World War Two
Published 18 May 2021While the US was fighting for freedom and liberty across the globe, their home country and armies are still deeply segregated, causing minority groups in the USA to fight not one but two wars.
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May 19, 2021
Racism of the US Army – Fighting for Freedom? – WW2 Special
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May 18, 2021
In future, if you’re on TV, do not use your hands or fingers under any circumstances … OK?
… as a Jeopardy contestant has recently discovered, there is no hand gesture that is free from the slightest hint of an emanation of a penumbra of white supremacy:
And then they came for the integers. The small social universe surrounding the syndicated game show Jeopardy has been boiling over for the past month because of a hand gesture made by a contestant, Kelly Donahue, at the outset of the April 27 episode. Donahue, returning to the show as a three-time winner, held up three fingers in a gesture of triumph and tapped his chest with them. He had done something similar on earlier episodes, flashing a “one” after his first win and a “two” after his second.
Needless to say, he had to be immediately chastised. A small number of conspiracy theorists felt his use of three fingers to represent three of something “resembled very closely a gesture that has been co-opted by white power groups, alt right groups and an anti-government group that calls itself the Three Percenters.”
That quote is taken from an indignant open letter signed by almost 600 members of a private Facebook group for former Jeopardy contestants, in which the signers demanded to know why Donahue’s heinous Nazi code, “whether intentional or not,” hadn’t been cut from the show before broadcast.
[…]
Smith’s column doesn’t actually get around to answering the question, although with a little legwork he was able to establish that the Facebook group had actually approached the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Jewish grandparent of all anti-hate monitoring groups, for advice. The ADL told the addled ex-contestants, “Uh, it looks to us like the guy’s just making a three,” which led some in the internet cocoon to conclude they were being “gaslit.” Smith also talked to members of the Facebook group who knew that their fellow contestants were talking twaddle and fomenting harassment of an innocent man, but who were afraid to contradict the leaders of a witch hunt, lest the purifying fire be kindled beneath their own tootsies.
Smith does identify a crucial point in what is otherwise a workaday tale of cancel culture run mad. Former Jeopardy contestants, every last three-o-phobic one of them, are people selected specifically for high intelligence and wide knowledge. This didn’t make the signers of the letter any less obtuse, or any more resistant to a complicated conspiracy theory. It was their knowledge of disaggregated facts that made them susceptible in the first place.
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May 17, 2021
An older BBC dramatization on the slave trade that seems to have gone down the memory hole
At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin wondered why the BBC hadn’t gotten around to showing a 1970s historical series through the year-and-more of the pandemic lockdowns. He doesn’t mention the name of the series, and an unusually unhelpful BBC site search didn’t turn up a name but IMDB suggests it was 1975 and the series was called The Fight Against Slavery:
Fifty years ago, the BBC screened a dramatised documentary series about the fight to abolish the slave trade. Even a year of the virus limiting new series, at a time of great BBC eagerness to talk about racism, has not made them screen it again.
– I see one reason why they have not: the series displayed sleazy white slave traders and abusive white slave owners prominently, but it also showed white people eager to end the slave trade and (much worse) black people eager to continue it. It included the king of Dahomey’s threat: “if you do not allow me to sell you my slaves, their fate will be a great deal worse” (a very brief scene of the Dahomey murder spectacle lent meaning to his remark). After abolition was voted, it showed a white slave trader assuring the Dahomans, as a drug dealer might his suppliers, “It is one thing for parliament to pass a law …”, hinting at the Royal Navy’s long and hard campaign to enforce it.
– Only recently did I spot another reason why they would not want to show it again – the scene in which a corrupt old white slave trader warns his young colleague that “it’s more than your life’s worth” to doubt the ability of their slave-selling hosts to count very accurately the quantity of trade goods being handed over in exchange, and to assess their quality knowledgeably. The traders well knew that Africans counted two plus two as four, just as they did. Any trader who imagined that black ability to add diverged enough from white to enable an attempt to short-change them had learned otherwise long before the 1780s.
– The southern Confederacy thought the same. Until its death throes, it forbade enlisting a southern black as a Confederate soldier because, as one Confederate senator put it, “If blacks can make good soldiers then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” (Perhaps also because even southern white Democrats realised that southern black desire to fight against blacks being freed was likely to be a very minority taste.) But there was one exception. Every regiment had its regimental band, which played to set the pace at the start and end of marches, used trumpets to signal commands in battle – and fought when other duties did not supervene. From its start to its end, Confederate law said any black could enlist as bandsman, with the same pay and perquisites as a white – a very rare example of formal legal equality. (Playing music requires the ability to count time. For the woke, “dismantling the legacy of the Confederacy” apparently includes dismantling its realisation – shared by the Victorian composer Dvorak – that blacks often excelled in music so much as to overcome prejudice against black ability. Today, it’s “racist” to value instrumental skill.)
“Politically correct” has meant “actually wrong” ever since the first commissar explained to the first party comrade that it was neither socialist nor prudent to notice a factual error in the party line. “Structurally racist” is PC’s modern companion. No longer are the woke content merely to imply (“mathematics is racist”, “punctuality is racist”, “politeness is racist”) that blacks can’t count, can’t tell the time and can only behave crudely. They’re starting to say it in words of fewer syllables.
If I’d scrolled down to the comments, I’d have discovered that Natalie Solent had also dug up the name of the series:
Natalie Solent (Essex)
May 10, 2021 at 4:30 pm
Outstanding post, Niall. Was the BBC series you mentioned “The Fight Against Slavery“, written and narrated by Evan Jones? I have not seen it – given that I was ten or eleven in 1975 my parents probably thought I was too young too see it.However someone called “InternetPilgrim” has put up three videos of the series on YouTube. There is a link to Part I here, Part II here and Part III here, so I will try to remedy that lack soon.
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History Summarized: Africa
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 7 Jul 2017THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY: https://youtu.be/D9Ihs241zeg
It’s been brought to my attention that I made two mistakes: 1) Yes, I disappear at 18:26. Not sure how that happened. 2) At 12:25 I use a map of Africa that with some weird borders. That’s my bad. But if you look at a legit map of Africa, you’ll see the same straight lines in the places that I marked them.
(Remember: making mistakes is ok, so long as we learn from them)The Epic of Mwindo sure was cool, huh? This video is here to show you all about the lovely continent that it came from: Africa! And BOY are there a lot of misconceptions about it.
This video was produced with assistance from the Boston University Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.
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May 13, 2021
Were There Really BLACK CONFEDERATES???!!!
Atun-Shei Films
Published 24 Dec 2020Checkmate, Lincolnites! Debunking the Lost Cause myth that tens of thousands of black men served as soldiers in the Confederate army during the American Civil War.
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[1] “Black Confederate Movement ‘Demented'” (2014). AmericanForum https://youtu.be/fYFIWlGJhjM
[2] Sam Smith. “Black Confederates: Myth and Legend.” American Battlefield Trust https://www.battlefields.org/learn/ar…
[3] “25th USCT: The Sable Sons of Uncle Abe.” National Park Service https://www.nps.gov/articles/25-usct.htm
[4] Justin A. Nystrom. New Orleans After the Civil War (2010). Johns Hopkins Press, Page 20-27
[5] Kevin M. Levin. Searching for Black Confederates (2019). University of North Carolina Press, Page 45
[6] James Parton. General Butler in New Orleans (1864). Mason & Hamlin, Page 516-517
[7] Levin, Page 12-15
[8] Levin, Page 34-35
[9] Myra Chandler Sampson & Kevin M. Levin. “The Loyalty of ‘Heroic Black Confederate’ Silas Chandler” (2012). HistoryNet https://www.historynet.com/loyalty-si…
[10] Levin, Page 82-83
[11] James G. Hollandsworth, Jr. “Looking for Bob: Black Confederate Pensioners After the Civil War” (2007). The Journal of Mississippi History, Vol. LXVIX, Page 304-306
[12] Lewis H. Steiner. An Account of the Operations of the U.S. Sanitary Commission During the Campaign in Maryland, September 1862 (1862). Anson D. F. Randolph, Page 19-20
[13] Levin, Page 32-33
[14] Charles Augustus Stevens. Berdan’s United States Sharpshooters in the Army of the Potomac (1892). Price-McGill Company, Page 54-55
[15] Levin, Page 44
[16] Andy Hall. “Frederick Douglass and the ‘N*gro Regiment’ at First Manassas” (2011). Dead Confederates Blog https://deadconfederates.com/2011/07/…
[17] Jaime Amanda Martinez. “Black Confederates” (2018). Encyclopedia Virginia https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/…
[18] Levin, Page 58-61
[19] Levin, Page 39
[20] Levin, Page 46
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May 12, 2021
Looking at a highly influential document among progressive groups
Matthew Yglesias on Tema Okun’s “The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture” and its role in furthering progressive emotions over what they consider to be the most racist society in human history (that is, the modern west but especially the United States):
Click to see full-size image.
Debating abstractions is difficult and frustrating, and the discourse about “wokeness” and “cancel culture” has become a snakepit of semantic debates, bad-faith actors, and people of goodwill talking past each other.
So I want to talk instead about one specific document, not because I think it’s the most important document in the world, but because I don’t really see anyone who I read and respect talking about it even though I’ve seen it arise multiple times in real life.
I’m talking about “The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture” by Tema Okun, which I first heard of this year from the leader of a progressive nonprofit group whose mission I strongly support. He told me that some people on the staff had started wielding this document in internal disputes and it was causing big headaches. Once I had that on my radar, I heard about it from a couple of other nonprofit workers. And I saw it come up at the Parent Teacher Association for my kid’s school.
It’s an excerpt from a longer book called Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups that was developed as a tool for Okun’s consulting and training gigs.
But today, even though it’s not what I would call a particularly intellectually influential work in highbrow circles — even ones that are very “woke” or left-wing — it does seem to be incredibly widely circulated. You see it everywhere from the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence to the Sierra Club of Wisconsin to an organization of West Coast Quakers.
Which is to say it’s sloshing around quite broadly in progressive circles even though I’ve never heard a major writer, scholar, or political leader praise or recommend it. And to put it bluntly, it’s really dumb. In my more conspiratorial moments, I wonder if it’s not a psyop devised by some modern-day version of COINTELPRO to try to destroy progressive politics in the United States by making it impossible to run effective organizations. Even if not, I think the document is worth discussing on its own terms because it is broadly influential enough that if everyone actually agrees with me that it’s bad, we should stop citing it and object when other people do. And alternatively, if there are people who think it’s good, it would be nice to hear them say so, and then we could have a specific argument about that. But while I don’t think this document is exactly typical, I do think it’s emblematic of some broader, unfortunate cultural trends.
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
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May 6, 2021
Cold War 2: Electric Dumbaloo
Seva Gunisky at Hegemon has some thoughts on the undeclared-but-real new Cold War between the Peoples’ Republic Of China and what remains of the “west”:
Approximate casualties of the many separate “hot” conflicts of the first Cold War.
Last week I discussed some reasons for and against the label of “Cold War” to describe US-Chinese relations, but mostly ignored the ethical implications of this debate. Since then I’ve encountered some genuinely terrible takes on the subject, so I wanted to expand on the idea just a bit.
One thing I failed to mention is how the presence of Chinese-Americans in the US — something largely missing during the first Cold War — complicates the debate. If you’re a China dove, one argument might be that any criticism of China’s regime amounts to racism against Chinese-Americans …
I’ve worked with many people with Chinese ancestry and people who came to Canada quite recently (in the software business it’d be hard to avoid working with folks from former and current communist countries), so I’ve always tried to be as careful as possible to couch my criticism of China — the PRC — to ensure that even a casual reader is clear that I’m against the government and their system, not individual people from China. It doesn’t always work, because for too many people these days, everything has to be viewed through a racist lens and anything that might possibly look or sound like racism must therefore absolutely be racism.
I think this argument can be taken too far, and used as a cheap way to shield China’s regime from legitimate criticism. As Alex Hazanov points out, it’s the same patronizing conflation people make when arguing that any criticism of Israel must be an attack on American Jews.
The doves are right, however, that the presence of nearly four million Chinese-Americans makes cold war discourse more fraught than the first time around, when the Soviets were “white” and safely far away. Official statements and attitudes will have to take special care, but in general the US does not have a great history in this regard. I fully expect reactionary cranks to demand that Chinese-Americans publicly and ritualistically denounce the Chinese government. Still, I hope it should be obvious that characterizing any critique of China’s government as “imperialist” or “sinophobic” is silly.
But brace yourselves for the shitstorm of dumb that will accompany this (hopefully cold) geostrategic conflict:
Take first Cold War discourse, add a dash of racism, filter it through social media, and you are beginning to get a sense of how dumb the debates are going to be.
[…]
And if we are going to pick a cold war “doctrine”, we should consider that neither Russia or China is looking great in the medium run. It seems that despite its supposed efficiency the Chinese regime is unable to resolve the information problem common in closed regimes, that regime personalization under Xi has worsened the problem, and that this, combined with structural/demographic problems, means the Chinese regime has a rough road ahead in the next 10-30 years.
If so, the best policy for US is certainly to avoid head-on confrontation in favor of something like neo-containment. But that’s another conversation.
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
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May 4, 2021
Our modern verbal taboos
John McWhorter tackles the dreaded “N-word” — perhaps the most powerful taboo word in our current quasi-religious culture:
John McWhorter’s Twitter thumbnail image
The question is why we have become so extremely sensitive about that word since the 1990s, despite that our times are so much further from the ones where whites casually levelled the term with abandon. Why are we making a finger-cross and hanging garlic in the doorway against even any semblance or suggestion of a sequence of sounds?
Supposedly because the word recalls slavery, Jim Crow and horrific abuses. But then, even black people just a few decades ago didn’t typically think this meant that one cannot utter the word even to refer to it. That’s new, and it is, quite simply, a taboo — as in what we associate with societies vastly different from our own.
There are languages in Australia where you use a separate vocabulary with your mother-in-law, and it is taboo to use the regular word equivalents for it with her. In one of the languages, there is a general word for moving that you use when talking to your mother-in-law about going, walking, sailing and crawling. To use the regular words for these things with her would be like hauling off with a curse word in English.
This sounds quaint to us, but should not, because our treatment of the N-word is hardly different. The idea that the word is simply never to be uttered is so deeply entrenched now that it may seem odd to many people under about 40 that in times that seemed quite modern not so long ago, one could produce the sounds of the word nigger in public if you were talking about it rather than using it. With taste, of course — one didn’t go about saying it over and over. But there was an understanding that to refer to it — especially since this was usually in condemnation — was harmless. Because it was.
If you think about it, this made perfect sense. It’s today’s situation that is odd, in that suddenly we have a taboo of a kind we associate with pre-scientific indigenous societies. The word must be chased away whenever it seeps in through the cracks in the floor, just as if you pick up the phone and the Devil is on the line, you hang up. To wit, this is more evidence that Electness is a religion. The evolution in sensibility about the N-word has been an early manifestation of Elect ideology, penetrating so quickly because of the especially loaded nature of the word. It’s pretty easy to classify it as heresy for saying a word that is used as a slur; getting people fired for saying reverse racism — as happened to former San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Gary Garrels — takes a while.
Some will despise that I am calling the new take on the word pious. But 25 years ago we all knew exactly those things about the word’s heritage, and felt modern and enlightened to, with sensible moderation, utter the word in reference rather than gesture. Under normal conditions, the etiquette would have stayed at that point. The only thing that makes that take on the word now seem backwards is a sense of outright “cover-your-mouth” taboo: i.e. religion. This performative refusal to distinguish, this embrace of the mythic, shows a take on the N-word analogous to taking the Lord’s name in vain.
I call this refusal performative — i.e. a put-on — because I simply cannot believe that so many people do not see the difference between using a word as a weapon and referring to the word in the abstract. I would be disrespecting them to suppose that they don’t get this difference between, say, Fuck! as something yelled and fuck as in a word referring to sexual intercourse. They understand the difference, but see some larger value in pretending that it doesn’t exist.
In my experience, a common idea is that if we allow the word to be used in reference, there is a slippery slope from there to whites feeling comfortable hurling the slur as well. There are two problems with this point. One: for decades civilized people could use the word in reference, and yet there was no sign of the epithet coming back into style. Today’s crusaders can’t claim to be holding off some rising tide. Second: what is the sociohistorical parallel? At what point in human history has a slur been proscribed, but then returned to general usage because it was considered okay to refer to the word as opposed to use it? That many people can just imagine this happening with the N-word is not an argument, especially since it’s hard not to notice that this hypothetical scenario fits so cozily into their professionally Manichaean take on race.
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April 25, 2021
They don’t call it “neo-Marxism”, but that’s what Critical Race Theory really is
In City Journal, Christopher Rufo explains why Critical Race Theory is a natural child of orthodox Marxist thought:
Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s and built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism. Relegated for many years to universities and obscure academic journals, it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions over the past decade. It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human-resources departments, in the form of diversity-training programs, human-resources modules, public-policy frameworks, and school curricula.
Its supporters deploy a series of euphemisms to describe critical race theory, including “equity,” “social justice,” “diversity and inclusion,” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, critical race theorists explicitly reject equality — the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. To them, equality represents “mere nondiscrimination” and provides “camouflage” for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.
In contrast to equality, equity as defined and promoted by critical race theorists is little more than reformulated Marxism. In the name of equity, UCLA law professor and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth, and redistributing them along racial lines. Critical race guru Ibram X. Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, has proposed the creation of a federal Department of Antiracism. This department would be independent of (i.e., unaccountable to) the elected branches of government, and would have the power to nullify, veto, or abolish any law at any level of government and curtail the speech of political leaders and others deemed insufficiently “antiracist.”
One practical result of the creation of such a department would be the overthrow of capitalism, since, according to Kendi, “In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.” In other words, identity is the means; Marxism is the end.
An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of private property but also of individual rights, equality under the law, federalism, and freedom of speech. These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination, and omnipotent bureaucratic authority. Historically, the accusation of “anti-Americanism” has been overused. But in this case, it’s not a matter of interpretation: critical race theory prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.
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April 24, 2021
[“white” evil is] “not only objectivity, individualism, and writing, but linear thinking, quantitative reasoning, the Protestant work ethic, planning for the future, and being on time”
The latest post by John McWhorter at It Bears Mentioning discusses the “white” behaviours and thought patterns that many activists believe are as harmful to American blacks as outright white supremacism:
John McWhorter’s Twitter thumbnail image
The organization 1776Unites, founded by my mentor and model Bob Woodson, has tweeted out a video where various black people decry a now fashionable idea that “whiteness” includes being smart. As in, precise, objective, fond of the written word, oriented towards dispassion, on time.
Those things are all manifestations of intelligence, vigilance, discipline. But according to our Elect folk, we black people are best off channeling our Crazy Badass Mothafucka. Because that’s more “authentic.” And, I get the feeling, fun to watch.
Because so many think that the battle that I and others are waging against Critical Race Theory’s transmogrification into education for children is an obsession with something that isn’t a real problem, I want to explore a bit. Someone I deeply respect not long ago surmised to me that the idea that black kids should be exempt from real standards is something being promulgated via mere paper “handouts,” and that the real problem is censorship from the right. I just don’t think so.
First, watch this, the 1776Unites video. Just a few minutes.
And now, as to what we are referring to, it starts actually before last summer. I knew something was really wrong when in 2019 at a conference in New York City for the city’s principals and superintendents, participants were presented with an idea that to teach with sensitivity to race issues meant keeping certain issues in mind.
These included ways of looking at things that are “white” rather than correct: namely, objectivity, individualism, and valuing the written word. Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza was fine with this, happily telling the media that it’s white people’s job to do the “work” of identifying the racist assumptions in how they go about their business.
So: to stand outside of matters and analyze them with one’s own private mind, and perhaps couch one’s conclusions with the considered artifice of writing rather than the spontaneity of speaking, is inauthentic for black and Latino people. It is racist to impose such things on black and Latino (and Native American?) kids. Or at best, brown kids should be taught this uptight “white” business only as a gloomy alternative to the realness of just hanging out sharing passing personal impressions via chatting.
[…]
This view of precision and detachment as white is a view about, more economically, reason. The idea is that to master close reasoning is suspect. It is exactly the roots of the “Math is Racist” notion, and if you want a whiff of how religiously people can glom on to such ideas, take a look at my Twitter feed in the week after I posted about that here.
Yet, seeing this educational philosophy laid out in the sunlight, The Elect cannot dismiss it as fringe “kookiness” — unless they want to insult the curators of a national museum devoted to celebrating the very black people The Elect live to liberate. At the African-American History Museum in Washington, D.C., for a hot minute or two in 2020 you could see a variation on the Jones-Okun business, an expanded presentation of what we must reject as “white” evil. An educational poster was displayed that slammed not only objectivity, individualism, and writing, but linear thinking, quantitative reasoning, the Protestant work ethic, planning for the future, and being on time.
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April 16, 2021
The continued evolution of the Marxist class struggle – “Goodbye the working class, hello to the wokeing class”
Arthur Chrenkoff provides some background on the evolution of Marxist thought as they abandon efforts to rouse the working classes of the west against their capitalist oppressors and switch to attempting to rouse the “wokeing class” against their deplorable racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist white male cisgendered oppressors:
In developing his philosophy, Karl Marx posited human history as a struggle of two sections of society: the minority who hold the all power and the powerless majority. In Marx’s time, the minority was termed the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, or simply The Capital, those controlling (owning and benefitting from) the means of production, while the majority was called the working class, or the proletariat, the masses who sell their labour, and whose collective toil makes the capitalists rich. The essential dynamic of a society is one of power: who has it and who doesn’t, and how it’s exercised (or as Lenin said, “who whom?”). It’s a zero sum equation: all or nothing, the one or the other, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressors and the oppressed. There is a moral dimension to this dichotomy: the former, by virtue of their position, are the villains, the latter the virtuous. It’s also absolutist: the individual doesn’t matter and individuality is an irrelevant illusion; you are the class to which you belong.
One of the most important aspects of this group dynamic is that the dominant class uses its position and power to shape the society in accordance with its needs. Thus, all the institutions, laws, traditions and phenomena reflect the interests of the ruling class; they are designed to benefit them and only them and keep their power entrenched. And what benefits one class invariably harms the other: the masses. You can thus say that in a capitalist society everything’s classist.
The twentieth century dashed the hopes of Marx’s disciples that the proletariat would revolt against and overthrow their capitalist oppressors. The working class was bought off with better working conditions and rising incomes: a house, a car, and a football game. While elsewhere communism triumphed through coups and foreign invasions, in the Western world genuine revolutions did not happen; capitalism is still around. While the working class might have disappointed and let down Marxists, the basic Marxist thinking has not changed: the society is divided into two mutually hostile groups, the oppressors and the oppressed. Now we just need to find the different oppressed and we’ll have another crack at destroying capitalism and creating our socialist utopia. Out with the purely economic divisions, in with racial, gender and sexual ones. Goodbye the working class, hello to the wokeing class.
Fast forward to 2021, and the neo-Marxist struggle continues to gather wind in its sail. On the one side the power-holders: white, male, straight; on the other the powerless: women, people of colour, other sexualities. The actors might have been changed but the essential drama remains the same: the struggle of the virtuous but powerless oppressed majority against their dastardly rulers and the system created for their benefit and everyone else’s disadvantage. Just as in the past every aspect of society was biased against and harmful to the proletariat, so now it is against the proletariat 2.0: everything’s racist – and sexist, and homophobic and transphobic. This is also why the activists describe racism as “systemic”; not because there are still Jim Crow laws in existence, and legal segregation and discrimination, but because the system created by the “white” society by its very nature must be oppressive and hostile to anyone non-white. Piecemeal fixing problems and gradual reforms are useless; the only solution is a radical societal transformation that elevates the oppressed and casts down the oppressors.
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April 5, 2021
The 1919 Red Scare – the craziest year in American history
The Cynical Historian
Published 19 May 2016Many people have heard of the first Red Scare, but we should look at the year of 1919 more thoroughly. It’s probably the craziest one in American history.
Ann Hagedorn, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007). https://amzn.to/2NHIcaT
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wiki:
The First Red Scare was a period during the early 20th-century history of the United States marked by a widespread fear of Bolshevism and anarchism, due to real and imagined events; real events included those such as the Russian Revolution. At its height in 1919–1920, concerns over the effects of radical political agitation in American society and the alleged spread of communism and anarchism in the American labor movement fueled a general sense of paranoia.The Scare had its origins in the hyper-nationalism of World War I as well as the Russian Revolution. At the war’s end, following the October Revolution, American authorities saw the threat of Communist revolution in the actions of organized labor, including such disparate cases as the Seattle General Strike and the Boston Police Strike and then in the bombing campaign directed by anarchist groups at political and business leaders. Fueled by labor unrest and the anarchist bombings, and then spurred on by United States Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s attempt to suppress radical organizations, it was characterized by exaggerated rhetoric, illegal search and seizures, unwarranted arrests and detentions, and the deportation of several hundred suspected radicals and anarchists. In addition, the growing anti-immigration nativism movement among Americans viewed increasing immigration from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe as a threat to American political and social stability.
Bolshevism and the threat of a Communist-inspired revolution in the U.S. became the overriding explanation for challenges to the social order, even such largely unrelated events as incidents of interracial violence. Fear of radicalism was used to explain the suppression of freedom of expression in form of display of certain flags and banners. The First Red Scare effectively ended in mid-1920, after Attorney General Palmer forecast a massive radical uprising on May Day and the day passed without incident.
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Hashtags: #History #1919 #RedScare #SpanishFlu #Bolshevism #BlackSox #strikes #WoodrowWilson #LeagueOfNations #prohibition #suffrage
[Note: this was filmed in 2016 … I think 2020 has now taken the mantle of “craziest year”. Unless 2021 doubles down all the weirdness of 2020.]
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March 27, 2021
“Unfortunately for the RCMP, obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence is very much a criminal offence and it looks like the boys in red should lawyer up”
An investigation into the conduct of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) shows an organization that firmly believes — and acts — as though it is above the law:
To its credit, RCMP leadership accepted the findings of the CRCC [Civilian Review and Complaints Commission]. But the rank and file membership, the actual police officers who interact with the public, and their union, have rejected the report, calling it biased.
All of this is a stain on Canada’s top law enforcement agency, and part of a deeper failure by the RCMP to meaningfully address its own reluctantly acknowledged systemic racism toward Indigenous peoples, but it is far from criminal misconduct.
Unfortunately for the RCMP, obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence is very much a criminal offence and it looks like the boys in red should lawyer up.
In the course of the CRCC investigation, the commission requested all recordings, transcripts, and radio communications from the day of the shooting. These communications would have undoubtedly been important to the investigation and could have provided a window into why the RCMP engaged in illegal and discriminatory conduct.
But the RCMP destroyed those records. They claimed that it was part of a routine procedure and that records with no evidentiary value have a shelf life of two years. Except the RCMP knew that there was an ongoing CRCC investigation and a civil lawsuit by the Boushie family when they destroyed the records.
If you or I destroyed relevant records, while staring down a barrel of a civil lawsuit or investigation, we would end up before a judge on charges.
Every time I ask the RCMP to destroy records relating to my clients who have been acquitted at trial, even after years have passed, I am met with a wall of resistance. So it seems a bit convenient when relevant documents are so easily destroyed when it is the RCMP who are being investigated.
The CRCC report also discloses that the RCMP conducted a parallel investigation into the Boushie incident — with officers questioned and evidence gathered. This RCMP investigation not only potentially contaminated the CRCC inquiry, but the RCMP kept their investigation a secret and failed to disclose the fruits of their internal investigation to the CRCC.
This all reeks of a cover up and an attempt to obstruct justice.
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March 14, 2021
QotD: “Logomachia” – the use of language as a culture war weapon
During the Summer of Floyd, I commented to an American friend that this is the first time in my adult life that I am more optimistic about France than about America. The mass derangement of wokeness has been astonishing to watch. And the response from the right has been pathetic. Now, America has driven itself into ditches before, and found deep reservoirs of self-confidence from which to draw. I would never write off America completely. But the rapidity and fanaticism with which American elites have committed themselves to a course of what can only be called civilizational suicide — a kind of anti-American jihad — has been astonishing. Certainly I hope the Europeans take the right lessons from it and, as I mentioned, it seems that French elites aren’t buying it.
One of the left’s key weapons is what the philosopher Jean-Marie Benoist called “logomachia”, or language warfare. They invent all these words and use it to shape the ideaspace in their favor. It should be obvious to anyone who doesn’t have brainworms — at this point it is even obvious to many normies — that in contemporary American discourse a word like “racism” has as much connection to phenomena in the real world as “Trotskyite” had in Russia under Stalin. So if someone says “You’re a racist!” and you respond “I’m not a racist because X and Y and Z” you have already lost because you have implicitly conceded that there is this thing out there called “racism” which is really big and bad and scary, and one that your enemies get to define for you. And it doesn’t matter that your X or Y or Z may be absolutely correct. You still lose by dignifying the accusation e.g. (“I am not part of the Trotskyite conspiracy!”). The entire thing is transparently preposterous and should be responded to appropriately, with laughter and derision.
And let’s face it, we are so eager to say “I’m not a racist!” because we’re afraid of what will happen to us if we don’t. And people can smell fear, and it’s unattractive. Be not afraid!
Niccolo Soldo, “The Zürich Interviews – Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Unrepentant Baguette Merchant”, Fisted by Foucault, 2020-12-02.
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March 5, 2021
Schools told they need to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views”
No wonder I had trouble with math back in grade school: Math is a racist tool of White Supremacists!
“Math Class” by attercop311 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Mandatory teaching standards that focus on critical theory and identity politics to the detriment of liberalism and individualism are already working their way through state legislatures.
Now, math education itself has been deemed “racist.” A group of educators just released a document calling for a transformation of math education that focuses on “dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visibilizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math.”
Among the educators’ recommendations, which officials in some states are promoting, are calls to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views,” “provide learning opportunities that use math as resistance,” and “encourage them to disrupt the disproportionate push-out of people of color in [STEM] fields.”
Beyond activism, these recommendations also argue that traditional approaches to math education promote racism and white supremacy, such as requiring students to show their work or prioritizing correct answers to math problems. The document claims that current math teaching is problematic because it focuses on “reinforcing objectivity and the idea that there is only one right way” while it “also reinforces paternalism.”
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