Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

[American Dream]

‘[T]he ones who happily claim and embrace their own sense of themselves as privileged ain’t my primary concern. I don’t worry about them first. But, I would love it if they got to the point where they had the capacity to worry about themselves. Because then maybe we could talk. That’s like that Fred Hampton shit: he’d be like, “white power to white people. Black power to black people.” What I think he meant is, “look: the problematic of coalition is that coalition isn’t something that emerges so that you can come help me, a maneuver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”’

Fred Moten in ‘The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study‘ by Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, 140-141

[American Dream]

Hillbilly Ethnography

By JOHN THOMASON



A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of Trumpism

J.D. VANCE has had a very good year. With the bewildering rise of Donald Trump–buoyed, supposedly, by a groundswell of support among the white working class–the author of the best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy has become a de facto spokesperson for the president-elect’s constituency on the cable news circuit. “I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the northeast,” Vance writes in the book’s opening pages. “Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree.” A Yale Law School graduate who now works for Peter Thiel’s investment firm in San Francisco, Vance has made a second career explaining his Appalachian Kentucky and Rust Belt Ohio roots to the liberal audiences of MSNBC and the New York Times. (The Times even included Hillbilly Elegy in its list of “Six Books to Help Understand Trump’s Win.”)

Some on the left have taken liberal readers to task for their earnest gullibility: Vance is a conservative–albeit of the #NeverTrump variety–and he prescribes conservative values to rectify the Rust Belt’s “culture in crisis.” He takes great pains to insist that the decline of industry is not responsible for “a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it,” that reacts “to bad circumstances in the worst way possible”: with hedonism, materialism, poor work ethic, lack of thrift, disregard for family obligations, and a victim mentality. Those sound like the pathologies conservatives have long attributed to black Americans, as Sarah Jones points out in the New Republic, because that’s exactly what they are. (“I have known many welfare queens,” Vance writes, “some were my neighbors, and all were white.”) Like all bootstraps narratives, Vance’s focus on self-improvement distracts from the structural causes of the suffering that plagues his hometown.

If this were the extent of Hillbilly Elegy’s ideological baggage, it would be harmless enough–Vance’s policy prescriptions are vague, and his bootstraps mantra is unlikely to convince any liberals. But embedded within Vance’s many first-person plural appeals to the white working class is a set of racial assumptions that readers would do well to interrogate. Hillbilly Elegy insists, almost simultaneously, that it is and is not about race. Vance writes that he hopes his readers will not see class through “a racial prism,” but quickly goes on to say: “There is undoubtedly an ethnic component lurking in the background of my story.” Hillbillies, Vance claims, are a race of their own.

After lamenting that all whites fall under a single racial banner in the American imagination, Vance works to distinguish “hillbillies” from WASPs and other whites. “Hillbillies” are an ethnically homogenous and geographically identifiable subgroup: whites of Scots-Irish descent who live in the Greater Appalachia region of the United States. As Bob Hutton notes in Jacobin, Vance’s ethnographic description echoes historians Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney’s “Celtic Thesis,” which argued that white southerners were ethnically and culturally distinct thanks to their common descent from pastoral Celtic tribes in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. McDonald and McWhiney were also founding members of the League of the South, a white nationalist organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center currently lists as a hate group.

Vance’s view of Appalachian culture feels more opportunistic than sincerely white nationalistic. It allows him to portray Appalachian and Rust Belt poverty as an exceptional phenomenon, rather than a symptom of broader trends that could not be so easily ascribed to culture. As such, it conveniently justifies the existence of his book. This opportunism makes the book’s racial determinism all the more insidious: it makes it more palatable to audiences that might normally be on guard against explicit white nationalism.

For one thing, Vance cites racist-thinking much more directly than even his critics have indicated. The very first endnote references Razib Khan, a writer who the New York Times dropped as a regular science contributor after Gawkerrevealed his “history with racist, far-right online publications.” Charles Murray–author of The Bell Curve, and perhaps the most famous racial determinist in contemporary American public life–is cited approvingly. These citations are not accidental, nor the product of lazy research. Last month, Vance sat down with Murray for an hour-long discussion at the American Enterprise Institute, a discussion in which the two emphasized the “strong ethnic distinctions” that characterize the white working class.

It’s clear that Murray not only relishes Vance’s emphasis on the ethnography of the Scots-Irish–Murray’s reference to his own “pretty clean Scots-Irish blood” is a bit chilling–but also has good use for the cultural crisis Vance diagnoses in his supposed ethnic group: when Murray asks him to comment on the decline of steady marriages and male breadwinning, Vance obliges in good faith. The accident of Vance’s success is that he published his memoir about “a culture in crisis” at precisely the moment that Trump’s election has forged a national consensus that such a crisis exists. And, to paraphrase Milton Friedman, the ideas that get picked up in a time of crisis are the ones that are lying around.

But Charles Murray’s ideas about racial determinism are not the only ones still lying around. Another racial ideology is “lurking” in the background of Hillbilly Elegy, one so central to contemporary conservative thought that it doesn’t register as ideology at all. Call it racial innocence: Even as Vance wags his finger at the vices of his fellow hillbillies, he cannot help but insist on the innocence of their whiteness.

For decades, the explicit invocation of white supremacy has been anathema to American public life. If this was a welcome development, it was foolish to assume it would be a permanent one. Racial determinism was the Trump campaign’s center of gravity, from the candidate’s rise to prominence as a champion of the “birther” movement to his insistence that a Mexican-American judge would necessarily be biased against him. People like Murray have been peddling racial determinism for a long time, but Trump’s victory has made it a central tenet of the American right, rather than a fringe view it entertains with the occasional National Reviewarticle or think tank fellowship.

With its “ethnic component lurking in the background,” and with well-meaning liberals tacitly accepting its dubious racial claims, Hillbilly Elegy helps to normalize this thinking across the political spectrum. But while reactionary racial determinism spent decades in exile before its recent, triumphant return, an insistence on racial innocence never left the conservative mainstream. This ideology, too, is implicit in the book’s opening pages. Hillbilly Elegy asks us to accept that the Scots-Irish are fiercely loyal, quick to anger, and suspicious of outsiders. It’s just their culture. If the white working class is reacting badly to deindustrialization, as Vance argues, it is because of these innate characteristics.

Continues at: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/hillbilly-ethnography/

[American Dream]

http://recomposition.info/?p=1994

Visions of hope amongst the despondent: lessons of the Abolitionists in the age of Trump

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Recomposition





We live in a time of challenges that can seem so great that they lead many to despair. Climate change, global instability, rising misery and inequity, racism and misogyny are on the march; the barrage of dangers is a heavy load to carry. Today’s article comes from S Nicholas Nappalos and takes us back to an even darker time, slavery-era America, where small groups of radicals defied the odds and dealt the ruling class a blow that has resonated through our history ever since. The defeat of 19th century chattel slavery in the United States stands out as one of the greatest victories for the American left. This may not be obvious especially in light the despicable condition of blacks today in this country. Likewise the rise and integration of the subsequent counter revolution that has become normalized can obscure the scale of victory against capital. The distorted official narrative of the anti-slavery Republican Party freeing the slaves out of mere moral conviction adds to the confusion. The role of radicals is even lesser known.

If we back up a bit away from the Civil War things become clearer. The abolition movement was always a minority within society as a whole and likely a quite small one. The majority of anti-slavery forces always supported gradual transition and reform with significant accommodations for Slave holders. Prior to the Civil War the pro-slavery factions were defeating the efforts to reign them in again and again. They won repeated battles to expand slave states, held one of the most conservative Supreme Courts in US history, enforced slavery through forcibly returning escaped slaves not only in the South but also in so-called free states, and were able to convince and mobilize workers in across the country to fight struggles of blacks as an attack against their own. The radical abolitionists were thus a small if not tiny minority within a country that largely supported slavery and even openly hostile to blacks in general, slavery or no. The movement became more defined in the 1830s in response to the set backs and splintering of the gradualist movement to restrain and slowly eliminate slavery. By the 1850s the movement has suffered significant defeats with a seemingly unstoppable South and the potential of expansion of slavery into new territories on the horizon. It is hard to imagine how despondent they must have felt on the cusp of a shocking victory of historic proportions that they were soon to play a key role in.

The radical abolitionists sought immediate unconditional abolition and condemned not only slavery but the entire system it was based upon: capital, church, and state. They were condemned and attacked at their rallies and yet they did not cow tow to the politics of their day. At protests they tore up the constitution, burned flags, and condemned the government and churches that gave their support to any compromise with slavery. Their vision was such that they supported the rights of women and workers alongside the struggle against slavery. Clashing with slavery opened up their militants to questioning ruling power in general in ways that must have been shocking to their contemporaries. Despite being a small minority they engaged in perpetual direct action and even armed conflict in Kansas, to prevent the expansion of slavery states, and supporting or initiating insurrections in the South such as that of the raid on Harpers Ferry.

The abolitionists likewise were more middle class, white (though it’s multi-racial composition was key), and geographically isolated in the NE compared to their cause. The movement was built however on the interaction between the slave resistance, escaped slaves, and radicals in northern cities through a process of dialogue and shared struggle. The resistance of slaves and abolitionists were linked with different roles and powers, evolved in together, and intervening at different moments that sustained each other. Ultimately it was the revolutionary action of the slaves that was the actualizing force as WEB Dubois’ seminal 1935 Black Reconstruction in America demonstrated, but at key points abolitionists had crucial roles to play that would shatter the ruling class compacts that held slavery together.[1]

The abolitionists took illegal direct action against power, and in doing so were able to destroy the political parties of their day, bring sections of the ruling class to their knees, and helped force the country as a whole into a war that would produce oppositional forces of liberation.

In destabilizing ruling order, abolitionists were a key power in creating the space into which the revolutionary slaves asserted themselves. Revolutionary slaves were able to outmaneuver both sides and began to assert themselves as a collective revolutionary subject and fought for regionalized social organization up through reconstruction.[2] Though ultimately defeated by an alliance of counterrevolution in the South and the Northern ruling class, the radically democratic nature of ex-slave societies has provided a model that continues through this day in American politics. The wave of crises and labor insurrections that followed were a direct response to the fracturing of power created by the revolution led by slaves. Protagonists both of abolition and the upheavals of the civil war would in some instances carry over to the socialist and anarchist movements of the following decades including the US 1st International sections, the anarchist IWMA and allied anarchosyndicalist unions, and the labor movement more generally.[3]

It is worth noting that recent studies have shown slavery was far more profitable than comparable wage labor. Though capitalists of their day and left thinkers along with them believed that slavery was holding back industry, the opposite was true. When slavery was abolished cotton production fell massively and never fully recovered. The union army had to reinstate the compulsory plantation system due to the collapsing cotton economy, and when it too was ultimately overturned cotton harvests did not return to their slavery levels. Despite the arguments of the left for a hundred years slavery was an asset to capital, and its defeat led to vast changes that represent a defeat for the capitalists.[4]

The radical abolitionists are a powerful example of a revolutionary minority creating a program of action that expanded the unity of oppressed potentially revolutionary subjects (women, blacks, workers) and disorganized the ruling class. Their actions contributed to the break down of existing politics and redefined the central divisions of their day and ever since. They did so as a small relatively isolated minority and waged a war on all fronts: ethically, militarily, and through mass social organization. Their experiences brought them into conflict with the central institutions of power which had widespread support, and ultimately fed the more militantly revolutionary movements that came after. They did all this not with an alliance with the ruling class but largely against it.

The main failure we can point to is the inability to translate the victory against slavery into a victory of their other aspirations. The primacy of slavery, historically contingent and limited, was not enough to disband the power they fought, and the mass movement they contributed to remained invested in the union government. This was an obvious asset and most would argue necessity, but it also was the undoing of many of the gains made in Reconstruction. When the capitalists sought to roll back the revolt, the movement was attacked on all sides and successfully isolated. The abolitionists and insurrections (white and black) in the South failed to create a political crisis for capitalism and in doing so were vulnerable to the white supremacist reaction and assault on the working class in general that followed.

Today we live in a time of rolling crises with anemic recoveries. The embarrassing victory of Republicans with a ridiculous agenda on every front is surely sending many to despair. The left’s tiny and ineffective revolutionary minority is likewise isolated from any collective subject. Yet the repression of prisoners, immigrants, and radicals pales in comparison to the challenges of the 1830-1860s. Are our positions more unpopular than equality for women, blacks, and the liberation of workers before any such movement concretely existed?

The state’s base of support looks increasingly flimsy with widespread disillusion with all established forces, geopolitical displacement of the US’s unchallenged position, multiple conflicts looming, and disruptions from climate change on the horizon. The ruling class has shown itself unwilling and seemingly incapable of offering solutions to pressing and obvious daily issues like immigration, climate change, the growing health care crisis, rising immiseration and inequality. The journalists, intellectuals, and talking heads are persisting in defending unpopular factions and ideologies. Discontent is widespread and dissent finds little outlet, as of yet, within the existing power structure which is seemingly insulating itself against obvious reforms that might improve the situation. These are issues that anarchists and revolutionaries have concrete proposals for that answer immediate common needs. Such activity stands to discredit the ruling class and weaken their ability to govern, that is if we are able to elaborate our own and demonstrate with collective struggle how to achieve our goals and their worth.

The radical abolitionists faced down violence unparalleled in our own time with little personal gain and a seemingly hopeless situation in the environment they acted in. It’s unlikely that people had foreseen their part in the victory that came. Today as well it is hard to gain perspective as our position in history is obscured with the swirling of forces around us and the darkness that dominates our minds bombarded as we are with bad news and demoralization. What the example of the abolitionists provide is to remind us of the possibilities from where we stand, with all our weaknesses. Their victory is an encouragement to go further in owning our vision of anarchist communist society and taking action to shift the public imagination around the lines we draw and not the illusions of stability the system is straining ever more pathetically to maintain.

[American Dream]

There Is No Such Thing as "White Genocide"





On Christmas Eve, George Ciccariello-Maher, a political theorist and professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, tweeted, “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.” The tweet was subsequently deleted, but not before Breitbart News picked up on it, triggering hordes of racist trolls. “The professor’s Twitter feed is filled with hateful, obnoxious messages, anti-Americanism, slams of President Donald Trump, attacks on Jews, as well as pro-Black Lives Matter and pro-communist sloganeering,” Breitbart informed its readers. “He also tweeted a picture of a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat set on fire.” Ciccariello has since received hundreds of death threats.

The threat of ‘white genocide’ is a conspiracy theory, promoted by elements of the so-called alt-right and fueled by anxiety over fertility and immigration trends, that was popularized by South Carolina segregationist Bob Whitaker. In 2006, according to The Atlantic, Whitaker posted a rant on his website warning that “the third world pour[ing] into EVERY white country and ONLY into white countries.” (Whitaker ran for president this year before endorsing Trump.) A billboard, paid for by the White Genocide Project, appeared outside a town in Alabama last year. “Diversity Means Chasing Down The Last White Person,” it proclaimed. The idea also comes up in the writings of Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black parishioners at a church in Charleston.

Continues at: http://jezebel.com/there-is-no-such-thi ... 1790500883

http://www.leninology.co.uk/2016/12/we- ... rolls.html

We are all trolls. posted by Richard Seymour

V.
If we're going to be writers, we have to become better readers. Like it or not, we are all amateur hermeneuticists. We scan through acres of text, making very quick decisions as to what to spend more time on, what to share, what to 'like', what to dismiss. We are learning, quick sharp, how to discern 'fake news'. We know a paid advertisement when we see it. We know email scams so well that the scammers have had to move on. We are learning to be able to tell when we're being trolled, and when we're being conscripted for someone else's ego-driven crusade. We are learning the whereabouts of all sorts of invisible cultural thresholds, things that can and cannot be said and in what way. We are coming to sense, almost instinctively, when another person's premises differ so vastly from our own, that no discussion on Twitter can possibly be profitable. These are the new literacies we are forced to acquire in a perilous and volatile terrain, if we aren't to be taken in and sent on a wild-goose chase by every con artist, charlatan, or lunatic. We have to become subtle readers of pitch, tone and genre, so that we can keep on writing.


VI.
We have to slow it down. Every pressure on us, as readers and writers, is to read glancingly and do everything in first draft. We feel the urge to respond immediately, not several hours later, much less days or weeks later -- otherwise we'll miss the trend, we'll lose the chance to say that one perfect thing, crack that brilliant off-the-cuff joke, come up with that luminous line, that will enter the slipstream of mass attention and potentially go viral. But in playing this game, we deprive ourselves of the chance to think. In online discussion, we've developed an array of interpretive shorthands, ways of classifying statements quickly and easily and thus save time: edgelordism, splaining, entitlement, etc -- a dictionary of all this might be a contemporary equivalent of Notes on Rhetoric. Given the sheer amount of stuff there is to respond to, such labour-saving devices are a necessity, and often effective. But they are also a blunt tool, and an artefact of rushing. And the rush to judgment is what will always trip us up in the end. Resisting the accelerating drive of social media might entail making a conscious decision not to respond to the majority of potential interlocutors, not to post most of what occurs to us. We might prefer to save up thoughts provoked by online discussion, and transfer them to another medium. We might diarise them, blog them, or save them for a novel or play. If we're going to be writers, we don't have to do business on the most ephemeral media, even for the instant gratification of 'likes' and 'retweets'.


VII.
A short-hand is not necessarily a short-cut. You can be quite witty and concise in 140 characters, but every trope potentially unspools into thousands of threads of argument and haggling over interpretation. Drexel University today issued a statement condemning one of its employees, Professor George Ciccariello-Maher, for a tweet asking for "white genocide" as a Christmas present. His tweet was, as everyone in their right minds noted, intended ironically. Of course, irony is often invoked, inappropriately, as a sort of ideological get-out-of-jail-free card. In almost all cases of irony, there is a distinction between "use" and "mention". I might "mention" a statement in order to ironise it, without "using" it. But there is no mentioning without some kind of psychological meaning, and such mentioning can involve a dubious kind of enjoyment. Think of the provocateur who, after making a racist joke, says, "oh but of course, I was being totally ironic". But this is simply to say that one should pay attention to the context in which irony is invoked. The context in this case, is actually quite damning of Drexel. In the idiom of the alt-right -- whom Ciccariello-Maher was mocking with a certain jaunty, finger-in-the-eye swagger -- "white genocide" is caused by immigration. To believe in "white genocide", to feel even remotely threatened by the prospect, to think it could be real, one has to believe all sorts of other implausible things. To wit, one has to believe that there is a coherent biological and cultural entity that could correspond to the notion of 'white race', which is innately worth conserving, and which would be compromised by the biological and cultural mixing that large amounts of non-white immigration would produce. And one would have to see that as being tantamount to genocide, viz. an "attempt to destroy in whole, or in part". To believe in this idea, in other words, one has to be a neo-Nazi, or something close to it. To mock it, one need only be anyone else. But not everyone is au fait with the language of the alt-right, and not everyone has enough historical and political intuition to grasp that no one is likely to threaten genocide against white people, and that such a threat would have no teeth at all in the real world. For some people, it would take time to do a little googling, and think through the logic of the thing. Drexel, reacting the way it did, rushed to judgment without even a courtesy-google. It rushed out a statement during the Christmas holidays rather than wait for the opportunity to talk to Ciccariello-Maher, or even just think. I assume this isn't because management agree with the neo-Nazi view of "white genocide" which was being mocked. Rather, they used it as an opportunity to signal to staff members that they should adopt more corporate, HR-friendly personalities on social media -- even if in practice this means that, like other liberal institutions (ACORN etc), they end up caving to the far right. Whatever institutional resiliency they might have in the face of far right provocateurs was compromised for the sake of public relations expediency. And the more marketised higher education institutions become, the more that knowledge-production and the workers involved in it will be susceptible to the whip of this kind of frantic witch-hunting zeal.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

This article goes deeper into the roots of this bullshitty "white genocide" phenomenon. Not surprised to find out that Hitler himself was a big fan of the 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race.

Debunking the Breitbart-Promoted Right-Wing Fantasy of 'White Genocide'
Scholar targeted by Breitbart-backed smear campaign for mocking white supremacist term.
By Sarah Lazare / AlterNet
December 27, 2016

The false claim that there is a genocide against white people is a key rallying cry of organized white supremacists that is used to justify racist violence targeting people of color, Muslims and Jews. With the rise of Donald Trump, who promptly appointed white nationalist Steve Bannon as his “chief strategist,” those forces will soon have a direct line to the White House.

It is within this political landscape that George Ciccariello-Maher, a radical scholar of international politics and decolonization, recently found himself at the center of a smear campaign for mocking the concept of white genocide.

On December 24, Ciccariello-Maher—who works as an associate professor at Philadelphia-based Drexel University—posted a tweet which states, "all I want for Christmas is white genocide." He explained the tweet in a later statement: “For those who haven't bothered to do their research, ‘white genocide’ is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies (and most recently, against a tweet by State Farm Insurance). It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I'm glad to have mocked it.”

Ciccariello-Maher’s tweet and other social media commentary was soon reported by the white nationalist publication Breitbart, which ran an article by Warner Todd Huston that referred to the scholar’s Twitter feed as “hateful” and “obnoxious.” The comments section of the article included at least one death threat against Ciccariello-Maher, as well as hateful messages targeting LGBTQ people and African Americans. The story quickly spread to Reddit and 4chan, and soon the scholar became the target of a coordinated campaign to contact his employer, Philadelphia-based Drexel University. Ciccariello-Maher said he awoke Christmas morning to death threats targeting him and his family.

Drexel University, instead of defending Ciccariello-Maher, appeared to be swayed by the pressure it received and publicly condemned his social media remarks as “utterly reprehensible” and “deeply disturbing.” The University’s statement did not include any recognition of the white supremacist origins of the term which Ciccariello-Maher was mocking—an omission that extended to numerous press outlets that covered the story.

Scholars of fascism and the racist right told AlterNet that such omission is dangerous in the era of Trump, with implications far beyond Ciccariello-Maher. “This phrase and its broad dissemination these days is helping shape what Trumpism is politically and also, by its very framing, is something that can authorize any kind of violence against people of color,” Joseph Lowndes, an associate professor of political science at the University of Oregon in Eugene, told AlterNet. “We should mock it, expose it and delegitimize it.”

Term with a disgraceful history

“Fears of the decline of the so-called white race have been around for a long time, with different iterations,” Lowndes told AlterNet. “In the American context, it goes back to fears of slave revolts. You can see it in Thomas Jefferson’s notes, when he describes slavery as holding a ‘wolf by the ears.’ He claimed that, once you let the ‘wolf’ go, it will turn on you and devour you.”

Such racist concepts were used as salvo against movements to abolish slavery. "In the 19th century, before the civil war, you can look at how people who were anti-abolition were warning everyone about an impending genocide if slaves were liberated,” said Alexander Reid Ross, who teaches in the geography department at Portland State University and is author of the forthcoming book, Against the Fascist Creep.

In undated remarks published in a book of his writings and speeches, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison expressed his outrage at such baseless fear mongering:

Before I proceed any further, let me call attention to a remarkable exemplification of the insincerity and effrontery of the anti-abolition party in this country, as manifested this day. What have they not done, for the last five years, to cast odium upon our principles and measures? Have they not ridiculed without mercy, our demand for the immediate abolition of slavery as wild, chimerical, monstrous? Has not the idea of 'turning loose' so many unlettered, penniless, homeless creatures, seemingly filled them with horror? Have they not a thousand times declared, that a sudden emancipation would fill the land with blood, and be the signal for a war of extermination?... Though they have been prophesying 'evil, and only evil, and that continually,' of any and every scheme of immediate emancipation; though they have advanced it as a self-evident proposition, that bloodshed and ruin must be the inevitable consequence of letting all the oppressed go free at once, it seems, after all, that they knew nothing about the matter. What was beyond all doubt with them, a short time since, is now full of uncertainty: they wait for intelligence!

Following the civil war, false claims about threats to the “white race” influenced the rising eugenics movement, Reid Ross explained. This racist outlook was captured in the 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, authored by eugenicist Madison Grant, who was a personal friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s. Adolf Hitler was a fan of Grant’s and often quoted from the pages of his work.

A direct line can be traced from early 20th century eugenicists to racist movements of today. As the Southern Poverty Law Center points out, the Pioneer Fund was started in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, a textile magnate, with the express purpose of pursuing "race betterment" by promoting the genes of people "deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution." The SPLC notes, “The Pioneer Fund has supported many of the leading Anglo-American race scientists of the last several decades as well as anti-immigration groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).”

Trump’s choice for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, “regularly attends” events hosted by FAIR, according to the SPLC, which has classified the organization as a hate group since 2007. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a leader of Trump’s transition team, has served as counsel to the legal arm of FAIR, according to the SPLC. “We can see how the Trump Administration is only a stone's throw from this kind of angsty rhetoric and the people who advance practical ‘solutions’ to these made up problems,” said Reid Ross.

According to Reid Ross, fears of white genocide re-emerged “after World War II, with the decolonization process and war of liberation in Algeria, all the way through the liberation of Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia, as well as during the anti-apartheid movement.”

Reid Ross points to European intellectuals from the “European New Right” as playing a key role in “normalizing the notion of 'white genocide,' arguing that an apartheid-style racial separation would preserve cultural integrity against 'ethnocidal' multi-culturalism and liberal democracy.”

Lowndes emphasized that, in the U.S. context, fear mongering over the supposed decline of the white race picked up steam after the civil rights and black freedom movements. “There was a return of language about what is going to happen to white people if black people get full rights.”

‘They are the actual racists’

Sophie Bjork-James, a researcher at Vanderbilt University with expertise in conservative social movements, told AlterNet that the meme of “white genocide” has become an “increasingly popular frame” over the past ten years, because “it frames whites as victims in a very emotionally resonant way. It seems like it is getting a much broader audience, which is scary because that can make it seem like it’s a legitimate term. Some mainstream media outlets will use the term without referencing its white supremacist origins.”

Bjork-James emphasized that the concept of white genocide “dangerously deflects away from what's actually happening in terms of economic stratification.” She explained, “If we look at how white people understand contemporary race relations, a huge percent think whites now experience more discrimination than people of color. It is not just white nationalists who see white people as victims of racial discrimination.”

“On the one hand, our society is completely structured by racism that privileges white people, and many white people don't see that,” she continued. “I think it’s really telling that the U.S. was founded on the genocide of Native Americans, and now white people claim they are experiencing genocide.

Last year, a group calling itself the White Genocide Project temporarily erected a billboard in Springvale, Alabama which stated “Diversity Means Chasing Down the Last White Person” with “#white genocide” written on the bottom. One of the individuals behind the racist gesture told SPLC that the group took inspiration from the prominent segregationist Bob Whitaker. Widely influential among white supremacists, Whitaker authored an article which argued “Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white.”

Chillingly, baseless themes of white victimization were present throughout the manifesto of Dylann Roof, who massacred nine African-Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in June 2015.

Reflecting on his experiences over the past several days, Ciccariello-Maher noted that adherents of the mythical white genocide present the real danger. “White racists openly support the idea of a pure, white country led by white males, as Richard Spencer recently put it,” Ciccariello-Maher told AlterNet. “For them, anything is ‘white genocide,’ from multiculturalism to intermarriage. They are the actual racists who uphold the ideas that have been used to carry out actual genocide.”

[kool maudit]

This evil and stupid thread is travelling right up its own ass and it's funny to watch. You have this Drexel guy explicitly calling for white genocide, citing historical examples of instances in which Europeans were massacred by non-Europeans, and now we're talking about how it's all a right-wing fantasy that doesn't exist but should happen but is mainly satire but is conceptual rather than literal etc.

It's rather like when you encounter far right.wingers who go to great lengths to deny the holocaust while insisting that every aspect of its philosophical justification, intent, efficacy etc. was sound.

Why is it like this? Because people are signalling rather than thinking. This thread exists to counter-signal the right, point finale, just as the aforementioned deniers are counter-signalling the Jewish people. It's messy, tangled, obtuse, expedient, and decadent origins in Critical Race theory are really a mere footnote to the thread's true meaning.

As the title of the thread retains the precise syntactical structure of a call for the genocide of a human sub-group – Europeans, in this case – and the evasions of this truth ("whiteness is the concept of white supremacy"; "white genocide is a false right-wing meme"; "the abolition in question is of an unjust power structure") are so grievously pallid, I will continue to voice my opposition to this thread's existence.

I am of English descent and would be recognised as "white" in any context where the English-language term is known. The idea advanced by this thread's title could, in several places where I have lived and visited, increase the risk of physical violence against me or my family, just as any similar call for violence against other sub-groups in situations where they are a minority could, and regrettably has.

The exception that RI continues to make for this hatefully titled thread is an embarrassing fragment of "progressive stack"-type thinking and a shame for the board.

[American Dream]

Is that silliness and/or projection? Noel Ignatiev and George Ciccariello-Maher are both leftists with an anti-racist orientation. They are by no means leaders of a literal "white genocide". Anyone with a functioning nervous system should be able to figure this out very, very quickly.

[kool maudit]

Is that silliness and/or projection? Noel Ignatiev and George Ciccariello-Maher are both leftists with an anti-racist orientation. They are by no means leaders of a literal "white genocide". Anyone with a functioning nervous system should be able to figure this out very, very quickly.

I know, AD. I don't think that.

What I believe is that it is irresponsible to the point of moral disgrace to employ the language of calls-to-genocide in service to the subtler goals of people like Ignatiev, Ciccariello-Maher*, and Tim Wise.

It is also, beyond its turpitude, profoundly lame insofar as it reeks of that boomer-ish faux-radicalism that signals revolutionary whilst preserving bourgeois fundamentals. This is what gave us the Third Way; it's the left end of the neoliberal Overton window.

So: evil and stupid. That continues to be my take concerning this rhetoric.

*(I think this man's wife just had a white baby, think he just started a white family. Obviously he does not literally want to eliminate Europeans from the Earth; he just made a new one. So why does his language sound as if he does? Because he is posturing, and the symbol- and syntactical structures he is using for said posturing are degraded and foul, and his dishonesty makes him ludicrous.)

[American Dream]

What's changing is not the rhetorical flourishes of radical leftists but rather that crypto-fascists- whether they call themselves third positionists, alt right, or whatever else- have an "in" with the White House. It is probably a marriage of convenience more than anything and the socially maladjusted wingnuts and sociopaths who make up the troll army will ultimately be left high and dry, but right now they are useful.

In this case, "fascists are the tools of the State" even though may dream of establishing their own power at that level. They don't rule the White House- not even near to that- although they will be used by to full effect and definitely will get their 15 minutes of fame, at minimum.

Reactionaries generally though, that is another question. They clearly will have their day.




.On edit: Cleaned up text slightly

[kool maudit]

OK sure.

My criticism of the rhetoric discussed in this thread, and employed in its title, stands. My contributions here are going to point out the evil and stupid nature of this rhetoric without getting into other sorts of rhetoric, or other sorts of movements.

I don't regard the above as a convincing defence of the thread title in any sense whatsoever.

[American Dream]

Clearly, the mockery of such white supremacist "truths" is painful, if you take ideas like "white genocide" at all seriously.

[Sounder]

Given that the academic fellow refers to the Haitian experience, it does not seem that his reference to 'white genocide' is merely a sardonic play on alt-right myth making. But who knows, maybe I'm not up to speed on the 'new logic'.

Of course the idea of abolishing the Jewish race is reprehensible, but it would be nice if more Jews would renounce their racism.

http://mondoweiss.net/2016/12/article-saying-zionism/

Boehm says white nationalist Richard Spencer helped to blow up the liberal Zionist hypocrisy in his famous encounter with a Texas rabbi when he said he admires Israel for its ethnic purity and the rabbi had nothing to say. Some of Boehm’s hammer blows:

by denying liberal principles, Zionism immediately becomes continuous with — rather than contradictory to — the anti-Semitic politics of the sort promoted by the alt-right…

insofar as Israel is concerned, every liberal Zionist has not just tolerated the denial of this minimum liberal standard, but avowed this denial as core to their innermost convictions. Whereas liberalism depends on the idea that states must remain neutral on matters of religion and race, Zionism consists in the idea that the State of Israel is not Israeli, but Jewish. As such, the country belongs first and foremost not to its citizens, but to the Jewish people — a group that’s defined by ethnic affiliation or religious conversion…

Boehm never comes out and uses the term “racist,” but he might as well.

Trump has changed the map.

As long as liberalism was secure back in America and the rejection of liberalism confined to the Israeli scene, this tension could be mitigated. But as it spills out into the open in the rapidly changing landscape of American politics, the double standard is becoming difficult to defend…

[T]he following years promise to present American Jewry with a decision that they have much preferred to avoid. Hold fast to their liberal tradition, as the only way to secure human, citizen and Jewish rights; or embrace the principles driving Zionism.

- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2016/12/article-s ... PcgC3.dpuf



Escalation - bad, reconciliation - good.


http://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/black-ma ... ampaign=im

Daryl Davis is a black blues musician who has traveled the country for the last 30 years befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan.
This mission is not out of any sort of misplaced empathy with the organization’s racism – the 58-year-old believes that when Klansmen actually sit down and talk with a black man, they will find that their hatred is misplaced – and he’s usually right.

Since Daryl started his outreach goal, over 200 KKK members have told the musician that they had seen the error in their ways and they were hanging up their hoods for good.

[divideandconquer]

Hell just froze over: the New York Times runs an article saying Zionism is racist US Politics by Phil Weiss and Donald Johnson

Trump’s election is having fascinating consequences. Today the New York Times ran a long piece titled, “Liberal Zionism in the Age of Trump,” by Omri Boehm of the New School saying that liberal Zionism is a contradiction: liberal American Jews have “identified themselves with Zionism, a political agenda rooted in the denial of liberal politics.”

Boehm’s most startling point is that Zionism has anti-Semitic strains, witness its collaboration with Nazis. Hannah Arendt is happy today.

The piece will greatly increase the pressure on liberal Zionists to choose one idea or the other, and to stop denying the existence of apartheid.

Boehm says white nationalist Richard Spencer helped to blow up the liberal Zionist hypocrisy in his famous encounter with a Texas rabbi when he said he admires Israel for its ethnic purity and the rabbi had nothing to say. Some of Boehm’s hammer blows:

by denying liberal principles, Zionism immediately becomes continuous with — rather than contradictory to — the anti-Semitic politics of the sort promoted by the alt-right…

insofar as Israel is concerned, every liberal Zionist has not just tolerated the denial of this minimum liberal standard, but avowed this denial as core to their innermost convictions. Whereas liberalism depends on the idea that states must remain neutral on matters of religion and race, Zionism consists in the idea that the State of Israel is not Israeli, but Jewish. As such, the country belongs first and foremost not to its citizens, but to the Jewish people — a group that’s defined by ethnic affiliation or religious conversion…

Boehm never comes out and uses the term “racist,” but he might as well.

Trump has changed the map.

As long as liberalism was secure back in America and the rejection of liberalism confined to the Israeli scene, this tension could be mitigated. But as it spills out into the open in the rapidly changing landscape of American politics, the double standard is becoming difficult to defend…

[T]he following years promise to present American Jewry with a decision that they have much preferred to avoid. Hold fast to their liberal tradition, as the only way to secure human, citizen and Jewish rights; or embrace the principles driving Zionism.

By the way, the denial of the right of return is racist:

Opposition to the Palestinians’ “right of return” is a matter of consensus among left and right Zionists because also liberal Zionists insist that Israel has the right to ensure that Jews constitute the ethnic majority in their country. That’s the reason for which Rabbi Rosenberg could not answer Spencer.

And then this verboten history: Zionists collaborated with “anti-Semitic politics.” With Nazis:

The “original sin” of such alliances may be traced back to 1941, in a letter to high Nazi officials, drafted in 1941 by Avraham Stern, known as Yair, a leading early Zionist fighter and member in the 1930s of the paramilitary group Irgun, and later, the founder of another such group, Lehi. In the letter, Stern proposes to collaborate with “Herr Hitler” on “solving the Jewish question” by achieving a “Jewish free Europe.” The solution can be achieved, Stern continues, only through the “settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine.” To that end, he suggests collaborate with the German’s “war efforts,” and establish a Jewish state on a “national and totalitarian basis,” which will be “bound by treaty with the German Reich.”

It has been convenient to ignore the existence of this letter, just as it has been convenient to mitigate the conceptual conditions making it possible.

This is an opinion piece by an outsider, not a New York Times article. Hell and everything else would freeze if the NYT started writing news pieces which presupposed Zionism as actually practiced is racist. They won’t do that yet. They might conceivably start writing articles where people with that view are treated respectfully as they express it, rather than hiding the view from readers or treating people who express it as moral lepers.

Many of Boehm’s arguments have been made on the left for years, of course. The liberal Zionists chose to ignore them and talk about the two-state solution. They are losing that luxury. Though, expect some pushback from the Zionist forces inside the New York Times.

The Times would never have run this piece if Boehm were not Israeli. Just as the newspaper insisted, according to the late Tony Judt, that he identify himself as Jewish when he defended Walt and Mearsheimer in 2006. There are double standards in the press too.

[American Dream]

I give mixed reviews to all the Trotskyist groups I know of, but the reactionary nationalists in our midst certainly make them look highly thoughtful and principled in comparison:


https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2 ... our-party/

Why Jews should join Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.


The ‘anti-Zionist’ Politics we Loathe.

Introduction: one of the things which intensely annoyed many people during the ‘Momentum’ debacle was this accusation against a small left wing group, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. That they hold, “Subtle support for imperialist wars, uncritical support for Israel and fanatical support for the European Union are amongst their policies.” (Laura Catriona Murray here).

If I think rightly the AWL has a sensitive attitude on the issue of the Middle East.

Some of their views chime with mine.

I am ‘anti-zionist’ in the sense that Hannah Arendt was: I am not a nationalist and far less somebody who would base politics on religion.

I am, to put it in a word, an internationalist.

I am Not an anti–Zionist who is obsessed with the issue.

I am somebody who grew up with the ‘Jewish community’ in North London. I would not even dream of defining the ‘Jewish community’ as ‘one’ voice or group, or define ‘their’ stand on Israel.

This is an important contribution to debate on the issue.

“Why Jews should join Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party”

Daniel Randall Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.

Workers’ Liberty member Daniel Randall spoke on a panel at Limmud, a Jewish cultural and educational conference, on a panel entitled “why Jews should join Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party”. The other speakers were Jon Lansman (Momentum), Anna Lawton (Labour Party member and Limmud 2017 chair), and Barnaby Raine (RS21). The session was chaired by Andrew Gilbert (London Jewish Forum and Labour Party member).

This is a slightly-edited version of Daniel’s speech at the session.

I’m Daniel Randall; I work on the underground in London, where I’m a rep for the RMT union. I’m also a member of the socialist group Workers’ Liberty; we’re a Trotskyist organisation, but a rather heterodox one. I should also say that I’m not currently a member of the Labour Party, having been expelled, twice, for my membership of Workers’ Liberty. So I’m speaking here somewhat as a Labour Party member “in exile”.

The title of this panel is “why Jews should join Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party”. I’m going to approach the issue slightly differently, because I’m not a communalist; I’m not a Zionist, or a Bundist, or nationalist or cultural autonomist of any other stripe. I don’t believe in a unitary “Jewish interest”, and I don’t believe there’s any essentialist, innate “Jewish characteristics” that ought to compel Jews to join Labour, or any other political party. Fundamentally, I think Jews should join the Labour Party if they support its foundational purpose: to represent in politics the interests of working class.

I should also say that I don’t believe there’s any such thing as “Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party”. The Labour Party belongs to its members, not to its leader, and has always been a politically contested space and a site of struggle. You might not like the current political composition of the leadership, for whatever reason, but if you believe in labour representation, you should be in the Labour Party.

But to say nothing more than that would be a missed opportunity, I think, so I will use the not-very-much time I have to say a bit more on what a Corbyn-led Labour Party might imply for the relationship between Jews and the left.

I think the Corbyn surge represents an opportunity to recompose and renew the left. Hundreds of thousands of young people, many of them new to politics and without the training and baggage of years spent organised under prevailing far-left common sense, good and bad, have become politicised, and some have become mobilised and active.

If you’re a Jewish leftist or labour movement activist who has felt uncomfortable with, or alienated by, the common sense that has prevailed on the left around certain issues, and I agree that there has been much to feel uncomfortable about, then the febrile political atmosphere created by the Corbyn surge represents an opportunity to challenge and change that common sense. You should get involved in and be part of those discussions, but that means making a commitment to attempt to see this political moment through, on its own terms.

Much has been said about Jeremy Corbyn’s personal, individual attitude to Israel/Palestine and antisemitism. On substantive questions of policy he has a much better position, in my view, than the one which has predominated on much of the far-left: he is for a two-state settlement, rather than the destruction of Israel, and against blanket boycotts of Israel. That puts him one up on much of the far-left.

His weaknesses on these issues, his historic softness on Hamas, for example, reflect the reality of him as a product of the existing left – a left characterised by Stalinist politics, and a “my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend” approach to international issues. But the new left in the Labour Party is bigger than Jeremy Corbyn himself and, as I’ve said, represents an opportunity to challenge those politics.

I think it’s also important for me to say here that the view that the entire far-left is institutionally antisemitic is a calumny, and I think some of the antisemitism scandals in Labour have been blown out of proportion and manipulated for factional ends, by figures on the right of the party.

Nevertheless, left antisemitism is a real and distinct phenomenon which needs a specific analysis and response. We don’t have time to say much here, but briefly, I think we can understand antisemitism on the left as a form of implied political hostility to Jews, distinct from the racialised antipathy of far-right antisemitism. This has its roots in the efforts by Stalinism, from the 1950s onward, to cynically conflate “Zionism” with imperialism, racism, and even fascism, which established a common sense which came to dominate even on the anti-Stalinist left. Only an analysis that understands the historical roots of left antisemitism, and which sets as its aim the renewal of the left, on a politically healthier basis, can meaningfully confront it. The required response is fundamentally political, rather than moralistic or administrative or bureaucratic; to be part of recomposing and renewing a movement you must first be part of the movement.

The key is a culture of open debate, discussion, and education, conducted in an atmosphere of free speech, on all sides. We’re not there yet; far from it. But I believe we have an opportunity to build a left that is characterised by those things, and if you believe in them too then I urge you to help shape it.

I will finish by offering a different, perhaps more fundamental set of reasons why Jews should join the Labour Party.

We live in a grossly unequal world, characterised by exploitation and oppression. Just in this country, one of the richest in the world, over 500,000 people use food banks. In 2016, nearly 200 employers were found to be paying less than the minimum wage – a wage which it is now widely acknowledged it too low to live on anyway. Various forms of social oppression persist, and ecological degradation continues. It’s a bleak picture. And against this backdrop, the wealth of the richest continues to skyrocket. The richest 1,000 in Britain have increased their wealth by 112% since 2009.

All of that is grotesque and obscene. It should offend you, “as Jews”, and as human beings. It should make you want to change it. The only way we can change it is on the basis of a movement based fundamentally, structurally, on the relationship and conflict that animates it all: class. That is what the Labour Party and wider labour movement is for. And if you believe that it is the mission of the labour movement to change the world, and you find the labour movement before you inadequate or deficient in some way, then it is your responsibility not to abandon it, but to help transform it.

As I said at the beginning of this speech, I don’t believe in any innate Jewish characteristics that ought to compel us in a particular direction. But perhaps there is something in our historical experience that can help us gain an understanding of why our world is organised in that way, and how it might be different. In his essay “The Non-Jewish Jew”, Isaac Deutscher explores why Jews have seemed to be over-represented in the ranks of the thinkers and organisers of the left. Considering various figures including Marx, Trotsky, and Luxemburg, he writes:

“Have they anything in common with one another? Have they perhaps impressed mankind’s thought so greatly because of their special ‘Jewish genius’? I do not believe in the exclusive genius of any race. Yet I think that in some ways they were very Jewish indeed. They had in themselves something of the quintessence of Jewish life and of the Jewish intellect. They were a priori exceptional in that as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilisations, religions, and national cultures.

“They were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs. Their minds matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilised each other. They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations. They were each in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future.”

That is our history. We do the most honour to our heritage when we attempt to use that history and experience to go beyond our own experience, into perspectives for universal emancipation.

That is why you, as a Jew, should dedicate yourself to the struggle to change the world. That is why you should join the Labour Party.

[Sounder]

Given that the academic fellow refers to the Haitian experience, it does not seem that his reference to 'white genocide' is merely a sardonic play on alt-right myth making. But who knows, maybe I'm not up to speed on the 'new logic'.

AD has no response as he goes skating away on the thin ice of a new day.


Oh but he did respond one may say; with the continuing (implied) theme that calling out Zionism as being racism means that one is anti-Semitic.




AD earlier wrote...

Clearly, the mockery of such white supremacist "truths" is painful, if you take ideas like "white genocide" at all seriously.

Typical weaselly assignment of emotional response and 'white allegiance', false on both counts, yet thought by the author as a witty and meaningful response to the assertion from koolmaudet that this thread title intentionally foments hostility and hatred.

But all is good in AD land where no engagement is needed because there are wheelbarrow loads more stuff written that says it better than AD can, so we will just have to settle for that.

Indoctrination 101, a class in repetition.