Tag Archives: Whites

Stokely Carmichael on liberal pitfalls

Posted on by

Most liberals are naive to other thinking or to the insightful speeches of the socialist black activists of the 60’s. Stokely Carmichael saw the powerlessness of the liberal that other moderate Negro leaders wouldn’t attempt or couldn’t see.

The Black Panthers saw through the petty liberal ideology that always sought cooperation with the capitalists, or as Stokely put it, the oppressors. He talked of liberals and peace activists rejection of violence as a means to achieve real change. Real change defined as eliminating capitalism which is the very root of our dilemma. Is it that the progressive/liberal ideology is largely bankrupt? That it goes nowhere often and deceives its followers into static worn out Gandhi-Goodman, no alternative strategies that always succumb to the real power that is the fascists source of control? Violence? Yes is the answer.

Less a massive armed militant mobilization and a clean break from the stink that is capitalism, there will never be a fair social system that works for the vast working class population. And a re-education of our children away from fascisms model and as to the truth about democratic socialism.

“What we want to do for our people, the oppressed, is to begin to legitimize violence in their minds. So that for us violence against the oppressor will be expedient. This is very important, because we have all been brainwashed into accepting questions of moral judgment when violence is used against the oppressor.”

The Pitfalls of Liberalism
by Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)
(From the book; “Stokely Speaks – From Black Power to Pan Africanism”)

Whenever one writes about a problem in the United States, especially concerning the racial atmosphere, the problem written about is usually black people that they are either extremist, irresponsible, or ideologically naive.

What we want to do here is to talk about white society, and the liberal segment of white society, because we want to prove the pitfalls of liberalism, that is, the pitfalls of liberals in their political thinking.

Whenever articles are written, whenever political speeches are given, or whenever analysis are made about a situation, it is assumed that certain people of one group, either the left or the right, the rich or the poor, the whites or the blacks, are causing polarization. The fact is that conditions cause polarization, and that certain people can act as catalysts to speed up the polarization; for example, Rap Brown or Huey Newton can be a catalyst for speeding up the polarization of blacks against whites in the United States, but the conditions are already there. George Wallace can speed up the polarization of white against blacks in America, but again, the conditions are already there.

Many people want to know why, out of the entire white segment of society, we want to criticize the liberals. We have to criticize them because they represent the liaison between other groups, between the oppressed and the oppressor. The liberal tries to become an arbitrator, but he is incapable of solving the problems. He promises the oppressor that he can keep the oppressed under control; that he will stop them from becoming illegal (in this case illegal means violent). At the same time, he promises the oppressed that he will be able to alleviate their suffering – in due time. Historically, of course, we know this is impossible, and our era will not escape history.

The most perturbing question for the liberal is the question of violence. The liberals initial reaction to violence is to try to convince the oppressed that violence is an incorrect tactic, that violence will not work, that violence never accomplishes anything. The Europeans took America through violence and through violence they established the most powerful country in the world. Through violence they maintain the most powerful country in the world. It is absolutely absurd for one to say that violence never accomplishes anything.

Today power is defined by the amount of violence one can bring against one’s enemy – that is how you decide how powerful a country is; power is defined not by the number of people living in a country, it is not based on the amount of resources to be found in that country, it is not based upon the good will of the leaders or the majority of that people. When one talks about a powerful country, one is talking precisely about the amount of violence that that country can heap upon its enemy. We must be clear in our minds about that. Russia is a powerful country, not because there are so many millions of Russians but because Russia has great atomic strength, great atomic power, which of course is violence. America can unleash an infinite amount of violence, and that is the only way one considers American powerful. No one considers Vietnam powerful, because Vietnam cannot unleash the same amount of violence. Yet if one wanted to define power as the ability to do, it seems to me that Vietnam is much more powerful than the United States. But because we have been conditioned by Western thoughts today to equate power with violence, we tend to do that at all times, except when the oppressed begin to equate power with violence….then it becomes an “incorrect” equation.

Most societies in the West are not opposed to violence. The oppressor is only opposed to violence when the oppressed talk about using violence against the oppressor. Then the question of violence is raised as the incorrect means to attain one’s ends. Witness, for example, that Britain, France, and the United States have time and time again armed black people to fight their enemies for them. France armed Senegalese in World War 2, Britain of course armed Africa and the West Indies, and the United States always armed the Africans living in the United States. But that is only to fight against their enemy, and the question of violence is never raised. The only time the United States or England or France will become concerned about the question of violence is when the people whom they armed to kill their enemies will pick up those arms against them. For example, practically every country in the West today is giving guns either to Nigeria or the Biafra. They do not mind giving those guns to those people as long as they use them to kill each other, but they will never give them guns to kill another white man or to fight another white country.

The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as a means to attain liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions about violence. I want to state emphatically here that violence in any society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It is neither right nor is it wrong. It is just simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.

It is not a question of whether it is right to kill or it is wrong to kill; killing goes on. Let me give an example. If I were in Vietnam, if I killed thirty yellow people who were pointed out to me by white Americans as my enemy, I would be given a medal. I would become a hero. I would have killed America’s enemy – but America’s enemy is not my enemy. If I were to kill thirty white policemen in Washington, D.C. who have been brutalizing my people and who are my enemy, I would get the electric chair. It is simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence. In Vietnam our violence is legalized by white America. In Washington, D.C., my violence is not legalized, because Africans living in Washington, D.C., do not have the power to legalize their violence.

I used that example only to point out that the oppressor never really puts an ethical or moral judgment on violence, except when the oppressed picks up guns against the oppressor. For the oppressor, violence is simply the expedient thing to do.

Is it not violent for a child to go to bed hungry in the richest country in the world? I think that is violent. But that type of violence is so institutionalized that it becomes a part of our way of life. Not only do we accept poverty, we even find it normal. And that again is because the oppressor makes his violence a part of the functioning society. But the violence of the oppressed becomes disruptive. It is disruptive to the ruling circles of a given society. And because it is disruptive it is therefore very easy to recognize, and therefore it becomes the target of all those who in fact do not want to change the society. What we want to do for our people, the oppressed, is to begin to legitimize violence in their minds. So that for us violence against the oppressor will be expedient. This is very important, because we have all been brainwashed into accepting questions of moral judgment when violence is used against the oppressor.

If I kill in Vietnam I am allowed to go free; it has been legalized for me. I has not been legitimatized in my mind. I must legitimatize it in my own mind, and even though it is legal I may never legitimatize in in my own mind. There are a lot of people who came back from Vietnam, who have killed where killing was legalized, but who still have psychological problems over the fact that they have killed. We must understand, however, that to legitimatize killing in one’s mind does not make it legal. For example, I have completely legitimatized in my mind the killing of white policemen who terrorize black communities. However, if I get caught killing a white policeman, I have to go to jail, because I do not as yet have the power to legalize that type of killing. The oppressed must begin to legitimatize that type of violence in the minds of our people, even though it is illegal at this time, and we have to keep striving every chance we get to attain that end.

Now, I think the biggest problem with the white liberal in America, and perhaps the liberal around the world, is that his primary task is to stop confrontation, stop conflicts, not to redress grievances, but to stop confrontation. And this is very clear, it must become very, very clear in all our minds. Because once we see what the primary task of the liberal is, then we can see the necessity of not wasting time with him. His primary role is to stop confrontation. Because the liberal assumes a priori that a confrontation is not going to solve the problem. This of course, is an incorrect assumption. We know that.

We need not waste time showing that this assumption of the liberals is clearly ridiculous. I think that history has shown that confrontation in many cases has resolved quite a number of problems – look at the Russian revolution, the Cuban revolution, the Chinese revolution. In many cases, stopping confrontation really means prolonging suffering.

The liberal is so preoccupied with stopping confrontation that he usually finds himself defending and calling for law and order, the law and order of the oppressor. Confrontation would disrupt the smooth functioning of the society and so the politics of the liberal leads him into a position where he finds himself politically aligned with the oppressor rather than with the oppressed.

The reason the liberal seeks to stop confrontation – and this is the second pitfall of liberalism – is that his role, regardless of what he says, is really to maintain the status quo, rather than to change it. He enjoys economic stability from the status quo and if he fights for change he is risking his economic stability. What the liberal is really saying is that he hopes to bring about justice and economic stability for everyone through reform, that somehow the society will be able to keep expanding without redistribution the wealth.

This leads to the third pitfall of the liberal. The liberal is afraid to alienate anyone, and therefore he is incapable of presenting any clear alternative.

Look at the past presidential campaign in the United States between Nixon, Wallace, and Humphrey. Nixon and Humphrey, because they try to consider themselves some sort of liberals, did not offer any alternatives. But Wallace did, he offered clear alternatives. Because Wallace was not afraid to alienate, he was not afraid to point out who had caused errors in the past, and who should be punished. The liberals are afraid to alienate anyone in society. They paint such a rosy picture of society and they tell us that while things have been bad in the past, somehow they can become good in the future without restructuring society at all.

What the liberal really wants is to bring about change which will not in any way endanger his position. The liberal says, “It is a fact that you are poor, and it is a fact that some people are rich but we can make you rich without affecting those people who are rich”. I do not know how poor people are going to get economic security without affecting the rich in a given country, unless one is going to exploit other peoples. I think that if we followed the logic of the liberal to its conclusion we would find that all we can get from it is that in order for a society to become suitable we must begin to exploit other peoples.

Fourth, I do not think that liberals understand the difference between influences and power, and the liberals get confused seeking influence rather than power. The conservatives on the right wing, or the fascists, understand power, though, and they move to consolidate power while the liberal pushes for influence.

Let us examine the period before civil rights legislation in the United States. There was a coalition of the labor movement, the student movement, and the church for the passage of certain civil rights legislation; while these groups formed a broad liberal coalition, and while they were able to exert their influence to get certain legislation passed, they did not have the power to implement the legislation once it became law. After they got certain legislation passed they had to ask the people whom they were fighting to implement the very things that they had not wanted to implement in the past. The liberal fights for influence to bring about change, not for the power to implement the change. If one really wants to change a society, one does not fight to influence change and then leave the change to someone else to bring about. If the liberals are serious they must fight for power and not for influence.

These pitfalls are present in his politics because the liberal is part of the oppressor. He enjoys the status quo while he himself may not be actively oppressing other people, he enjoys the fruits of that oppression. And he rhetorically tries to claim the he is disgusted with the system as it is.

While the liberal is part of the oppressor, he is the most powerless segment within that group. Therefore when he seeks to talk about change, he always confronts the oppressed rather than the oppressor. He does not seek to influence the oppressor, he seeks to influence the oppressed. He says to the oppressed, time and time again, “You don’t need guns, you are moving too fast, you are too radical, you are too extreme.” He never says to the oppressor, “You are too extreme in your treatment of the oppressed,” because he is powerless among the oppressors, even if he is part of that group; but he has influence, or, at least, he is more powerful than the oppressed, and he enjoys this power by always cautioning, condemning, or certainly trying to direct and lead the movements of the oppressed.

To keep the oppressed from discovering his pitfalls the liberal talks about humanism. He talks about individual freedom, about individual relationships. One cannot talk about human idealism in a society that is run by fascists. If one wants a society that is in fact humanistic, one has to ensure that the political entity, the political state, is one that will allow humanism. And so if one really wants a state where human idealism is a reality, one has to be able to control the political state. What the liberal has to do is to fight for power, to go for the political state and then, once the liberal has done this, he will be able to ensure the type of human idealism in the society that he always talks about.

Because of the above reasons, because the liberal is incapable of bringing about the human idealism which he preaches, what usually happens is that the oppressed, whom he has been talking to finally becomes totally disgusted with the liberal and begins to think that the liberal has been sent to the oppressed to misdirect their struggle, to rule them. So whether the liberal likes it or not, he finds himself being lumped, by the oppressed, with the oppressor – of course he is part of that group. The final confrontation, when it does come about, will of course include the liberal on the side of the oppressor. Therefore if the oppressed really wants a revolutionary change, he has no choice but to rid himself of those liberals in his rank.

Kwame Ture
(aka Stokely Carmichael)

Kwame Ture was born Stokely Carmichael on June 29, 1941 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, the son of Adolphus and Mabel Carmichael. He immigrated to the United States in 1952 with his family and settled in New York, New York. He graduated from the academically elite Bronx High School of Science in 1960 and made the decision to attend Howard University. Howard University conferred on him a Bachelor of Science Degree in Philosophy in 1964.

It was while in Washington that Stokely became deeply involved in the “Freedom Rides,” “Sit-Ins,” and other demonstrations to challenge segregation in American society. He participated with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG). He later joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was elected its National Chairman in June 1966. While in Greenville, Mississippi, he along with his friend and colleague Willie Ricks, rallied the cry “Black Power” which became the most popular slogan of the Civil Rights era. Consequently, he became the primary spokesman for the Black Power ideology. In 1967, he coauthored with Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power, the Politics of Liberation in America. That same year, Stokely was disassociated from SNCC and he became the Prime Minister of the Black Panthers, headquartered in Oakland, California. He soon became disenchanted with the Panthers and moved to Guinea, West Africa.

While residing in Africa, Stokely Carmichael changed his name to “Kwame Ture” to honor Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to independence from Britain, and, Sekou Toure, who was President of Guinea and his mentor. For more than 30 years, Ture led the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party and devoted the rest of his life to Pan Africanism, a movement to uproot the inequities of racism for people of African descent and to develop an economic and cultural coalition among the African Diaspora.

In 1998, at the age of 57, Kwame Ture died from complications of prostate cancer. To the end he answered the telephone, “ready for the revolution.” His marriage to Miriam Makeba and Guinean physician Marlyatou Barry ended in divorce. He has one son, Bokar, who resides in the United States.

Why?

Posted on by
1

Black Americans are getting sick and fed up with the entire racist criminal injustice system of the US. Still fresh in memory is the picture of White cops with guns turning back Blacks trying to cross the Mississippi Bridge to get out of New Orleans. In mind, too, is the new blatantly open use of torture not only of American military held POWs, but also of Black common folk held in US prisons around the country.

Thousands marched against racial profiling this week In D.C., their protest fed by the movement to defend the Jena Six. Why?

Why? is the question that was asked in Miami this week, too, and got a young man shot down by the police there. Why? too another taser death, not just in Canada, but in Miami that same week, this time of a Black man? Why? Black Agenda Report reports these stories of the Miami events. Executed ‘Walking While Black’ in Miami

Why? The answer is simple. We live in a world ruled by corporations run by Whites of privilege. They control and run a police and judicial system run and controlled by Whites of privilege, too. We live in a US privleged White world where a White privileged and dominated system arrests and tortures prisoners of color without any sense of the human indecency of their actions, fed by an even larger White community that cheers this on. We live in a racist US society.

Nothing that much has changed from the past. MLK’s ‘dream’ is still a dream and not any reality. That is the answer to Why?

For Black Americans especially there is no national security under the so-called national security state. Instead, it is a state of criminal injustice Blacks live under and promises of change for the better cannot be fed when all the recent changes have been for the worse. Racial injustice cannot be disappeared, when class injustice is the norm.

Student Zionist group, Hillel, and Darfur

Posted on by
Reply

Hillel, the US’s most prominent student Zionist group, is actively pushing for US intervention against and into Sudan. On their web site which passes itself off as progressive and green, you will not find any concern for the people of Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Somalia, or Afghanistan. All these being countries currently being torn apart by US interventions into their affairs.

Instead, Hillel is all into encouraging the notion that US and British imperialism is a benign humanitarian thing for the peoples of Sudan to experience, just as so many other colonized and semi-colonized peoples have. Onward Christian and Jewish soldiers, I guess?

One local activist who is often times connected with the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission through his work at Springs Action Alliance, is now celebrating Hillel’s work over at the University of Colorado in Boulder. There some students have erected a ‘shanty town’ to ‘call attention to Darfur’. Some of these folk were Hillel sutdents for sure.

The Springs Action Alliance’s most recent newsletter called our attention to this ‘shanty town’ constructed by a few students over at the UC at Boulder. This activist is concerned about Darfur. Good. He wanted us to know about this ‘shanty town’ build for us to try to get our support for intervention into Sudan.

I guess though that this individual has forgotten about the segregated shanty towns of White Apartheid South Africa that Zionist groups like Hillel enouraged Israel and the US to accept for decades? He, and other local liberal Darfur fetishists seemingly are blind to the allies they sometimes keep, it seems. They focus on Darfur alongside at many times a rather mixed crowd, Zionists included. These Zionists of today want us to forget about Apartheid shanty towns, and to think that Muslims are putting people into shanty towns instead of Christian Whites, or Jews.

These liberals that push us to become more concerned about Darfur don’t seem to understand that we already are concerned about the violence there. We don’t need Hillel to ‘inform’ us of the problem. We don’t need the Carter Center folk either. We, too, are concerned with all the dying that is going on in that region of Sudan.

We don’t need Zionist backed construction of fake ‘shanty towns’ at UC-Boulder to prompt our interest. We are against the continued bloodshed in that sad region of Sudan, Darfur, with or without Zionists and Israel pushing the issue.

Unlike the Zionists, both Jewish and Christian in the US, we don’t primarily hold the mainly Muslim government of Sudan to be alone responsible for the killing that has occurred there. We also don’t think that an increase in US-British govenrment directed intervention is the solution to what decades of British colonialism in the region has brought about.

More Imperial directed colonialism is not the solution to problems accruing from several centuries of European colonialism, even if it comes disguised as UN or African Union intervention instead of directly Brit and American.

Hillel and Darfur? How sweet their concern for Africa certainly is. It’s just not very sincere though. Instead, it’s little more than a propaganda tool they hope to use to gain support for more Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians off more of the Palestinian’s land.

Who are they really going to fool long term here? Their concern about any killing going on in Sudan is nothing more than a distracting device, to help keep people’s attention away from Israel’s own crimes committed with the help of the US government. If they want to worry about shanty towns, then worry some about those refugee camps both Israel and the US have created all over the Middle East. Until then, their concern about shanty towns in Sudan rings a little too false to me.

I only wish I believed my own rhetoric

Posted on by
4

Marie argues with Officer Paladino
Freedom to express oneself, to think independently, was the lure that led the masses to our shores. Safety from abusive and intrusive government is the dream that continues to draw people to our borders. Our military men and women are in Iraq and elsewhere fighting for these same principles on behalf of those who cannot battle tyranny alone. Yet here in Colorado Springs, where so many are at great personal risk because of American ideology, we do not recognize the basic Constitutional freedoms of our own citizens.

It was a private parade, you say. The police were just following the orders of John O’Donnell, the parade organizer. Those people had no right to be there. What a load of garbage. The city was a partner in the St. Patrick’s Day parade. They blocked off public streets and used public resources. For the city and the CSPD to hide behind another organization’s insurance policy is not only cowardly, it is un-Constitutional. The ACLU won a recent case in Hawaii, wherein a “private” parade sought to exclude a particular group from marching. The conclusion: government entities can not shield themselves, nor take directives, from private citizens using public resources. The rest of the country seems to understand this.

In any case, the excessive force used by several of the policemen called to the scene is absolutely indefensible. Miscommunication, fear of public safety, parade crashing. None excuse what ensued. Not for a minute. Today it was peace activists; tomorrow it will be someone else. This type of unchecked abuse of power is a terrifying thing to witness. The lack of accountability by the CSPD illustrates that this thug behavior is tolerated, perhaps encouraged. If they are willing to behave that way in the presence of hundreds of spectators, can you imagine the treatment of those less visible? Are they taught to leave their humanity at the door when they don their uniforms and guns?

While I appreciate the attempts made by John Weiss to reconcile the community, his call to the activists to drop the threat of a civil suit is wrong. Where the people have no voice the court system is the next step. A hung jury in so simple a case shows that we are a town that is not as freedom-loving as our local daily newspaper professes. Perhaps, as in Hawaii, a higher court will possess greater wisdom. It is the next peaceful step in our cherished democratic process. The checks and balances built into the Constitution provide a measure of hope.

If there is no relief to be found by those who have sworn to defend the Constitution, then we will have to take to the streets. Systemic change is always resisted by those in power. If the populace had not banded together in the past to demand its rights, women would not vote, blacks and whites would be segregated, workers would toil in dangerous conditions, children would be chattel.

We should not live in fear of our local government, they should fear and respect us. They are public servants. We are a country of the people, by the people, for the people. We will not rest until our government, including those on Capitol Hill, abides by the Bill of Rights. Don’t mistake quiet acquiescence for peace. It is a reaction to oppression.

What the peace marchers need is not a call to lay down, but the rising up of their fellow citizens. They call for peace. Let the rest of us support them with a call for justice. As Thoreau said in Civil Disobedience, “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.” It is time for every concerned citizen to help stop the rampant abuse of power in our city and beyond. Without liberty and justice, there will never be peace. Here, there or anywhere.

New Age posturing with the ‘pickaninnies’

Posted on by
Reply

Those who grew up in the Old South, remember when racist politicians used to pose with ‘Negro’ children to supposedly show their concern for Black people. That was a crude technique to deflect criticism for being a racist.

White racists often called Black children ‘pickaninnies’, and loved to rub their heads with the different type of hair. They would then comment about how cute and funny Black children were as opposed to the uppity adult Blacks who never fully wanted to acknowledge their assigned places in Apartheid America.

Why the term ‘pickaninny’ for Black children? Try thinking about what ‘pick a ninny’ means. A ninny means a fool. Black children were considered kind of adorable jesters in the court of White racist America of that era, so Whites often tried to help out the supposedly ‘adorable pickaninnies’ with gifts of food and clothing. That made the racist feel good and generous, instead of feeling full of self loathing for being the miserable monsters that most racists really are.

So enter today’s world, and has the posturing with the ‘pickaninnies’ now disappeared? No, it has just morphed into technicolor instead. Instead of touching the ‘pickaninnies moppy heads’ old style, we have good hearted folk posing themselves next to emaciated, injured, and distraught ‘pickaninnies’. And this is done outside US borders, and not inside them as of Old. Case in point is Mia Farrow posing in Chad today on Yahoo News with her great concern for the welfare of the ‘pickaninny’.

Don’t get me wrong here. Much suffering is underway in Africa, as it has been ongoing for centuries. That’s not the point of the posturing though, no more than it was with the posturing of the past. Why is Darfur THE GENOCIDE, and not Congo or Iraq or Palestine? That is the point of the posturing, simply to deflect attention elsewhere from one’s own crimes.

It is not just actresses like Mia Farrow, doing the posturing with the ‘pickaninny’ neither. Here is from antiwar.com today which links to an article titled… Bush considering Darfur no-fly zone. The title says it all. But look who else is posturing to deflect attention away from their own constructed genocides! It is Israel itself. We have Israel, Bush, and Mia Farrow all posing with the ‘pickaninny’. That little ‘pickaninny’ is called Darfur and we are supposed to forget all context in the real world and cry along with the crocodile tears of the genocidal and racist maniacs running amok across the planet. I refer to the governmental leaders of Israel and the US.

They can’t be racists and genocidists at all, look at their concern for the ‘pickaninny’! ‘Save the Pickaninny!’ they seem to be all shouting at one time. Send the candy distributing troops (our boys) in to save the ‘pickaninnies’ of Darfur! Hands off the ‘pickaninnies’! In the link, it is noted that ‘The Holocaust museum has taken the lead on behalf of Darfur’. How nice. Not noted is why the Holocaust museum has not taken the lead on behalf of the Palestinians instead? And why is Bush not trying to impose a no-fly zone over Iraq at this time instead of Darfur?

Let’s face it, New Age posturing with the ‘pickaniny’ is just as nauseating as it was in the Old South of another era. In fact, it may be even more repulsive than before.

The tiers of torture inside American prisons

Posted on by
4

It’s been ages since I saw an article in Time Magazine worth reading, but ‘Are Prisons Driving Prisoners Mad?‘ does ask the right question It even goes so far as to answer the question honestly, and then to conclude that driving prisoners insane is in nobody’s real interests. There is though another question which is, ‘Are the Prisons Deliberately Driving Prisoners Insane?’ I believe that the answer is YES, which in turn leads to yet another question. ‘Why?’

The short article in Time hints that YES, the prisons are deliberately doing what they are doing, and says that it is out of society’s relatively normal urge, which they call ’emotional sense’ to make life harsh for those who have committed brutal acts. They conclude though, that ’emotional sense’ does not make practical sense. That’s because some of these now insane prisoners get eventually released back out into society and there they are even more likely to do harm than before.

What was interesting about this relatively honest Time Magazine commentary, is that nowhere did it ever call what was going on TORTURE. It did say that examining how SuperMax prisons and isolation function to permanently injure people did open up the need for courts to examine these practices and to maybe stop them. That somehow a line had been crossed?

So what amount of torture crosses the line for Time/Life/ AOL and folks like them? Apparently they have some second thoughts about turning people into vegetables and raving psychotics through sensory deprivation? But that is just one tier of torture within America’s Gulags. You get to that tier because other tiers of torture also are in place. SuperMaxes and isolation chambers begin in stages to torture prisoners. Are the earlier stage of solitary confinement deemed normal and appropriate by Time Magazine?

Take for example, the routine separation of prisoners in America from their children and spouses? Is that not a form of torture and prisoner abuse, too. Is that not the first tier towards driving human beings insane by torture? After all, what is a norm in prisoner abuse in American jails is not the norm in many other countries. In other systems of detention, prisoners are not forced into homosexuality, nor separated from the calming effects of holding their babies and hugging their older children. Is it not a form of torture to not allow normal human contact of this type for prisoners that will, in their majority, some day return to society?

Also, is it not torture to physically and emotionally allow some prisoners to torture others. The prison administrators like to charge that this is something that prisoners do to themselves and that they are doing all they can to stop it. Does anybody really believe this? Actually, just like in our foreign wars, the ‘deciders’ in control use one group against another, and afterwards blame them all for being responsible for the mayhem that is presided over. Inside the prison, homosexuals are often used against the others as informants, and heterosexuals are used against the homosexuals. Blacks vs Whites vs Hispanics. Short timers vs lifers, and lifers vs short timers. The prison administrative gang lords it over the prisoner gangs, and the prisoner gangs fight back, but usually against each other. The forms of torture administered within the American prisons are varied and often quite camouflaged. but they are there and constant. The greatest torture in the prisons is arbitrariness. It is used as a constant stick by the legal system.

All this mayhem encouraged amongst the tiers of torture inside American prisons only goes to reinforce the excuse for having so many locked up. ‘See? We got to do it! It’s not that we are cruel, oh hell no! It’s just that they are animals!’ But that’s all really a lie.

The truth is, that America’s tiers of torture inside the prison system were deliberately put into effect because the economically elite ruling class hates the poor, hates the weak, hates the people they rob and abuse, and want to torture them. It’s no mistake at all, and they encourage a mob to support them in their own hatred towards those they despise. The torture is there, because the rulers want to break others down into dysfunctional, mentally and physically destroyed human beings. This is the same nastiness and viciousness of those that burned witches at the stake, lynched innocent Blacks, beat and whipped slaves and prisoners of the past. It’s still going on, though the forms have evolved.

The tiers of torture within the US prison system are twin to the secret rendition centers and Guantanamo where our military abuses POWs held without any due process. So the answer to Time Magazine’s question is…. Yes, US prisons are driving prisoners insane. Thats’ what torture is meant to do, and torture works.

Should we honor the torturers and their work in America, Time? You do in most of your commentaries and ‘news’. We need to stop torturing all prisoners, and not just those held by the military.

Bump Clubs

Posted on by
Reply

This one is good for when Others start chanting about how united the people were in World War 2, and everybody did his part for the War Effort, Bravely and Nobly, sacrificing all without complaint For The Duration.

In Detroit, where there were suddenly lots of jobs because of two factors: the men were getting drafted and the Military were buying up supplies, machines were the focus in MoTown at the hour.

People often wonder, (and this comes in to the thread of thought a little later) if things were so very bad in the South for blacks, why didn’t they just leave? The promised land up Nawth wasn’t as bad as the Southroners now was it?

The answer: no really available jobs. Escaping the Jim Crow south was not really an option, because what do you do when you get there? Starve?

But with the war, things changed on one front, there were suddenly not enough people to fill the jobs.
So an exodus of sorts, to the factories and foundries of the Promised Land.

Funny thing about a war, the government has to maintain xenophobia at a fever pitch, in order to keep the people hating the Enemy (wish I could write sound effects like crashing thunder, and a basso reverberation on the end of the Enemyeeeeee……) they had to be made to hate anybody different. Which isn’t so hard to do.

There is a distinct shade of Katrina in all of this.

The Government put up posters, everywhere, Why We Fight, Know The Enemy, Loose Lips Sink Ships, Lucky Strikes Green has Gone To War! (the last was kind of a stupid advertising exaggeration. The red dye they used in making the little target on the front of a pack of Lucky’s was strangely, a chemical which was used in making Olive Drab green paint. So the Army hogged the supply, Lucky Strikes parent corporation changed the color For The Duration, and the cigarette manufactures also hogged in with giving away in every box of C and K rations, a box of five cigarettes. Which they had lost their Far East and European market for anyway. Capitalism at it’s best)

There were posters the writers of which cynically called Know Your Gooks, telling the differences in facial structure and speech patterns between Chinese (good Gook) and dirty filthy sinister Japanese. MIND YOU the phrases in the past sentence WERE NOT MINE.

So, naturally, assisted much by the unnatural provocation of warmongering, there was resentment amongst the Good People of Detroit, directed against these people coming up with a strange accent, almost a different language, a radically different appearance, strange customs and who had a trained distrust of Whites.

And a lot of Southern Whites, who had shared the poverty of the south with the Blacks, just on the other side of the tracks. Sharing in a separate Apartheid kind of way.
And many had been told all their lives that the blacks were the reason for the poverty of the South.
Like so many now tell the story that Mexicans are the reason for the economy being so poor nowadays.

Which culminated in Race Riots. When people speak of the Detroit Ghetto Riots they usually mean the ones in the sixties. These were like 20 years earlier.

One of the myths spread around was that Blacks were deliberately and in an organized manner provoking whites by bumping them. You know, like when you get on a bus or train or trolley, and actually physically contact another human. You get 50 people jammed onto a bus made for 30 and somebody is going to be touching.
There were even whispers that the Blacks had formed Bump Clubs, and were keeping score on how many whiteys they bumped.

Kind of like now when you ride the bus and a couple of Spanish people will be talking to each other IN SPANISH and somebody will glare at them and say “They’re talking about us, you know they are”.
If you try to speak logically to this, by saying “Oh, you speak spanish, then, What exactly are they saying?”

“well, I don’t have to learn Spanish, they need to learn English, they come up here and live free and refuse to learn the language”

And it was that type of thing, the creation of the rumor of Bump Clubs, which was a spark to ignite a smoking smoldering pit of hatred.

So much for the myth of Unity. Shot down by the Myth of The Bump Club.

So when somebody mourns for the Everybody Rally Round the Flag days of world war 2, look him straight in his beady little eyes and say “Bump Clubs”.

It might not serve to educate him, but it will keep you from losing your mind. Sometimes it helps to focus.

Nuke Dublin and other stories

Posted on by
Reply

Ok so not many other stories in this.

But you know how you can go into certain stores, you know the ones, that have posters and bumper stickers and tee shirts with the Tricolor in the international NO sign, the red circle with the diagonal slash?

And short snappy slogans like Nuke Paris or Boycott France or whatever the hell else the Freedom Fries commando would gladly wear or display.

You hear stupid jokes about how the French are worthless as soldiers, the one about “have you heard the joke about the french army? Well the french army IS the joke!!” and every redneck in earshot busts a gut laughing at how very clever that is.

And you think, to yourself, Self, if the French army really were worthless, why are these buffoons so angry that they didn’t throw their worthless soldiers’ lives away the way GW throws away American and British lives?

So I came up with a new thought for Tee Shirts, and Bumper Stickers, a non-slogan to monkey wrench the slogan driven world gone mad.

Boycott Ireland, ask me why or Nuke Dublin (ask me why)

When somebody asks what that means, tell him that the Irish Republic had also refused to back The Chimp’s war play. Along with other Commonwealth nations like Canada.
It seems to me, personally, that all the invective thrown against the French, is done by cowards.

Simple math tells these cowards that though Ireland had also flat out given the Bushmaster the bird on Iraq, in America there are one fuck of a lot more Irish descendants than French. So they play the Frog-baiting game because they feel that the French descendants probably aren’t nearly as likely to kick their damn teeth down their throats.

Of course, that wouldn’t play very well in Louisiana, because most of the non-French whites there are Irish, so who would they target there?

Mengistu found guilty of genocide

Posted on by
Reply

Ethiopia’s ex-ruler and Leonid Brezhnev’s African superstar, Mengistu, was found guilty in absentia for genocide today. He fled Ethiopia for Zimbabwe after the capital, Addis Ababa, was taken by rebel forces in 1991. He has been tried in absentia by a regime that itself is now having real problems with keeping its repression from running totally out of control. Still, Mengistu was definitely a bloody tyrant despite his original revolutionary drive. Under his Dergue regime, somewhere beetween 1 and 2 million died during his time in power, either from famine, through war, or directly through assassinations ordered by Mengistu’s people. He deserves his conviction, though he alone was not responsible for all those who died.

The problem one has though in assigning responsibility for crimes such as genocide, is that often there is so much blame to share all around. All of Africa became an arena for proxy fights in the ‘Great’ Cold War between the US plus its allies Portugal, France, Spain, Belgium, Britain, and the White Apartheid regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa, all combined in struggle to keep the former Soviet Union from influencing the region in alliance with various indegenous rebel groups. This combined European-US interventionism caused the deaths of millions upon millions of Africans. And yet no genocide trial for the Whites.

Much has been made of Brezhnev’s miserable decision to have Russians fight it out on foreign soil in Afghanistan against the Islamic proxy troops of the US. This was actually a reasonable fight though, since what went on in that country certainly effected the Soviet Union, too. But why on earth Brezhnev continued to side and fund Mengistu in the Horn of Africa wars is hard for many to understand. He truly was a totally incompetent and corrupt leader, and his decisions he took in regard to the African tribal conflicts, certainly had a major effect on what ultimately led later on to Gorbachev’s own reaccionry and embecilic policies. That in turn led to the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union back into a group of many barbaric and often warring, Fourth World capitalist states.

That all being said, one positive effect of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, is that it pulled the rug out from under Mengistu’s foreign funding for war in the Horn of Africa. When he finally fell in 1991 from power, he was about as credible as Pol Pot had become in Kampuchea after beating back the US in SE Asia. Lesson learned once again? An intial revolutionary movement that comes to power with war being waged continuously by imperialist powers against it, can lead to a meltdown of the revolution and a total disintegration into slaughter and famine.

Not My Tribe

Posted on by
1

NMT. It bears discussing I think, and I hardly know what I’m talking about. Not My Tribe. It’s racist, it’s ethnocentric, it’s xenophobic, it’s human nature.

Avoiding males of another tribe coming your way is self preservation. Being attracted to a person whose physical traits match yours is self-propagation. Looking out for your brother is serving your blood line. Favoring others who look like you, who may be kin from somewhere back, is racism yes, it’s also tribal.

This TV season’s Survivor is catching flack for grouping its contestants into tribes by skin color. Is that appropriate? If the other aspects of Survivor reflected the human struggle, perhaps the tribal groupings would be intriguing. Instead I find the stunt rather distasteful.

For one, the “tribes” will be competing against each other. Is there any doubt that skin color has shown itself to be a statistical predictor of aptitude? Not human potential, mind you, physical aptitude. Are not the fastest runners dark-skinned? Are not most chessmasters light-skinned? In climates where people grow fair-skinned, do they not spend more time reading? Under the sun where people grow dark-skinned, is physical conditioning not more imperative? We should get over the platitude that all men are created equal. They are not. It’s doesn’t mean we can’t respect one another.

Second, what are called “racial” distinctions have little to do with tribe. Black Africans are no more from the same tribe than are whites. We all practice tribal eugenics when we size each other up. Eye color, skin texture, hair type, nose, shape, build. These are the traits which mark our tribes. That’s how we recognize our kin. We compete, but not in dead heats. We assert hierarchies over time, we do not breast-beat about far-reaching superiority. We co-exist.

I wonder if Not My Tribe has a place anymore in modern society. At last the planet has become too small to accomodate elements in the melting pot which resist dissolving. In the process however, I don’t see any benefit to lying about our differences. They’re there, they represent our personal culture, to celebrate and assimilate.