotically rational, its folly to pretend otherwise. We're animals; we have overriding instinctive reactions, and tribalism is a biggy. The patent physical difference between blacks and whites is so binary and so strong, and meanwhile there is this ridiculous expectation that individuals shouldn't even notice. My preference is an openness where blacks and whites can openly acknowledge ALL their differences, even be antagonistic about them, but at the end of the day it's all back to square one because everyone knows there are overarching issues of common interest. Let's just get all that right out in the open, no more say-this-mean-that bullshit games. There is real hope for mutual understanding and consensus this way. This 'deny the differences' game however is madness, literally. It denies reality; it leads to nothing but neurotic head games.

Go back and look at the beginning of that last example one more time: a textile mill in the black South. I worked there full-time for five years, and I got to know the lives of the black majority in that place REALLY well. It wasn't just a shallow trivial kind of understanding, it was total immersion. Because of that, I know *issues of immediate survival* is just a wee bit melodramatic. Now when it comes to THE LAW being geared to throw black men into prison at the drop of a hat, that really gets back to the ruling elite again, and I think it is literally a conscious genocidal program, but assigning equal blame to average whites for this is ludicrous. They're unwitting pawns in this game.

JA: "You're not recognizing that the "food chain," to employ your metaphor, has *multiple* levels, and that someone who is prey in one instance can also be predator in another."

Okay, granted, the predator/prey dichotomy didn't allow for levels, but how does this overturn the idea that the entire ecology is primarily about money and class -- NOT exclusively, I NEVER said that, but primarily?

" is that Whites and Jews are just innately evil and that any other group placed in their shoes just couldn't possibly be as nasty"


You said "Jews"- you forgot to say Zionists- not that ANY of us doubted what you've meant in the past.

why do they allow this kind of racist drivel on Indybay anyway?

The reason why europeans and japanese have the illusion of being exceptionally domineering as a 'race' - and the concept I'm going to choose to work with is colonialism instead of individually racist - is because only four major regions of the world adopted full agriculture about 10,000 years ago: east Asia, mesopotamia, europe, and (closer to AD 800) mesoamerica. The rest of the world, without the addition of fossil fuel driven tractors and trucking, are not geographically suited for full agriculture. Rather, most regions of SE Asia, North america, south america, lots of Africa, Australia and the pacific islands work best with partial agriculture, as well as large-scale range management for fish, birds and animals.

It is not that difficult to demonstrate that with partial agriculture, the best legal system of property is to have shared landownership, where communities and villages share a large range for game, and have family level arrangements to share labor for harvesting fruit, berries, and planted crops (such as potatoes in south america, and big berry fields maintained by controlled burns in western Washington state).
However, once there is a transition to full agriculture, there is always a conflict over labor rights over which property rights develop, so that farmers can be guaranteed the crops that they spent work on. Agriculture requires much more work per day than alternative systems. Out of the property rights legal system, every culture has seen the development of large landowners who rent out land in exchange for labor and profit, and then, inevitably, the nation-state, kings and patricians, and army and military technology to defend the state.
Because there was a time before agriculture, we could also envision a time in the future that is entirely different from what we have seen during the past 1000 years. Indeed, there have been many sub-eras under agricultural europe and China with its dynasties, then communism.
Anyway, if you look at europe (and similarly for east asia), each country didn't participate in colonialism (directed by the kings) equally. How many colonies did Finland, the baltics, Sweden, Siberia, Greece/Armenia, Switzerland, and so forth have. Some others that became pushy later on such as Germany and Russia weren't major players in early colonialism. Largely, this has to do with the power that monarchism had in these respective countries.

So, I will put your initials in " "'s for now to express my uncertainty.

"TW": "The alternative belief you seem to be holding forth is that Whites and Jews are just innately evil and that any other group placed in their shoes just couldn't possibly be as nasty."

Nope. I'm saying just look at the historical record. Black-*Americans* have no record of espousing Black-*American* supremacy -- quite to the contrary. And Palestinians Arabs and Palestinian Jews -- before the Zionist project -- which Palestinian Jews neither called for or welcomed -- lived in fairly in peace.


"TW": "Look at the Hutu/Tutsi thing."

There were no phenotypical differences between Hutus and Tutsis. Contrary to what the Western media propagated (to cover the West's own complicity in the tragedy), you couldn't tell a Hutu from a Tutsi. The racial contrivance was one created by European neocolonialists. Look up Slave Revolt Radio's coverage of them. At any rate, the absence of different "races" does not mean that there wouldn't be violent conflicts between people in the world. Look at all the wars in Europe, some of them lasting for *decades*, going on for centuries between *white* people.


"TW": "Since it's a transaction between tribes and not races this may not satisfy the most picayune technical definition of racism, but in psychological terms there's absolutely no distinction there."

Actually, there would be a distinction, because in wars/violence where people are racialized, the group believing itself to be "racially superior" are usually more willing to inflict mass suffering in a way that they would not do to groups considered of the same race. Just look at how Hitler treated the Jews (he didn't put French or British or American prisoners in gas chambers -- and the allies were a much greater threat to Germany's existence) -- or how the Jews in Israel savagely treat the Palestinians (complete with Israel's own 'Nuremburg' laws). Look at how Japan (believing itself to be racially superior) treated the Chinese in WWII (the Rape of Nanking). Look at how whites in the KKK treated Blacks -- whites' sado-sexual torture-mutilation-lynching or burning alive -- making a whole after-Sunday-morning-church picnic celebration of such murders -- inviting wives and children in on the 'festivities'. This is the difference between violence and *racialized* violence. So, the differences are *not* "picayune".


"TW": "And again the alternative you're holding up is "ALL white persons," as in 'ALL white persons are racists.' "

I've already responded to that. How many *Black* people do *you* -- or have *you* ever -- live/d with? How many Black neighborhoods have *you* ever lived in?


"TW": "The message I'm getting from you loud and clear is that the really damnable kind of racism is a thing only whites do. When other categories do something identical, like the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s, it's just not the same."

I've already covered that.


"TW": "Down in your gut it may feel like what you have to do, and I know there's no negotiating that, but just don't kid yourself you're not cutting off your nose to spite your face."

You know, I'm not really sure what you're saying here, but like Tracey James might say, if you spent just half the time and energy fighting the only racism I know to exist in this country, rather than the emotional and time energy you are spending 'worrying' about *me*, we'd *ALL* be just that much further along, *obviating* the feelings in me that you are projecting.

THE PERSON ATTACKS AGAINST ME -- WHICH I HAVE NOT DONE TO YOU -- WON'T GET YOU VERY FAR. YOU'RE LUCKY -- FOR THE MOMENT -- THAT I'M EVEN PUTTING UP WITH THEM.

I JUST WANT TO SEE, FOR JUST THIS POST, WHERE YOU'RE GOING.


"TW": "Believe it or not, I know how you feel about whites and Jews. White Europeans are exceptional in many ways, and exceptionally racist is definitely way up that list. As white European racists go, Ashkenazi supremacists are nothing special EXCEPT for the way they place other white Europeans squarely into the untermenschen category. So therefore it is only from a fanatical zionist that another white European like myself can get a full taste of what European racism is like, and it is incredibly distasteful stuff, no doubt -- get's me going wild on them every time."

Okay, we're in agreement here, to a limited extent. Except that white Europeans were no more or less exceptional than, particularly, WWII era Japan -- which also thought of itself as racially superior to the Chinese, Korean, Phlippinos and everyone else in Asia. And except that I don't put all whites -- and I *certainly* don't put all Jews in the same category. The *bravest* non-Palestinian opponents of Zionism are anti-Zionist *JEWS* -- of which there are *plenty* (if not yet enough) in the Bay Area.


"TW": "So fine then, here you are stuck under the thumb of this ruling order of white European psycho-racists, so WTF are you going to do about it? Flip them off and call them names until they lynch you by the light of the cross burning in your front yard, cuz now you get to triumphantly tell the non-witnesses "See! See! I told ya what they're like!!"? Yeah, you showed them."

Again, *you're* the one who's suddenly decided to engage in *personal attacks*. Other than that, I don't understand the point of your question or what you're trying to elicit from me. My posts have all engaged in *analysis* -- not name-calling. If one cannot correctly diagnose the symptoms (here, in particular, whether "race" matters -- coincidentally the title of one of Cornel West's books, isn't it?), then one cannot cure the disease.


"TW": "All I've been saying all along is that we have to meet each other half-way, and that I AM WILLING TO DO THAT. This message only seems to anger you."

*WHERE'S* *my* anger??? *SHOW ME*! *YOU* are evidently the "angry" one here. The only one "angry" on my end of the wire is my *white* housemate -- at *you*. *My* patience with you is *much* greater than *her's*. I had to *tone down* a couple of the things she wanted me to tell you (not to mention some others). She 'hates' white people/men with the "it's class and not race" or "it's not race at all" (or the "it's not gender at all") attitude, because she feels that it comes with a whole sort of emotionally prejudicial attitudes whether the person expresses it analytically/ideologically or not. No offense intended to you -- it's just her attitude: she wouldn't have the slightest inclination to do all (well, *any*) of this typing to you (fortuately I proficiently 10-finger touch-type). I'm actually more patient with you than another white person!


"TW": "All I've been saying all along is that we have to meet each other half-way,"

I wish that I could get the majority of whites to do just *that* much! I'm tired of almost always having to go *all* the way in trying to resolve conflicts with most whites (and even *some* Asians) -- who don't seem to understand simple gestures of human decency -- all my adult life -- and I've finally stopped.


"TW": "When I said 'delusional differences' I meant that a white factory worker and a black factory worker grunting and sweating side by side have way more in common with each other than either does with the investor-class family that OWNS both of them. The thing that holds them back from each other is recieved wisdom and social programming and a lot of that shit IS delusional, dammit!"

Hasn't every Black intellectual and activist been saying that since DuBois, Robeson, X, King, SNCC, West, the Black Panthers, etc., etc., etc.?


"TW": "They're BOTH racists, and they're both STUPID for being racists, and as long as one or the other persists in that stupidity it's a no-win deal for the other to break out of it. It's such an easy thing for a third party to keep going! And I know absolutely what I'm talking about because I've lived that scene, and having lived it I've been on the recieving end of black racist resentment day-in and day-out. What makes it racist is *I* never did anything to those people."

Why don't you work on the racism that holding us all back then: *white* racism? Because *you* know the language, *you* know the socioculture, *you* have the skin color to reach those overt racists, closet racists, and liberal racists that I don't have.

Now, I'd venture to guess that in a system where only whites have power, you don't understand the analysis that Blacks *CAN'T* be racist, since racism is utimately a system of *power*. So, racism is a *structural* entity, not merely a psychological/emotional phenomenon. Let's see if I can clarify this for you: would you seriously entertain some Israeli Jew saying that, "But some Palestinians are racists too!" Back during the so-called "[anti-]Indian Wars" of the late 1800's, would you have said, "But some Indians are racists too!" If you know anything about Japanese racism against Koreans in Japan (or when Korea was a colony of Japan), would you say, "But some Koreans are racistst too!"

There is no Black person in the country that ultimately controls the economic or political destiny of any white person, especially that that white person -- in any exception you want to try to come up with -- doesn't have recourse to another white person for redress. And we control no apparati of mass media. I also define racism as "a system of economic organization that determines and divides the wealth and resources of the nation according to a hierarchy of sociopolitically constructed (and sometimes arbitrarily, legally defined) 'races' " -- i.e., who, as a group, statistically needs to be economically and politically accomodated the most to who, as a group, statistically needs to be accomodated the least. Now, Blacks had and have no control over that division of wealth in this country. I tried to find my own independent notes on the thesis of racism as a structural political and economic system of power, but I've been in Canada and Europe for nearly two months, so I can't find them to help you further on my thesis right now. Damnnn...! Hopefully, later.

So, Blacks can be prejudicial and Blacks can certainly be resentful -- AND I'M SURE THAT YOU MIGHT FIND THAT PREJUDICE VERY DISTASTEFUL WHEN MISTAKENLY APPLIED -- AND I WOULD FIND IT VERY SAD IF IT WERE A MISTAKEN VICTIM OF ITS APPLICATION -- but Blacks -- in the *U.S.* -- *cannot* be racist because they don't control (or even meaningfully, let alone critically, as with the Jewish establishment, share control of) power in America.

When I asked one of my white housemates how she would respond to mistakenly applied racial (note, I didn't say *racist*) prejudice, resentment or even harm to her from someone Black, she didn't skip a heartbeat: she said, "That's why we need to fight against racism: because *innocent* people get hurt too." And I remembered, *the good Germans* of the Nazi era -- the ones who waited too long to speak up until it was too dangerous for them too -- got bombed too in WWII. Not enough innocent Americans spoke up before 9-11. If I were a Jew, the first thing I would think is that those racist Zionist fffooollls could ultimately put *all* we Jews in danger again.

As far as white racism as a system of power, really there are numerous critical studies (books) on the thesis and history of whiteness (just do a web search) as a system of power. I've already mentioned one above:

"THE RULES OF RACIALIZATION: CLASS, IDENTITY, GOVERNANCE"

by STEVE MARTINOT

As far as I'm concerned, this is one of the *must read books* on the issue of white racialized identity and *white* identify politics. I know that you can get it at Black Oak Books in Berkeley. It's published by Temple University Press, 2003 -- 240pgs. ISBN 1-56639-982-3

Richard, you should interview Steve (who's an intellectual from the dyed-in-the-wool white working-class).

There's the landmark book:

THE INVENTION OF THE WHTE RACE
- by Theodore Allen

There's:

How the Irish Became White
- by Noel Ignatiev (also from the white working-class)

There's:

How theJews Became White Folks
- by Karen Brodkin (Jewish)

There's:

The Wages of Whiteness
- by David Roediger

Among other important works.

Note, *none* of the above people are disgruntled Black "racists" with a big chip on their shoulders.

Now, you started off acting kinda ignorant, but I see that you are really trying to stuggle with issues of race and gender, so that's why I'm still hangin' with you in this post.


"TW": "What makes it racist is *I* never did anything to those people."

That's the old "I never owned any slaves" argument -- and it *misses* the historical and political point.


"TW": "You keep invoking all this high doctrine of black politics and culture to show how black racism doesn't exist."

Actually, it's really just a simple, almost cursory, analysis based on what racism actually *is*. I don't even have a book on it -- just a little time of *analytically* thinking about it and a few articultate notes (burried somewhere for now).


"TW": What does that have to do with anything? When a white racist offends you is it because of some high and mighty doctrine he/she represents?"

*YES*!!

*NOW* YOU'RE 'STARTING' TO GET IT!

As mentioned in the works referenced above.

And, again, unlike a Black person, a white racist can call on the powers of the *STATE* or its *INSTITUTIONS*.

And whites can instantly call on the prejudices of nearly all of white society -- with the kind of racism that secretly believes that any Black male is a hidden sexual predator to non-Black women; the kind that believe the police can be morally and/or legally excused from almost any brutality because those Black people 'are so dangerous'; the kind that readily believes any story of Black savagery coming out of New Orleans; the kind that can readily, negatively label any Black male to all the whites around him without a moment's question from them: "HE **DID**!!?" -- and nearly *all* act, socially and institutionally, accordingly.


"TW": "...here are JUST A FEW examples of what I meant..."

You know what?: I'm not going to respond to any of your examples, because coming from me, it won't have any lasting, if convincing, effect. I'm going to ask my *WHITE* housemate for a *BIG* favor and have *her* respond to you on this matter. (I can tell you right now that with her short patience on these matters, she will only do so once -- and only as a *BIG* favor for *me*, so don't expect a back-&-forth with her.)

Other than that, let me say that I AM AS OPPOSED TO BLACKS WHO MISUSE AND DISHONOR THE SUFFERING OF BLACK PEOPLE, AS I AM TO JEWS WHO MISUSE AND DISHONOR THE SUFFERING OF JEWISH PEOPLE -- AND I HAVE **ACTIVELY** OPPOSED **BOTH**.

But, *look* at what you said, "

But, I will touch on one thing that you said, "TW": "Years ago I had a job in a textile mill in the Southeast. The workforce was 100% working class, 80% black. MOST OF THE BLACKS WERE OPEN-MINDED AND FAIR ..."

GEE, I WISH I COULD EXPERIENCE MOST WHITE PEOPLE BEING THAT WAY.


"TW": "...In addition, the hiring and advancement practices of this place discriminated wildly in favor of blacks. ..."

-- GEE, THAT'S *NICE* FOR A CHANGE!

Other than that brief, admittedly, quip, I usually find that when a white-owned workplace is mostly especially Black, female, Latino, or non-white immigrants, it's usually because the whites who own it are compensating those minorities (in pay and benefits) for less than they would a predominantly white male workforce (ever hear about the fight for gender equity and how white male janitors can get as much or more pay than white female clerical workers?). Otherwise, it's because perhpas now textile factory work is considered near the bottom of the employment scale and the system expects (at least statistically) white males to have higher level jobs. Look at the Bay Area coffeeshops that have mostly white workers vs. those who have mostly Latino workers (like Espresso Roma on College & Ashby in Berkeley's upscale and generally affluent Elmwood district: most of the workers are Latino and they get lower pay and *no* benefits no matter how many years they work there -- *very* low pay that no white person would ever put up with after even a couple of years -- and the Latinos work *harder* and *faster* than most whites (oh, *don't* get in line when a white person is behind the cappucino machine -- or get everything you need the first time in line!) *or* Blacks (although Blacks would tend to work harder than most whites) -- vs. Pete's Coffee which pays its mostly white workers rather well (I'm *not* saying that Pete's discriminates), workers who even get *benefits* and *holiday* pay -- and even *vacation* pay, after a certain amount of time on the job. I *can* say that one or two Pete's store didn't hire a Palestinian friend of mine whose personality and cultural background would have made him an *ideal* coffeeshop worker.


"TW": "Go back and look at the beginning of that last example one more time: a textile mill in the black South. I worked there full-time for five years, and I got to know the lives of the black majority in that place REALLY well. It wasn't just a shallow trivial kind of understanding, it was total immersion."

Well, in a place that's 80% Black, I'm sure your experience was probably more than trivial. But your understanding isn't. *BUT*, did you have any Black friends??? And I don't mean just on the job. I mean, as I said before, Blacks that you *personally* socialize with outside of and independently of work, school, etc. Did you go out for beers -- outside of some work group? Did you go over to each other's homes? Did you go to any entertainment events together? Did you take any road trips together? Did you play poker with the Black guys over at one of their homes? Because your grousing -- although I appreciate your apparent sincerity -- doesn't indicate any of that.


"TW": "...Because of that, I know *issues of immediate survival* is just a wee bit melodramatic. ..."

Actually that was my intellectually stellar *WHITE* female housemate's words, which I merely borrowed for immediate convenience, when I asked her about how you express your feelings and grievances. I've been asking her, occasionally, much to her impatience, what words might reach psychologically and emotionally resistant (if, again in your case, apparently sincere) white people like you. Because, as part of prejudice/racism, I've long noted that whites will sometimes here her 'white magic words' (or is it see her white magic skin color) and believe -- or give pause to -- what she says, when they will just dismiss me out of hand -- even though I thought that I congruently said the same thing. So, I guess that she has some 'magic white words' (or skin color) that gives other white people pause.


"TW": "[average whites] They're unwitting pawns in this game."

I don't know, the whites who've discriminated against me -- or, in the rural South said that I better not be there when they got back, or who shot at my grandmother's farmhouse -- or, when I once lived in St. Louis, shouted to get away from that white woman (one of my housemates) -- or some of my old crazy white female bosses -- and other crazy white women -- DIDN'T SEEM LIKE UNWITTING PAWNS TO ME!! Oh, but then the fraction of the *Blacks* that were messing with you at the *Southern* textile mill weren't, right? You didn't emotionally dismiss that fraction -- vs. "MOST" of the Black people that you said were *NICE* to you -- as mere "pawns" of the system. You've held your resentment of Blacks to this day!! You even personally resent *me* for my thesis (no part of which says "kill whitey")! And I've *lived* with whites! No average white person has ever given me the patience that I've given you. Now, if you were *so* emotionally scarred from working in a textile mill for a few years where most Blacks treated you nicely, can you imagine A **LIFETIME** of most whites treating someone *badly* (or *dismissively* or *suddenly taciturn* over some *really trivial* bullshit that they've paranoiacally manufactured and magnified in their psyches)!! -- and especially in the *South* (where there are still entire towns and counties that Blacks can't live in, or streets they can't drive on, and are dangerous for Blacks to even go through)!! And still, you're the proverbial Angry White Man!! (Let's hope you don't ever go shoot up your present work place because your wife/girlfriend left you! [I say that rhetorically, mostly in jest.])


[JA: "You're not recognizing that the "food chain," to employ your metaphor, has *multiple* levels, and that someone who is prey in one instance can also be predator in another."]

"TW": "Okay, granted, the predator/prey dichotomy didn't allow for levels,"

No shit!!


"TW": "but how does this overturn the idea that the entire ecology is primarily about money and class -- NOT exclusively, I NEVER said that, but primarily?"


It's primarily about *social* class and *power* structure -- and economic class is merely *part* of that -- which is proven by the fact that people in the same economic class -- say, whites and Blacks -- can have a different social status due to things like *RACE*. So, if you're saying that it's *essentially* (because you are dismissing the importance of anything else) all about class, but you mean about economic class then you're *obviously* *WRONG* -- because I've given you all sorts of examples of how even poor rural white males are privileged over poor rural Black males -- and even over middle-class and affluent Black males. If it were, indeed, primarily about class, then racial issues would have been solved by now. The fact that racial disparities are so persistent across the working class is a demonstration that it is a more important part of the social structure than you're giving it credit for. If this racial stuff were just an illusion/delusion then the white working class would have been willing to throw it aside by now. But it's *not* an illusion/delusion because it gives whites across the board at least *some* *GENUINE* ADVANTAGES -- though *yes* they are being manipulated (and even needlessly exposed to chickens coming home to roost and blowback terrorism from the Middle East and who's kids, wives, husbands, familial sisters and brothers are sent to die in Iraq or before in Vietnam or before in Korea, using WWII as "the good war" historical cover story) by the ruling white elites so those elites can even get *more* mega-richer.

--and just like with (more obviously) the Israeli Jewish working class vs. the Palestinian working class in Israel's more obviously apartheid system -- and that's why the Israeli Jewish working class ain't gonna join no hands with the Palestinian working class to overthrow the Israeli capitalist bosses or any Palestinian bosses that Israel and the U.S. hope to co-opt (so far, try as they might, it hasn't worked yet) into the capitalist system in order to sell out the masses of the Palestinian people (and whatever anyone can say about Arafat, he didn't live high on the hog at all and was never ready to sell out his people).

[--as with what has indeed happened in South Africa with the ANC -- but at least black South Africans aren't being almost mass killed on a daily basis, aren't living under the very very worst of conditions, or forced to submit to pass laws and other daily degrading treatment anymore, and aren't languishing or being tortured in prisons, by the white South African military machine, although *economic* apartheid still marches along for most South African blacks, with the economy largely still firmly in white hands and white-stolen land redistribution non-existent -- I haven't heard about any reparations to black people there].

Okay, I can't really do another long one like this. I've got other people I have to respond to (not to mention other writing work and scholarly reading). And unless you have a brief counterargument, I'm going to have to more or less peel off. At some point you'll just have to go to other resources, like the ones I gave you above. If you want to, you can go to Steve Martinot's Tuesday night discussion group on race and bring up your arguments with him (see the previous week's indybay calendar for Tuesday night for contact info, time and location). If none of that will do it, then I can't help you anymore on this particular issue.



Take care.

"TW": "...here are JUST A FEW examples of what I meant..."

JA: "You know what?: I'm not going to respond to any of your examples, because coming from me, it won't have any lasting, if convincing, effect. I'm going to ask my *WHITE* housemate for a *BIG* favor and have *her* respond to you on this matter. (I can tell you right now that with her short patience on these matters, she will only do so once -- and only as a *BIG* favor for *me*, so don't expect a back-&-forth with her.) "

Fortunately, she's willing to meet me at this lovely outdoor coffeeshop. Now, she's not going to read your whole post -- I'm lucky to get her to type anything at all -- she's not as patient as a Black militant like me -- so some of what she says might be slightly out of context to the entirety of your post (or what I believe to be your otherwise sincerity):


TW: "All I've been saying all along is that we have to meet each other half-way, and that I AM WILLING TO DO THAT. This message only seems to anger you. When I said 'delusional differences' I meant that a white factory worker and a black factory worker grunting and sweating side by side have way more in common with each other than either does with the investor-class family that OWNS both of them. The thing that holds them back from each other is recieved wisdom and social programming and a lot of that shit IS delusional, dammit! They're BOTH racists, and they're both STUPID for being racists, and as long as one or the other persists in that stupidity it's a no-win deal for the other to break out of it. It's such an easy thing for a third party to keep going! And I know absolutely what I'm talking about because I've lived that scene, and having lived it I've been on the recieving end of black racist resentment day-in and day-out. What makes it racist is *I* never did anything to those people."


It *always* comes to this: "I never did anything to those people." Or sometimes it's "I never owned slaves." Well, you may not be able to see it, but you *have* had -- as an individual -- advantages due to your white skin. Most of those are converse advantages, i.e. something bad *not* happening to you. Thus when someone black meets you -- who does have to go through all those things you don't, who knows that you've escaped them, and who knows *why* you've escaped them -- yes, many of those black people are going to resent you. Why is it so hard for you to see that? They aren't being delusional -- you're being blind.


TW: "You keep invoking all this high doctrine of black politics and culture to show how black racism doesn't exist. What does that have to do with anything? When a white racist offends you is it because of some high and mighty doctrine he/she represents? Please. Since you keep pushing this point, here are JUST A FEW examples of what I meant in the first place"

TW: " 1) Not long ago I visited the offices of a major hip-hop publication. I was there in work clothes to do a job, big kinda slobby white guy hanging out in the waiting area. Two black men, very much part of the hip hop scene, were also in the waiting area. I wanted to yack with them to pass the time, and they responded by making a cat-and-mouse game out of the situation. It was like they were playing a 'diss the white boy' game with each other. Something similar happened to me on a passenger train not long ago"


Oh, please. Who cares? Frankly, this is probably more of an example of your awkward or nonexistent social skills than anything else. I think if you had done the same thing to two white males at a rock magazine you would have had the same reaction: i.e., "who the hell *is* this weird guy and why is he bothering us?" This isn't an example of social status being used to threaten someone -- it's just you looking like a 'doofus' (to quote you, some "big kinda slobby white guy" trying to "yack with them to pass the time") tryin' to rap with tha brothas about rap, when maybe they were trying to talk business to each other. You think it would have been any different if you were hangin' out at some major white punk music or death metal or goth publication? Oh and they did rattle you, didn't they. And you think 50 Cent is change in your pocket.


TW: " 2) Movies have come out over the years that have taken an unapologetic angry black viewpoint. The Kings of Comedy is a good example. I've sat in predominantly black audiences watching this stuff, so I know first-hand about the enthusiastic response it gets. If a white audience were to watch a movie that took the counterposition, i.e who the f-- do these blacks think they are?, there would be stunned embarrassed silences even if only whites were present. You'll just have to trust me on this. In point of fact no such movies ever get made. The creators would wake up the next morning on a nationwide all-industry blacklist."


Have you seen the movie Hollywood Shuffle or Bamboozled? Have you heard what Asian actor-comediennes (like Margaret Cho) have to say about this? Have you seen those mostly awful black sitcoms that white producers put out on WB and UPN that make blacks look silly, almost minstrel. Blacks can either act in them or go hungry. Even star of Hollywood Shuffle had to act in one of them. Rather than the couple or so where blacks are witty (like Bernie Mac or Everybody Hates Chris)? Have you ever heard of Birth of a Nation (which financially saved MGM) or all those white-celebrated classic movies with fat black mammy maid characters always helping the slender sexy white lady get dressed to go out?


TW: "Even the worst blacksploitation stuff from the '70s doesn't get so bold. Caricature is usually at least one step below outright hostility"


This kind of humor is appreciated because it allows blacks to let off steam built up from having to deal with a racist white-dominated society. Humor is often the only way for those in a less powerful position to cope. When this becomes a black-dominated society and this humor is being used as a weapon to reinforce existence exploitation of whites, then you'll have a good reason to complain.


TW: " 3) Years ago I had a job in a textile mill in the Southeast. The workforce was 100% working class, 80% black. Most of the blacks were open-minded and fair but there was a faction that was openly racist. They were not unpopular. In addition, the hiring and advancement practices of this place discriminated wildly in favor of blacks. This was a Fortune 500 company, and this policy bias came down from corporate HQ; I'm pretty sure it was just liability control. This place was a breeding ground for racism on all sides. Without fail, it threw gasoline on the fire of any tendency in anyone to be racist. As a white person, the thing that inflamed me was the blatant pro-black bias of the entire social and management structure. Openly racist blacks were okay, but an open white racist would ride out of there on a slab. Now I know from discussing it with black friends that this inversion of the usual race game is not seen as a bad thing, but as tit-for-tat and an important lesson for whites. Having been away from there for some years, I have come to see the truth of that second point, but as to tit-for-tat I think this is nothing but destructive. It inflames every dimension of The Problem."


I'm afraid I'm going to have to be a little skeptical here. I've heard many whites complain about supposedly pro-black bias and discrimination, and in the end those things turned out to be perfectly reasonable practices where whites were resentful just because they didn't get all the advantages they were accustomed to.


TW: "The best thing is NO such game, and my final thought on this point is that it may be impossible for blacks and whites to relate this way. Humans are not robotically rational, its folly to pretend otherwise. We're animals; we have overriding instinctive reactions, and tribalism is a biggy. The patent physical difference between blacks and whites is so binary and so strong, and meanwhile there is this ridiculous expectation that individuals shouldn't even notice."


Well, well, well. *Now* we see your true attitude come out at last. You're the one talking about, "overriding instinctive reactions", and "The patent physical difference between blacks and whites is so binary and so strong..." What "overriding instinctive reaction" do you secretly have to black people? This explains a lot to me. It also explains why we disagree: I believe that white people are educable, if ultimately only by a drastic change in the circumstances of white people in this country, and you don't. -- like a change in the position of the United States in relation to the rest of the world and the white working and middle class in the United States vis-a-vis the rest of the world. The U.S. losing the Iraq war, or creating a longterm mess, in Iraq would become part of the process of the U.S. losing its hegemonic grip on the rest of the world. Or what if China becomes the hegemonic power in the world? If it becomes obvious that being white-American is nothing special, then white-Americans will stop thinking of themselves as superior and maybe they'll change their relationship to people of color at home and abroad.


TW: "My preference is an openness where blacks and whites can openly acknowledge ALL their differences, even be antagonistic about them, but at the end of the day it's all back to square one because everyone knows there are overarching issues of common interest. Let's just get all that right out in the open, no more say-this-mean-that bullshit games. There is real hope for mutual understanding and consensus this way. This 'deny the differences' game however is madness, literally. It denies reality; it leads to nothing but neurotic head games."


It seems to me that you've been the one engaged in the "denying the differences" game. And I don't mean the utterly superficial and in many cases fatuous "physical ... binary" differences that you appear to be happy to focus on and go on and on about (if you haven't noticed, black-Americans are a continuous spectrum of colors and physical features: they are not "binary" to whites) -- no wonder those guys in the office of the hip-hop magazine dissed you if you talked like that. No -- what you *deny* is the social difference that society has created between white and nonwhite groups that has real-life consequences for both sides. Until you stop denying *that*, you're the one engaged in head games.


TW: "Go back and look at the beginning of that last example one more time: a textile mill in the black South. I worked there full-time for five years, and I got to know the lives of the black majority in that place REALLY well. It wasn't just a shallow trivial kind of understanding, it was total immersion. Because of that, I know *issues of immediate survival* is just a wee bit melodramatic. Now when it comes to THE LAW being geared to throw black men into prison at the drop of a hat, that really gets back to the ruling elite again, and I think it is literally a conscious genocidal program, but assigning equal blame to average whites for this is ludicrous. They're unwitting pawns in this game."

Whites are unwitting pawns? Oh, please! Whites can and do *deliberately instigate* the police or the criminal justice system against black people they dislike (just because whites *can*) or who just happened to look at them wrong, let alone instigate the white boss against some black employee. This happens frequently, and blacks never know which random white coworker or neighbor or passerby, or even sometimes "friend", they might catch shit from. And if it isn't invoking the criminal justice system, it's abusing the system's bias in some other way to affect the black person's job, housing, or other -- yes -- critical issue of survival. The fact that you think it's melodramatic just shows how unaware you are about reality in this country.

JA: "I don't believe that if Black-Americans or Palestinians had the socio-economic upper hand over their oppressors that they would start oppressing in reverse."

All you'd need to do would be to examine the behavior of the nations where the Moslems are in the majority to learn the falscity of this statement.

Dhimmitude is the status that Islamic law, the Sharia, mandates for non-Muslims, primarily Jews and Christians. Dhimmis, "protected people," are free to practice their religion in a Sharia regime, but are made subject to a number of humiliating regulations designed to enforce the Qur'an's command that they "feel themselves subdued" (Sura 9:29). This denial of equality of rights and dignity remains part of the Sharia, and, as such, are part of the law that global jihadists are laboring to impose everywhere, ultimately on the entire human race.

Well, JA's incessantly-invoked "white housemate," with her "stellar education," and knock-your-socks-off resume has finally graced us with her esteemed presence.

The cyber-world stands in awe.

I'll have to correct myself. You didn't even say that any Black person was messin' with you at the factory, just that some had "a pro-black bias" -- but, again, that *"most"* of them were actually *nice* to you.

[ this is a great day
by aaron Saturday, Oct. 15, 2005 at 4:54 PM

Well, JA's incessantly-invoked "white housemate," with her "stellar education," and knock-your-socks-off resume has finally graced us with her esteemed presence.

The cyber-world stands in awe ]


Did I mention that not only was she was, of course, Phi Beta Kappa, had an undergraduate paper published in an academic journal; accepted to every law school that she applied to -- including Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley (having scored the *MAXIMUM* score on the LSAT; and is a practicing attorney -- but that she also studied taekwondo in Korea alone for two years where the school was at a mountain retreat (attaining a black belt of course); that she's travelled all over Asia; that she studied with a Korean instructor in the States for several more years; then she's studied Muay Thai kick boxing for several years out here in California; and that she's now studying Filipino stick fighting.

Want me to set up an ass-whoopin' -- err, match -- for ya with her? Just ask yourself: "Am I feeling lucky today?" ...Well, *PUNK* ..., *are* ya...!?

[ wrong again JA
by wrong again JA Saturday, Oct. 15, 2005 at 4:38 PM

JA: "I don't believe that if Black-Americans or Palestinians had the socio-economic upper hand over their oppressors that they would start oppressing in reverse."

All you'd need to do would be to examine the behavior of the nations where the Moslems are in the majority to learn the falscity of this statement. ]


Go ask your Israeli historians. Even they now admit that Palestinian Jews were never persecuted by Palestinian Arabs.

It's 2005 now.

Start from there and move forward.

Look up "Dhimmi", then re-think your ideas about life for Jews as Dhimmi (like "Jim Crow") in the Moslem world. Then look up JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa). After that, we can talk.

"Jews as Dhimmi (like "Jim Crow")"

entirely ahistorical.

or better yet, another triumph of-- "Emotive History"!!

Don't tell how you feel, talk to me about what you actually, really know.

i do know that apples aren't oranges, nor are they readily equated.

except in cases of emotional hot-button issues.

Does that mean you haven't looked it up?

and, i know what christians were doing to jews and others in europe (let alone in the western hemisphere) while muslims were taxing everyone.

you cant take it out of context and make it jim crow just becasue it feels right to you.

you might get away with presuming ignorance in amerika in general, but not here at indymedia, buddy!!

Look JA I *do* appreciate your forbearance and I apologize if I've offended you. Stating this stuff in unvarnished terms is, to my viewpoint, a surer path to clarity than the 'say this, mean that' bullshit game. This is stuff I have needed to hammer out with a black person for most of my life, and I don't think I'm the only one. Whenever I've tried to broach this with a black friend it became clear I was about to lose a friend while resolving nothing, so I just dropped it. Anyway, thank you for being patient and I hope this doesn't come between us.
That said, tally-ho!

JA: "...you don't understand the analysis that Blacks *CAN'T* be racist, since racism is utimately a system of *power*. So, racism is a *structural* entity, not merely a psychological/emotional phenomenon."

Yes, I have seen this analysis and I think it's poison. This gets right to the heart of what we're going back and forth about. I understand that racism can be an economic/political institution, and that this is coming from the white side alone, but this is a metadefinition of racism's primary meaning, which relates strictly to assumptions and attitudes http://merriamwebster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=racism . I don't agree that the institutional and emotional senses of the word 'racism' are joined at the hip for analytical purposes. What's really going on with this is the 'institution' metadefinition is being selectively stretched to include the emotional one IN THIS CONTEXT ONLY, and I think this is being constructed and pushed for a very dubious reason, namely to impose asymmetric conditions on discourse that are to the taste of one entrenched party.

"No, don't you pretend a mutual agreement requires mutual respect! I think you suck and I like that feeling and I'm gonna keep right on nursing it and don't you DARE tell me that's racist of me because ONLY YOU are racist!!"

That's exactly how it comes across, and this is a deadly toxin to negotiation, a contrived impasse. No self-respecting party on the other side, no matter how well-intentioned, will accept this DOUBLE STANDARD as a condition to further negotiations. If there are people on the other side who do accept it, they either don't have any self-respect or they have extremely fucked up hidden motives. Either way, whatever agreements you and they hammer out aren't going to survive when they hit the larger world. How an advocate of black equal rights can imagine this is a sound strategic position is beyond me. Two possibilities occur to me: A) this is really originating with people who are NOT on your side, and summoning names of purported authors will not of itself disprove this. If two things have ever been clear about politics, they're that 1) people can be bought and 2) creepy unrecognized channels of influence exist. B) if this really is coming from black advocates, I'd have to say they're a lot more interested in humiliating their opponents than in securing benefits for blacks, cuz anything built on this foundation is doomed to self-destruct. This is advocacy and sincerity taking a back seat to vengeance.

What I see lurking beneath this is a deeper, truly demented premise: while there can be neutrals on either side, ONLY blacks are victims and ONLY whites are villains. The same binary dementia is woven into another thing you said:

"would you seriously entertain some Israeli Jew saying that, "But some Palestinians are racists too!" "

YES!!! I would confirm it! That there is racism on both sides is just a simple objective truth! This doesn't diminish the Palestinians' grievances or cancel the Israelis' crimes at all!! "Who is racist" and "who is the criminal aggressor" are two different loosely related questions. You're totally hung up on racism being the totality of the crime, when it's not, it's just a mental state that supplies motive, and then out beyond motive are still more variables in the chain of causation leading to actual crime. Meanwhile, if you refuse to acknowledge that the Israel/Palestine situation is more complex than a child's crayon drawing, you give the zionists a valid reason to ignore you. If you were them, YOU would ignore you! In fact, I know you don't see Israel/Palestine so simplistically, but then you undo all that when you say this ridiculous thing "Palestinians aren't racists, ever."

Meanwhile, back where I started from, blacks are still entirely capable of being racist according to the straightforward basic definition. By all means, insist on calling it 'prejudicial behavior' -- FINE -- the point still stands that this incites prejudicial behavior in turn, and in this context blacks have been and continue to be their own enemies. I'll take responsibility for my own racist conduct, but this has to happen on both sides or there's hardly a point. This is just adult common sense. If I keep grinding this axe, that's because this issue remains obstinately unresolved, and you're making my point for me here by persistently refusing to consider my statements on their own terms, e.g. by resorting to this 'blacks can't be racists' sleight of hand.

Then you tell me 'white racism is the real problem, so go work on that,' and this is more of the same sleight of hand! The problem -- the WHOLE problem -- is white racism AND black racism interacting with and feeding each other, and the refusal to deal with this WHOLE problem honestly is why I think nothing ever really changes. It's like the members of a dysfunctional family always fighting with each other, always pulling out baggage from years ago to "prove" they're not the ones to blame, that everything's so-and-so's fault, around and around forever. The baggage isn't the real issue. The problem is that they loathe each other in the present tense and not one of them wants to take responsibility for it. If you could get them to behave civilly, the baggage would scar over and eventually become dusty memories, but as long as their present emotional state is so hurtful they're never going to let any of that shit rest in peace. It sets up positive feedback. Even if one were trying to be civil, the others would destroy their resolve and pull them back into the family disorder. They all have to reform simultaneously

__Their immediate emotional state is the determining factor__ and each of them has to be motivated to adress this within themselves. It's the only solution possible

What teed me off about your housemate's choice of phrase was its hyperbolic manipulative inaccuracy. I really fuckin hate lies and liars; that's most of why I can't stand zionists -- lies are to their thinking what theorems are to geometry. Dishonesty is a kind of insanity, the most prevalent and dangerous of all

I know for a fact that blacks are not by and large running around in constant mortal terror of random white rage. This is a ridiculously overblown statement. They were in the Deep South until within my lifetime and rightly so, but not today. As for what the South is like now I think I know that story better than you. I knew one person at the textile mill who was murdered, shot to death by her husband. Black-on-black violence accounted for most of the rest of the black murders in that town (several hundred thousand people, 25% black), with cops making up the remainder. In the decade that I lived in this place there was not a single instance of a race-motivated murder of a black by a white. These are very sensational crimes. I daresay this is an excellent sample of the REAL life-and-death risks faced by blacks today. I will go statistic-hunting if you insist.

The one grain of truth in your housemate's overwrought statement relates to black incarceration rates, racial profiling, etc., i.e. effective policy against blacks which seems orchestrated on a higher-than-state level even though the relevant bodies of law are a domain of state's rights. This has ruling class fingerprints all over it. It was in this context that I said "they're unwitting pawns in this game" and I wish you wouldn't rob my statements of context as you did that one. Average whites may contribute to getting a given black person locked up, but they are not by and large privy to any grand agenda behind black incarceration rates nationwide.

Your housemate isn't impressing me too much JA. About all she's really said is "well obviously you're a fuckin jerk who deserves to get treated like shit and that explains everything." It appears I've committed an unforgivable faux pas by speaking frankly about certain things. Um, pray tell dear housemate, is there some other way to sort this stuff out? And please don't assume in answering that I'm the only one whose stuff needs sorting. Dialogue definitely has its place

Anyway, JA, I wish you well

The Kings of Comedy was also a Spike Lee production. For this reason and others, everything you said to "dismiss" my example 2 was completely off the mark

[JA is a retard
by James Saturday, Oct. 15, 2005 at 5:39 PM

It's 2005 now.

Start from there and move forward.]

and your about a dozen scintillating words amounting to merely jr high school name-calling makes you a fucking genius, ay, uhhh, "james" is it this time?

(actually it's been 2005 for a long while now if you haven't heard. we're a lot closer to 2006.)

TW: "Look JA I *do* appreciate your forbearance and I apologize if I've offended you. Stating this stuff in unvarnished terms is, to my viewpoint, a surer path to clarity than the 'say this, mean that' bullshit game."

No problem. If you want an opportunity for cross-"racial" straight talk without any intent to personally offend -- on either side -- then I can handle it without taking it personally if you can.


"This is stuff I have needed to hammer out with a black person for most of my life, and I don't think I'm the only one. Whenever I've tried to broach this with a black friend it became clear I was about to lose a friend while resolving nothing, so I just dropped it."

And I know that you're not saying so, but do you think it's any different with most whites from a Black perspective? Most of my Black friends talk about how they have to "baby" whites in order to communicate with them on a deeper social level. Even when there are cross-cultural person misunderstandings -- usually when some white person (especially female) has conjured up some self-imagined bullshit offense -- I've given up even trying to find enough baby-coddling words for whites -- to try to establish *human* contact and to try to offer *human* gestures -- to try to iron things out -- because the white person typically expects the world to operate on the basis of white linguistic and social meanings standards -- and doesn't even *know* that they are white standards because white standards are, 'of course', "universal"! And then you wonder why some Black people are "resentful" (or to use your word, "racist")!? There are too lines that I will always remember from someone Black: One, from a friend of mine from the ghetto: "You've got to be damn sociologist in order to deal with those white people!" (He -- coming from the hard *ghetto* -- racial ghettos being *artificial/manipulated*, not natural, economic creations of a white racist system -- even said that sometimes he has regretted giving up and momentarily treating some white person badly when he later felt it was not called for.) And two, a Black rap exclamation which I have always remembered: "We have to lose a portion of our humanity in order to survive!"


TW: "Anyway, thank you for being patient and I hope this doesn't come between us."

No sweat.


TW: "That said, tally-ho!"

Sure, but let me get back to you later. I just got in from a short trip out of town and I have a couple of other posts I have to get back to first.

RE: hmm,
by aaron Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2005 at 7:49 PM

-- [aaron is not Aaron Aarons]


aaron the 'genius': Going all the way back to the late 17th century, and in particular starting in the years after Bacon's Rebellion (when poor whites, blacks and native americans burned down Jamestown),


JA (the decendent of slaves): Yo '*GENIUS*' (I'm gonna be sarcastic, since you, aaron, *tried* to be sarcastic against my female housemate) ... , Bacon's group of rebels -- black and white -- were *SLAUGHTERING* Native Americans, *NOT JOINING* them. The "class conflict" that triggered the rebellion was the desire by poor, particularly white, settlers for harsher colonial policies designed to push those Native Americans still left in Virginia off their remaining lands, because those poorer settler classes (joined by blacks) who were hemmed in between the larger plantations and the then legally enforced Native American borders, saw that as their most likely route to economic betterment. When the colonial authorities instead insisted on policies of then peaceful coexistence with the Native Americans and legally circumscribed settlement borders, and thus delimited settler expansion, a populist settler rebellion (led by one Nathaniel Bacon, who's true motives were questionable) ensued. Poor whites and blacks thus took on a role *VERSUS* -- NOT *WITH* -- Native Americans similar to that that poor whites later took toward blacks. Get your history right: you know, READING IS FUNDAMENTAL! TRY IT SOMETIME!


aaron the 'genius': "working class whites, as whites, have been given relative advantages over blacks as a means of keeping all working class people in check. The ruling class has always feared trans-"racial" solidarity and class affinity and the surest way of keeping such impulses at bay is to recompose class feelings into racial ones, and dispensing justice and apparent privileges along racial lines is the best way of doing this."

JA (the decendent of slaves): First of all, let's remember that "race" was invented, accepted, and imposed by *whites*, not minorities. And after hundreds of years of this imbalance, the only conceivable way to build a "universal" working class consciousness is to eliminate white racial privilege. Until white working class people no longer feel innately superior (mentally, socially, and culturally) to Blacks -- which has not yet happened -- such whites will never work in *genuine* (rather than generally provisional or statistically token) coalition with them, and no amount of Blacks inviting whites to unify with them, given white workers sense of racial superiority and thus superior entitlements to the resources alloted and left to them by the ruling class, will change whites' attitude. Thus, it is not Black/Latino/Native/Asian workers' attitudes that are the determining and limiting factor in most of the country, but white attitudes. The white attitude can only be undermined by *actually dismantling white privilege*. This means that white racial attitudes and active opposition to white-minority racial inequity must be at least verbally addressed first. And whites themselves would be the most effective at challenging other whites and dismantling the institutional systems/structures that constitute white privilege (like, employment discrimination, minority voter disenfranchisement measures, financial redlining/discrimination, locally funded schools, housing discrimination, institutionally reinforced police brutality, differential criminal-justice sentencing, racial jury rigging, etc.).


aaron the 'genius': "In a racist society racial nationalism may appear--or *feel*--radical and transgressive, but in itself it poses no threat to our rulers because it feeds divisions that capital must always kindle if it is to survive."

JA (the descendent of slaves): Well, here's a white liberal version of blaming the victim. Actually, what aaron vaguely calls -- *not* what I call or accept -- "racial nationalism" (and the only kind I've heard of in the U.S. is so-called "Black nationalism") *is* transgressive because it challenges white-supremacy and racism in the U.S. and the very divisions created and sustained by white privilege.

Yet not even aaron's so-labelled "racial nationalism" attempts to substitute white-supremacy with, for example, Black-supremacy (unlike Zionism, Jewish settler-colonial nationalism, an ideology of Jewish-supremacy. in Palestine): minority-Americans have never believed in the biological supremacy of anyone. And so-called "Black nationalism" really meant "Black *cultural* nationalism and Black *economic* nationalism: meaning, encouraging and developing a national Black cultural awareness, consciousness and pride (previously all-but-quashed by white racism) and a self-help consciousness for Black community and national economic development.

Now, "Black nationalism" is not a term I use because it is ambiguous and has different meanings/connotations for different people; also because no American minority has been or is attempting to set up a nation-state within the U.S. and no American minority constitutes a "nation" (also a multi-connotative term) in the modern political science definition/criteria of the term "nation" -- so I avoid the term "Black nationalism" on a technical basis, as well as because it's ambiguous and otherwise, again, because it means different things to different people.


aaron the 'genius': The Nation of Islam may make some whites uneasy but you can be assured that the exploiting class fears them not. Indeed, it has contracted them to do security in the housing projects across America,"

JA (the descendent of slaves): Actually, when the larger white powers that be found out about those housing project contracts in only a few certain cities, pressure was put on the lower powers that be to terminate those contracts: not only because it was the Nation of Islam, but because the NOI was doing a much better job than the police (thus embarrassing them) -- AND WITHOUT GUNS!


aaron the 'genius': "not to mention kill Malcolm X (who was rightly viewed as an increasing threat as he moved away from a racial/nationalist perspective).

JA (the descendent of slaves): The Nation of Islam *HAS MOST CERTAINLY INDEED* been seen as a threat whenever the elite classes were afraid it might grow into a truly mass movement. (Didn't you see the movie "X", aaron? Remember the scene in front of the police station with the phalanx of so-called "Black Muslims"?)

The FBI spied on and harassed Malcolm X *LONG* before he broke with the NOI.

Furthermore, the "increased threat" posed by the post-NOI Malcolm was not because he suddenly embraced white Americans: Malcolm's post-Mecca organization was, after all, called the Organization of *AFRO-AMERICAN* UNITY, with politically "Black nationalist" aims. But Malcolm had gained an *international* perspective that *INDEED* posed a threat to U.S. interests. Malcolm had become a major spokesman for the Third World Movement and The Non-Aligned Nations Movement and thus had become *FAR* more than merely a domestic problem for the U.S. govt -- hence, his assassination became necessary (perpetrated or aided by comission, omission, or direct or indirect facilitation -- what Nelson Mandela used to call "the invisible hand").

Remember aaron, READING IS FUNDAMENTAL!:

"ONLY IN AMERRRIKKKA!!" (a motif Eddie Murphy used to apply and repeat with sociological irony) can you have the descendent of *slaves* exhort a *white* guy of that.


aaron the 'genius': I agree with a good deal of what JA said above, but I believe his race centered perspective is strategically bereft.

JA (the descendent of slaves): Once again, white "liberals/progressives" think that anyone is solely "race centered" who doesn't, in effect, put the primacy on white social and economic concerns/interests (class) *first* and makes everyone else's (more immediate) problem ("race" and catching racial hell) *SUBORDINATE* (like men who always want to subordinate gender interests/concerns as of lesser, rather than equal, importance) -- so any minority who talks about racism is solely "race centered" and "strategically bereft". Such white "liberals/progressives" want to ignore/avoid ruling-class-perpetuated and pre-existing conditions that, indeed, keep all the rest of us emotionally at odds, when not antagonized, and thus politically divided.

[It reminds me of the American Zionists' "Seeds of Peace" program where Israeli Jewish and Palestinian teenagers are brought together in some ideal American summer camp to supposedly to make friends and feel good while Zionist racism is still structurally and firmly in place.The Israeli Jewish teenagers go back home to enjoy continued privilege and the Palestinian teenagers go back home to enjoy continued privation. So, should we fight to abolish the immediate problem -- Zionism, Israeli apartheid -- as we did with legalized American Jim Crowism and South African apartheid -- or wait for that wonderful day when we all overthrow the capitalists and abolish classism. Would Palestinians be long eager to join hands with Israelis who would continue to enjoy -- and never challenge -- a racist system that gives Israelis the likes of 8 times more water and vastly better schools, until they can all defeat the capitalist bosses?: "No, wait! When we all defeat the capitalist bosses everything will be better."]

Actually, at least all my politically conscious teenage and adult life I've considered myself a *multiculturalist* and an *internationalist* -- and, as an adult, I've been on record numerous times on the radio and even interviewed on the PBS Newshour saying so. Furthermore, I don't even believe in races -- a biologically fictitious concept. So, I don't know where the hell aaron gets that I am "race centered".

what the hell ARE you SMOKING?

I AM working to open the abysmally narrow American-white-centric viewpoint to larger realities. This is an excerpt from a piece I wrote recently:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Granted, this government isn’t starving / gassing / incinerating millions of ‘undesirables’ just yet. Instead, it’s concentrating them into the largest prison system the world has ever seen, larger even than that of Stalinist Russia. Do not doubt that this is a kind of death. Blacks particularly are the targets of an incarceration effort that has very creepy eugenic overtones. Suppressing a people’s reproductive capacity doesn’t require killing them: just shove the young virile men into cages until they’re middle-aged. The same policy serves to demolish black family life, communities, and ultimately any prospect of a black cultural resurgence, i.e. a strong sense of identity. This is the same coup de grâce once dealt to Native American cultures by state-sponsored Indian boarding schools. Boldly but briefly, this agenda as it relates to black culture thrust its head out in plain sight when local and federal law enforcement killed the NOW movement in Philadelphia. There are other less dramatic examples. Non-violent ‘drug crimes’ are the main excuse for doing all this to blacks, but if drugs are the real issue why does the U.S. government have a clear, proven, decades-long hand in importation and distribution? Wouldn’t closing that supply valve make more sense than keeping this bait laying around and wrecking the life of anyone who picks it up?

If not for the way WWII demolished Germany’s industrial capacity and transport infrastructures, meaning its ability to sustain large populations, the Germans may well have taken their ethnic elimination programs no further than we’ve now taken ours.

The main war front for this sort of thing is not here at home, however, where so few understand the meaning of the word ‘struggle.’ It’s out there in the global realm of America’s vast colonial holdings. In Africa, for example, where ghastly often genocidal wars have been serving U.S. strategic/economic interests for several decades: Angola, Rwanda/Burundi, Congo, Sierra Leone, Sudan... In these we see the same calculated passive aggression. The United States has played a constant role in weaponizing these countries and whipping political and factional tensions toward full-blown war. Then when the hatred boils over, this government very studiously looks the other way while maintaining the flow of logistical necessities. Why step in? That would assume black Africans exterminating each other is a bad thing. Like most of the rest of the world, Africa is a domain of hegemonic Western control and has been for 100+ years. Such things don’t happen without our passive participation. This is true in terms of weapons alone. The standard line that these are “independent countries that do what they want” would be hilarious if it weren’t so ruthlessly false; every time one of these countries has attempted to become exactly that, assorted Western spooks have slipped out of the shadows and slit the throats of the people responsible.

Similar themes are visible in the U.S. government’s apathy regarding Africa’s AIDS pandemic. Also in U.S./Haiti relations going back 110 years. Also in policies aimed at willful indigenous societies in Latin America. The rural Maya of Guatemala’s northwestern highlands, for example, where Ronald Reagan’s pet puppet Rios Montt subjected the natives to horrors sickening beyond words.

The quiet finesse and far-off invisibility of these patterns doesn’t make America’s fascism less real, only more insidious and effective. So masterful are its perceptual engineering methods that Americans have become the proverbial frogs in boiling water -- even the “dissidents” can’t see it. This is why the Nazis would be so spellbound. Of course, the perceptual engineering gets a big assist from certain innate prejudices: Americans are A) willfully deluded as to this nation’s history, clearly preferring happy myths to gritty truths, and B) the thing they want to know least is that their aggregate moral culture has always been quite like that of a fascist state.

What we did to Indians, for example, was far more damning than what Germans did to Jews. The Holocaust’s most obscene work was tucked out of sight in closed facilities, cleverly sanitized and conducted by a select few on an industrial scale within a few years, while the U.S. indigenous bloodbath was perpetrated openly, crudely, and with unmistakable enthusiasm by the general American public for over a hundred years (the 1864 massacre of Cheyenne at Sand Creek, Colorado, is one example of hundreds). When other European cultures preceded Americans in the same territory (French Louisiana, Spanish Aztlan), their worst treatment of natives paled in comparison to later American practice. These earlier usurpers were not so hell-bent on “opening” the West, i.e. erasing every obstacle to possessing it absolutely even when this meant obliterating other human societies, half of which were completely unoffending. This larger crime perpetrated by ourselves is the one Americans really should ‘never forget,’ but we’ve forgotten already. It’s not one of the happy myths.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I do not deny that collective white self-absorption is a huge part of the problem, but neither do I think it's the ENTIRE problem. When it comes to the discussion between you and I, there are more pressing matters than agreeing on the nature of white self-adoration

I'll check your article out when I get a chance today.

JA: "The Israeli Jewish teenagers go back home to enjoy continued privilege"

_AND EVEN JOIN THE ARMY_


"and the Palestinian teenagers go back home to enjoy continued privation."

[JA: "The Israeli Jewish teenagers go back home to enjoy continued privilege"

_AND EVEN JOIN THE ARMY_


"and the Palestinian teenagers go back home to enjoy continued privation."]

Many Israeli teens suffer serious privation even as they enlist and serve in the military, so much so that many are reluctant to ever go on deserved furloughs and vacations back home to starve and endure other hardships.

RE: a short reply
by anon Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2005 at 11:59 PM


anon: "To JA-- Let me say I think Race is central of any analysis of American society. However I choose to look at it within a class framework, which is what I like about Reed. That's probably may main disagreement with you."

I don't want to make this about Reed. I based my opinion of him on the one article, which I had some disagreements with. If his wider body of work reflects a more balanced perspective, that's fine. But, I find that it fits a pattern that whites have this tendency to declare that "it's class, NOT race". Why does it have to be "either one or the other", instead of "both...and"? I mean, I always wonder why white progressives (especially males) often seem so simple-minded that they can't hold more than one single concept in their heads at the same time -- or get compulsively and rigidly fixed on just one. The world is more complex than that.


anon: "Otherwise I liked your critique of Malik Rahim"

Thanks.


anon: "I heard him on KPFA and he kept on refering to the fact that god was behind everything that was happening in New Orleans."

Malik Rahim -- I assume -- is doing some helpful work (assuming also that he's not being a wrongheaded petty tyrant down there) and he gave some very good information, but it's quite unfortunate that -- especially for a former Black Panther -- he has some severe ideological misconceptions and appears to have gone politically SOFT IN THE HEAD over the years (and you know, just as the right-wing has a LOT of obnoxious bullheaded tyrants, even the left has a SOME that I would *never* want to work under or around). I'd bet that Malik's statements about runnin' people out that he disagrees with -- even those who are otherwise on the same side -- are no surprise to his Black neighbors in New Orleans: I think Malik's crudely arrogant remark on that count reveals an *attitude*, not just a comment. (An parallel analogy would be like a leftist guy who's politically commited and active out in the streets, but denigrates and psychologically abuses his wife and kids back at home.)

You know not everyone can be a sharp political analyst, even if they might do some good work when extra hands are called for: many of us are good at different things and have our best talents in different tasks. Maybe Malik wasn't the Black Panther Party's sharpest political analysts, or perhaps even one of the sharpest motivators/organizers of people -- especially with his attitude and lack of political clarity -- back in the day in the first place: not everyone even on the left excels at everything. Maybe Malik primarily just had strong, useful hands and a good 'megaphone' vioce (as in, "hey, Malik, tell tha brothas out there in the parking lot to bring that stuff over here by the door and give Alphonso a hand with those desks!").

But, there is also a strong Black New Orleans woman called Mama D & her "Soul Patrol" who we've not heard much from on KPFA or other progressive/liberal radio and print/web media. I think that Slave Revolt Radio has covered her because I heard about her from Tracey James: she went out with her Soul Patrol to rescue people and, from what I heard, she's faced down a lot more in her rescue work than Malik Rahim has. I'd like to know more about her!


anon: "As far as Slave Revolt. I've heard it a few times and I would just say that they seemed to deal with race from a "class struggle" or anti-capitalist point of view. Maybe I'm wrong but that's what I thought I heard. They seem to be fairly close to Adolph Reed IMHO but I guess T. James thinks otherwise. No "gotcha" intended. "

Thanks.

Of course Slave has a STRONG anti-capitalist point of view! And, of course, Slave shows how capitalist tyrants can come in ANY color -- on ANY continent -- even in Mother Africa. But Slave certainly DOESN'T minimize the very real issue of RACE in favor of "let's-tell-the-working-class-to-just-join-hands-and-defeat-the-capitalists" wishful thinking. Tracey James is *always* talking about white-supremacy -- he doesn't minimize the issue of racism (and its constant racial double standands, as well as its inherent white privilege): just listen to his "Hurricane Sam" series archived at the Slave Revolt Radio website.


anon: "RWF seems to being saying that identity politics are manipulated well by the democratic party. I would agree. I believe that movements without a class framework of race are always going to end up in the dead end of the democratic party."


And *equally*: class-based activism without a racial awareness or framework is also a dead-end.

If you don't believe me, watch and see. If you think that you can have a white progressive organization in the movement that doesn't address legitimate traditional minority (or gender) issues, interests and needs, and be successful at bringing everyone together to fight anything else, then you haven't been paying attention to American sociopolitical history. Because, in all the cases I can think of, that's exactly why those Black progressive organizations came about in the first place.

And, again, the dismissive, disparaging, backlash term "identity politics" was invented by white conservatives and wittingly or unwittingly adopted by others down the political spectrum -- the term is manipulated not just by either Republicans or Democrats, but by the system.

(The term "politically correct" had a reverse origin up from the left -- as is, "Are you clear on /the/your analysis or are you just saying that or trying to be politically correct?" Sometimes the term was purposely used tongue-in-cheek as shorthand to describe an unfamiliar person, as in "She's politically correct", or "I hear that he's not politically correct". Conservatives subverted the term to mean an imposed, fashionable and silly dogmatic ideological mental straightjacket.)


anon: "And finally Aaron brings up Farrakhan which I would just add that he goes beyond a "race analysis" but to a racial conspiracy analysis of what happened in New Orleans. He's promoting the idea (from what I read in the Final Call) that somebody blew up the levees. His main source seems to be repeating what a white supemacist talk show host named Hal Turner has been saying. Talk about sowing confusion."

The problem is that white liberals -- and even white progressives -- 'always' either immediately jump on or immediately tend to shun/dismiss Blacks in such a knee-jerk fashion whenever those blacks dare bring race into the analysis or discussion: JUST LIKE THE CONSERVATIVES too many white liberals/progressives think that race/racism will go away if we all just stop talking about it or focussing on it! (Would they ever say that about gender? "We don't need a gender analysis: it's class, not gender. Once we overthrow this capitalist system, there won't be any more sexism in men!")

Therefore, the only well-known blacks who dare to express the full force of frustration that many working-class blacks feel in their daily lives are people like Farrakhan. Blacks -- the vast majority of whom have NO intention of giving up bacon, pork sausages, barbeque ribs, pork roasts, let alone beer, and joining the Nation of Islam -- will stand in line by the thousands (not in NOI attire, but in Black church "Sunday bests") at any public speech or listen by the millions to give Farrakhan an audience because he's one of the few who isn't afraid to say what he thinks, and get down to the nitty gritty, and who isn't generally interested in "making nice" with the white liberal establishment -- and (unlike, for example, Jesse Jackson, who is dependent on the Democrat party) is politically and financially independent enough to do so. That may stay the same or that may change if Farrakhan gets higher ambitions in the American system.

For example, Farrakhan will not hesitate to say that the police in the Black community represent a racist *system*, not "a few bad apples". Jesse Jackson is still talking that "few bad apples" bullshit.

Now, neither Tracey James or myself care for Farrakhans politics of advocating a 'vision' of Black capitalism (and Black capitalist bosses) to replace white capitalism. I scoffed at Farrakhan squandering the presence of bringing nominally a million Black men together in PEACE, to not even -- *unlike* the Million Women March -- present a political program or a set of political demands to the president and the government.


(And, as for the ideas of levees being blown up, it isn't so far-fetched. It *has* been done before in great floods in the U.S. to prevent more widespread flooding by relieving pressure on an area's overall levee system and sacrifice land or real estate of lesser value to protect that of greater value. I'll bet that never have the authorities pick some affluent white town or business district to sacrifice first. Whether it was because of weaker-constructed levees or neglected levees or secretly blown levees, I find it suspicious that apparently the poor Black neighborhoods suffered the brunt of the flooding in New Orleans, but the more affluent white neighborhoods and the white business districts either went largely unscathed from the flooding or suffered more minimally.)


Farrakhan -- who is not dependent, politically or financially, on white individual or corporate support or patronage -- *unlike* the NAACP, the Urban League, and all other national Black organizations, which is why the hiphop generation ain't joining them -- and Farrakhan, who has a national reach, will continue to have a following until white liberals/progressives give Blacks a real seat at the table instead of just a token one.

"It's class, NOT race" either ignores the suffering or travails of Black folks or (once again) puts them down or subordinates that suffering to the primarily class interests of white males: this time white workers instead of white capitalists. Blacks see this as both obviously devaluing the culture, experiences, and even suffering of Blacks and other traditional minorities.

I find that it's people -- whether even lower income white women, lesbians, gays, or Black, or whomever -- with a social consciousness who, especially, at any given time are at least *personally* and *currently* suffering the lowest socioeconomic status in America who understand this.This is probably why straight white feminism (often seemingly more concerned with university-degreed white women getting published, or professorships, or executive promotions, etc. -- and many of whom were originally concerned with just *white* women getting the vote, and maybe Black women "later") was never particularly successful at recruiting Black women (who came up with their own term "womanist") -- although, in fact, American history's first feminists were Black women like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.



(Okay, I just finished this over lunch and did this lengthy one for "anon" because of his respectful and inquiring approach, and because earlier I said I would, but I'm going to have to start greatly trimming down any more answers I might give or even peeling off a little. Between my extended discourse and the scholarly books I've listed in earlier posts above, there is enough information for others to think about more on their own. Because, this takes even my proficient typing a lot of cummulative time that I need to devote elsewhere -- and to shorter responses *ZZZINGING* 'DEM *C'-RRRAAAZZZY* Zionists!)

c'rrraaazzzy zionist: "Many Israeli teens suffer serious privation even as they enlist and serve in the military"

Ohhh, the suffering of *Israeli Jewish* teens in the military!: ...it takes a *LOT* to make me cry!

JA, I for one could care less about what makes you cry.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews there live in poverty. Your beloved Palis have done their part to exacerbate this problem.

Obviously anyone challenging your screeds, you brand at least crazy. Now get to your shrink.

C'-RRRAAAZZZY Zionist: "JA, I for one could care less about what makes you cry."

BOOOO-HOOOOO.....!! BWWWWA.......!!!


C'-RRRAAAZZZY Zionist: "Hundreds of thousands of Jews there live in poverty. Your beloved Palis have done their part to exacerbate this problem."

***GGGOOOOD***!!!

(It shouldn't be too long then when Zionism finally falls.)

Even in the unlikely event that Zionism "falls", it'll eventually morph into a different form of Jewish nationalism. Just as the Jewish Second Commonwealth was destroyed in ancient times and eventually Jewish nationalism found its successful expression in Zionism. Jews can wait thousands of years to reestablish independence, at a time when you won't even be a footnote in history.

In the meantime, the Palis are suffering far more, also due to your immense disservice to their cause.

Now buy some meds.

C'-RRRAAAZZZY Zionist racist: "Just exposes your psychotic racist hatred."

Yeah..., I HATE crazy Zionist racists!


C'-RRRAAAZZZY Zionist racist: "Even in the unlikely event that Zionism "falls", it'll eventually morph into a different form of Jewish nationalism. Just as the Jewish Second Commonwealth was destroyed in ancient times and eventually Jewish nationalism found its successful expression in Zionism. Jews can wait thousands of years to reestablish independence, at a time when you won't even be a footnote in history."

Yeah -- and in the *modern* age -- HItler and Mussolini were ALSO trying to revive the race-based glory of their old ancient Tuetonic and ancient Roman kingdoms too -- ALSO based on blood -- while ALSO trying to ethnically exterminate and/or cleanse the land of some despised, demonized, and displace minority (*WHO* were they?--I forgot -- who he was going to make "a footnote in history").

Weren't those new kingdoms supposed to last for a *thousssand* years? So, what's *happening* to your "Land of Milk & Honey"???... Ha-ha-ha!!

But we knew that already, didn't we?

Just another hater in the great fellowship of indybay

"Many Israeli teens suffer serious privation even as they enlist and serve in the military, so much so that many are reluctant to ever go on deserved furloughs and vacations back home to starve and endure other hardships."

Maybe their parents should take them and go back to New York or wherever else they came from in Amerca.

What's significant about Bacon's Rebellion was that it showed the potential class power that the poor in colonial America possessed if they banded together unconstrained by racial allegiances. It began as an anti-Indian war stirred up by an aristocrat (Bacon) for his own narrow personal/political ends, but spun outside his control and culminated with the burning of Jamestown. What was intended to be yet another series of Indian massacres instead morphed into an onslaught against the elite. I have read that Indians joined in the festivities, but you are right that the uprising was composed mainly (if not exclusively) of poor whites and blacks--drawn from the "six parts of seven" of the population that Virginia Governor Berkeley described as "poor, indebted, discontented, and armed." This was a class force that the white planter elite rightly feared. This fear goes a long way in explaining why in the following decades it implemented a racial regime in which poor whites *as whites* were afforded relative privileges over blacks, indentured servitude was phased out, and "black" increasingly meant "slave." This contrasted vividly with the first fifty years of the Virginia colony where miscegenation and black-white solidarity was not uncommon and the living conditions faced by poor whites and blacks were in many ways quite similar.

Most of the rest of what you wrote re these matters I don't have any big disagreements with. I agree with your criticism of summer camps with Palistineans and Israelis which contain the unsubtle message that the only thing getting in the way of peace and harmony is generic ill-will on both sides. Likewise, I agree that the onus is on white workers to shed feelings of racial superiority and repudiate privileges accorded based upon "race" before we can realistically expect blacks to white workers, en masse, as potential allies.

As far as the Nation of Islam is concerned, however, I think you're defense of them is completely weak. NOI is a reactionary, anti-Jewish, capitalist racket lead by a guy who believes in aliens and called for Malcom X's assasination. That you could deny in the same breath as you defend NOI that there are any minorities in the US that believe in racial supremacy is incredible.

If you want to paint me as some "liberal-progressive" racist--so be it. For months you insisted that I was a zionist because I didn't accept your hyperbolic (and indiscriminate) defense of the Iraqi resistance, so I take it with a large grain fo salt.

Thanks for the detailed response. I would agree that white American workers need to repudiate any privilege based on race before there is any hope of fomenting cross racial solidarity into a serious assault on the US ruling class.

I read closely some of your comments on "identity politics" and I do think you have some good insights. Though I disagree on some points about race and class, I see that you're not for people being led into liberal co-optation of the democratic party

And finally, like Aaron, I digress on Farrakhan. For every decent idea Farrakhan puts out-- he has three really horrible ones. And his anti-Jewish politics are off the map.

As far as blown up levees goes. There needs to be some evidence. Farrakhan has absolutely no credible evidence in this regard. So his racial conspiracy theories help distract thousands (if not millions) of black people from the real economic and social policies that are at the root of their problems into disempowering conspiracy theories originally promoted by a white supremacist! However, I don't diagree that real estate speculators will try to keep blacks from reclaiming their homes in New Orleans, which to me is real and not a conspiracy.

The last thing that I want to say about Bacon's rebellion is that I wouldn't want to join working class whites to conquer/massacre another people (whether in colonial Virginia, in "the Indian Wars" of the late 1800's, in the Phillipino-American War at the turn of the 20th century where many Black soldiers defected and joined the the *Philippinos*, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Lebanon, or in Iraq.

I consistently side with the *oppressed* -- whomever they are against whomever attacks them -- and thus those fighting Euro-American imperialism. If that means that even *Black* soldiers must die, THEN SO BE IT. I'd tell anyone that if someone sends you out to kill someone else, the first question you better ask is *WHY* -- and look into it and decide for yourself -- not let the rich and the old -- once again -- send the young and the poor to do the ruling class's dirty work and fighting for them. (Let Bush and Saddam have it out -- mano a mano -- somewhere out in the desert on their own.)

Now, let's take your last point: "For months you insisted that I was a zionist because I didn't accept your hyperbolic (and indiscriminate) defense of the Iraqi resistance, so I take it with a large grain fo salt."

I just glibly called you a Zionist, because Zionists are the biggest supporters around here, posting at Indybay, of the war on Iraq -- and, *of course*, they are the biggest critics of any armed resistance.

Can you even read any perfectly rational analyses of the war in Iraq and make the slightest sense out of it? If you could, you would know that my position is anything but hyperbolic and indiscriminate.


My position with respect to Iraq is this: As Iraqis they have the right to resist any foreign occupation from a country they did not attack or declare war on -- let alone an illegal invasion and a war based on patent *LIES* (the purpose of which was to gain control over their natural resources, resources we don't even need, as our oil came from elsewhere) -- the same way any citizen of any other country has a right to oppose foreign invasion and occupation from any country that it did not attack or declare war on.

Can you to understand anything as absolutely basic as irreducibly fundamental national and human rights?


Furthermore, every international human rights organization or study has pointed out that the U.S. has killed *FAR* MORE -- by *MULTIPLES* -- civilians than the Iraqi "insurgents" have. So, if the U.S. was out, the number of civilians killed would **PLUMMET DRAMATICALLY**.

So, if you hate what those "nasty" insurgents are doing, then do what is necessary over here to see that the resistance doesn't feel that they have to do what is necessary over there. (This is the same thing I say about such resistance fighters as Hamas -- also originally supported by Israel, vs. the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq.) We as Ameircan citizens can do more over here to affect how many Iraqi civilians are killed than the Iraqis can over there.

Now, I would think that this all this seem so *obvious* to anyone *intelligent* and not a wishy-washy *LIBERAL* that, of course, I would not entertain your, then, personal attacks on me to explain it. I don't normally waste a lot of my good time -- like *this* -- to explain the *obvious*.


(Do I support the, especially, fundamentalist religious ideology of many of the "insurgents", although the majority of people in Iraq were "secular Muslims" -- any more than the Christian fundamentalist Bush administration who has invaded Iraq -- anymore than the Jewish fundamentalism ideologically driving Israel? Of course not. But I *do* support the right of people to resist a particularly racist imperialism/colonialism. And I had *already* established before, once I got done playing with you before, by RWF and myself, that the resistance in Iraq is, in fact, if not all neat and clean for a people we had bombed for a decade without much liberal/progressive opposition here -- the same position Arundhati Roy took in one of her speeches -- is also not indiscriminate.)


In short, I support **ARMED RESISTANCE** against, especially, RACIST imperialism (and its troops *whatever* includes their color, and its compradors, collaborators, and lackeys) -- whether in IRAQ or PALESTINE. And the #1 thing we can do TO CHALLENGE THE U.S.'s or ISRAEL's "moral authority" is to at least support the moral *RIGHT* -- and even the OBLIGATION, when necessary -- of either Iraqis or Palestinians to *ARMED RESISTANCE* against imperialism or colonialism. If you can't do that, then you're no leftist -- you're just a damn wishy-washy liberal (the most *insidious* enemy of the people and thus my first target of the revolution so we can clear you/them out from getting in the way).


aaron: "As far as the Nation of Islam is concerned, however, I think you're defense of them is completely weak."

JA *REPEATS* (CUT-&-PASTE, CAPS added): [ "JA: Now, neither Tracey James *OR MYSELF CARE FOR FARRAKHAN'S POLITICS* of advocating a 'vision' of BLACK CAPITALISM (and Black capitalist bosses) TO REPLACE WHITE CAPITALISM. I *SCOFFED* at Farrakhan *SQUANDERING* the presence of bringing nominally a million Black men together in PEACE, TO *NOT* EVEN -- *unlike* the Million Women March -- PRESENT A [porgressive] POLITICAL PROGRAM OR a set of political *DEMANDS* TO THE PRESIDENT and the government." ]

Yeah, that's pretty weak, alright.


aaron: "NOI is a reactionary, anti-Jewish, capitalist racket lead by a guy who believes in aliens and called for Malcom X's assasination. That you could deny in the same breath as you defend NOI that there are any minorities in the US that believe in racial supremacy is incredible."

I've heard all this "anti-Jewish" stuff about Farrakhan and -- and I don't know if it's true or not -- but I haven't yet seen any *PROOF*. But, just as I oppose O.J., I won't stand by an see any Black man *racistly* railroaded. I've heard him speak numerous times but I have never heard him make any anti-Semitic comments and I've never read any anti-Semitic comments in the many issues of The Final Call that I have read. And I've never *ever* seen that 'famous' video/audio tape where Farrakhan supposedly just called Judaism "a gutter religion", if that's part of what you are referring to. If you have any provable evidence as to Farraikhan's anti-Semitism, then I am open to seeing it. I also recognize that Farrakhan was created by *white*-American -- both Christian and Jewish -- *RACISM*; not 'Black-American racism'.

I know that many of the NOI's members come from Black urban degrading ghetto buildings, in places like New York, that used to be owned by Jewish slumlords in many cases -- many of whom *burned* their way out of the slumlord business, leaving many Blacks people homeless. I know that the Jewish-American political establishment has become more and more conservative -- and *anti-Black* -- as their, ahem, "Devil's" (rap language for whitey) deal with the increasingly conservative WASP govt to unequivocally support Israel in oppressing, in turn, another demonized minority (well, the Palestinians weren't a minority in their own land until European Jews invaded Palestine). So, my opposition to Farrakhan is *critical* but not blind.

As for believing in "aliens", I was brought up in a religion that believed in at least *two* great "aliens": the Father, the Son, and The Holy [yyyikes!] Ghost!! -- not to mention *virgin* birth -- turning water into wine and turning a couple of peaces of bread into hundreds of loaves -- and for Judaism, the celebrating of other people's massacres and the suddenly very timely parting of the Red Sea (a story religious Zionist Jews use to justifying modern Israel, for which their is absolutely *NO* objectively historical or archeological evidence! NOI religious beliefs -- especially its religious cosmology -- are basically no more or less ridiculous than those of Christianity or Judaism -- and it too borrows much from the Bible. Most religions attempt a supernatural explanation of origin, existence and reality -- or, alternately, many times, a propaganda ruse to oppress others.

The NOI religion attempted to explain -- during the heart of Jim Crow America and after 400 years of inhuman European slavery and wanton genocide on two continents and the connecting isthmus and all the associated islands in the Americas -- "WHY white men were so *evil*". In NOI religious cosmology -- developed in the 1930's, if I'm right -- can you imagine what the U.S. was like for Black people even then? -- with many former slaves (or Blacks born into slavery as children or Blacks who had slave parents) still living, and often as abject peonage labor (one of slavery's substitutes) -- the answer was that "white men were *genetically* evil."

At least, NOI religious cosmology attempted to answer an urgently valid question addressing *FOUR CENTURIES* of historically *unprecedented* evil, as horrendous as the previous evils were among themselves (including burning countless women at the stake): white people who would attempt to wipe out *TWO* ENTIRE CONTINENTS of indigenous people, to make unlimited room for themselves, and steal as much of a *THIRD* continent's people as they could get their hands on, and who had -- EVEN TO THIS DAY -- this often genocidal and semi-genocidal white OBSESSION WITH POSSESSION of *anything* and *everything*.

Again, my opposition to Farrakhan is *critical* but not blind. White namby-pamby LIBERALS'/pseudo-progressives' *DOUBLE STANDARDS* (what they share with white conservatives) -- like your religious comments about the NOI -- opposition to Farrakhan *is* blind.

Not only that. He's also a bald faced liar. He uses the "also" while knowing perfectly well he's lying.


>>Many Israeli teens suffer serious privation even as they enlist and serve in the military, so much so that many are reluctant to ever go on deserved furloughs and vacations back home to starve and endure other hardships.

>Maybe their parents should take them and go back to New York or wherever else they came from in Amerca.

Only a minute segment of the Israeli populace came from America. Poverty is rare among American-Jewish expats there. About half of the Israeli Jews were born in Israel. It'd be best if you stopped talking out of your behind and went back to wherever you came to America from.

I didn't see your post before I was working on aaron's, last night, while watching a video with my housemates.
.

anon: "I read closely some of your comments on "identity politics" and I do think you have some good insights."

Thanks.


anon: "Though I disagree on some points about race and class, I see that you're not for people being led into liberal co-optation of the democratic party."

Well, feel free to disagree. I'll try taking this discussion a little further with you, as time permits. It'll be interesting to see what your further arguments are.

(As I said, unlike Malik, I'm not going to try to run anyone outta town -- well, except for the Zionists -- haha -- for disagreeing with me -- but then, just like with the latest white-supremacy march, I'd want to run any white-supremacists -- Jewish or Christian -- out of town if they came marching through. I objected to Malik, but I was actually too nice to him. I wanted to retort back, "You're not going to run *me* outta town" And now I'm sorry that I didn't, since he persisted in acting politically ignorant.)


anon: "And finally, like Aaron, I digress on Farrakhan. For every decent idea Farrakhan puts out-- he has three really horrible ones. And his anti-Jewish politics are off the map."

See my comments to aaron on Farrakhan above. See what you think about that. Otherwise, for me, you will have to *document* his "anti-Jewish" politics. You see, I don't just blindly take people's word for anything. I'm last from (though only for a few years) Missouri (St. Louis): "The Show Me State!" So, you'll have to *show me*.


anon: "As far as blown up levees goes. There needs to be some evidence. Farrakhan has absolutely no credible evidence in this regard. So his racial conspiracy theories ..."

No, Blacks have *nevvver* endured about 150 years of *true* racial conspiracies in the *SOUTH*, have they.

Didn't I cover this with you before about the levees?: [ "JA: (And, as for the ideas of levees being blown up, it isn't so far-fetched. It *has* been done before in great floods in the U.S. to prevent more widespread flooding by relieving pressure on an area's overall levee system and sacrifice land or real estate of lesser value to protect that of greater value. I'll bet that never have the authorities pick some affluent white town or business district to sacrifice first. Whether it was because of weaker-constructed levees or neglected levees or secretly blown levees, I find it suspicious that apparently the poor Black neighborhoods suffered the brunt of the flooding in New Orleans, but the more affluent white neighborhoods and the white business districts either went largely unscathed from the flooding or suffered more minimally.)" ]

Now, I myself, am not particularly concerned with *how* the levees failed. I only care that it appears that they only failed whether to purposely poor construction (to undoubtedly save money), neglect, or even being blown in/around/near poor *Black* neighborhoods which apparently suffered the brunt of the flooding. And I wouldn't be surprised, one day, to find out one of *any* of those three reason why they failed if they didn't have to. And, ultimately, I only care how poor and working-class Blacks were/are treated *after* they failed.

I'm neither a follower of, nor *fixated* on, Farrakhan -- next to the white racist shell game of the O.J. boogeyman one year, the Mike Tyson boogeyman another year, Latrell Spreewell boogeyman another, or any other successive white folks' Black boogeyman of the year, or some perennial Black boogeyman like Farrakhan.

And especially neoconservative American Zionist Jews have tried to exploit Farrakhan for all he is worth as, in effect, their #1 domestic boogeyman fundraising figure -- and as a way to project any latent white-American anti-Semitism all onto Blacks, because those Zionist Jews couldn't go around calling the goyim nasty names all the time while urging the goyim's support, especially financial support in the role of billions of dollars in American taxes unequivocally going to Israel every year getting nothing substantive but big foreign policy headaches and exposing *ourselves* to danger back in return.


(You ever notice how Bart train stations have all those benches, including the 'cute' round concrete and tiled 'mushroom' ones at the Embarcadero station for the largely white yuppie commuters that work in the financial district -- *EXCEPT* at the 16th street station -- where Bart has *NONE* -- in the heart of San Francisco's poor/working-class immigrant Mission district? Now was that "a conspiracy" or do you care what the particular reason was, that the people -- poor immigrants -- who probably per capita own among the fewest cars, and therefore would depend on Bart the most, yet have the fewest benches to wait for trains on -- *NONE* -- at their central Bart station?)


anon: "[Farrakhan] ... help distract thousands (if not millions) of black people from the real economic and social policies that are at the root of their problems into disempowering conspiracy theories originally promoted by a white supremacist!"

You know, poor/working-class Black people don't need some white-supremacist to tell them (for his own purposes) that they're catchin' hell (and they're certainly not about to follow him if he does). And Black people in New Orleans could hardly be distracted from the flood waters, toxic residues, misery, and lack of appropriate resources all around them. And once Black people noticed that it was largely their neighborhoods that suffered the brunt of the flooding, they didn't need Farrakhan or anyone else to have them theorize about *why* -- theories whether true or false.

Farrakhan only publicly magnifies the thoughts, opinions and voices that most ordinary Blacks *already have* about how a white racist system -- and its otherwise mostly bound-&-gagged from speaking directly Black politicians -- treats especially poor and workingclass Blacks (I know how it's treated *me* in relatively *affluent* neighborhoods/institutions!). Black people openly or secretly like that he is basically voicing their straighforward, no-nonsense, *tell-it-like-it-izzz* opinions publicly, straight to white folks -- the same way Malcolm X once did (though Malcolm's intellectual development capacity was light-years ahead of and much deeper than Farrakhan or the NOI) -- and with a deft articulation and style that most/many of them may not have.

And as long as Farrakhan isn't having Black grandmothers sending him the last of their pension and insurance money -- like white fundamentalist preachers do for their followers -- then I'm really not into quoting his every word, like, "Did you *hear* what *Farakhan* said!?"


In perhaps my first major commentary that I wrote for at a midwestern university campus newspaper about discrimination against Black workers, I got so much love and hugs and congratulations from Black workers who loved how I said what they had to experience -- I laid it down *def* -- in basically a very educated and intellectually unassailable way -- but with a certain style, as always. Still I was so pleasantly surprised, almost *stunned*, at the Black workers' accolades for me everywhere I went all over the campus. It showed me how oppressed or semi-oppressed people ache to see their experiences publicly validated and intelligently articulated. (And that's how white progressives can help Black workers join white workers in the class struggle: to begin that endeavor by dealing with race.) At that midwestern university Blacks had seen nothing like that in print there, because any Black worker who might be able to say/write that publicly would probably lose their job, and probably not even the few Black professors their would write about it out of fear of being called a Black militant, accused of having a chip on their shoulders, and ostracized by their white colleagues and retaliated against by the administration.

How does that one rap lyric line end?: "...the most dangerous weapon -- an educated Black man." (who isn't afraid)


anon: "However, I don't diagree that real estate speculators will try to keep blacks from reclaiming their homes in New Orleans, which to me is real and not a conspiracy."

But *that*, by definition, *is* a conspiracy -- a real estate conspiracy to keep poor Black people from moving back into New Orleans! -- not unlike many other real estate conspiracies when it comes to poor and working-class minorities -- unless the real estate developers are going to announce it *publicly*!


I don't mean to give you a hard time on Farrakhan. I appreciate your thoughts. As a social creation of white-American racism, I think that his rise to national spotlight/'spokesman' can be an interesting phenomemon. But, I think that I have already given enough of my opinion and analysis on him -- he's basically a very articulate social creation of white-American racism, I don't follow him (especially because of his role in Malcolm's death which to my knowledge he's never apologized for), I don't pay much intellectual attention to patriarchal religious orthodoxies, but I still oppose racist and racist double standard attacks on him, and I more or less leave it t that. Other than that -- and unless you want to document your claim about his "anti-Semitic" (a claim mostly promulgated by neoconservative anti-Black racist Jews), our time would be more fruitful in sorting out your remaining disagreements with me about race and class.


I just looked once more back up at your last post. It's not Farrakhan's "racial conspiracies" that would distract Blacks "from the real economic and social policies that are at the root of their problems". It's his championing of Black capitalism to replace white capitalism solution. Why not work for a *new* vision (for which there have already been limited successful models elsewhere and before to emulate): to build classless or class-minimized, human-oriented communities that provide a strong sense of a caring community that provide an alternative to, or depend the least on, capitalist relations and capitalist activity between its members? He's got the money, the national organization, the personnel, and the following to try that.

Just like the NOI provided an alternative to armed policing in certain projects. Just like the NOI provides its own alternative to junk/processed food consumption and non-preventative health maintenance. Just like the NOI provides a supposedly rather successful alternative, based on brotherly/sisterly love and increasing one's self-esteem, to traditional substance abuse programs. Farrakhan's so-called 'vision' of nothing but Black capitalism to replace white capitalism is the distraction.

National Black Agenda Convention: Boston, March 18, 2004

On Jews and Homosexuals:
“I call them the so-called Jews because to be a Jew you have to adhere to the statutes and laws that create the special relationship. How can you be a Jew and promote homosexual marriage?”

On alleged Jewish control of the slave trade:
“If we dig, we run into the Jewish pot of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”

On the Talmud:
“Dewey, Kant and Hegel, and the rabbis that wrote the Talmud, make blacks inferior.”

Saviours’ Day: Chicago, February 29, 2004

On alleged Jewish control of the slave trade, and the NOI’s book enumerating this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory,
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews:
“So when the Jews were punished and beaten and murdered, they left Spain. Where did you go? Went into the Carribean. Went into South America and you became plantation owners. That is why many Jewish people don’t want us to talk about reparations. I’m not a hater, just get that out of your mind. My passion is for truth and justice. But no Jewish person who will be brave enough to read your history will come away saying your hands are cleaned. Here’s a book, where’s my book? Here it is – it’s called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews… One of our brothers, brother Allen, did research in Jewish libraries, he never quoted a rabbi or Jewish scholar who was a hater of the Jewish people. He put out this book.”


On the Hamitic curse:
“You don’t mention the horror of our suffering. Here’s why…it’s because of something called the Hamitic curse. Now I know that this is kinda rough. But according to the Babylonian scholars, writers of the Talmud, not the Torah, but Talmud. Now I want you to listen….Look at this now, the Hamitic curse was written off in the Talmud 400 years after the birth of Jesus. And the way they wrote it was, I got to find the exact words, ‘cause it’s really powerful….Oh, Lord, let me find it. I’m gonna take my time. Oh boy, well I’m gonna say it, in the Talmud they talk abut because he looked at Noah in that condition and marked the redness of his eyes, the turning of his head made these kinks in his hair, the thickness of his lips – that’s our features. We were black and cursed."

On Jewish control of the media:
“See, you so called Jews – I’m not gonna give you the credit for being one of those that obey God. You portrayed us, you know what images do, that’s why you jumped on Mel Gibson. But you painted us, big lips, red eyes, kinky hair, you put in the movies like that. You mocked our characteristics and made us to hate God’s creation of us. You did that. Hollywood did that….You take our strongest, more courageous black minds, you think we don’t see you? And you put us in Hollywood. You give us television shows, and then we gotta bug our eyes.”

8th Anniversary The Holy Day of Atonement speech at Mosque Maryam, Chicago, 10/16/03

"You say I hate Jews. I don't hate the Jewish people, I never have. But there [are] some things I don't like. 'What is it you don't like, Farrakhan?' I don't like the way you leech on us. See a leech is somebody that sucks your blood, takes from you and don't give you a damn thing. See, I don't like that kind of arrangement. You become our manager, you become our agent. Every one of us that got talent, we can't make it because you opened the door, and when you opened the door you get and we end up dead with nothing, owing the IRS."

Farrakhan on Sen. Joseph Lieberman:

"Mr. Lieberman, as an orthodox Jew, is also a dual citizen of Israel."

Los Angeles Times, 8/12/00

Farrakhan: "Is the Federal Reserve owned by the government?"
Audience: "No."
Farrakhan: "Who owns the federal reserve?"
Audience: "Jews."
Farrakhan: "The same year they set up the IRS, they set up the FBI. And the same year they set up the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith… It could be a coincidence… [I want] to see black intellectuals free… I want to see them not controlled by members of the Jewish community."

Dallas Observer on-line, 8/10/00


Farrakhan on Jewish control:

Farrakhan said that he is fighting the "inordinate control" some Jews have over Blacks, particularly in entertainment and business.

Associated Press, 7/31/00

"They [the Jews] are the greatest controllers of Black minds, Black intelligence. They write the scripts -- the foolish scripts on television that our people portray. They are the movie moguls that feature us in these silly, degrading, degenerate roles. The great recording companies that portray our people in such a filthy and low-rating way, yet they would not allow such a man as Michael Jackson to say one word that they thought would besmirch their reputation, but they put us before the world as clowns and as purveyors of filth. No, I will fight that."

Meet The Press interview, 10/18/98

"Of course, they [the Jews] have a very small number of people but they are the most powerful in the world, they have the power to do good and they have the power to do evil...Now what do the Jews do best? Well, they have been the best in finance that the world has ever known...They finance a lot of stuff in the world, and there's nothing wrong with that, but they are not good politicians, they are the worst politicians because they don't recognize really their friends and as well their enemies..."

Saviours' Day Speech, Chicago, 2/22/98

"I believe that for the small numbers of Jewish people in the United States, they exercise a tremendous amount of influence on the affairs of government...Yes, they exercise extraordinary control, and Black people will never be free in this country until they are free of that kind of control..."

Joseph Anderson cares about none of that. He even coveretly admires Farrakhan's antisemitism, not so covertly, certainly enthusiastically.

*THAT* WAS *FFFUNNN*... !!!

WE ALLL -- JEWISH AND NON-JEWISH -- RRRAN HIS ZZZIONIST RRRACIST ASS RRRIGHT OUTTA TOWWWNNN!!!

HA-HA-HA --HA-HA...!!


(I even *wrote* about the deed in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Berkeley Daily Planet!)

"Free speech" advocates bragging about denying someones rght to free speech? The hypocracy just grows. Because to anti-zionists, "Justice" means "Just us".

JA, doesn't that make you 7/8 cracker?

What did you do in that capacity? Fondle his nuts?

your *documention* *URL's* are missing: that's called *PROOF*.


re [Louis Farakhan on "The Jews"
by Louis Farakhan on "The Jews" Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005 at 9:40 AM]

re [ SchtarkerYid: " "Free speech" advocates bragging about denying someones rght to free speech? " ]

We -- anti-racist, anti-Zionist Jews and non-Jews alike -- deny the 'right' of *A MASS HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATOR* to carry on without inconvenient interruptions.


The same reason we would run any other 'Hitler' or white-supremacist (this time Zionist instead of Aryan) out of town.

Exactly, you've just nailed what makes you a hypocrite. Free speech means free speech for all, not just those that you agree with. Your closed minded bigoted opinions don't get to dictate who gets to speak. Even ignorant, hateful bigots like yourself get the rights that you would deny to others.

SchtarkerYid: "Free speech" advocates bragging about denying someones rght to free speech?]

Racist Anderson: "We -- anti-racist, anti-Zionist Jews and non-Jews alike -- deny the 'right' of *A MASS HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATOR* to carry on without inconvenient interruptions. The same reason we would run any other 'Hitler' or white-supremacist (this time Zionist instead of Aryan) out of town"

Translation:
We -- racist, anti-Zionist Jews but mostly non-Jews -- deny the right of *ANY SPEAKER RUNNING A JEWISH ZIONIST STATE to speak without being subjected to uncivil behavior and/or physical threats. We consider any national Jewish leader on par with Hitler or white supremacists.

Zionist: [ Translation: "We -- racist, anti-Zionist Jews and non-Jews -- deny the right of *ANY SPEAKER RUNNING A JEWISH ZIONIST STATE to speak without being subjected to uncivil behavior and/or physical threats. We consider any national Zionist Jewish leader on par with Hitler or white supremacists." ]

Lets learn from JA and give Illan Pappe the same kind of reception!

Oh, I forgot. We are the good guys. We don't do that kind of thing.

JA- are you gonna kiss Pappe's butt next week or is that kind of fawning admiration reserved just for Finkelstein? You were down right embarrassing to watch. And in a church, yet!!!!!

JA confesses to being antisemitic. His pitiful resot to the "Zionist" figleaf is a vain effort to maintain a facade of political respectability.

I didn't even ask Finkelstein a question!

And these Zionists are actually trying to *embarrass* me by saying that I admire Norman Finkelstein! Now, they're going to try to embarrass me by saying that I admire Illan Pappe!

What next?: are these Zionists going to try to embarrass me for my admiring Tim Wise, or Baraba Lubin, or Jeffrey Blankfort, or even Cynthia McKinney?

Okayyy... Gee, is myyyy face *rrrred*!!

Happy!?...


('Dem Zionist boys is on *CRACK*!!)

JA should be embarrassed. Not just for falling all over Finklestein (as if Finklestein has anything to say of consequence other than that he wishes that he was Allan Dershowitz. Has anyone ever heard a real academic mention his mother more times in a lecture or what?) but for being a bigoted hypocrite in a preppies ward robe.

Farrahkhan is an antisemite by any measure. The quotes above are the tip of iceberg.

It's almost straight from the antisemitic textbook. The Jews control the financial system and Federal Reserve. The Jews drove black slavery. The Jews control the media. The Jews are responsible for the IRS and FBI, etc., etc., ad nauseaum.

One of the signature features of antisemitism is to endow Jews with mystical powers of control and manipulation. No need to understand, let alone explain, how the financial system works--or anything else for that matter--when one can sum it up with "the Jews are in control."

The internal logic of antisemitic hatred leads ineluctably toward the view that all Jews must be eradicated.

JA, you're always bragging about how fucking smart and learned you are. Stop playing dumb about Farrakhan.

How can you not see that much of JA's admiration for Farrakhan is precisely because of the antisemitism of these two racists? JA has also failed to distance himself from an antsemitic NOI screed which accuses the Jews in America of beaing almost equal partners in the Black slavery business..

I DON'T KNOW IF AARON WROTE THIS, "hmm", BECAUSE IT IS JUST *TOO* DAMN **IGNORANT**!!


RE: " hmm,
by aaron Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005 at 12:48 PM

Farrahkhan is an antisemite by any measure. The quotes above are the tip of iceberg. ...

[...BLAH, BLAH, BLAH ..., GUILT BY MERE ACCUSATION AND OTHER IRRELEVANT BULLSHIT PADDING ...

THIS AIN'T THE FIRST TIME IN AMERICA THAT SOME WHITE GUY HAS ATTEMPTED TO FRAME A BLACK MAN.]

... JA, you're always bragging about how fucking smart and learned you are. Stop playing dumb about Farrakhan. "


YOU KNOW WHY I'M SO "FUCKING SMART AND LEARNED"? BECAUSE I DEMAND LEGITIMATE **DOCUMENTATION**, PROPPER **VALIDATION**, AND APPROPRIATE ***PROOF*** FOR PEOPLE'S CLAIMS.

NOW WHERE ARE THE DOCUMENTATION ***URL's*** FOR THE ABOVE CLAIMS AND SO-CALLED 'QUOTES' PURPORTED TO BE FARRAKHAN?

I'M SO "FUCKING SMART AND LEARNED" BECAUSE I DON'T OPERATE ON MERE HEAR-SAY AND RUMOR.

IT'S CALLED -- ARE YOU READY FOR THIS LEARNED WORD? -- **EPISTEMOLOGY** .

THAT'S WHY I CAN ARTICULATELY DISCOURSE IN A WAY THAT YOU **CAN'T**, "AARON" -- AND THAT JUST *PISSES* OFF THE ZIONISTS (HA-HA-HA!!) -- AND INTELLECTUALLY FORCE YOU TO ADMIT WHEN I'M RIGHT, "AARON", AS YOU OTHERWISE HAD TO ABOVE.

NOW MY FIRST ASSUMPTION ABOUT A **ZIONIST** IS THAT S/HE IS **LYING** WHENEVER THEY MOVE THEIR LIPS AND UNLESS THEY GIVE ***PROOF*** -- OR UNLESS I ALREADY KNOW, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, FROM OTHER DOCUMENTATION AND PROOF.

THE FACT THAT ***PROOF*** -- ***URL's*** WERE SO ***CONSPICUOUSLY ABSENT*** IN SO-CALLED 'QUOTE' AFTER 'QUOTE' ABOVE --- POSTED BY A ZIONIST --- MAKES ME ***IMMEDIATELY SUSPICIOUS***.

AFTER ALL, IF ZIONISTS CAN LIE ABOUT DRIVING AT LEAST 750,000 PALESTINIANS OUT OF THEIR HOMES IN 1947/8 ALONE...,

AND IF ZIONISTS CAN FABRICATE AN ENTIRE LETTER AND SAY THAT **MARTIN LUTHER KING** (!!!) WROTE IT -- LIE ABOUT **KING**(!!!) ...,
(see "Fraud Fit for a King", by anti-racist, anti-Zionist Jewish-American activist Tim Wise)

AND IF ZIONISTS CAN FABRICATE WHOLE STORIES ABOUT AND FRAME OTHER PEOPLE ...,

THEN I DON'T BELIEVE A **DAMN THING** ZIONISTS SAY UNLESS THEY GIVE ME ***PROOF*** -- ***PERIOD***.

IF ZIONISTS CAN'T DO THAT, "AARON", BUT YOU STILL JUST TAKE THEIR WORD FOR IT, THEN YOU CAN BELIEVE WHATEVER YOU WANT TO BELIEVE IF IT SUITS YOU AND YOUR READY RACIAL PREJUDICES.


===================================================================


SO, "AARON", *WHAT* **IS** YOUR POSITION ON "THE JEWISH STATE", ISRAEL AND ZIONISM VIS-A-VIS THE PALESTINIANS???

SchtarkerYid: "Has anyone ever heard a real academic [Finkelstein] mention his mother [a Holocaust survivor] more times in a lecture or what?"

NOT SATISFIED TO TRY TO 'TAR' ME FOR ADMIRING FINKELSTEIN AND PAPPE, ZIONISTS EVEN 'TAR' FINKELSTIEN FOR ADMIRING HIS ELDERLY MOTHER.

ZIONISTS -- HAVE THEY NO SHAMMME? *HAVE* THEY NO **SHAMME**!? NEXT THE ZIONISTS WILL BE ATTACKING FINKELSTEIN'S MOTHER HERSELF.

WHAT WILL THE ZIONISTS HERE DO NEXT!???

JA, you're just frothing at the mouth, again.

Why should anyone pay any attention to someone who lies constantly about everything, beginning with the fundamental matter of their identity?

http://www.indybay.org/news/hidden.php?id=1773003#1773999

Answer: you shouldn't

Yes- what do you say about someone who constantly uses a different handle?

http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/10/1774983_comment.php#1775776

You anti-zionists have called me all kinds of things. So what? No, I'm not 14, I'm not "Becky" etc. Oh, and I have teeth TW

answers?
by if the troll fits • Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005 at 5:15 AM

"Oh but tia stupid that wasn't until after you started screaming "white supremacist," "troll," etc. in retaliation for me calling you a fascist, and I'm sorry but you simply ARE."

Fine. I am willing to give up playground tactics if you are. Chose a handle. If you use one consistently, I will. Until then if the "troll" fits....
And any devotee of Elizabeth Dilling deserves to be called a white supremacist, and I'm sorry, but they simply DO.

"You proved it a long time ago with your desperation to defend one of the most blatantly fascist countries on earth today."

Didn't Orwell say the term fascist had become just another meaningless modern insult, incorportating anyone who liked youth hostels, dogs or Chang kai Shek? You throw around meaninless insults, I throw around meaningless insults.

"Likewise, your new asshole friend is a quintessential American fascist right down to the Eagle Scout credential (BSA is the American Hitler Youth) and the gung-ho ex-jarhead mentality, and you two get on like frikkin peas in a pod, don't you?"

BSA is one of the few organizations around that teach kids practical skills for self reliance. It has major, major issues- but there aren't many organizations that attempt what it does. Any group that gets kids outta the cities and into the Sierra can't be all bad. If you don't know what is out there to preserve, you aren't going to have any motivation (although apparently that logic didn't work for "Eagle Scout")

"peas in a pod" - I was in that thread first- you attacked me- there was no mention of Israel- but all you wanted to do was destroy my credibility. It felt like I was being cyber stalked. At least the Eagle Scout was polite. Sort of.

"So anyway who is the "we" in "We're trying to get this troll kicked off the website"?"

Thats what you are really trying to find out, huh? Looking for clues to the vast Zionist conspiracy? Nobody down here but little old me and some free-masons.
And why do you think that was from me? I've seen that line thrown about quite a bit around here.

"Also, you've dropped the "$6 billion embezzled by Arafat" bullshit bomb a few more times since I last called you on it. Do you have anything now that actually substantiates this?"

Duh. It was from Al jeezera. Again. And from Forbes Magazine. And 60 minutes, and about a dozen other sources. Do you need urls?

"Also when did I brag about my income and "belittle labor,"

Covered. I must have misplaced my Audubon field guide to troll identification. If you ever take the white hood and robes off, maybe I won't make the same mistake twice.

"cornflake brain?"

Gehrig, Yid- Now he's seeing cornflakes IN his Zionists!!!!!

*YID* -- A PSYCHOTIC ZIONIST WITH A MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER!!


OH, 'DEM ZIONIST BOYS JES' CRACK ME UP!!

HA-HA-HA--HA-HA!!

and an irrelevant one at that

I'm willing to dig up sources that detail Farrakhan's and NOI's long history of engaging in anti-Jewish hatred and shit-talking, but I'm curious why you (JA) are unwilling to address those posted above.

A very quick look at a google on Farrahkan pops up some shit which I'm sure JA will dismiss as proving nothing but is pretty damning to anyone who's not inclined to come to his defense. Farrahkan is on record as saying that "Hitler was a great man" and "Judiasm is a gutter religion." Over the years he has repeatedly raised the Jews as a--or *the*--chief source of black woes. That JA would deny this is pretty pathetic.

Certainly, you must remember the name Khaled Muhammed, JA. Was he an antisemite?

In my google (which I'm willing to further pursue, but not for a couple days due to being busy) I found this short piece on Adolph Reed, who, I learned, wrote a book sharply critical of Farrakhan. Seems relevant.

http://www.postelservice.com/archives/000016.html

as to this thread:
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/10/1774983_comment.php#1775776
I made one appearance. Guess which one

And I have NEVER sanctimoniously stated "I have *one* name and I stick with it." Yidiot has. But hey, Yidiot **LIES**. CONSTANTLY. Does that make you mad Yidsky-buns? Is that what you mean by "I have teeth?" Well come on down, then! You've been turning in your info on me like a good bug-eyed pro-Israel traitor, haven't you? I'm sure ADL can tell you where I live by now. Just know this up front: I won't be easy like Faurisson. Your mama may not find you so adorable when your skull doesn't extend above your brow ridges anymore

re tia "devotee of Elizabeth Dilling...?" Look asshole, you don't even know what you're talking about. You got this second-hand from gehrig, and if you actually TRUST gehrig then *I* am absolutely the least of your problems

Who gives a fuck what Orwell said? The term Orwellian is best applied to Orwell himself -- a virulent anti-communist ideologue who wrote propaganda professionally for the British Government and whose best-known works are also rabid anti-communist propaganda, although everyone seems to have forgotten this now. The guy came out of the Spanish Revolution twisting words and meanings relentlessly and never looked back. That's why he was such an expert on it. It's to him that we owe the ridiculous useage of the word 'reactionary' -- his favorite smear of the left.

Fascism wasn't just a German thing. It's what the Western class imperative naturally evolves toward given adequate technology and social science; capitalist totalitarianism if you will. The Germans were just the vanguard. After they got taken down, the US and British "liberal" governments became the vanguard, and we've been proving it all over the world ever since. We even hired Hitler's and Tojo's ex-underlings to keep them doing exactly what they did before: hunting down and killing the same leftists we were calling allies before the war ended. This emerged in nationalist China, Korea, Vietnam, Philippines, all of Western Europe, the Balkans, Greece -- Hitlers goons became our goons. Same with the human experimenters, both German and Japanese. Cool guys! Bring' em right on over to the States! Total amnesty! Joseph Mengele who?

You can't pursue global domination without some neato doomsday weapons, ya know!

It's the real context of Chamberlain's infamous "appeasement," also. The British knew exactly what they were doing. As long as Hitler looked like a rabid dog who could be unleashed EASTWARD, he was their buddy, they egged him on. If he'd just stuck to that he'd be a hero to this day, even if he did all the same shit behind the scenes. You'd never hear a peep about all that. You still don't hear about the 30,000,000 Russians he killed. It was only when Hitler also advanced *westward* that he bacame "a madman who had to be stopped."

So Orwell -- a paid propagandist of a fascist government -- discredits the word "fascist," eh? My that IS persuasive!

tia: "I was in that thread first- you attacked me- there was no mention of Israel"

You mean two days ago when I said this: "Fascists like the two of you have other domains..."? Because I'd noticed you already and had posted in the thread repeatedly, and this is the first time I went anywhere near you. And yes you had brought up Israel already. Go back and look. Now I'll admit it wasn't a nice thing to say, but neither was it aimed directly at you, but at a smug planet-killing asshole who totally had it coming. You will never persuade someone like this to see the environmental light, quit fooling yourself.

tia: "BSA is one of the few organizations bleep bleep blappy blap.."

NO. The BSA is EXACTLY what I said it is: an equivalent of the Hitler Youth, i.e. a fascist program to socialize young boys to the military life. Camping out, uniforms, rankings, everything regimented, shit they even take field trips to military bases every year and shoot machine guns, ride tanks, i.e. get enticed by the super-neato way of life that awaits the Eagle Scout. The agenda is OBVIOUS. Worked on your jar-head pal like a charm, didn't it? Do you actually believe this government would put anywhere near this much effort into a program that was about self-esteem or tree-hugging? You have a lot of waking up to do. Go back and re-read what I said about Orwell

re: "the vast Zionist conspiracy": So if it wasn't you, just say so, and if it was you why did you use the word "we?" This would be the *honest* approach to the question. Mystifying, huh?

tia re Arafat's $6 billion: "It was from Al jeezera. Again."

Ah, but numnuts, that Al Jazeera piece didn't substantiate any such claim! They said Arafat had a $6 billion portfolio and that the PA wanted this rolled into the treasury, they did NOT say where he got it from. I pointed this out before. What's with the facultative amnesia? So far you have done NOTHING to convince me this bit about Arafat isn't just like everything else you pro-Israel maniacs get your hands on: start out with a little kernel of fact and roll it into a giant snowball of defamatory lies, always working from the gloating presumption that your audience is stupid enough to fall for it. And then you wonder why we're so combative!

If it's just that you've been fed a giant system of propaganda yourselves and have fallen for it, then again, you need to wake up

I didn't know all that stuff about Orwell. ...Quite revealing.

As for Hitler: yes, you stated it more articulately, but I always interpreted the Munich Agreement not as "appeasement", but as Chamberlain wanting to avoid another world war, if that was possible -- as ulitmately pointless as WWI -- a war that would cost millions of lives and decimate the British workforce again: 'After all, Herr Hitler only wants what the rest of us -- any respectable and internationally aspiring major player country -- wants: colonies and empire. As long as he doesn't mess with us, or our treaty-allied countries (like Poland), we can let him have some other countries like Czechoslovakia, Austria, and a few other countries to the east, and how 'bout Russia (he can solve that problem), as well as some non-European colonies again (as long as he doesn't threaten ours).'

Hitler actually had/wrote a very good discourse asking how Germany could be critcized for merely wanting what Britain and France had been doing all over the world: getting colonies, using virtually slave colonial workforces, and building their empires. Hitler also had good criticisms of the Weimar Republic. And Hitler rose to power just as the U.S. was finishing the hunting down of the last of the great Native American chiefs and the remnants of their tribes and put them on worthless (well, until gold/uranium/copper was discovered) extended concentration camp hellholes (where virulent and homicidal white racism coupled with a more readily identifiable, well by then, minority was the fence) called reservations. And Hitler got his ideas for "ethnic hygience" from racial practices in the U.S. started and used against Black-Americans. Hitler thought that he might fall behind the U.S. in getting rid of or isolating, controlling and oppressing his unwanted minorities.

(And just like with the extended concentration camps called the Gaza Strip, and what's left of the West Bank, and the Palestinian refugee camps, the remaining indigenous Americans neither actually owned nor controlled the natural resources under their feet, the sky over their heads, or the borders around their relegated reservations land.)

Of course, that doesn't begin to exonerate Hitler's genocide against -- first -- the mentally and genetically/congenitally handicapped (those who didn't fit his claim about non-Jewish/-Romani Germans being "the superior race"), then leftists (which Western govts liked), and only later "Gypsies" and Jews (Jewish extermination camps started in 1942/3, the last few years of the Nazis 13-year reign), as well as his slaughter of Slavs.

Not so by the way: ABC News conservative wack George Will *ALSO SAID* that "Hitler was a great man" -- and in the same context that Farrakhan said it -- that Hitler was a greatly wicked man who held a powerful sway/control over his people (just like all the 'great' *Zio*Nazi leaders) -- but the Zionists and white "liberals" never went after George Will and Will was never demonized for saying the same thing that Farrakhan said in the same context.


Anyway, great post TW. I love the way you skewer those Zionist dolts.

aaron: "I'm willing to dig up sources that detail Farrakhan's and NOI's long history of engaging in anti-Jewish hatred and shit-talking, but I'm curious why you (JA) are unwilling to address those posted above."

I TRIED TO GIVE YOU A CHANCE, AARON, BUT SINCE YOU WANT TO ACT LIKE AN *IG'N'ANT* FOOL, THEN YOU CAN DO IT WITHOUT ME. YOU'RE JUST PISSIN' AGAINST THE WIND.

Farrakhan said -- on the Oprah Winfrey show -- that "*ANYONE* who uses their religion to oppress others is practicing it as a gutter religion -- whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim."

Of course we all *understand* why Zionist Jews would leave out most of that quote, take only *three* selected words, take them out of context, and claim that Farrakhan said that, 'Judaism is a gutter religion'. And it becomes a Zionist-created urban legend. What did Geobbels say about constantly repeating a lie over and over and over again [you know, like the Zionists' "land without a people" line], until most people think it's true? ZioNazis have learned quite well the methods of the original Nazis, haven't they?

Haven't you always wondered why Zionist Jews could never come up with a *video/audio* tape of Farrakhan -- and play that over and over again on TV/radio -- saying what they claimed he said?

These are also the same people who came up with the Martin Luther King letter (ref., "Fraud Fit for a King") that no one ever saw!

I think it was true that no one save Hitler's inner circle of maniacs wanted another WWI, but the "Chamberlain's appeasement" account has a mind-blowing stench of historical myth. The British were the world's most seasoned imperialists. The suggestion that they were NAIVE in those negotiations is just insultingly absurd. Meanwhile Harry Truman (Missouri Senator at the time) was saying things like we should just let Stalin and Hitler "bleed each other white," meaning not intervene so long as the Nazis were just heading east. Truman was pandering to the "isolationist" crowd, of course, but he was also probably letting the cat out of the bag vis what the brits really had in mind -- except it was only the communists they truly wanted dead. Hitler was a rogue, but he was our kinda rogue, i.e. the commie-killing capitalist kind. I refer you to Michael Parenti for the historical details:

http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/barparent.htm

Do you know of Michael Parenti? AWESOME political analyst!

re: Hitler's 'very good discourse.'
I am not surprised. Hell, he was right, and they knew he was! A lot of Western leaders probably identified with him very strongly. God knows Henry Ford and the Bushes did. The resonance between the Axis' brand of fascism and the mainstream of Western politics that succeeded it following WWII (e.g. McCarthyism) is the locus of a very large and creepy American historical blind spot, undoubtedly a product of masterful and relentless saturation PR (Orwelliana US-style). WWII didn't kill fascism AT ALL. It just got sneakier and went global, helped along by the same thing Hitler knew: that people on the milk-and-honey end of a colonial food chain are real easy to deceive as to how vile that food chain is and how villainous are those who partake of it with abandon. To others, however, looking in from the cold and observing this face-stuffing orgy, the 'fascist' label isn't too much of a leap. Sorta rolls off the tongue even.

Anyway, people very badly need to get a clue about this stuff. The book "Killing Hope" by William Blum is the most brutal eye-opener I know of.

re: zionists cropping Farrakhan's words on Oprah: oh, JA shut your mouth! You know as well as I do they'd never do any such thing! That's almost like saying they'd LIE!

TW (Wed, Oct.19, 5:17AM): "re: zionists cropping Farrakhan's words on Oprah: oh, JA shut your mouth! You know as well as I do they'd never do any such thing! That's almost like saying they'd LIE!"


HA-HA-HA--HA-HA ...!!

IS *THAT* WHAT I SAID ...!???

...Gee, is my face rrrred...!!




(I'll get back to ya.)

Our personal favorite:

“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. "

George Orwell

Apparently JA the loud-mouthed fool has nothing to say about Khalid Muhammed. Why's that JA?

Farrakhan said "Hitler was a great man" not because he wanted to make the mundane assertion that Hitler was a significant historical figure (as people like JA are apt to "interpret" his words). No, Farrahkan made that comment in response to those who accused him of being Hitlerian--he embraced the accusation, glad to be so compared, and went on to say that "Hitler was a great man."

JA's pathetic defense of Farrakhan's comment that "Judiasm is a gutter religion" is evidence of his own inclination to defend anti-Jewish utterances. He says that it's okay to say that Judiasm is a gutter religion because of the crimes of zionism but I'm sure he wouldn't defend someone who called Islam a gutter religion because of the crimes of the Saudi royal family.

Stop playing words games, clownface.

Interesting enough, this was actually exposed on the Jewish website CAMERA. And while the "letter" is false, the sentiment was indeeed Dr. Kings

"Since the message of the letter (anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism) was one Martin Luther King, Jr. had indeed articulated, we can understand why the King family and the ADL did not feel the need to verify the “Letter to an anti-Zionist friend.” This episode is a reminder of the importance of verifying the authenticity and accuracy of sources, even when they appear to be solid.

Below is a January 21, 2002 op-ed by U.S. Rep. John Lewis, who worked closely with Dr. King. In the op-ed, he shares Dr. King's views on Israel, views which stressed Israel's democratic nature and Israel's need for security. And he also relates that Dr. King said, “When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism.”

This quotation has been confirmed, so you should feel assured that you can use the quotation in letters. Just be sure to mention that it came from Dr. King's 1968 Harvard University appearance, so that no one will think it is from the debunked “letter.”


http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_article=369&x_context=8

As a white person, I'm an expert at reading another.

1) FOLLOWING a speaking appearance at Harvard in 1968 (even this looks thin), King MAY HAVE been the guest of honor at a dinner party in Cambridge MA, where a student MAY HAVE asked his opinion of zionism (yes, that's the real story! Follow the link at the bottom). He is said to have dismissed the question out of hand with a SINGLE SENTENCE: "When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism.”

2) a zionist word-cooker (Rabbi Marc Shneier, apparently) gets his hands on this single sentence and concocts a frikkin mini-essay out of it, introducing all sorts of elaborations and fraudulently attributing these to King as well

3) The rabid pro-Israel propaganda organ CAMERA gets its hands on the letter and while pretending to "debunk" it EXPANDS IT EVEN FURTHER!!!! The obvious message of their "debunking": "yeah, so the letter's bogus, but it's okay to circulate those ideas as King's anyway since that's obviously (wink, nudge) what he meant."

This shit is fukkin MIND-BOGGLING!!

4) Tia gets his/her hands on this CAMERA page and blithely informs us it's "surprising" for CAMERA to do this, by which I assume he/she means surprisingly HONEST, conclusively proving once again that either 1) he/she has his/her head hopelessly lodged several feet up inside his/her asshole, or 2) he/she thinks WE DO

Woweee, thanks tia! I didn't really need a three-hundredth iteration of this lesson, but hey, you never know when some poor gullible idiot might drop in!

Meanwhile, here's what a few healthy black skeptics think of the whole thing (MUST READ, JA!):

http://www.blacksandjews.com/Israel.MLK.html

Namely, the stinking pile of hokum called the "NEW anti-Semitism."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040202/klug

Short version: bug-eyed caterwauling zionist bullshitomaniacs want you to dismiss any and all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic by definition, and will stoop to anything to force this understanding on you. This particular disinfo program explains 90% of their appearances on this site

It is not anti-semitic to criticize Israel. Almost all of the Israelis I know do. Much of the Israeli press does. Much of the Israeli cabinet does. Almost all of the Jews I know, do. It is anti-semitic to single out Israel for a standard of behavior that we do not hold the rest of the world up to.

Again, from Dr. King "I solemly pledge to do my utmost to uphold the fair name of the Jews- because biogtry in any form is an affront to us all"

"We" are here to challenge YOUR lies. Repeating them louder and more often will not make them true.

Have you noticed our voices are growing, both on Indybay and more importantly, in the streets? Gehrig and Yid and others have empowered the people. We will speak truth to power. We will stand our ground. And we will not be silenced by haters like you.

Tia

Tia: "For the one hundredth time"

It's not that he _can't_ understand. He just finds it convenient not to. That intentional neglect allows him to go off on those self-exonerating tirades about how, no no no no, there couldn't possibly be any antisemitism on the left, no no no, there couldn't possibly any legitimacy to that charge, no no no.

In the meantime, in other places saner heads prevail: http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/comment.php?id=44

@%<

gerhig: "...about how, no no no no, there couldn't possibly be any antisemitism on the left..."


GERHIG, YOU'RE AN EVER-STAUNCH CARD-CARRYING ARCH-MEMBER THE "THE ***JEWISH*** KLU KLUX KLAN" -- THE ZIONISTS !!

YOU'RE A CARD-CARRYING ***JEWISH*** (instead of Christian) WHITE SUPREMACIST !!

YOU'RE 'A JIM CROW JEW' !!

YOU'RE A PRO-ISRAEL APARTHEID 'AFRIKANER JEW' !!

IT WOULD BE LIKE THE KKK RAILING AGAINST ANTI-WHITE RACISM !!


YOU'RE WHAT ANTI-ZIONIST JEWS CALL "NAZIS IN YARMULKES" !!

YOU'RE WHAT A FAMOUS ANTI-ZIONIST JEW ONCE CALLED -- POINT BLANK -- "A JUDEO-NAZI" !!

YOU'RE WHAT THE REST OF US KNOW AS *ZIONAZIS* !!

NO LESS THAN ALBERT EINSTEIN COMPARED ZIONISTS TO NAZIS !!

ALBERT EINSTEIN AND HANNAH ARENDT IN THEIR LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES -- WHICH *DOES* EXIST -- CALLED MENACHIM BEGIN A RACIST FASCIST !!

MAHATMA GANDHI REFERRED TO ZIONISM AS "A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY" !!!


IT WOULD BE LIKE THE NAZIS RAILING AGAINST ANTI-ARYAN RACISM !!


OHHH, THE SHEER ***IRONY*** ... !!!


AS NORMAN FINKELSTEIN SAID, IT'S JUST SIMPLY (as his new book is entitled) "BEYOND CHUTZPAH" !!!

Grow up.

@%<

Lithium.
It will help with the mood swings. And if you take it with meals it won't upset your stomach.

TIM WISE SPEAKS ON THE ISSUE OF RACE AND CLASS.

http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/10/1776313.php

ANTI-RACIST ANTI-ZIONIST ACTIVIST TIM WISE ON KPFA -- NOW -- THURS, OCT 20 -- AT NOON [ON THE PROGRAM "LIVING ROOM"]
- posted by JA Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005 at 12:21 PM

ANTI-RACIST ANTI-ZIONIST ACTIVIST TIM WISE ON KPFA -- NOW -- OCT 20 -- AT NOON. IF YOU MISSED PART OR ALL OF IT CHECK AT THE ARCHIVES AT KPFA.ORG OR AT KFCF.ORG (24-HOUR ARCHIVE).


NOTE: TIM WISE IS JEWISH
by JA Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005 at 12:28 PM

SEE:

"REFLECTIONS ON ZIONISM BY A DISSIDENT JEW"

- by TIM WISE

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2001-09/05wise.htm


ALSO SEE OTHER TIM WISE ESSAYS ON RACE:

http://www.zmag.org/bios/homepage.cfm?authorID=96

If JA likes it then we can all be assured that this guys a wack job also.

(kfcf.org cyclically archives -- for *only* 24-1/2 hours and in 24-hour cycles -- KPFA programs beginning 1/2-hour, on the half-hour, *after* every half hour of broadcasting.

Stream the last 24 hours of KFCF or download any or all 30-minute segments of the daily broadcast.

http://www.kfcf.org/Mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=21&Itemid=39 )

Zionism = Racism
Zionism is a racist ideology, like all nationalisms. The specific racist characteristics are summarised here: labelling them racist should be uncontroversial in itself. However Israel and its supporters are allergic for the label, and that hinders rational assessment of nationalist ideology.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nationalism and racism
Nation states are components of a nationalist world order, and nationalism is the ideology or movement that promotes that world order. The specific characteristics of that world order are listed in the introduction to Nation Planet. The present world order is composed of permanent states. With one exception, the Vatican, they are formed by trans-generational communities - nations. Together these states hold all inhabitable territory, as contiguous national territories: a planet of nations. All nationalists hold certain core beliefs about this world order, about the nation itself and about the nation state. Some of these core beliefs are clearly racist. Others - such as the belief that nation states should be transgenerational - are not racist in themselves, but lead almost inevitably to racist policies by the states. All modern nation states are founded on certain racist principles, which derive directly from nationalist ideology. The multi-ethnic empires, the traditional target of European nationalist resentment, did not always apply such principles.

The catechism of nationalism
The nations are collectively equivalent to humanity: they are its natural units.
Each person inherently belongs to a specific nation, and no-one can validly claim not to belong to any nation.
Nations are sacred: they have a status which no other group or collectivity can have. Nations deserve supreme respect, beyond that for other groups.
The nations have a monopoly of state formation. No entity which is not a nation may acquire or hold territory, to form a state.
Nations have a great historical continuity and should be continued. National cultures have intrinsic value, therefore nations must exist to produce and preserve them.
Nations may not be abolished, singly or collectively. No process which terminates the existence of any nation is legitimate. The world order of nation states shall never be terminated. If a nation ceases to exist, by decline or erosion, then its place in the world order shall be taken by a successor nation.
from: Nation Planet

All nation states are founded on the nationalist belief that each nation has a specific claim to a specific territory. Nationalists can and do recognise other nations claims to other territories, but almost all make an exclusive claim to at least some territory. This claim is, by definition, an expression of group superiority. The members of the nation, according the nationalist movement in question, possess an inherently superior claim to the territory, purely by membership of the group. They do not have to do anything for it. The claim covers not only their claimed right to live there, but their claimed right to exclude others.
There is one exception to this pattern: the diaspora nationalism of the Roma. The Roma do not know exactly where their ancestral homeland is located. Therefore, in sharp contrast to other nationalist movements, Roma nationalism does not claim territory. And until they know where it is, Roma nationalists can not attempt to expel the existing inhabitants of that territory.

All existing nation states do make a claim of superior right to national territory. In all cases, this claim is made on behalf of a single ethnic group, or a cluster of ethnic groups (titular nation plus national minorities). That the groups are ethnic is the source of most of the racism in ideology and policy. If states were exclusively founded on gender, their ideology might be sexist, but not racist.

Conversely, all nation states claim that other groups do not possess that specific right to the territory in question. Irish nationalists believe that the 'Irish people' have a superior right to the island of Ireland, and that the Paraguayan people do not possess this right. They believe that individual Irishmen and Irish women are the bearers of this collective right, and that these individuals can not be denied the right to reside in Ireland. They they do not believe this about randomly selected individual Paraguayans. Ireland has no indigenous ethnic minorities so the definition of the nation is relatively simple. However these beliefs can be held on behalf of more than one national group, but never on behalf of all nations of the world - at least not in any existing nation state. The formal expression of these underlying beliefs is the citizenship and immigration policy of the nation states. Note that nothing stops Irish and Paraguayan nationalists from respecting each others claims, especially since they have no common disputed territory. However, that does not make their claims any less racist.

It is often said, that the nation states have widely differing conceptions of citizenship. In fact they all operate in conformity with these two principles of superior claim, and legitimate exclusion. All existing nation states share two other characteristics. No nation state has an absolute open-border policy (totally free immigration), and all nation states allow the acquisition of citizenship by descent.

These four characteristics allow Zionism to be considered racist - in the company of other nationalisms, including the quasi-official ideologies of each nation state.

The superior claim to national territory is the attribution of a superior quality to members of the national group. The denial of this claim to certain other ethnic groups is the attribution of an inferior status to their members. The lack of an open-door immigration policy means, that these claims are translated into real exclusion. Finally, the acquisition of citizenship by descent is a purely biological mechanism: it is racist in the general sense, but it is also closest to the biological ideologies first described by the term 'racism'.

French and German attitudes are said to represent the extremes of citizenship policy, but in fact both states share a biological concept of citizenship. Both illustrate this core policy, despite their differences in emphasis. Germany has a generally restrictive immigration policy, which it relaxed in the 1960's and 1970's to allow labour migration for (West) German industry. The children of the many Turkish immigrants grew up in Germany as foreign citizens, with a Turkish passport and a German residence permit. Even the third generation, often born in Germany of German-born parents, usually speaking only German, were still Turkish citizens. If they committed a crime they were liable to be deported to Turkey, even if they did not speak a word of Turkish and had never been there before. Only in the last few years has naturalisation become almost automatic for the third generation. In contrast, descendants of Germans who settled in eastern Europe, sometimes two or three centuries ago, can arrive in Germany and claim full citizenship. It is not necessary that their parents are German citizens, and they are not required to speak a word of German. The German state will pay for their full integration in German society, because they are considered part of the German 'Volk'.

French policies are based on different assumptions, about the effectiveness of French society in transferring its own core values. Living in France for a long period, or growing up in France, is considered to effectively assimilate the migrant or the child. (There is an underlying belief in the self-evident superiority of French values). Naturalisation is therefore easier, and in principle birth in France confers citizenship - but the parents must get there first, for the child to be born there.

However in both cases a basic rule applies, which undermines the French pretensions to have a 'non-racist' citizenship and nationality policy. The child born of citizens is a citizen. All existing nation states apply this principle, usually without regard to place of birth. The child born to a French-citizen mother and a French-citizen father, in Zambia, is a French citizen. The child born to a German-citizen mother and a German-citizen father, in Zambia, is a German citizen. No special procedure is required of either the parents or the baby, and no supplementary qualifications.

The child of Zambian parents, who have no German or French ancestors and no connection with Germany or France, can make no claim on the citizenship of these countries. Both doors are equally closed. That essential inequality is by definition racist. As an adult, the Zambian child can later try to enter either country, and acquire citizenship. That means going through a special procedure, and meeting certain norms, for instance on educational level. Ultimately, acquiring citizenship might be easier in France, but there is no guarantee there either.

This is the reality of nation states: most people got their citizenship from their parents, and they did nothing for it. They certainly did not have to cross the Strait of Gibraltar in a small boat, and spend 10 years picking tomatoes or cleaning toilets - which is what a Zambian might do to acquire legal residence in an EU country. In other words the average citizen, certainly in the richer countries, is complicit in a grand racist scheme. They benefit greatly from their privilege at birth, while others lose horribly. That is presumably why they don't like to talk about the issue, but in terms of human suffering this is the worst aspect of the inherent racism of the nation states. If adults in a western city were arrested, and condemned on the basis of their ethnicity to the typical conditions of life in rural Africa, it would be considered a crime against humanity.


Origins and definition of Zionism
The racist characteristics of nationalism can be found in the Zionist ideology and in the State of Israel, a nation state. The word Zionism is used today for the foundational ideology of the Israeli nation state - the claims by which it justifies its existence. However Zionism as a nationalist movement is older than that state: past and present Zionism do not always coincide.
Zionism is a diaspora nationalism of the Jewish people. In a diaspora nationalism, most members of the national group are not resident on the claimed national territory, and the nation state can only be achieved by 'return' migration. Zionism is an unusual nationalism: it is largely the creation of a single individual, Theodor Herzl. He was the first to make a public claim to a Jewish State, and promoted that idea in Europe. His work reflected the general climate of nationalist revival movements in eastern Europe at the time, especially in the Austro-Hungarian empire. It was almost inevitable, that a Jewish movement would identify Jews as 'a people' when all around them Germans, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and Hungarians were doing the same. The other historically possible options - a purely religious revival movement, and an emancipation movement - were side-tracked.

Zionism is also unusual because, in the early years, there was no clear idea of the national homeland. There was a clear territorial concentration of Jews in Europe, in what is now Poland, Belarus, the Ukraine and southern Russia. However, except for local concentrations, they were in a minority even in this territory. The idea of a Jewish nation state in eastern Europe was never influential in Zionism. Some of the early plans for Jewish resettlement were not even formally nationalist: they made no claim to a state. Resettlement in a British colony, such as Uganda, was for a time the most serious option. The negotiations came to nothing - but the idea influenced British policy, when Palestine became a British mandate territory, after the First World War.

By the time of the Balfour Declaration, Zionism was a standard nationalist movement. Zionists claimed to speak on behalf of a people, the Jewish people. They claimed a nation state for that people in Palestine, on the grounds that it was the historic homeland of the Jewish people. The 'Jewish people' for almost all Zionists was (and is) an ethno-national group - and not a religious community. A minority of religious Jews still opposes Zionism for religious reasons.


Zionism in the State of Israel
When the State of Israel came into existence, it included a mainly Arab minority, now about one million people. Historically Zionism has never recognised any 'national minority' within the nation, the status of (for instance) the Frisians within the modern Dutch nation. For Zionists, the Jewish people is the Jewish nation: Zionism is a mono-ethnic nationalism comparable to Irish nationalism. The present State of Israel generally has the constitutional structure of a secular nation state. It has conceded citizenship to the 'Israeli Arabs', although many will identify themselves as 'Palestinians'. However there is no tradition in Zionism which sees this group ('Arabs' or 'Palestinians') as a constituent minority of the Jewish people. Although many Zionists claimed the territory where Yasir Arafat lived, no Zionist ever saw him as a Jew.
There is also no nationalist movement to establish a bi-national state on the former mandate territory of Palestine. Zionism is not such a movement, and the State of Israel does not claim to be a bi-national state. In this respect, Zionism is comparable to Czech nationalism or Slovak nationalism - not to Czechoslovak nationalism.. No Zionists call themselves Palestino-Jews or Judaeo-Palestinians. The State is called Israel, not Filastino-Israel or Israelo-Filastina

Within this framework, which includes contradictory ideas about Israeli citizenship, the four racist characteristics can be identified.

Firstly, the Zionist movement historically made a claim to territory on behalf of 'the Jewish people', an exclusive geopolitical claim. It claimed that individual Jews had a right to residence in that territory, which did not apply to randomly selected non-Jews outside that territory. None of the early Zionists advocated the ethnic cleansing, which in fact preceded the establishment of the Sate of Israel in 1948 - but none of them believed that non-Jews had a right to the Jewish homeland either. Zionists attribute a superior quality to Jews, namely the exclusive right to the Jewish national territory. The State of Israel, by definition, claims Israeli territory for Israeli's. It attributes a superior quality to Israeli's, although paradoxically that includes the Arab minority with Israeli citizenship. However, the State of Israel is not 'Israelist' - in the sense of consistently presenting these claims for both its Jewish and Arab citizens. In official pronouncements, such as its defensive speech to the Durban anti-racism conference, Israel continues to claim state legitimacy as the national homeland for the 'Jewish people'. It is therefore not correct to say, that in Israel Jewish diaspora nationalism has been succeeded by Israeli nationalism. The legitimising ideology of Israel is still largely Zionism, and not 'Israelism'.

Secondly, Zionism attributes an inferior status to members of non-Jewish ethno-national groups: that they lack the absolute right to residence in the Jewish homeland, and to citizenship of a Jewish nation state. The State of Israel confers no right of residence or citizenship on persons born outside Israel, unless they have specific links to Israel, to the Jewish people, or to Judaism. That excludes about 99% of the world population. The only exception to the general pattern of nationalist exclusion is, that the State of Israel extends citizenship to the historically resident Arab minority. However, some groups in Israel dispute even their right to residence, and propose their expulsion as part of a 'peace settlement' - together with the expulsion of Palestinians from all or part of the occupied territories. According to a 2003 opinion poll in Israel (Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies), 31% now support the expulsion of the Arab minority, and 46% support clearance of the territories.

The most obvious exclusion, which was not foreseen by the early Zionists, is the status of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Theodor Herzl never imagined that a Jewish state would be an occupying power, and therefore the de facto government, for a large non-Jewish population. In addition, about three million people belong to the clearly identifiable 'Palestinian-refugee' minorities, in other Arab countries, although most were born in their present country of residence. The State of Israel clearly attributes an inferior status to this population: namely that they do not possess the right to Israeli citizenship. This population is generally equivalent to the 'Palestinian people' in the occupied territories, although it includes small non-Jewish, non-Arab minorities. The members of this population, (primarily Palestinian), can not vote, for instance, and if they did all vote in Israeli elections, it would mean the end of the State of Israel. Again it is true that all nation states operate this exclusion, and none of them extend citizenship to everyone, certainly not to hostile populations. That does not make such policies any less racist, since the exclusions are by definition on ethnic or national grounds.

That would not matter so much, if Israeli borders were open to all immigrants: but they are not, and this is the third racist characteristic of Zionism. Israel has one of the highest immigration rates in history, but immigration policy has always been restrictive. Although Israel grants citizenship to the resident Arab minority, it does not permit Arab immigration, even by former residents of its territory. Only those who stayed in their villages in 1948 got Israeli citizenship: those who crossed the front line to the Arab side can not get back - not as a citizen, and probably not as a visitor. Other Arabs, who have no connection with Palestine, can not simply migrate to Israel, nor can most of the world's population. Israeli immigration is essentially for Jews only, and this is the most obviously racist policy of present Zionism. In this case, the State of Israel has a formal and explicit policy of Jewish immigration, which is clearly Zionist. It is the logical consequence of the original Zionist demand for a Jewish state formed by migration, meaning migration of Jews.

In one respect Israeli policy differs from most national immigration policies: citizenship can be indirectly acquired on religious grounds. A person who converts to Judaism can be a Jew in the sense of the Israeli Law of Return, if the conversion is accepted as valid by religious authorities in Israel. The convert can then go to Israel (entry can not be legally refused), and can claim Israeli nationality and citizenship. Sometimes this is quoted by Israel's supporters, to show Israel is not racist. In theory, all the inhabitants of the Palestinian territories can sincerely convert to Judaism tomorrow, and on acceptance of their conversion move to Israel. - where they will all presumably live as good and prosperous Israeli citizens. In practice this is absurdly unlikely. And the question is: why should they have to convert to Judaism, when native-born atheist or Buddhist Israelis can still be part of the Jewish people?

This is the fourth racist characteristic, equally present in the state policies of Israel and present Zionist belief. It was not very relevant for the early Zionists, who were too far from a Jewish state to think about its future citizenship policy. Nevertheless, it was predictable even at the time Herzl wrote, on the basis of the general characteristics of European nation states (and of the Austro-Hungarian empire where he lived). The child of an Israeli citizen mother and and Israeli citizen father is an Israeli citizen. (I am not sure if this applies to the children of Israeli Arabs, born in the occupied territories). The child acquires this privilege without effort: no application under the Law of Return, no conversion to Judaism, no other qualification for citizenship. The child simply acquires the rights (and duties) of an Israeli citizen through unconscious biological process. The child without this biological advantage (birth, or parentage, or genetic material) does not automatically acquire citizenship. Life in Israel is not always pleasant, and many western Jews hesitate to emigrate there, but within the region an Israeli-born child has the advantage. The child born to Israeli settlers in central Hebron will statistically live longer, be better educated, and have a higher standard of living, then the Palestinian child born in an adjoining house. This advantage is part of the general advantage of being born in a rich country, which about one-fifth of the world's population share.

In citizenship and immigration issues, biology determines fate. Not inevitably, but because nation states are structured that way. There is no inherent moral reason why states should limit immigration, or residence, or citizenship, simply on grounds of birth. In fact, it is hard to think of any moral justification for it. It is clearly racist in the general sense of the word, and its derivation from the ideology of nationalism indicates the racist origins of that ideology. The nationalism underlying the nation state Israel, which is accurately called Zionism, is no different in this respect. Here too, Zionism is racist.

Zionism is racism.

So jewish nationlism is racist, but palestinian nationalism is FANTASTIC?

That's very confusing.

Its been long proven that Anti-zionists name call, lie and false post when convenient. So whats new?

Yet you are unable to address the fact that antizionism is racist, and instead just have to post silly pictures and name-call.

If Jewish nationalism is racist, isn't palestinian nationalism also racist?

If not, explain why.

You can't. SO you'll call me a silly name and post silly pictures.

You are owned.

Ant-Zionists lie when convenient. Proven everyday. Are you JA, TW, Nazi troll, Allison Weir, Wendy Campbell etc?

Anti-zionists lie when convenient. Itsproven everyday. So are you JA, Allison Weir, Wendy Campbell, Jeff Blanckenfort, Nazi troll, etc?

it's more fun just to fuck with you---more entertaining to see the glassy-eyed freaks froth at the mouth
How many aliases? Bobby Twofingers/James/JD/Proud Jew/Scholar/Yid/ect.

AGAIN, Let me explain to THE *SIMPLE-MINDED* ZIONIST RACISTS:

by JA Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005 at 3:03 PM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


IN FACT, PALESTINE *WAS INDEED* AN INTERNATIONALLY-RECOGNIZED STATE TO BE HELD IN TEMPORARILY ADMINISTERED TRUST BY BRITAIN. BUT...


IT DOESN'T MATTER *WHAT* THE **PEOPLE** WERE CALLED.

IT DOESN'T MATTER *WHAT* THE LAND WAS CALLED.

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT TANGENTIAL, *IRRELEVANT*, PHONY RACIST *EXCUSES* RACIST ZIONIST JEWISH SUPREMACISTS TRY TO COME UP WITH.

THE INDIGENOUS/NATIVE PEOPLE OF PALESTINE HAD AND HAVE A RIGHT TO LIVE THERE WITHOUT BEING EXTERMINATED OR ETHNICALLY CLEANSED FROM THE LAND -- WHATEVER THEY OR IT WAS CALLED.

(THE NATIVE AMERICANS DIDN'T HAVE "COUNTRIES" PER SE, "NATION-STATES". THAT DIDN'T MEAN THAT THEY WERE FAIR GAME FOR EXTERMINATION, OR OTHERWISE DISPOSSESSION AND ETHNIC CLEANSING.)

PALESTINIANS HAVE THE SAME RIGHT TO LIVE IN PALESTINE AS THE JEWS OF GERMANY AND CONTINENTAL EUROPE HAD A RIGHT TO LIVE IN EUROPE -- WHETHER OR NOT JEWS THEMSELVES HAD A COUNTRY IN EUROPE -- WITHOUT BEING EXTERMINATED OR ETHNICALLY CLEANSED FROM THE LAND.

ONLY MORONIC ***RACISTS*** DON'T UNDERSTAND THAT SIMPLE MORAL FACT.


AND THAT'S WHY I *OPENLY* AND *PUBLICLY* -- AND EVEN ON THE *RADIO* -- SUPPORT **ARMED** STRUGGLE AGAINST ISRAEL.

AND I *STILL* GET ON PLANES AND FLY TO WASHINGTON, NEW YORK, AND LONDON -- AND BACK!!

SO *THERE*!

Pretty *weak* comeback by you above, huh?

Did you type it yourself? -- or did you have someone type it for you while you were still curled up on the floor in pain?

Ha-ha-ha!!

Its a little one sided to post in response to someone who has the editors ear and simply deletes my posts.

Keep raving on with your hateful message. Bigots and haters like you ALWAYS get whats coming to them.

[SchtarkerYid: No ones has "exterminated" or "ethnically cleansed" (the Palestinians)]

Nazis and Zionazis - different tune, same song

From "The Rape of Palestine"

"We should expect to find an exodus of Arabs from lands where Jews are settled. But exactly the opposite is true: it is precisely in the vicinity of those Jewish villages that Arab developement is most marked. Arab Haifa, profiting from the Jewish boom grew from 1922 to 1936 by 130%, Jaffa by 80% and Jerusalem by 55%...In the vicinity of the Jewish villages Arab workers earn twice the wage paid in other parts of Palestine.

Once the poorest , sorriest population in this whole section of poverty stricken masses, the Arabs of Palestine are now the richest per capita of their race"

So many Arabs FLOCKED to Palestine, following the Jewish settlers. and the prosperity they brought.
Hardly there for GENERATIONS!!!!!

"Fully 75% of the area in Jewish hands morever has not known the plough for centuries. The northern colonies in Galilee were built on land rendered impossible for life since roman times because of marsh and endemic disease. Tel Aviv was erected on sand dunes which were considered without monetary value. The great granary, the valley of Jezreel, now nestling so trim and green in the shining sun, wa sso deserted and pestilential when Jews bought it that it was said any bird trying to cross it would fall dead in its flight."

According to this book, the "Jews of Jerusalem constitute 72 % of its souls"

Ziff says "In the case of the peasants who sold to the Jews, with the exceptionof a bare five percentwho bettered themself in urban pursuits, all remained on the land. Most of them sold only part of their acresand with the money obtained got out of debt for the first time in their lives. Within the past 6 years the debt of the Arab cultivator has been reduced by 60% while his income has sharply increased. The most solicitous prodding of the Government over the last ten yearshas not been able to bring forth more than 664 Arab families that could come under the definition of displaced."

Let me explain to THE *SIMPLE-MINDED* ZIONIST RACISTS:
by JA Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005 at 2:14 PM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Booby Twocells (in my brain): "so jewish nationalism is racist, but palestinian nationalism is FANTASTIC?"


The Palestinian people are primarily engaged in A *LIBERATION* STRUGGLE AND MOVEMENT.

Hence the names: PALESTINIAN *LIBERATION* MOVEMENT.

The Palestinians are carrying out a struggle -- are attempting to *LIBERATE* their land -- and to *LIBERATE* themselves -- from *OPPRESSION* -- against an armed settler-colonizer invader (with a racist, supremacist *NATIONALIST* ideology) -- invading from *THOUSANDS* of miles away -- FROM *ANOTHER* CONTINENT!!

(It would be like saying that "French nationalists" were resisting the Nazi invasion during WWII.)

The Palestinians -- that's right, it *wasn't* the Zionist lie, "a land without a people" -- *ALREADY HAD* a country/land called -- guess what? -- *PALESTINE*.

1. “The first group of our fifth column consist of those who abandon their homes…At the first sign of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle” -- Ash-Sha’ab, Jaffa, 1.30.48



2. “(the fleeing villagers)…are bringing down disgrace on us all… by abandoning their villages” -- As-Sarih, Jaffa, 3.30.48



3. "Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe." -- Haifa District HQ of the British Police, April 26, 1948, (quoted in

Battleground by Samuel Katz).



4. "The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by order of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city.... By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa." -- Time Magazine, May 3, 1948, page 25



5. “The Arab streets (of Palestine) are curiously deserted (because)…following the poor example of the moneyed class, there has been an exodus from Jerusalem, but not to the same extent as from Jaffa and Haifa”. -- London Times, 5.5.48



6. "The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war." -- General John Glubb "Pasha," The London Daily Mail, August 12, 1948



7. “The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the act of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem." – Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, in an interview with the Beirut Telegraph 9/6/1948. (same appeared in The London Telegraph, 8.48)



8. The most potent factor [in the flight of Palestinians] was the announcements made over the air by the Arab-Palestinian Higher Executive, urging all Haifa Arabs to quit... It was clearly intimated that Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."

-- London Economist Oct. 2, 1948)



9. “It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees’ flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem”. -- Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station, Cyprus, 4.3.49



10. "[The Arabs of Haifa] fled in spite of the fact that the Jewish authorities guaranteed their safety and rights as citizens of Israel." -- Monsignor George Hakim, Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee, New York Herald Tribune, June 30, 1949



11. “The military and civil (Israeli) authorities expressed their profound regret at this grave decision (taken by the Arab military delegates of Haifa and the Acting Chair of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee to evacuate Haifa despite the Israeli offer of a truce). The Jewish mayor of Haifa made a passionate appeal to the delegation (of Arab military leaders) to reconsider its decision”.

-- Memorandum of the Arab National Committee of Haifa, 1950, to the governments of the Arab League, quoted in J. B. Schechtman, The Refugees in the World, NY 1963, pp. 192f.



12. Sir John Troutbeck, British Middle East Office in Cairo, noted in cables to superiors (1948-49) that the refugees (in Gaza) have no bitterness against Jews, but harbor intense hatred toward Egyptians: “ They say ‘we know who our enemies are (referring to the Egyptians)’, declaring that their Arab brethren persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes…I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district over”.



13. "The Arab states which had encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promise to help these refugees." – The Jordanian daily newspaper Falastin, Feb. 19, 1949.



14. "The Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade...Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes, and property to stay temporarily In neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of invading Arab armies mow them down." --Al Hoda (a New York-based Lebanese daily) June 8, 1951.



15. "Who brought the Palestinians to Lebanon as refugees, suffering now from the malign attitude of newspapers and communal leaders, who have neither honor nor conscience? Who brought them over in dire straits and penniless, after they lost their honor? The Arab states, and Lebanon amongst them, did it." -- The Beirut Muslim weekly Kul-Shay, Aug. 19, 1951.



16. "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."

-- Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said, quoted in “Sir An-Nakbah” (The Secret Behind the Disaster) by Nimr el-Hawari, Nazareth, 1952



16. "The Arab Exodus …was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated description spread by the Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews. …For the flight and fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs ... By spreading rumors of Jewish atrocities, killings of women and children etc., they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs in Palestine, until they fled leaving their homes and properties to the enemy."

– The Jordanian daily newspaper Al Urdun, April 9, 1953.



17. The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in. (Quoting a refugee) -- Al Difaa (Jordan) Sept. 6, 1954.



18. “The wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boasting of an unrealistic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of some weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab states, and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and re-take possession of their country”. -- Edward Atiyah (Secretary of the Arab League, London, The Arabs, 1955, p. 183)



19. “The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the UN and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders do not give a damn whether Arab refugees live or die”, -- Ralph Galloway, former head of UNWRA, 1956



20. "As early as the first months of 1948, the Arab League issued orders exhorting the people to seek a temporary refuge in neighboring countries, later to return to their abodes ... and obtain their share of abandoned Jewish property." -- Bulletin of The Research Group for European Migration Problems, 1957.



21. "Israelis argue that the Arab states encouraged the Palestinians to flee. And, in fact, Arabs still living in Israel recall being urged to evacuate Haifa by Arab military commanders who wanted to bomb the city." -- Newsweek, January 20, 1963.



22. "The 15th May, 1948, arrived ... On that day the mufti of Jerusalem appealed to the Arabs of Palestine to leave the country, because the Arab armies were about to enter and fight in their stead." -- The Cairo daily Akhbar el Yom, Oct. 12, 1963.



23. In listing the reasons for the Arab failure in 1948, Khaled al-Azm (Syrian Prime Minister) notes that “…the fifth factor was the call by the Arab governments to the inhabitants of Palestine to evacuate it (Palestine) and leave for the bordering Arab countries. Since 1948, it is we who have demanded the return of the refugees, while it is we who made them leave. We brought disaster upon a million Arab refugees by inviting them and bringing pressure on them to leave. We have accustomed them to begging...we have participated in lowering their morale and social level...Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson and throwing stones upon men, women and children...all this in the service of political purposes...” -- Khaled el-Azm, Syrian prime minister after the 1948 War, in his 1972 memoirs, published in 1973.



24. "The Arab states succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity. They did not recognize them as a unified people until the states of the world did so, and this is regrettable." -- Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), from the official journal of the PLO, Falastin

el-Thawra (“What We Have Learned and What We Should Do”), Beirut, March 1976.



25. “Since 1948, the Arab leaders have approached the Palestinian problem in an irresponsible manner. They have used to Palestinian people for political purposes; this is ridiculous, I might even say criminal...” -- KING HUSSSEIN, Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, 1996.



26. “Abu Mazen Charges that the Arab States Are the Cause of the Palestinian Refugee Problem” (Wall Street Journal; June 5, 2003):



 Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) penned an article in March 1976 in Falastin al-Thawra (cf. supra), the official journal of the PLO in Beirut: "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe" (emphasis added).



 As Abu Mazen alluded, it was in large part due to threats and fear-mongering from Arab leaders that some 700,000 Arabs fled Israel in 1948 when the new state was invaded by Arab armies. Ever since, the growing refugee population, now around 4 million by UN estimates, has been corralled into squalid camps scattered across the Middle East - in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank.



 In 1950, the UN set up the United Nations Relief and Works Agency as a "temporary" relief effort for Palestinian refugees. Former UNRWA director Ralph Galloway stated eight years later that, "the Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders do not give a damn whether Arab refugees live or die." The only thing that has changed since then is the number of Palestinians cooped up in these prison camps.”

Yidiot
by Read a book ignorant JA Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005 at 4:17 PM

From "The Rape of Palestine"


Or is that the name of a chapter in Joan Peters' book, "From Time Immemorial", that was *so* discredited that not even *Allan Dershowitz* wanted to openly use it (although he did shamelessly plagiarize it) or be associated with it -- or her.

No URL, as usual.

No url - hah. Its from a BOOK. You know, the paper things- your mommy may have read them to you when you were small. You can find them in LIBRARIES. You can look up BOOKS and LIBRARIES on Wikipedia if you aren't sure what they are.

The Ziff book has been discussed extensively on this site.

To JA a "zionist" book means a book that he hasn''t read or heard of. JA, you are loud, ignorant and bigoted

It was written during the British mandate period. Way before the internet and Amazon.

If you know so very little, why do you post so much? Go to school or read a book instead. You are embarrassing.

The 'superior culture' that the Revisionists planned to bring to the Middle East contained a large measure of European racism. It is one of the tragic ironies of history that what the Rivisionists and other Zionists wrote and said about the Palestinian Arabs closely resembled the calumnies that the Nazis were making against the Jews. Indeed, in their writings the Revisionists often used the same terminology as the Nazis.

An extreme example of this can be found in The Rape of Palestine, a book written by WILLIAM ZIFF, an American representative of the Revisionist movement. Ziff described the Palestinian Arabs as *** _a 'sickly and degenerate race'[25] that was 'low on the scale of human development'_ ***. [GEE, WHERE HAVE WE HEARD *THAT* BEFORE!?] In explaining the origins of the Palestinians, Ziff noted that 'from the steppes, mountains and deserts *** _an agglomeration of primitive and savage man_ *** has swarmed [AND WHERE HAVE WE HEARD *THAT* BEFORE!?] in successive waves over Palestine and left their seed.'

Since to Ziff the Palestinians were the result of a 'churning stew of races', it should not be surprising that he believed that they had 'virtually no creative gifts'. He also charged that 'the ruling passion of an Arab is *** _GREEDINESS OF GOLD _***.' [AND, OH MY GOD, WHERE HAVE WE HEARD ***THAT*** BEFORE!!!??] Ziff suggested that an Arab's 'love of money is such that he loses all sense of proportion whenever currency is discussed.' Similar remarks directed against the Jews could easily be found in any number of anti-Semitic propaganda sheets then being published in Germany. {FOOTNOTE: Not surprisingly Ziff's book was endorsed by many of the leading members of the 'American liberal establishment' of the 1930s. Like their equivalent in our own day, they saw no inconsistency in condemning anti-Semitism while supporting Zionist anti-Arab racism.}


http://www.shiachat.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t990.html

On the other hand, there is substantial documentary evidence that large numbers of Arabs in Palestine in 1947 were either themselves immigrants or the descendants of recent immigrants.

Fairly large numbers of Egyptians were brought into Palestine in the early part of the 19th century by the son of Muhammad Ali (himself apparently a Bulgarian), and they founded numerous towns and villages on the coastal plain (including Furadis, Um al-Fahm and others). Hence, the very common family name al-Masri (the Egyptian).

The Balkans, too, were a source of Muslim out-migration. With the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria, about 1 million Muslims, some speaking Turkish, others not, moved east to remain in the diminished empire. Many of those who settled in Turkey assimilated, but some village communities persist in retaining a distinct identity (Palaczek, 1993).

Circassians arrived at their present location from Balkans in year 1880 after 10 years of residence at Marvel-border of Greece and Bulgaria, they migrated to Palestine, the Holy Land of the three monotheist religions. Ottoman Sultan asked them to reside at Rihania (Reyhaniye) and Kfar-Kama villages.

The inhabitants of Palestine are composed of a large number of elements, differing widely in ethnological affinities, language and religion. It may be interesting to mention, as an illustration of their heterogeneousness, that early in the 20th century a list of no less than fifty languages, spoken in Jerusalem as vernaculars, was there drawn up by a party of men whose various official positions enabled them to possess accurate information on the subject. It is therefore no easy task to write concisely and at the same time with sufficient fullness on the ethnology of Palestine." -- Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911
There were also large numbers of Muslims - many not even Arabs - who were brought in by the Ottoman Sultan during the second half of the 19th century. So, for example, Qabili Berbers (not Arabs) became immigrants following their failed rebellion against the French in Algeria, and Bosnian Muslims were encouraged to settle in Palestine by the Sultan following the loss of the Balkans.

There are numerous well documented cases of itinerant workers coming into Palestine from Syria and Sudan during the mandate and establishing villages. Even today, there are Arab residents in the area around Lod and Ramle who can relate to you exactly where their families came from in Libya or Sudan during the 1920s.

TW: "Thanks JA
by TW Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2005 at 5:17 AM"


TW: "Meanwhile, here's what a few healthy black skeptics think of the whole thing (MUST READ, JA!):

http://www.blacksandjews.com/Israel.MLK.html "


TW: "I refer you to Michael Parenti for the historical details:

http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/barparent.htm "


TW: "A Comedy of Conceits (and Deceits)
by TW Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005 at 12:50 AM"


I read it all -- as well as your articulate (and often funny!) arguments -- and copied them to my computer disk.


(I've got a few ineluctable arguments for Tia too. I've just have to stop playing footsie with *YIDIOT* long enough to have time to post them. Ahhh..., *so* many Zionist *IDIOTS*; so little time! ...Well, we know that virtually ALL of them are the *SAME* person. AIPAC can't find enough Zionist IDIOTS to take us on, so they have to pose as THE SAME *MULITPLE* ZIONIST IDIOTS USING DIFFERENT ALIASES IN THE SAME THREAD!!)

Tia: "It is not anti-semitic to criticize Israel. Almost all of the Israelis I know do. Much of the Israeli press does. Much of the Israeli cabinet does. Almost all of the Jews I know, do. It is anti-semitic to single out Israel for a standard of behavior that we do not hold the rest of the world up to."

And as I have pointed out to YOU, zionists converging on the entire Indymedia network in order to scream down/ "rebut" ANY criticism of Israel (in one of the few places where you can regularly find it) is TOTALLY INCONSISTENT with your canned shit about how MODERATE criticism of Israel is just fine as long as it's "counterbalanced" with totally dehumanizing stereotyping criticism of the Arab/Muslim side.

It's just another time when you're lying through your teeth and your dishonesty is so profound you can't even understand this about yourself. Perfectly symptomatic.

It's just like the way you perpetually refuse to understand that Israel and all its atrocities are really just a massive appendage of US Global Empire, and that the Arabs/Muslims are REACTING in a DEFENSIVE anticolonial manner to this berserk murderous monster. This even explains their fanaticism. Zionism being merely the agent of an insane planet-gobbling malignancy (one that is doomed to self-destruct by the way) justice is NOT ON YOUR SIDE. All it takes is a truly non-racist sense of fairness to understand all this (but you don't have this, see). That's why 90% of the people on the planet agree with me on this stuff. Half of these people you could walk up to in your kippa and curlicue sideburns and introduce yourself as Shlomo Rabinowitz from Prospect Heights and they still wouldn't know you were Jewish. They don't have an anti-Semitic bone in their bodies. They do know what justice is, though, and you can scream your talking points at them all you want to. Thank providence for people who have minds of their own!

Israel being in fact a Hitlerian global domination thrust of the US empire -- the thing that is sucking away 60+ percent of my tax outlay totally without my consent -- I am absolutely justified in focussing my criticism on Israel above all other mid-east parties. My condemnation of Israel is a subset of my larger condemnation of US foreign policy, and I DO MEAN *LARGER*.

Yes, yes, I know, now I'm a "self-hating American"

Unlike your judeocentric interpretation of Israel and all the rest of reality, this Grand Chessboard interpretation of Israel is all-encompassing, explains everything about Israel and the larger Middle East situation, and represents a truly even-handed viewpoint. It identifies zionists as the criminal aggressors and Arabs -- Palestinians emphatically -- as the besieged victims. Thems the breaks.

I didn't get this from "Arab propaganda," by the way. This interpretation jibes perfectly with every imperial movement in history. Your "everything's all about Jews" sniveling, on the other hand, is a perverse reformulation of timeless political themes. Yes yes I know everyone on earth has AAAALWAYS hated the poor Jew (segue mewling violins)

Another thing: by working so hard at barking me down, you zioscreamers get your own self-fufilling "he's an anti-Semite" prophecy going by causing me to bark you down right back. It would be beyond you to notice, but a little while ago when you guys took a little breather while the Israel criticisms kept flowing on the newswire, the anti-zionist comments dwindled dramatically also.

Your whole "you're all anti-semites or you wouldn't bash Israel so much" shtick is just another of your cheap fukkin Jedi mind tricks. It's a REACTION that you are CAUSING, just like you're causing the Palestinian reaction, and NO this is NOT "blaming the victim"

YOU'RE NOT THE FUKKKINGGGG VICTIMS !!!!!

GET OVER YOURSELVES!!

This is some seriously convoluted shit. Yeah, the IRISH do have a superior national claim to IRELAND -- DUH!! -- versus say a bunch of invading kleptomaniacs like the British. What totally sets the zionists up as bigots is they're doing exactly what the brits did. Nationalism and Manifest Destiny aren't quite the same thing. Nationalism as a reaction to foreign conquest of one's indigenous territory* has far more potential to be legitimate

*note to zionists: 2,000 year-old claims to somewhere else are a preposterous basis for this, especially when their based on RELIGION, not even on ancestry. If Jews have a solid claim to Israel then Irish Catholics have a solid claim to the former territory of the Holy Roman Empire

Thanks for rippin Ziff a new asshole

Remember how one of the screaming maniacs said "Ziff's Rape of Palestine has been discussed here a lot"? Yeah, that's right, I've torn into this putz repeatedly and these loons just keep bringing him back up like he's God. Thanks for adding another source to the anti-Ziff arsenal

JA: "AIPAC can't find enough Zionist IDIOTS to take us on, so they have to pose as THE SAME *MULITPLE* ZIONIST IDIOTS USING DIFFERENT ALIASES IN THE SAME THREAD!"

Ain't it delish?? And Yidiot's been totally busted on this and yet he keeps all his aliases going. He's a regular Dershowitz, this guy. I think Finkelstein's phrase "beyond chutzpah" is destined to become an immortal summation of the entire zionist phenomenon.

That Finkelstein is one enormously courageous dude, you know it? Dennis Bernstein too. Seeing as you're in the Bay area, I'm wondering if you've ever met Dennis. On his show he's been saying the windshield of his car has been smashed in four times in the past several months, he gets toast in the mail, constant death threats, his co-host's house was broken into and "tossed," there was a Monica Lewinsky type op recently to get him thrown out of KPFA... The intimidation effort against this guy is HUGE, and yet he keeps right on saying his mind. He says right on the air that they'll have to kill him to shut him up. You gotta admire this man!

His coverage of unreported Israeli state terror is second to none by the way. You can download any show via the website

http://www.flashpoints.net/

He just recently featured Norm Finkelstein

I’ll assume you put up the Red Cross article for my benefit?
http://www.indybay.org/news/hidden.php?id=1776258#1776482


(I've got a few ineluctable arguments for Tia too. I've just have to stop playing footsie with *YIDIOT* long enough to have time to post them. Ahhh..., *so* many Zionist *IDIOTS*; so little time! ...Well, we know that virtually ALL of them are the *SAME* person. AIPAC can't find enough Zionist IDIOTS to take us on, so they have to pose as THE SAME *MULITPLE* ZIONIST IDIOTS USING DIFFERENT ALIASES IN THE SAME THREAD!!)

So are you saying its NOT a Zionist Conspiracy? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t- I just can’t keep up with you- you change your mind so often. Who was I supposed to be again last week? I was supposed to be that guy arguing with you over 9/11- he trashed you BTW. I woulda bought him a bottle of wine, if I knew who he was. No, TW, that wasn’t me. Just because you’re paranoid.....I laughed when he posted "Who the hell is Tia?" He made you sound like a ranting madman...which isn't that difficult or too far from the truth.


"And as I have pointed out to YOU, zionists converging on the entire Indymedia network in order to scream down/ "rebut" ANY criticism of Israel (in one of the few places where you can regularly find it) is TOTALLY INCONSISTENT with your canned shit about how MODERATE criticism of Israel is just fine as long as it's "counterbalanced" with totally dehumanizing stereotyping criticism of the Arab/Muslim side."

Now, now. You just said it was one or two of us. Take a breath dear and decide. Is it the vast Zionist conspiracy or is it just one or two zealots posting under different names? You can’t argue both sides of the equation. . The only Indymedia site I personally converge on is this one, but now that you mention it, it might be a good idea to explore some others. I hear the Urbana Champlain one is particularly well done.

".....They do know what justice is, though, and you can scream your talking points at them all you want to. Thank providence for people who have minds of their own!..."

Ah talking points. Once again, if “we” do it, its somehow unholy, but if “they” do it, its righteous? Remember this?

Recently, I attended a conference on enhancing the public appeal of the Palestinian cause. I attended a workshop on the failure of the divestment movement. It was suggested that new "talking points" be used. We were told instead use terms like: “economic leverage,” or “socially responsible investment,” rather "divestment" which sounded too "intellectual" and “too harsh”. (its hard to be "grassroots" when you sound too intelligent, apparently.)

I see you and yours as useful idiots of big oil. Israel is demonized and used as a scapegoat to camouflage the schemes of Big Oil. As long as Israel exists, the Saudis can blame their social failures on it and cover up the fact that only the 7,000 members of the royal family get all the oil revenue. Its Israel’s fault. Yeah, right.


Another thing: by working so hard at barking me down, you zioscreamers get your own self-fufilling "he's an anti-Semite" prophecy going by causing me to bark you down right back. It would be beyond you to notice, but a little while ago when you guys took a little breather while the Israel criticisms kept flowing on the newswire, the anti-zionist comments dwindled dramatically also.

No. We were well aware of it. It was an impromptu plan- a conspiracy, if you will. (Wink, nudge, say no more) Once we had Carlos controlled, it worked quite well. I’ve often wondered (I don’t know why I’m treating you like an actual thinking caring human being, but here goes)if having “us” around as a living symbol of your hatred is counter-productive. Is it better to let you channel and vent your bile to the empty air? Is the best response to the presence of evil to challenge it face to face, or is the best response simply to work on increasing the amount of good in the world? Yes, this has been discussed. Yes, this is being discussed. We don’t have a conclusion yet. But I have learned that confrontation can be empowering. At every rally I’ve attended, and at every talk...I get people to come over to my side. And I’m not the most articulate person .... But the jury is still out on this one.

You anti-semitic bigots are such IDIOTS! For starters, Yes, "you're all anti-semites” AND you bash Israel as cover. Thats been proven and conceded. And the Palestinians are NOT THE VICTIMS !!!!! They are part of the Arab aggressors. None of you however, is either Jewish nor Arab, just officious intermeddlers who feel ,in a condescendingly racist way, that these poor Arabs can’t speak for themselves and so you, with your “White Man’s Burden”, must do it for them. How racist that it is!

GET OVER YOURSELVES!!

Finkelstein is one enormously jealous dude, you know it? He just wishes that he was Dershowitzor Joan Peters.

What paranoid mania to think that Dennis Bernstein was “set up” in a “MonicaLewinsky scam”. Is it another, yet another, CONSPIRACY?

Another bit of pin headed idiocy, “when you guys took a little breather”.... Thats because it was Jewish High Holidays and the zionist posters here were all presumably worshiping instead of playing “footsie “ with you haters and bigots.

All prejudice comes from ignorance and the haters and bigots on this site take then cake.

Another bit of pin headed idiocy, “when you guys took a little breather”....

Thats because it was Jewish High Holidays and the zionist posters here were all presumably worshiping instead of playing “footsie “ with you haters and bigots.

Aw Yid!!! You told him!!! No fair!!! It was more fun to let him think it was part of the conspiracy. We had to get Carlos (not Jewish, but Judeophilic) to play along too. It did work , didn't it? They were certainly baiting us.

Toothless: ". . . by working so hard at barking me down, you zioscreamers get your own self-fufilling "he's an anti-Semite" prophecy going by causing me to bark you down right back."

Why, it looks like Toothless has a confession to make.

@%<

YO GERHIG!!
by JA Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005 at 4:01 PM

Pretty *weak* [AND DOWNRIGHT *ANEMIC*] comeback by you [Oct 20 at 11:15am] above, huh?

Did you type it yourself? -- or did you have someone type it for you while you were still curled up on the floor in pain?

Ha-ha-ha!!


IS *THAT* ALL YOU COULD MUSTER???

IS *THAT* ALL YA *GOT*???

HA-HA-HA!!

Wow, TW ranting wack job. None of that made any sense. Rabbi Kahane (T'zl) was assasinated years ago by an Arab guy from the same teror cell that did the first World Trade Center bombing. If you actually read his writings, he's really the mirror image to Abbas. Both of them work om the premise that Jews and Arabs can't live together. So if you condemn one, condemn both.

Baruch Goldstein was a "blue suicide". After watching some number of his friends slaughterd by Arab teror, he flipped out and committed suicide other than by his own hand. If he hadn't been lynched and had a trial, this would have come out.

Toothless Warrior, you're both a hater and a victim of mainstream media.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/23/INGPIFACKO1.DTL&hw=race+bias+ivy+league&sn=001&sc=1000

url for SFChronicle article on institutionalized racism against Jews in College admissions- I cited this in my earlier post. Oh, ys, America just loved the Jews.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/23/INGPIFACKO1.DTL&hw=race+bias+ivy+league&sn=001&sc=1000

url for SFChronicle article on institutionalized racism against Jews in College admissions- I cited this in my earlier post. Oh, yes, America just loved the Jews.

Race Bias in Higher Education

Jerome Karabel did not have to dig very far for evidence of discrimination in researching his new book, "The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton." "There were so many smoking guns," says the Berkeley sociologist, "that by the end, I couldn't see across the room, there was so much smoke."

Indeed, the competition for the title of most shameful incident is pretty stiff. Would the lowest moment be when a Harvard alumnus, in 1925, sent the college's president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, a letter noting his "utter disgust" at having run into several Jewish students on a recent campus visit? (Lowell responded sympathetically that he "had foreseen the peril of having too large a number of an alien race and had tried to prevent it.")

Or perhaps the Anecdote Least Likely to Appear in an Admissions Brochure involves the brilliant black student who showed up to all-white Princeton in 1939 and was promptly pulled out of a registration line. As the student, later a New York appeals court judge, recalled, he was taken to the dean of admissions, examined "like a disgusting specimen under a microscope," and told he should go home.

Other writers -- notably Nicholas Lemann, in "The Big Test: The Secret History of the Meritocracy," and Dan Oren, in "Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale" -- have recently told versions of the story.

It begins with the Big Three as lily-white bastions of the Establishment, then continues through the social revolution of the 1960s, when the colleges lifted what were effectively quotas on Jews and public school students, and reached out to blacks.

Karabel's twist is that he traces today's opaque admissions system, which puts heavy emphasis on all sorts of nonacademic criteria, to that decisive moment in the 1920s when elite colleges had to figure out what to do with the high-achieving Jews who were lining up at their doors.

"The encounter with the 'Jewish problem' was formative," Karabel says. "It led to a system that went well beyond the Jews." Today, Karabel says, alumni kids, class presidents, athletes and, ironically, black and Latino students, benefit from the system born in the discriminatory 1920s.

But some readers -- like Harvard's current dean of admissions -- have a few doubts about the parallels Karabel draws.

Until the 1920s, the admissions system had taken care of itself: Only the wealthy elite had the academic preparation to carry them into Yale or Princeton. But then came a flood of ambitious public school kids, disproportionately Jewish, from the likes of New York and New Jersey. By the mid-'20s, Harvard had gone beyond 27 percent Jewish enrollment and was terrified of turning into Columbia, which had hit the 45 percent mark and was scorned by New York's social elite. Yale and Princeton, a few years earlier, had grown alarmed over Jewish enrollments of 13 and 5 percent, respectively.

So the colleges reached for nonacademic reasons to reject students. "Bookishness." Low "moral character." Lack of "manly vigor." The very vagueness of these concepts made them usefully flexible. Deploying such "standards," Harvard drove Jewish enrollment down to about 15 percent, and it continued to restrict the number of Jews through the 1950s.

Wilbur Bender, Harvard's admissions dean from 1952 to 1960, provides Karabel with the most deliciously quotable descriptions of the balancing act that the three colleges faced throughout the 20th century: brains versus what Bender without irony called "snob appeal."

Brains were fine, Bender wrote, but Harvard had to be careful not to be tagged as a place "full of long-haired aesthetics, pansies and poets and various la-de-da types." To maintain its prestige, it needed to pay close attention to "the good solid middle" from top prep schools, "the good healthy extrovert ... who can pay his own way."

Bender resigned in 1960. And yet, Karabel writes, "The cause that Bender fought for has remained Harvard's basic admissions policy to this day."

Karabel does not slight the social revolution of the 1960s and early '70s, when the Big Three opened themselves to Jews and African Americans and admitted women for the first time.

Nor does he suggest that there is overt discrimination today -- although the current regimes aren't "very Asian American friendly," he says.

But colleges continue to weigh subjective and personal factors in a way Karabel says he's not comfortable with. "It always leaves room for discrimination," he says. And he reads the preference given to children of alumni, especially the richest alumni, as continued deference "to the prerogatives of wealth and power" -- a vestige of the old balancing act.

While outright lies about admissions have ended -- all three colleges used to deny they had Jewish quotas -- opacity still reigns.

In the early 1990s, Princeton faculty were still clashing with their admissions dean, Fred Hargadon, over why he was rejecting a not-insignificant number of students the admissions office itself had ranked as academic superstars. Statistics, when unearthed, invariably show that the breaks given to athletes and alumni kids are far bigger than the admissions offices let on.

Karabel's overarching thesis may be a little too neat. Lemann, for example, says Karabel underplays the fact that the Establishment elite endorsed standards like "manly virtue" long before the 1920s -- and applied those standards to white Protestants, too.

"It's not as if they believed in academic merit, but said, 'We'll pretend we don't, because we want to keep Jews out of Yale,' " says Lemann, dean of Columbia's journalism school. The elite meritocracy, he adds, was from the start based on these other, harder-to-define qualities.

"Admission in the 1920s and admissions today are not just different worlds, they are in different universes," says William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions and financial aid.

And Harvard, Fitzsimmons insists, now views the snob factor as the opposite of a plus: Courting talented students of moderate to low income, who may be sensitive to social condescension, has become a top Harvard priority.

New financial-aid programs have helped raise the number of freshmen from families making less than $60,000 a year from 246 to 299 (out of a class of 1,650) this year alone. Though that's still only 18 percent of the entering class.

Karabel's attacks on nonacademic admissions criteria are so thunderous that it comes as a surprise to learn, near the end of "The Chosen," that he embraces them, or some form of them, too.

He would maintain race-based affirmative action and add a very hefty boost to low-income students of all ethnicities who achieve in the face of adversity. He would not eliminate the athletic advantage but only curtail it.

He even says he is "open to recognizing human qualities other than academics that are relevant to a well-functioning society." He, too, wants to keep admissions an art and not a science -- making him a lot more like Wilbur Bender, scourge of "beatniks" and "brittle intellectual types" than perhaps he realizes.

It's easy to lament past discrimination. But here's the uncomfortable question in Cambridge: Is it dishonest to revel in Harvard's prestige while dismissing some of the policies that, although now abhorrent, built and nurtured it?

“Zionism springs from an even deeper motive than Jewish suffering. It is rooted in a Jewish spiritual tradition whose maintenance and development are for Jews the basis of their continued existence as a community.”

Albert Einstein
Manchester Guardian, (October 12, 1929)

Is this the quote you were looking for?

Einstein on Zionism
by Tia Monday, Oct. 24, 2005 at 8:32 PM:

"Is this the quote you were looking for?"


NO, THE *ABOVE* (title line) QUOTE WAS THE ONE.

Actually (I didn'thave room in the title line for the complete exact quote):


"IT WOULD BE MY GREATEST SADNESS TO SEE JEWS DO TO [PALESTINIAN] ARABS, MUCH OF WHAT NAZIS DID TO JEWS."

-- ALBERT EINSTEIN

I'm on troll watch tonight. The issue:

TW: In addition to this extraordinary median privilege, US politicians and middle-class society have also moved heaven and earth to soothe their incipient self-victimology hysteria, which still mounts regardless. It evidently has nothing to do with reality, or at least not with any reality of actually being oppressed.

So, shall I produce more historic documentation showing American discrimination against Jews? I can begin with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s order banning Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi I can continue with stories of the lynching of Jews thoughout America. I could write about Henry Ford's refusal to hire Jews to work in his factory .

Or I could just follow Gehrig's advice and not take you seriously at all.

Another anti-zionist lie. Note a pattern?

By the way,I've never seen misogyny on Indybay like the anti-zionists on this threads hidden posts. Now we've learned that they hate Jews AND Women. Anyone else?

basically, I read the first line, if I can even get that far, and then I ignore the rest

sometimes I just see the ALL CAPS and don't even bother

just thought you should know that by overusing ALL CAPS you are less likely to be read by myself and I am sure others

ALL CAPS are for emphasis, and if you emphasize every last thing you write, the net effect is that it all becomes the same and nothing is emphasized. it's a truely self-defeating way to express yourself

but maybe you don't care if people ignore you, you just like to yell into the wind

if I want to follow certain threads, I run into your stupid ALL CAPS crap

you make me see it when you do that in public forums

it's annoying and fewer people read what you have to say when you do that

calling it a style is not a justification for breaking rules of common online communication. it just makes you look like an ass and negates whatever it is you are trying to say

"Zionists believe that the jewish people have the right to maintain their homeland."

aaron: "you have no idea what my position is on zionism"


(Note: "aaron" is not Aaron Aarons, the well-known Bay Area anti-Zionist Jewish-American.)

JA never responded to my rejoinder to his defense of Farrahkan, preferring to deflect the conversation to yet another tirade against zionism.

Farrakhan is a counter-revolutionary by any definition. He's not simply an anti-semite; he's also a defender of capitalism, a social reactionary who believes blacks should "atone," and, by his own admission, complicit in the murder of Malcolm X...Yet JA upholds this fraud/gangster as some sort of threat to our rulers. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As to the suggestion that I'm a zionist (an epithet JA hurls when he's losing an argument), let me say that I'm unequivocally opposed to the zionist project. That it surprises JA that one could be opposed to Zionism and Farrahkanism is more proof of JA's impoverished political vision.
#######

To JA's highly-accomplished "white room-mate": you're an idiot.

Malik and other Common Ground participants are very accessible. You could call, but you need to be there if you want to understand life in Algiers or the 9th Ward, right now. There's a lot more to the story than one statement from one speech.

Write more when you've had a chance to spend time in Algiers or the 9th Ward.