Trump’s election campaign wanted to deter millions of Black Americans from voting in 2016. The ‘Deterrence’ project can be revealed after Channel 4 News obtained the database used by Trump's digital campaign team.
Millions of Americans in key battleground states were separated into eight categories, so they could be targeted with tailored ads online. One of the categories was named ‘Deterrence’, which was later described publicly by Trump’s chief data scientist as containing people the campaign “hope don’t show up to vote”.
Analysis by Channel 4 News shows Black Americans - historically a community targeted with voter suppression tactics - were disproportionately marked ‘Deterrence’ by the 2016 campaign. In total, 3.5 million Black Americans were marked ‘Deterrence’. Overall, people of colour labelled as Black, Hispanic, Asian and ‘Other’ groups made up 54% of the ‘Deterrence’ category. Meanwhile, categories of voters the campaign wished to attract were overwhelmingly white.
The investigation reveals the Trump campaign targeted Black Americans with negative ads on Facebook and social media - despite the campaign's denials.
The World Wildlife Foundation, in collaboration with the
Zoological Society of London, recently issued an eye-popping description
of the forces of humanity versus life in nature, the Living Planet
Report 2020, but the report should really be entitled the Dying Planet
Report 2020 because that’s what’s happening in the real world. Not much
remains alive.
The report, released September 10th, describes how the
over-exploitation of ecological resources by humanity from 1970 to 2016
has contributed to a 68% plunge in wild vertebrate populations,
inclusive of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish.
The report offers a fix-it: “Bending the Curve Initiative,” described
in more detail to follow. The causes of collapse are found in human
recklessness and/or neglect of ecosystems. It’s partially fixable
(maybe) but don’t hold your breath.
What if stocks plunged 68%? What then? Why, of course, that is an
all-hands-on-deck panic scenario with the Federal Reserve Bank
repeatedly pressing “a white hot printing press button,” hopefully,
avoiding destructive deflationary forces looming in the background. But,
an astounding jaw-dropping 68% loss of vertebrates doesn’t seem to
budge the panic needle nearly enough to count.
Of special note, according to the Report, tropical sub-regions were
clobbered, hit hard with 94% loss of vertebrate life, which is
essentially total extinction. For comparison purposes, the worst
extinction event in history, the Permian-Triassic, aka: the Great Dying,
of 252 million years ago took down 96% of marine life and has been
classified as “global annihilation.”
According to the Report, on a worldwide basis, two-thirds (2/3rds) of
wild vertebrate life has vanished in only 46 years or within one-half a
human lifetime. That is mind-boggling, and it is indicative of
misguided mindlessness, prompting a query of what the next 46 years will
bring. What remains is an operative question?
According to the report:
“Until 1970, humanity’s Ecological Footprint was smaller than the Earth’s rate of regeneration. To feed and fuel our 21st
century, we are overusing the Earth’s biocapacity by at least 56%.”
(Report, page 6) Meaning, we’ve gone from equilibrium to a huge deficit
of 50% in less than 50 years. Putting it mildly, that’s terrifying!
As stated in the Report, we’re effectively using and abusing and
trampling the equivalence of one and one-half planets. How long does
that last? The experience of the past 46 years provides an answer, which
is: Not much longer.
The denuding, destructing of natural biodiversity is almost beyond
description, certainly beyond human comprehension, which may be a big
part of the problem of recognition. Still, by and large, people read the
World Wildlife Foundation report and continue on with business as
usual. This lackadaisical behavior by the public has been ongoing for
decades and not likely to end anytime soon. Therefore, an eureka moment
of radical change in farming practices and ecosystem husbandry is almost
too much to wish for after years, and years, of preaching by
environmentalists about the ills associated with the anthropogenic
growth machine.
In all, with ever-faster approaching finality, and worldwide failure
to act to save the planet, the answer may be that people must learn to
adapt to a deteriorating world.
More to the point, the Report is “an extermination report.” Consider the opening sentence:
“At a time when the world is reeling from the deepest
global disruption and health crisis of a lifetime, this year’s Living
Planet Report provides unequivocal and alarming evidence that nature is
unraveling and that our planet is flashing red warning signs of vital
natural systems failure.” (Report, page 4)
Accordingly, unequivocally “nature is unraveling.” And, the planet is
“flashing red warning signs of vital natural systems failure.”
Why repeat that disheartening info? Simply put, it demands repeating
over and over again. Yes, “nature is unraveling.” And, by all
indications, time is short as “flashing red warning signs” are crying
for help. But, will it happen? Or, does biz as usual rattle onwards
towards total extinction of life way ahead of anybody’s best guess,
which, based upon how rapidly the forces of the anthropocene are
gobbling up the countryside, could be within current lifetimes. But,
honestly, who knows when?
Still, with great hope but not enough fanfare, the Report proposes a
new research initiative called “Bending the Curve Initiative” to reverse
biodiversity loss via (1) unprecedented conservation measures and (2) a
total remake of food production techniques.
One of the upshots of the breakdown in nature is the issue of “adequate food for humanity.” Accordingly:
“Where and how we produce food is one of the biggest
human-caused threats to nature and to our ecosystems, making the
transformation of our global food system more important than ever,” Ibid
Which implies the end of rainforests obliteration, the end of
industrial farming, full stop, eliminating mono-crop farming, and
“stopping dead in its tracks” the use of toxic, deadly insecticides,
which kill crucial life-originating ecosystems by bucketloads, as for
example, 75% loss of flying insects over 27 years in nature reserves in
portions of Europe (Source: Krefeld Entomological Society, est. 1905).
What kills 75% of flying insects?
Additionally, the Report recognizes the necessity of “transformation
of the prevailing economic system.” Meaning, a transformation away from
the radical infinite growth hormones that are attached to the world’s
lowest offshore wages and lowest offshore regulations as an outgrowth of
neoliberalism, which is rapidly destroying the world. It’s a terminal
illness that’s fully recognized around the world as “progress.” But, its
unrelenting disregard for the health of ecosystems and for workers’
rights makes it a serial killer.
The wonderful world of nature is not part of the neoliberal
capitalistic formula for success. In fact, nature with its life-sourcing
ecosystems is treated like an adversary or like one more prop to use
and abuse on the way to infinite progress. Really?
The Report alerts to the dangers of a “business as usual world,” an
epithet that is also found throughout climate change literature. These
warnings of impending loss of ecosystems, and by extension survival of
Homo sapiens, depict a biosphere on a hot seat never before seen
throughout human history. In fact, there is no time in recorded history
that compares to the dangers immediately ahead. The most common
watchword used by scientists is “unprecedented.” The change happens so
rapidly, so powerfully. It’s unprecedented.
Meanwhile, people are shielded from the complexities, and heartaches,
of collapsing ecosystems in today’s world by the artificiality of
living a life of steel, glass, wood, cement, as the surrounding world
collapses in a virtual sea of untested chemicals.
In the end, humans are the last vertebrates on the planet to directly
feel and experience the impact of climate change and ecosystems
collapsing. All of the other vertebrates are first in line. Maybe that’s
for the best.
Still, how many more 68% plunges in wild vertebrate populations can civilized society handle and remain sane and well fed?
In March 2015, Bill Gates showed an image of the coronavirus during a
TED Talk and told the audience that it was what the greatest
catastrophe of our time would look like. The real threat to life, he
said, is ‘not missiles, but microbes.’
When the coronavirus pandemic swept over the earth like a tsunami five
years later, he revived the war language, describing the pandemic as ‘a
world war’.
‘The coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus,’ he said.
In fact, the pandemic is not a war. The pandemic is a consequence of
war. A war against life. The mechanical mind connected to the money
machine of extraction has created the illusion of humans as separate
from nature, and nature as dead, inert raw material to be exploited.
But, in fact, we are part of the biome. And we are part of the virome.
The biome and the virome are us. When we wage war on the biodiversity of
our forests, our farms, and in our guts, we wage war on ourselves.
The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the
health emergency of extinction, the health emergency of biodiversity
loss, and the health emergency of the climate crisis. All of these
emergencies are rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric
worldview that considers humans separate from—and superior to—other
beings. Beings we can own, manipulate, and control. All of these
emergencies are rooted in an economic model based on the illusion of
limitless growth and limitless greed, which violate planetary
boundaries, and destroy the integrity of ecosystems and individual
species.
New diseases arise because a globalized, industrialized, inefficient
agriculture invades habitats, destroys ecosystems, and manipulates
animals, plants, and other organisms with no respect for their integrity
or their health. We are linked worldwide through the spread of diseases
like the coronavirus because we have invaded the homes of other
species, manipulated plants and animals for commercial profits and
greed, and cultivated monocultures. As we clear-cut forests, as we turn
farms into industrial monocultures that produce toxic, nutritionally
empty commodities, as our diets become degraded through industrial
processing with synthetic chemicals and genetic engineering, and as we
perpetuate the illusion that earth and life are raw materials to be
exploited for profits, we are indeed connecting. But instead of
connecting on a continuum of health by protecting biodiversity,
integrity, and self-organization of all living beings, including humans,
we are connected through disease.
According to the International Labour Organization,
‘1.6 billion informal economy workers (representing the most vulnerable
in the labour market), out of a worldwide total of two billion and a
global workforce of 3.3 billion, have suffered massive damage to their
capacity to earn a living. This is due to lockdown measures and/or
because they work in the hardest-hit sectors.’ According to the World
Food Programme, a quarter of a billion additional people will be pushed to hunger and 300,000 could die every day. These, too, are pandemics that are killing people. Killing cannot be a prescription for saving lives.
Health is about life and living systems. There is no ‘life’ in the
paradigm of health that Bill Gates and his ilk are promoting and
imposing on the entire world. Gates has created global alliances to
impose top-down analysis and prescriptions for health problems. He gives
money to define the problems, and then he uses his influence and money
to impose the solutions. And in the process, he gets richer. His
‘funding’ results in an erasure of democracy and biodiversity, of nature
and culture. His ‘philanthropy’ is not just philanthrocapitalism. It is
philanthroimperialism.
The coronavirus pandemic and lockdown have revealed even more clearly
how we are being reduced to objects to be controlled, with our bodies
and minds as the new colonies to be invaded. Empires create colonies,
colonies enclose the commons of the indigenous living communities and
turn them into sources of raw material to be extracted for profits. This
linear, extractive logic is unable to see the intimate relations that
sustain life in the natural world. It is blind to diversity, cycles of
renewal, values of giving and sharing, and the power and potential of
self-organising and mutuality. It is blind to the waste it creates and
to the violence it unleashes. The extended coronavirus lockdown has been
a lab experiment for a future without humanity.
On March 26, 2020, at a peak of the coronavirus pandemic and in the
midst of the lockdown, Microsoft was granted a patent by the World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Patent WO 060606 declares
that ‘Human Body Activity associated with a task provided to a user may
be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system….’
The ‘body activity’ that Microsoft wants to mine includes radiation
emitted from the human body, brain activities, body fluid flow, blood
flow, organ activity, body movement such as eye movement, facial
movement, and muscle movement, as well as any other activities that can
be sensed and represented by images, waves, signals, texts, numbers,
degrees, or any other information or data.
The patent is an intellectual property claim over our bodies and
minds. In colonialism, colonisers assign themselves the right to take
the land and resources of indigenous people, extinguish their cultures
and sovereignty, and in extreme cases exterminate them. Patent WO 060606
is a declaration by Microsoft that our bodies and minds are its new
colonies. We are mines of ‘raw material’—the data extracted from our
bodies. Rather than sovereign, spiritual, conscious, intelligent beings
making decisions and choices with wisdom and ethical values about the
impacts of our actions on the natural and social world of which we are a
part, and to which we are inextricably related, we are ‘users.’ A
‘user’ is a consumer without choice in the digital empire.
But that’s not the totality of Gates’ vision. In fact, it is even
more sinister—to colonise the minds, bodies, and spirits of our children
before they even have the opportunity to understand what freedom and
sovereignty look and feel like, beginning with the most vulnerable.
In May 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York announced a
partnership with the Gates Foundation to ‘reinvent education.’ Cuomo
called Gates a visionary and argued that the pandemic has created ‘a
moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’]
ideas…all these buildings, all these physical classrooms—why with all
the technology you have?’
In fact, Gates has been trying to dismantle the public education
system of the United States for two decades. For him students are mines
for data. That is why the indicators he promotes are attendance, college
enrollment, and scores on a math and reading test, because these can be
easily quantified and mined. In reimagining education, children will be
monitored through surveillance systems to check if they are attentive
while they are forced to take classes remotely, alone at home. The
dystopia is one where children never return to schools, do not have a
chance to play, do not have friends. It is a world without society,
without relationships, without love and friendship.
As I look to the future in a world of Gates and Tech Barons, I see a
humanity that is further polarized into large numbers of ‘throw away’
people who have no place in the new Empire. Those who are included in
the new Empire will be little more than digital slaves.
Or, we can resist. We can seed another future, deepen our
democracies, reclaim our commons, regenerate the earth as living members
of a One Earth Family, rich in our diversity and freedom, one in our
unity and interconnectedness. It is a healthier future. It is one we
must fight for. It is one we must claim.
We stand at a precipice of extinction. Will we allow our humanity as
living, conscious, intelligent, autonomous beings to be extinguished by a
greed machine that does not know limits and is unable to put a break on
its colonisation and destruction? Or will we stop the machine and
defend our humanity, freedom, and autonomy to protect life on earth?
In 1888, the year before he went insane, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following in Twilight of the Idols:
We have got rid of the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? … But no! Along with the real world we’ve done away with the apparent world as well.
So, if you feel you also may be going insane in the present climate of digital screen life, where real is unreal but realer than real, the apparent is cryptic, and up is down, true is false, and what you see you don’t, it has a history. One hundred and thirty-two years ago, Nietzsche added that “something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.” We know it did, and the bloody butcher’s bench known as the twentieth century was the result. Nihilism stepped onto center stage and has been the star of the show ever since, straight through to 2020. Roberto Calasso puts it this way in Literature and the Gods:
Here we are, announces Nietzsche, and it would be hard not to hear a mocking ring in his voice. We thought we were living in a world where the fog had lifted, a disenchanted, ascertainable, verifiable world. And instead everything has gone back to being a ‘fable’ again. How are we to get our bearings … This is the paralysis, the peculiar uncertainty of modern times, a paralysis that all since have experienced.
Obviously, we haven’t gotten our bearings. We are far more adrift today on a stormy electronic sea where the analogical circle of life has been replaced by the digital, and “truths” like numbers click into place continuously to lead us in wrong, algorithm-controlled directions. The trap is almost closed.
Of course, Nietzsche did not have the Internet, but he lived at the dawn of the electric era, when space-time transformations were occurring at a rapid pace. Inventions such as photography, the phonograph, the telephone, electricity, etc. were contracting space and time and a disembodied “reality” was being born. With today’s Internet and digital screen life, the baby is full-grown and completely disembodied. It does nothing but look at its image that is looking back into a lifeless void, whose lost gaze can’t figure out what it’s seeing.
Take, for example, the phonograph, invented by Thomas Edison in 1878. If you could record a person’s voice, and if that person died, were you then listening to the voice of a living person or one who was dead? If the person whose voice was recorded was alive and was miles away, you had also compressed earthly space. The phonograph suppressed absence, conjured ghosts, and seemed to overcome time and death as it captured the flow of time in sound. It allowed a disembodied human voice to inhabit a machine, an early example of downloading.
“Two ruling ambitions in modern technology,” writes John Durham Peters in his wonderful book, Speaking into the Air, “appear in the phonograph: the creation of artificial life and the conjuring of the dead.”
Many people started to hear voices, and these people were not called deluded. Soon, with the arrival of cinema, they would see ghosts as well. Today, speaking ghosts are everywhere, hiding in hand-held devices. It’s Halloween all year round as we are surrounded by electronic zombies in a screen culture.
This technological annihilation of space and time that was happening at a frenetic pace was the material background to Nietzsche’s thought. His philosophical and epistemological analyses emerged from German intellectual life of his time as well, where theologians and philosophers were discovering that knowledge was relative and had to be understood in situ, i.e., within its historical and social place or context.
Without going into abstruse philosophical issues here, suffice it to say, Nietzsche was suggesting that not only was God dead because people killed him, but that knowledge was a fiction that changed over time and was a human construction. All knowledge, not just science, had to be taken “as if” it were true. This was a consoling mental trick but falsely reassuring, for most people could not accept this, since “knowledge” was a protection racket from pain and insanity. It still is. In other words, not only had people murdered God, but they had slain absolutes as well. This left them in the lurch, not knowing if what they knew and believed were really true, or sort of true – maybe, perhaps. The worm of uncertainty had entered modern thought through modern thought.
While the average person did not delve into these revolutionary ideas, they did, through the inventions that were entering their lives, and the news about Darwin, science, religion, etc., realize, however vaguely, that something very strange and dramatic was under way. Life was passing from substance to shadow because of human ingenuity.
It is similar to what so many feel today: that reality and truth are moving beyond their grasp as technological forces that they voluntarily embrace push everyday life towards some spectral denouement. An inhuman, trans-human, on-line electronic life where everything is a parody of everything that preceded it, like an Andy Warhol copy of a copy of a Campbell’s soup can with a canned mocking laugh track that keeps repeating itself. All this follows from the nineteenth century relativization of knowledge, or what at least was taken as such, for to say all knowledge is relative is an absolute statement. That contradiction goes to the heart of our present dilemma.
This old feeling of lostness is perhaps best summarized in a few lines from Mathew Arnold’s 19th century poem, “Dover Beach”:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
But that was then. Today, the Joker’s sardonic laughter would suffice.
I am sitting outside as I write, sipping a glass of wine before dinner. Although New England fall weather is approaching, a nasty mosquito is buzzing around my head. I hear it. I am in killer mode since these bastards love to bite me. This is real life. If I went into the house and connected to the Internet on the computer screen – news, social media, anything – I would be entering another dimension. Screen life, not real life. The society of the spectacle. No real mosquitoes, no wine, no trees swaying in the evening breeze.
In his novel, The Sun Also Rises, written between Nietzsche’s time and now, Ernest Hemingway, a man who surely lived in the physical world, writes of how Robert Cohn, the boxing champion from Princeton University, wants Jake Barnes, the book’s protagonist, to take a trip with him to South America. As they sit and talk in Paris, Barnes says no, and tells Cohn, “All countries look just like the moving pictures.”
Whether Hemingway was being ironic or not, or simply visionary, I don’t know. For in the 1920s, before passports and widespread tourism, there were many places you could only see if you traveled to them and they would never appear in moving pictures, while today there is almost no place that is not available to view beforehand on the internet or television. So why go anywhere if you’ve already seen it all on a screen? Why travel to nowhere or to where you have already been? Déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra put it and everyone laughed. Now the laugh is on us.
This is neither an argument nor a story. It’s real. I am trying to get my bearings in a disorienting situation. Call it a compass, a weather-vane, a prayer. You can call me Al or Ishmael. Call me crazy. Perhaps this writing is just an “as if.”
About fifteen years ago, I was teaching at a college where most communication was done via email. I was, as they say, out of the loop since I didn’t do email. I was often asked why I didn’t, and I would repeatedly reply, like Melville’s Bartleby, because “I prefer not to.” Finally, in order to keep my job, I succumbed and with the laptop computer they provided me, I went “on-line.” There were 6,954.7 emails in my in-box from the past three years. In those three years, I had performed all my duties scrupulously and hadn’t missed a beat. Someone showed me how to delete the emails, which I did without reading any, but I had entered the labyrinth. I went electronic. My reality changed. I am still searching for Ariadne’s thread.
But I am not yet a machine and refuse the invitation to become one. It’s a very insistent invitation, almost an order. Neil Postman (Oh such a rich surname!) sums it up well in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology:
The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines – thinking machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless. It is for this reason that the computer is the quintessential, incomparable, near perfect machine for Technopoly. It subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it ‘thinks’ better than we can…John McCarthy, the inventor of the term ‘artificial intelligence’…claims that ‘even machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs…What is significant about this response is that it has redefined the meaning of the word ‘belief’ … rejects the view that humans have internal states of mind that are the foundation of belief and argues instead that ‘belief’ means only what someone or something does … rejects the idea that the mind is a biological phenomenon … In other words, what we have here is a case of metaphor gone mad.
Postman wrote that in 1992, before the computer and the internet became ubiquitous and longer before on-line living had become de rigueur – before it was being shoved down our throats as it is today under the cover of COVID-19.
There is little doubt that we are being pushed to embrace what Klaus Schwab, the Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), calls COVID-19:The Great Reset, that involves a total acceptance of the electronic, on-line life. On-line learning, on-line news, on-line everything – only an idiot (from Greek, idiotes, a private person who pays not attention to public affairs) would fail to see what is being promoted. And who controls the electronic life and internet? Not you, not I, but the powers that be, the intelligence agencies and the power elites. Goodbye body, goodbye blood – “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in support of human estrangement.
Peter Koenig, one of the most astute investigators of this propaganda effort, puts it this way:
The panacea of the future will be crowned by the Pearl of the Fourth Industrialization – Artificial intelligence (AI). It will be made possible by a 5G electromagnetic field, allowing the Internet of Things (IoT). Schwab and Malleret [Schwab’s co-author] won’t say, beware, there is opposition. 5G could still be blocked. The 5G existence and further development is necessary for surveillance and control of humanity, by digitizing everything, including human identity and money.
It will be so simple, no more cash, just electronic, digital money – that is way beyond the control of the owner, the truthful earner of the money, as it can be accessed by the Global Government and withheld and / or used for pressuring misbehaving citizens into obeying the norms imposed from above. You don’t behave according to our norms, no money to buy food, shelter and health services, we let you starve. No more travel. No more attending public events. You’ll be put gradually in your own solitary confinement. The dictatorial and tyrannical global commandeering by digital control of everything is the essence of the 4th Age of Industrialization – highly promoted by the WEF’s Great Reset.
Like everything, of course, this push to place life under the aegis of cyberspace has a history, one that deifies the machine and attempts to convince people that they too are machines without existential freedom. Thus the ongoing meme pumped out for the past three decades has been that we are controlled by our brains and that the brain is a computer and vice versa. Brain research has received massive government funding. Drugs have been offered as the solution to every human problem. So-called diseases and disorders have been created through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and matched to pharmaceutical drugs (or the revers) for scandalous profits. And the mind has been reduced to a figment of deluded imaginations. People are machines; that’s the story, marvelous machines. They have no freedom.
If one wishes an example of techno-fascism, there is one from the art world. Back in the 1920s and 1930s there was an art movement known as Futurism. Its leader proponent was an Italian Fascist, friend of Mussolini, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The futurists claimed that all life revolves around the machine, that the machine was god, that it was beyond human control and had to be obeyed. They extolled war and speed and claimed that humans were no more significant than stones. Patriotism, militarism, strength, method, and the kingdom of experts were their blueprint for a corporate fascist state. The human eye and mind would be re-educated to automatically obey the machine’s dictates.
Now we have cyberspace, digital machines, and the internet, an exponential extension of the machine world of the 1930s and the rise of Mussolini, Fascism, and Hitler. That this online world is being pushed as the new and future normal by trans-national elite forces should not be surprising. If human communication becomes primarily digitally controlled on-line and on screens, those who control the machines will have achieved the most powerful means of mind control ever invented. That will be MKULTRA on a vast scale. Surveillance will be complete.
Yes, there are places on the internet where truth is and will be told, such as this site where you are reading this; but as we can see from today’s growing censorship across the web, those power elites and intelligence forces who control the companies that do their bidding will narrow the options for dissenting voices. Such censorship starts slowly, and then when one looks again, it is a fait accompli. The frog in the pan of slowly heating cold water never realizes it is being killed until it is too late. Free speech is now being strangled. Censorship is widespread.
The purpose of so much internet propaganda is to confuse, obsess, depress, and then repress the population. The overlords accomplish this by the “peculiar linking together of opposites – knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism – [which] is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society,” writes Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “The official ideology abounds with contradictions even where there is no practical reason for them.” One look into one’s life will suffice to see how the overlords have set people against each other. It’s a classic tactic. Divide and conquer. Trump vs. Biden, Democrats vs. Republicans, whites vs. blacks, liberals vs. conservatives. Pure mind games. Contradictions every day to create social disorientation. Orwell describes Doublethink as follows:
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt…To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary…If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. [author’s emphasis]
Nietzsche said that along with the real world we have done away with the apparent as well. Digital online life has accomplished that. It has allowed the rulers – through the media who are the magicians who serve them – to create counterfeit news and doctored videos at will, to present diametrically opposed points of view within the same paragraph, and to push breaking news items so fast that no one half-way sane could keep up with their magic shows. Nietzsche obviously didn’t foresee this technology, but he sensed the madness that the relativity of knowledge and the technology of his day would usher in.
The popular 1990s term “Information Superhighway,” meaning the internet and all digital telecommunications, was the perfect term to describe this lunacy. Get on that highway and go as fast as you can while trying to catch the meaning of all the information flashing past you as you speed to nowhere. For not only does censorship, propaganda, disinformation, mixed messages, and contradictions line the road you are traveling, but contextless information overload is so heavy that even if you were stopped in a traffic jam, there is too much information to comprehend. And if you think this Superhighway is a freeway, think again, for the cost is high. No one puts out their hand and asks you to pay up; but the more you travel down this road you’ll notice you are missing a bit of flesh here and some blood there. And without a speed pass, you are considered road kill.
To make matters much worse, they say we need 5G to go much faster.
Paul Virilio, who has devoted himself to the study of speed (dromology), puts it this way in Open Sky:
The speed of the new optoelectronic and electroacoustic milieu becomes the final void (the void of the quick), a vacuum that no longer depends on the interval between places or things and so on the world’s very extension, but on the interface of an instantaneous transmission of remote appearances, on a geographic and geometric retention in which all volume, all relief vanishes.
And yet I don’t have a simple answer to the internet dilemma. You are reading it on-line and I am posting it there. It is very convenient and quick. And yet…and yet….
Can we just walk away from it? Maybe. Perhaps like those few who, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s excruciating story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” we may decide the price for our conveniences and so-called happiness is too high and that there are hidden victims that this techno-scientific “progress” creates beneath its veneer of efficiency. Others, us, our children, all children, who are reaching out not for speed and machines, but for the human touch that the on-line propagandists hope to destroy. In Le Guin’s story, the price nearly all the citizens of Omelas are willing to pay for their happiness and comfort is the imprisonment of a single child. Perhaps we should consider what we are doing to all the world’s children and their futures.
My friend Gary recently sent me this letter. I believe it sums up what many people feel. There is a vast hunger for reality and truth. The analog life. How to live it – the question hangs in the air as the artificial intelligence/digital controllers try to reduce us to machines.
Although apparently it isn’t clear if Twain ever said this, it’s still a great quote: (“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.”) To which “amen” is the only appropriate response.
I continue to daily stay abreast of events through the web, and these days much of what passed for “progressive media” simply regurgitates the covid madness as if it had been delivered on stone tablets – rather than by the same MSM that lie to us daily about literally ANYTHING of any importance.
There are days I wonder “why” I continue to bother to follow the unfolding madness as if it made some “difference.” I could certainly play guitar more, and I might even get it together to write a few pieces on the nature of our collective madness, for which I have studiously assembled copious notes. I really don’t need any more information or examples – I think I have things covered on that front.
Instead I find myself daily doing the little dance we’re all familiar with – uncomfortable with being “uninformed” – yet at almost every turn finding myself being routinely – “misinformed” – and so having to sift through the endless debris to have any chance at developing any coherent understanding of the world.
So yes, I totally get the draw of just saying to hell with the internet. After years of shifting through the endless propaganda operations our generation has been subject too, I have no doubt you and I see through most the nonsense for what it is before we even have the proof in hand. Once the rose-colored glasses of ‘American exceptionalism’ are off, one can almost sense and see through the lies in real time even as they are being uttered.
Reading Gary’s words reminded me of those of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s definition of the Unspeakable:
It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said, the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience…
Yes, real time, real life – as we do our little dances.
Can we do our little dances and preserve reality? I’m not sure.
Jim Sciutto is CNN's chief national security correspondent and co-anchor of CNN Newsroom. Sciutto previously served as ABC News’ senior foreign correspondent. As a foreign correspondent and in his other professional roles, Sciutto has traveled to and reported from more than 50 countries including Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan.
Sciutto's new book is “The Madman Theory: Trump Takes On the World”.He explains that there is no strategic logic or so-called “madman theory” guiding Donald Trump and his control over the country’s foreign policy. He warns that America’s foreign policy is now guided by Donald Trump’s personal whims, delusions, authoritarianism, narcissism, greed, corruption, and personal fealty to Vladimir Putin.
He goes on to detail how Donald Trump has brought the United States to the brink of what could have been a horrible war with North Korea and Iran – but it was only because the country’s senior military officials did not allow Trump to follow through on his worst impulses that disaster was avoided.
The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
A hidden light illumines all our seeing, An unknown love enchants our solitude. We feel and know that from the depths of being Exhales an infinite, a perfect good.
Though the heart wear the garment of its sorrow And be not happy like a naked star, Yet from the thought of peace some peace we borrow, Some rapture from the rapture felt afar.
Our heart strings are too coarse for Nature’s fingers Deftly to quicken as she pulses on, And the harsh tremor that among them lingers Will into sweeter silence die anon.
We catch the broken prelude and suggestion Of things unuttered, needing to be sung; We know the burden of them, and their question Lies heavy on the heart, nor finds a tongue.
Till haply, lightning through the storm of ages, Our sullen secret flash from sky to sky, Glowing in some diviner poet’s pages And swelling into rapture from this sigh.
(Skip to the 4:40 mark if you don't understand Spanish)
How can we combat the present deterioration of democracy, the rise of
authoritarian powers, and the increasing precariousness of life? For
Henry Giroux, the solution necessarily entails unmasking the ultimate
causes of these evils: ignorance and the assault on critical thought.
According to Giroux, the great triumph of neoliberalism has been its
erasing of other social alternatives and imposing its own model of
society which is based on a culture of immediacy and monetisation, on
competition instead of cooperation, and unbridled individualism instead
of solidarity. In combatting this increasing degradation of society,
Giroux champions the school as a crucial bastion of democracy. He
believes that education is central to politics and the struggle for
knowledge, power, and agency. It is in education where the seed of a
critical sensibility is planted, where a radical imagination is
cultivated so that new social scenarios can be devised, and a feeling of
community and political responsibility can be re-established. This is
why the school constitutes the first and perhaps the most important
space of democracy.
The portrayal of Jesus as a white, European man has come under
renewed scrutiny during this period of introspection over the legacy of
racism in society.
As protesters called for the removal of Confederate statues in the U.S., activist Shaun King went further, suggesting that murals and artwork depicting “white Jesus” should “come down.”
As a European Renaissance art historian, I study the evolving image of Jesus Christ from A.D. 1350 to 1600. Some of the best-known depictions of Christ,
from Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” to Michelangelo’s “Last
Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel, were produced during this period.
But the all-time most-reproduced image of Jesus comes from another period. It is Warner Sallman’s light-eyed, light-haired “Head of Christ” from 1940. Sallman, a former commercial artist who created art for advertising campaigns, successfully marketed this picture worldwide.
Through Sallman’s partnerships with two Christian publishing
companies, one Protestant and one Catholic, the Head of Christ came to
be included on everything from prayer cards to stained glass, faux oil
paintings, calendars, hymnals and night lights.
Sallman’s painting culminates a long tradition of white Europeans
creating and disseminating pictures of Christ made in their own image.
In Search of the Holy Face
The historical Jesus likely had the brown eyes and skin of other first-century Jews from Galilee,
a region in biblical Israel. But no one knows exactly what Jesus looked
like. There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime, and while
the Old Testament Kings Saul and David are explicitly called tall and handsome in the Bible, there is little indication of Jesus’ appearance in the Old or New Testaments.
Even these texts are contradictory: The Old Testament prophet Isaiah reads that the coming savior “had no beauty or majesty,” while the Book of Psalms claims he was “fairer than the children of men,” the word “fair” referring to physical beauty.
The earliest images of Jesus Christ emerged in the first through
third centuries A.D., amidst concerns about idolatry. They were less
about capturing the actual appearance of Christ than about clarifying
his role as a ruler or as a savior.
To clearly indicate these roles, early Christian artists often relied
on syncretism, meaning they combined visual formats from other
cultures.
Probably the most popular syncretic image is Christ as the Good Shepherd, a beardless, youthful figure based on pagan representations of Orpheus, Hermes and Apollo.
In other common depictions, Christ wears the toga or other attributes of the emperor. The theologian Richard Viladesau argues that the mature bearded Christ, with long hair in the “Syrian” style, combines characteristics of the Greek god Zeus and the Old Testament figure Samson, among others.
Christ as Self-Portraitist
The first portraits of Christ, in the sense of authoritative
likenesses, were believed to be self-portraits: the miraculous “image
not made by human hands,” or acheiropoietos.
This belief originated in the seventh century A.D., based on a legend
that Christ healed King Abgar of Edessa in modern-day Urfa, Turkey,
through a miraculous image of his face, now known as the Mandylion.
A similar legend adopted by Western Christianity between the 11th and
14th centuries recounts how, before his death by crucifixion, Christ
left an impression of his face on the veil of Saint Veronica, an image
known as the volto santo, or “Holy Face.”
These two images, along with other similar relics, have formed the basis of iconic traditions about the “true image” of Christ.
From the perspective of art history, these artifacts reinforced an
already standardized image of a bearded Christ with shoulder-length,
dark hair.
In the Renaissance, European artists began to combine the icon and
the portrait, making Christ in their own likeness. This happened for a
variety of reasons, from identifying with the human suffering of Christ
to commenting on one’s own creative power.
The 15th-century Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, for example,
painted small pictures of the suffering Christ formatted exactly like
his portraits of regular people,
with the subject positioned between a fictive parapet and a plain black
background and signed “Antonello da Messina painted me.”
The 16th-century German artist Albrecht Dürer blurred the line
between the holy face and his own image in a famous self-portrait of
1500. In this, he posed frontally like an icon, with his beard and
luxuriant shoulder-length hair recalling Christ’s. The “AD” monogram
could stand equally for “Albrecht Dürer” or “Anno Domini” – “in the year
of our Lord.”
In Whose Image?
This phenomenon was not restricted to Europe: There are 16th- and 17th-century pictures of Jesus with, for example, Ethiopian and Indian features.
In Europe, however, the image of a light-skinned European Christ
began to influence other parts of the world through European trade and
colonization.
The Italian painter Andrea Mantegna’s “Adoration of the Magi” from
A.D. 1505 features three distinct magi, who, according to one contemporary tradition,
came from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. They present expensive
objects of porcelain, agate and brass that would have been prized
imports from China and the Persian and Ottoman empires.
But Jesus’ light skin and blue eyes suggest that he is not Middle
Eastern but European-born. And the faux-Hebrew script embroidered on
Mary’s cuffs and hemline belie a complicated relationship to the Judaism
of the Holy Family.
In Mantegna’s Italy, anti-Semitic myths
were already prevalent among the majority Christian population, with
Jewish people often segregated to their own quarters of major cities.
Artists tried to distance Jesus and his parents from their Jewishness. Even seemingly small attributes like pierced ears
– earrings were associated with Jewish women, their removal with a
conversion to Christianity – could represent a transition toward the
Christianity represented by Jesus.
Much later, anti-Semitic forces in Europe including the Nazis would
attempt to divorce Jesus totally from his Judaism in favor of an Aryan stereotype.
White Jesus Abroad
As Europeans colonized increasingly farther-flung lands, they brought
a European Jesus with them. Jesuit missionaries established painting
schools that taught new converts Christian art in a European mode.
A small altarpiece made in the school of Giovanni Niccolò,
the Italian Jesuit who founded the “Seminary of Painters” in Kumamoto,
Japan, around 1590, combines a traditional Japanese gilt and
mother-of-pearl shrine with a painting of a distinctly white, European
Madonna and Child.
In colonial Latin America – called “New Spain” by European colonists – images of a white Jesus reinforced a caste system
where white, Christian Europeans occupied the top tier, while those
with darker skin from perceived intermixing with native populations
ranked considerably lower.
In a multiracial but unequal America, there was a disproportionate
representation of a white Jesus in the media. It wasn’t only Warner
Sallman’s Head of Christ that was depicted widely; a large proportion of
actors who have played Jesus on television and film have been white with blue eyes.
Pictures of Jesus historically have served many purposes, from
symbolically presenting his power to depicting his actual likeness. But representation matters, and viewers need to understand the complicated history of the images of Christ they consume.
American feminist author, journalist, and former Presidential political advisor, Dr Naomi Wolf talks to Daniel G Newman (author of "Unrig") and Greg Palast ("The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" and "How Trump Stole 2020") about the challenges voters — and the very institution of U.S. democracy — face in the upcoming election. Both books — "Unrig" by Newman and "How Trump Stole 2020" by Palast — "hold the key to what we can actually do to save the vote, save the election, and save democracy,” says Wolf, who moderates a discussion which is essential pre-election viewing.
White people, you are the problem. White Supremacy to be exact.
Racism is baked into American culture. People of color, for the most part, are like David confronting Goliath that keeps advancing & stomping, relentlessly. America cannot rid itself of this curse, this Goliath, unless white people accept responsibility for it. And, frankly, most white people aren’t willing to take that leap - & make the critical sacrifices - as they benefit handsomely from it (for the most part).
So, lamentably, the fire will be at your doorstep. We, the people of color of the United States, are tired.....
It wasn’t Black-on-Black crime. Violent
video games and rap songs had nothing to do with it; nor did poverty,
education, two-parent homes or the international “bootstraps” shortage.
When a judge tasked researchers with explaining why Massachusetts’ Black
and Latinx incarceration was so high, a four-year study came up with
one conclusion.
Racism.
It was always racism.
According to 2016 data
from the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission, 655 of every 100,000
Black people in Massachusetts are in prison. Meanwhile, the state locks
up 82 of its white citizens for every 100,000 who reside in the state.
While an eight-to-one racial disparity might seem like a lot for one
criminal justice system, nationwide, African Americans are imprisoned at
almost six times the rate of white people. So, in 2016, Massachusetts
Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Ralph Gants asked Harvard
researchers to “take a hard look at how we can better fulfill our
promise to provide equal justice for every litigant.”
After
gathering the raw numbers from nearly every government agency in the
state’s criminal justice system, examining the data, and researching the
disparate outcomes, Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Policy
Program found that Black incarcerees received more severe charges,
harsher sentences and less favorable outcomes than their white
counterparts. They looked at more than a million cases, from the initial
charges through the conviction and sentencing, and discovered
disparities that could not be explained by logic or reason.
“White
people make up roughly 74% of the Massachusetts population while
accounting for 58.7% of cases in our data,” the study explained.
“Meanwhile, Black people make up just 6.5% of the Massachusetts
population and account for 17.1% of cases.”
Of course, that could only mean that Black people commit much more crime, right?
Nope.
OK, then maybe Black people commit worse crimes.
That wasn’t it.
What they found is the criminal justice system is unequal on every level. Cops in the state are more likely to stop
Black drivers. Police are more likely to search or investigate Black
residents. Law enforcement agents charge Black suspects with infractions
that carry worse penalties. Prosecutors are less likely to offer Black
suspects plea bargains or pre-trial intervention. Judges sentence Black
defendants to longer terms in prison. And get this: The average white
felon in the Massachusetts Department of Corrections has committed a more severe crime than the average Black inmate.
It’s not that Black people are criminals: It’s that the cops think Black people are criminals:
For instance, despite making up only 24 percent of Boston’s population,
Black people made up 63 percent of the civilians who were interrogated,
stopped, frisked or searched by the BPD between 2007 and 2010.
According to the researchers, this suggests “that the disparity in
searches was more consistent with racial bias than with differences in
criminal conduct.”
Black suspects don’t get bail: The
average bail is slightly higher in cases involving Black defendants.
Furthermore, more Black and Latinx defendants are detained without bail
as compared to white defendants.
Black people are charged with higher offenses: But curiously, when they get to court, Black defendants are convicted of charges roughly equal in seriousness to their White counterparts despite facing more serious initial charges.
There are actually two separate systems: The
study notes that prosecutors are more likely to exercise their
discretion to send Black and Latinx people “to Superior Court where the
available sentences are longer.”
And separate sentences: If
you’re Black and charged with crimes carrying a mandatory minimum, you
are substantially more likely to be incarcerated and receive a longer
sentence.
Especially if they find drugs or guns on you: Black
and Latinx people charged with drug offenses and weapons offenses are
more likely to be incarcerated and receive longer incarceration
sentences than white people charged with similar offenses
Sentencing length:
The average Black person’s sentence is 168 days longer than a sentence
for a white person. Even when the researchers controlled for criminal
history, jurisdiction, and neighborhood, they concluded: “[R]acial
disparities in sentence length cannot solely be explained by the
contextual factors that we consider and permeate the entire criminal
justice process.”
The researchers
even looked at poverty rates, the family structures of convicted felons
and the neighborhoods they lived in. They eventually decided that the
only reasonable explanation that explained the disparities was racism.
One
of the more interesting parts of the report juxtaposed people who
possessed illegal firearms with people arrested for operating a vehicle
under the influence (OUI). They reasoned that both acts are potentially
dangerous but statistics show that driving under the influence actually
causes much more harm to the public than simply carrying an unlicensed
firearm. But, because white people make up 82 percent of people who are
convicted of OUI, the state considers operating under the influence as a
“public health problem,” so the charge is often resolved without a
felony conviction. In fact, 77 percent of the people who don’t end up
with a felony conviction after admitting that they operated a vehicle under the influence are white.
However,
despite Black defendants making up 16.4 percent of firearm cases in
2012, 46 percent of the people convicted of a firearm offense was Black.
And 70.3 percent of the time, the Black person’s only offense was
carrying a firearm without a license.
The
researchers also couldn’t figure out why Black people are always
initially charged with more serious crimes than white people. The
easiest explanation was that Black suspects commit worse crimes than
white people, but the data disproved that assumption. Then, they
hypothesized that prosecutors may be overzealous when it came to
convicting violent cases but that proved not to be the case. When all
was said and done, Black people were arrested more often, had higher
bail and received harsher sentences. But when they examined convictions,
they discovered that Black people were surprisingly less likely to be convicted than white people. Essentially,
according to the researchers, a white person has to commit an egregious
offense to wind up behind bars while all a Black person has to do
is...well, be a Black person.
The
researchers noted that they could not “conclusively isolate the impact
of unconscious bias, prejudice, and racism in generating the
disparities” precisely because there was so much of it. They
could only conclude that the criminal justice process was a Rube
Goldberg machine that produces “racially disparate initial charging
practices leading to weaker initial positions in the plea bargaining
process for Black defendants, which then translate into longer
incarceration sentences for similar offenses.”
I didn’t go to Harvard but when I Googled the word “systemic” it said:
“relating to a system, especially as opposed to a particular part.”
“prejudice,
discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on
the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group,
typically one that is a minority or marginalized.”
When truly intelligent people talk, the air crackles & pops around them & seeds are planted in the mind of the listener. In this interview, Philadelphia-based singer/songwriter Jaguar Wright, gets brutally honest about the music business, womanhood, patriarchal power, drugs, race, Generation X, entrepreneurship & pedophilia, She also smacks down a few artists & airs their dirty laundry.😄. Quite entertaining & thought-provoking.
The Republican and Democratic Party conventions showed that both
major parties are failing to control the pandemic and protect people,
address the climate crisis and clean up the environment, support
families and businesses during the economic collapse, prevent police
violence or deal with any of the other major problems we face.
These were two substance-less conventions. The Democrats focused on
criticizing Trump without putting forward an agenda while the
Republicans claimed Biden was a front for socialism when he is a deeply
embedded corporate Democrat. Trump’s term as president has been a
disaster and Biden has been consistently on the wrong side of history
over his 47 years in politics. On issues today, both are out of step
with the views of the majority of voters.
The two parties demonstrated that people must lead from below because
the parties represent the wealthy and transnational corporations. We
must continue to organize and build popular power if we are to win the
changes we need.
The Two Parties Have Failed The People
At the Democratic Convention, no one used the phrases Medicare for
all, Green New Deal, tuition-free college and vocational school,
universal basic income, or wealth tax, even though all of these issues
are supported by the majority of voters. Sen. Bernie Sanders, AOC, and
Andrew Yang were silenced on issues they had championed during their
campaigns.
At the Republican Convention, if those policies were mentioned, they
were derided or called ‘socialist.’ The two parties did not talk about
economic, health, and environmental policies because neither has any
solutions. Instead, the bi-partisan policies they support have created
the economic, public health, and environmental crises we are facing.
The United States is in crisis because the two-party system has failed the people and the planet. On a global scale, the United States is rated as a “flawed democracy” and corruption is on the rise. Studies within the United States
find that popular support for a policy has no impact on whether it will
be made into law by Congress, while wealthy interests have a
significant impact over whether a law passes or fails. This is
consistent with the United States being a plutocracy ruled by the
wealthy.
As we have written in the past,
the United States is a mirage democracy where the candidates are
largely chosen by the power holders and the people get to vote for one
or another corporate-approved candidate. A few progressive candidates
are elected from time to time but they are marginalized at the federal
level. If they do gain power, the elites move swiftly to rein them in or
redistrict them out.
Third party candidates are kept out of the debates and the media,
even left-leaning media like Democracy Now has not interviewed the Green
Party candidate Howie Hawkins
although he’ll be on the ballot in most states. Third party candidates
have to fight to be on the ballot in each state, a challenge often made
more difficult by Democrats and Republicans challenging them and tying
them up in court.
For this reason, many people throw up their hands and decide that
trying to work within the two-party system is the only available option,
as flawed as it is. But, where has that gotten us? Federal elections
these days are more commonly about voting against what you don’t want
rather than voting for what you do want. Lesser evil voting has driven a
race to the bottom in the quality of the candidates because as long as
people are voting out of fear, it doesn’t matter who the candidate is or
what they stand for.
Trump and Biden as the major party presidential candidates this year
are the result of the system we have. Whichever one wins in November,
the outcome will still be a plutocracy. The climate crisis will still
rage on with climate-transformed wildfires, derechos, and drought that
destroy crops and strong hurricanes that flatten towns but the Green New
Deal will be off the table. The COVID-19 pandemic will continue to
sicken and kill hundreds of thousands but Medicare for All won’t be an
option. Workers will still be forced to work for low wages in unsafe
conditions, families will lose their homes and students will be buried
under heavy loans, but when Wall Street corporations or banks need help,
the Federal Reserve will whisk their troubles away to the tune of
trillions of dollars. Wars and interventions will continue as the
Pentagon receives record budgets year after year, but for some reason,
there isn’t enough money to fund our public schools, feed hungry
families, or rebuild our failing infrastructure.
This system is protected by a security state that has no regard for
human life, especially if you are black or brown. Time and again, the
legal system lets the police get away with cold-blooded murder. This
lack of accountability emboldens law enforcement. And now, it is clear
from the recent events in Kenosha Wisconsin, and even before that, those
right-wing militias are an unofficial arm of the security state. If
this continues and they are not held accountable, they will also be
emboldened to kill with impunity.
This is the reality in which we live. It is not the first time in
history that this situation has existed in the world but it is unique to
our generations in this country. We are living in a dark period, a
failing state, and changing this situation is going to take hard work
and sacrifice, but history also teaches us that people do have the power to take on the power elites and win.
Building Power To Lead From Below
We are in the midst of a national uprising on multiple fronts of
struggle. There are widespread protests against racist police violence
and there have been more than 900 wildcat strikes since March over
worker safety and low pay. Teachers are striking over school reopenings.
There are ongoing protests stopping pipelines and extreme energy
extraction projects as well as demanding action on the climate crisis.
Just last week, there was a national day of protest involving actions in
hundreds of cities to save the US Postal Service.
Since the Occupy protests of 2011, which focused on wealth inequality
and political corruption, but also included system-wide change on low
wages, police violence, the climate crisis, and student debt, people
have been building deeper movements in all of these areas. During the
Obama-era, the Fight for $15 began, along with Black Lives Matter,
immigrant rights, climate, and debt protests. When the pandemic and
recession began, people started organizing General Strike and Rent
Strike campaigns
The potential for people power has never been greater. Hundreds of
thousands of people are ready to take the streets and stop business as
usual. This is a time when every one of us has a role to play, whether
it is sharing information in our communities (being the media), starting
conversations in our social circles (education), organizing and
mobilizing people in the groups we belong to or providing support for
our neighbors and people who are in the streets (mutual aid). Learn how
social movements create transformational change in our free online course.
No matter what happens this November, the protest movement must
continue to fight for economic, racial, and environmental justice as
well as peace. The next presidential Inauguration Day will need to be a
day of protest when more people come to Washington, DC to make demands
of the next president than are there to celebrate him.
The growing movement of movements has a broad foundation of
education, organization, and mobilization on which to build. We have the
ability to make this country ungovernable and if we use that power, we
can make demands that cannot be ignored.
Samsara is the continuous cycle of life, death, and reincarnation
envisioned in Hinduism and other Indian religions. In Hindu and Buddhist
practice, samsara is the endless cycle of life and death from which
adherents seek liberation. In Hinduism, the prominent belief is that
samsara is a feature of a life based on illusion (maya). Illusion
enables a person to think s/he is an autonomous being instead of
recognizing the connection between one's self and the rest of reality.
Believing in the illusion of separateness that persists throughout
samsara leads one to act in ways that generate karma and thus perpetuate
the cycle of action and rebirth. By fully grasping the unity or oneness
of all things, the believer has the potential to break the illusion
upon which samsara is based and achieve moksha—liberation from samsara.
This short, deeply illuminating film eschews dialogue and traditional narrative
techniques. Instead, it uses striking visuals and music to take us
on an emotional exploration of the world around us — and of the
oft-unseen cause and effect behind things we usually take for granted.Shot over five years in 25 different countries,
it’s a surprisingly affecting film — not just for the glorious images it
presents, but for the darkness and hope it exudes as well.
Isn't it amazing how many hidden figures are breaking through the surface now? And we are only just beginning to discover just how much knowledge/information was suppressed in the US of the critical contributions people of color made to US society in spite of the tremendous odds against them by the white power structure. Truth crushed to the ground shall rise again,,,,
I
once asked a British cabinet minister why the country had never
apologised for the transatlantic slave trade. After all, this nation
trafficked more enslaved Africans than almost any other – at least 3 million on British ships – yet it has only ever expressed “regret”. It’s a strange choice of words for playing a leading role in the greatest atrocity in human history.
The
minister explained to me that the UK cannot apologise, because the case
against it – watertight in moral and ethical terms – might then become
legal too. In short, Britain won’t use the language of apology, out of
fear this might pave the way for reparations.
That
admission made me sit up and take notice. Because, passionate as I have
always been about racial justice, I’m also not immune from the
perception of reparations as – in the words of American writer Isabel Wilkerson – especially “radioactive”.
Yet
I’m now seeing with increasing clarity how this perception only serves
to reinforce systems of race and power. The debate about reparations
has, conveniently, been branded extreme and unrealistic by those who
don’t want to pay them. We happily listen to the heir to the throne –
who on Windrush Day said Britain owed a “debt of gratitude” to the people of the Caribbean – while ignoring the reality that what Britain owes is, in fact, a straight-up financial debt.
The case is unequivocal. The African American intellectual WEB Du Bois was right when he described the enslavement of at least 12 million Africans
as “the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all
prejudice”. In the Caribbean, Britain received, in the words of Nobel
prize-winning economist Arthur Lewis, 200 years of free labour – from
over 15 million black people, and those who were indentured from India.
The
proceeds from this enslavement, and the heavily exploitative years of
“apprenticed” labour that followed it, provided the profits with which
Britain modernised its economy. The systemic poverty that remains in the
Caribbean can be directly traced to the era of enslavement and
colonialism, at the end of which Britain walked away leaving 60% of the
region’s black inhabitants functionally illiterate.
The
conditions in the Caribbean were so bad that, during the second world
war, Britain tried to prevent deployment of African Americans on
military bases in the islands. Whitehall feared the sight of better-off
black Americans might wake its colonial subjects out of the ignorance of their condition on which British exploitation depended.
The Caribbean’s “pandemic of chronic diseases”
– as historian Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor of the University of the
West Indies, has termed it – can be directly traced to British slavery
and colonial practice. It is now a global hypertension hotspot. The high
diabetes rate has left two of Britain’s former colonies, Barbados and
Jamaica, vying for the dubious honour of being the per capita amputation
capital of the world. “For 300 years the people of this region were
forced to consume a diet based on what we produced, sugar,” Beckles
explains.
Beckles was speaking this week as the Caribbean Community (Caricom) demanded reparations
for Native genocide and African enslavement from 10 European nations,
including the UK. It’s not a fringe set of demands but the formal
position of Britain’s former colonies in the region, now its
Commonwealth “friends”, including Jamaica, Guyana and Barbados – whose
prime minister, Mia Mottley, is a committed advocate of reparations.
These demands are not about money per se. To borrow the language of postwar Jewish reparatory justice claims,
which rightly run into the billions, it’s about the “mass murder, the
human suffering, the annihilation of spiritual, intellectual, and
creative forces, which are without parallel in the history of mankind”.
In
fact, reparations speak a language of apology that western nations
should understand. They have been profoundly comfortable receiving them.
In the US, the Confederates who lost the civil war received compensation for the loss of their property. France had no issue extorting huge sums from Haiti
for generations, as reparations for that nation’s audacity in
overthrowing slavery in 1804. This arrangement, euphemistically designed
to “indemnify” French colonialists, persisted until 1947.
A
common complaint about reparations is the alleged unfairness of
burdening today’s generation with debt arising from their ancestors’
wrongs. Yet where is the outrage that my generation contributed towards
the more than £300bn in today’s money notoriously paid to Britain’s slave owners for the loss of their human “property”? Their compensation
under the Slavery Abolition Act – comprising an astounding 40% of the
national budget at the time – was so large that it wasn’t paid off until
2015.
The pattern is clear. Reparations have
been paid to those who profited from African enslavement, rather than
those who were enslaved.
As the historian Ana Lucia Araujo
has written, to this day no former slave society in the Americas, no
former slaves or their descendants, and no African nation, has ever
obtained any form of reparations for the Atlantic slave trade.
Some
would argue that, with the slavery era having ended so long ago, it’s
now too late. But this is a piece of circularity par excellence. During
the time of enslavement, and unceasingly since the 18th century, black
people have stated the case in petitions, correspondences, pamphlets,
public speeches, slave narratives and judicial claims – advocating in
English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
As the French colonial writer Prince Marc Kojo Tovalou Houénou wrote of Benin, black people “cry ‘Reparations!’ without ceasing”. That this cry was deliberately ignored for so long in the past cannot logically form the basis of a denial in the present.
The
language of reparations continually evolves. Recently, it has taken the
form of Beyoncé’s Black Parade (“Need peace and reparation for my
people”); Belgians’ resurgent condemnation of the brutalisation, rape, exploitation and deaths of 5 million Congolese during colonial rule; and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ powerful testimony
before the US House of Representatives that, if the US wants to say
D-day matters, then so does the 1921 “Black Wall Street” race massacre.
Human Rights Watch has launched a formal investigation into that
atrocity, which saw an organised white mob, armed by city officials,
destroy a successful black economic hub in Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing hundreds.
The
case for reparations is becoming a global conversation to which every
nation that systematically enriched itself by stealing black people’s
very humanity – not to mention unquantifiable torture and cultural
destruction – now finds itself exposed.
Instead
of going away, these reparatory justice movements will continue to
reinforce each other across the black diaspora. As Beckles puts it,
there’s no carpet in the world with enough space under it for this
legacy to be swept away.
