Over an effing billion of these Goy-ionists?

Days later, India launched Operation Sindoor, a wave of air strikes, describing them as “non-escalatory” in nature. Yes, that is the face of Judaism in that part of the world, where Benzion Mileikowsky works wonders on the Jewish Population where 84 percent plus want all Palestinians wiped from lower Greater Israel.

Many of the drones used in the operation were Israeli-made.

Among the systems deployed was the Harop, a “suicide drone” developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). Designed to hover above a target area before diving for impact, the Harop carries a 10-kilogram warhead and can remain airborne for nearly six hours.

Since acquiring the Harop, India has increasingly relied on it.

Oshrit Birvadker, a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told The Times of Israel that India’s use of Harop drones reflects “Israel’s growing footprint in Indian defense.”

That’s fourth globally in arms sales, Jewish State of Murdering Maiming Raping Starving Poisoning Polluting Displacing Israel (sic).

Marching to get into the Katz’s and Benzion Mileikowsky’s heads? For fuck’s sake!

Chris Hedges: This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide. It will be over soon. Weeks. At most. Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets. They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse. Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated.  Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.

In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponizing starvation. It is enticing Palestinians to southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily guarded compounds and deport them.

Some bulwarks across international community would stop this. Fuck, it is a Jewish project across all DNA-lines.

Given Britain’s continued support for Israel, from refusing to implement a full arms embargo to continuing to send RAF spy flights over Gaza from the British base at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, Ahmed questions whether efforts have indeed been enough.

Israeli drones sprayed the Madleen with a white substance and an Israeli boat rammed the aid vessel before commandos boarded it, all because it contained things like baby food, medicine and prosthetics. Israel must defend itself from those things, apparently.

Is this a certain brand of Jewish Inspired, Supported, Financed death and murder cult? Is the question antisemitic?

Dirty dirty Sweden:

The Temporary Protection Directive (2001/55/EC) (commonly referred to as collective temporary protection) was activated in March 2022, granting Ukrainians seeking refuge temporary protection in EU countries, including Sweden. This directive provides residence permits, access to work, education, and limited social benefits without requiring individuals to go through the standard asylum process.

However, the practicalities of the Directive’s use differed significantly between countries. Sweden, despite its, until recent, reputation of being relatively liberal in its migration policies, has at times, lagged behind its Scandinavian neighbors in supporting Ukrainian displaced people. To illustrate this, it is useful to compare the Swedish approach to that of other Nordic states, as well as Poland.

Bizarrely, Israel’s act of piracy was described by the BBC as “diverting” the Madleen. In what universe was this a diversion? When you capture people in international waters who have committed no crime, you have not diverted them, you have kidnapped them. The crew of the Madleen are hostages, and not only that, Israel is already bragging about how it plans to abuse them.

The crew of 12, who the media describe as “activists”, comprised of journalists, politicians, and a doctor. They are to be taken to the port of Ashdod where they will be psychologically tortured by the IDF/IOF.

Israel Katz says he has given the order to make the crew watch footage of October 7th to show them “exactly who the terrorist organization they came to support and for whom they work is”. Presumably, they will only watch the killings carried out by Hamas and not the enactment of the Hannibal Directive killing hundreds of Jews by Jews.

Pointing out the non-Jews and Jews involved, is that antisemitic?

Remember this Jewish guy?

1992 document published by the US Department of Defense, known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine (because it was co-written by Paul Wolfowitz, who then served as US undersecretary of defense for policy, before later returning as Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush).

The Pentagon’s Wolfowitz Doctrine stated (emphasis added):

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.

The Trump administration’s foreign policy is still consistent with much of the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Although Trump has de-prioritized Western Europe and the territory of the former USSR, he has dedicated significant resources to US military operations in East Asia and Southwest Asia (also known as the Middle East).

Yep, even CIA-drenched Wikipedia advances Ratner’s Judaism:

Ely Ratner, who served as the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs in Biden’s Pentagon, wrote approvingly on X/Twitter, “Rhetoric aside, on actual defense policy Secretary Hegseth’s speech was near total continuity with the previous administration”.

“That’s good, but we’ll need heightened urgency, attention, and resources to address the China challenge”, Ratner added.

This fellow for years advanced his Jewishness for sure Zyklon or Final Solution Blinken:

Biden’s neoconservative Secretary of State Antony Blinken had also maintained a hardline anti-China position.

In a speech in 2022, Blinken announced what was essentially a containment policy targeting China.

“We cannot rely on Beijing to change its trajectory. So we will shape the strategic environment around Beijing”, he said.

Blinken added, “The scale and the scope of the challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China will test American diplomacy like nothing we’ve seen before”.

Tucker Carlson has posted an extraordinary article on X that could potentially stop a war with Iran. As everyone knows, Carlson’s political views are admired by President Donald Trump who sees the former Fox commentator as a blunt, but fair-minded analyst who sees the world in similar terms as himself. And while there’s no evidence that the two men communicate regularly, a number of pundits believe that Carlson has influenced Trump’s thinking, particularly on matters related to foreign policy. That said, it is entirely possible that Trump will read Carlson’s June 4 post on Iran, and see that—once again—influential neocons are making every effort to drag the US into another bloody conflict in the Middle East to achieve Israel’s ambition of becoming the preeminent power in the region. Here’s Carlson:

Mark Levin was at the White House today, lobbying for war with Iran. To be clear, Levin has no plans to fight in this or any other war. He’s demanding that American troops do it. We need to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons, he and like-minded ideologues in Washington are now arguing. They’re just weeks away.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the same people have been making the same claim since at least the 1990s. It’s a lie. In fact, there is zero credible intelligence that suggests Iran is anywhere near building a bomb or has plans to. None. Anyone who claims otherwise is ignorant or dishonest. If the US government knew Iran was weeks from possessing a nuclear weapon, we’d be at war already.

Iran knows this, which is why they aren’t building one. Iran also knows it’s unwise to give up its weapons program entirely. Muammar Gaddafi tried that and wound up sodomized with a bayonet. As soon as Gaddafi disarmed, NATO killed him. Iran’s leaders saw that happen. They learned the obvious lesson.

So why is Mark Levin once again hyperventilating about weapons of mass destruction? To distract you from the real goal, which is regime change — young Americans heading back to the Middle East to topple yet another government. Virtually no one will say this out loud. America’s record of overthrowing foreign leaders is so embarrassingly counterproductive that regime change has become a synonym for disaster. Officially, no one supports it. So instead of telling the truth about their motives, they manufacture hysteria: “A country like Iran can never have the bomb! They’ll nuke Los Angeles! We have to act now!” Tucker Carlson (tuckercarlsonliveshowpodcast)

*****

Back to the death spiral of the Jewish Controlled Palestine:

In his book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad writes:

Should a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist? What if the default accusation proves true, and we by implication be labeled terrorist sympathizers, ostracized, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are most zealously motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to them. For some, the worst plausible thing might be the ending of their bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned to rubble and all of it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible thing is being yelled at.

You can see his interview with El Akkad here.

You cannot decimate a people, carry out saturation bombing over 20 months to obliterate their homes, villages and cities, massacre tens of thousands of innocent people, set up a siege to ensure mass starvation, drive them from land where they have lived for centuries and not expect blowback. The genocide will end. The response to the reign of state terror will begin. If you think it won’t you know nothing about human nature or history. The killing of two Israeli diplomats in Washington and the attack against supporters of Israel at a protest in Boulder, Colorado, are only the start.

Chaim Engel, who took part in the uprising at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in Poland, described how, armed with a knife, he attacked a guard in the camp.

“It’s not a decision,” Engel explained years later. “You just react, instinctively you react to that, and I figured, ‘Let us to do, and go and do it.’ And I went. I went with the man in the office and we killed this German. With every jab, I said, ‘That is for my father, for my mother, for all these people, all the Jews you killed.’”

Does anyone expect Palestinians to act differently? How are they to react when Europe and the United States, who hold themselves up as the vanguards of civilization, backed a genocide that butchered their parents, their children, their communities, occupied their land and blasted their cities and homes into rubble? How can they not hate those who did this to them?

What message has this genocide imparted not only to Palestinians, but to all in the Global South?

It is unequivocal. You do not matter. Humanitarian law does not apply to you. We do not care about your suffering, the murder of your children. You are vermin. You are worthless. You deserve to be killed, starved and dispossessed. You should be erased from the face of the earth.

“To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library,” El Akkad writes:

To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, food. Banks. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.

There are people I have known for years who I will never speak to again. They know what is happening. Who does not know? They will not risk alienating their colleagues, being smeared as an antisemite, jeopardizing their status, being reprimanded or losing their jobs. They do not risk death, the way Palestinians do. They risk tarnishing the pathetic monuments of status and wealth they spent their lives constructing. Idols. They bow down before these idols. They worship these idols. They are enslaved by them.

At the feet of these idols lie tens of thousands of murdered Palestinians.

The post There are Only Jewish-Inspired Warsaw Ghetto Pogroms for Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/14/there-are-only-jewish-inspired-warsaw-ghetto-pogroms-for-palestinians/feed/ 0 538858 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/24/a-backward-look-at-easter-the-possibility-for-white-people-to-lose-supremacy-and-find-something-better/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/24/a-backward-look-at-easter-the-possibility-for-white-people-to-lose-supremacy-and-find-something-better/#respond Thu, 24 Apr 2025 05:52:14 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=361752 [I] was quite content…to let everything about me go on, unquestioned, like a great machine – that was its habit and mine – to take it all for granted and consider it all right…there was nothing wrong in my world – or, if anything, not much – or, little or much, it was no affair More

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Photograph Source: Cunhal94 – CC BY-SA 4.0

[I] was quite content…to let everything about me go on, unquestioned, like a great machine – that was its habit and mine – to take it all for granted and consider it all right…there was nothing wrong in my world – or, if anything, not much – or, little or much, it was no affair of mine.

–Mr. Morfin, dutiful employee-turned-whistle-blower at Dombey & Son in Dicken’s Dombey and Son (1848)

We perform in rituals, and doing becomes believing.

–Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days

The April speaker at The Other Side’s Hamilton speaker series, a retired professor of music, a musician and a black man, played videos for us of several tunes to illustrate his topic: Why Do Songs Matter?  In the video of gospel singer Hezekiah Walker’s It Will Get Better, we watched groups of people located in different places all over the country and the globe, singing and clapping and repeating the word “Better!” Is it mindless optimism thus to sing, clap your hands and move until you feel it?  Not, as “Doc” Woods pointed out,  if your life circumstances give you little-to-no reason for hope but still one must get up, go to work, live with some kind of spirit. But – and I ask this despite the video, which, like a beer commercial, included all races and colors, and many nationalities,  can white people experience the benefit of such resurrection optimism?  Might it be good for us? Kind of like the beer commercial, it looks good, especially now in Trump’s America, but isn’t there something one must be suspicious of? How does one leave the known surety of secular liberal skepticism for the unknown of joyful noise-making?

Supposing there’s a key here to defeating (not all at once, but over an unquantifiable period of time) fascism and white supremacy?  Would you take it? What if there’s something to this kind of earned optimism, to transformation, a gift of the spirit? D.H. Lawrence told us, “As long as there have been men,” “too little joy” has been felt. And this is our “original sin.” William Blake, another prophet of the heart, told us “Exuberance is beauty.” But here, surely, is a wide river to cross for those of us raised in virtuous, puritanist, delayed gratification. And not for us heirs of protestantism only.  Many who are quick to grab feel-good joy, sinless and free, also miss its deeper, sorrow-drenched significance.

There’s a connection, I think, between liberal mistrust of joy, and the puzzlement, even embarrassment, many white people – churchgoers and unchurched as well –  feel about Easter.  Still a holiday on our calendars, still inaugurating the spring vacation for schoolkids, with Good Friday, no less! – so one has to make the attempt. Some of us suspect, a little uneasily, it must be about more than insipid bunny and pastel egg-and-chick decorations, or even the coming of spring, since most of us aren’t pagans.   But we’re unable to do anything about it.  Is this a mystery worth looking into?  

What I’m calling resurrection optimism comes, I venture, with paying the cost, which is “undeserved suffering,” the suffering of the powerless. Of a certain kind of suffering, white people, being higher caste, remain innocent.  By that I mean not that we don’t experience pain and loss, but not as the shared experience of oppression, never the kind that would point to the need to supplant, or subvert our world. Irreducibly hierarchical,  triumphantly best, the world of white liberal reality in which we’re contained and privileged, optimistic that“what’s broken can be fixed,” keeps us both separate and in our separateness,  innocent about suffering.  This reassuring innocence can never be uprooted except by the individual’s experience of powerlessness; coincidentally, as I write on Easter morning this is the Easter message.   

How innocence is maintained is simple: Death, the universal teacher and keeper of the truth of powerlessness, has been long overruled in liberal reality. Not that anybody disbelieves in the fact of death, but its reality cannot touch us in the sense of allowing one to grasp one’s life in its true finiteness.  Without that grasp, white liberal innocence cannot be escaped. There’s nothing to force one into imagination. The denial of death is foundational to liberal optimism and to its discounting of the personal soul.  This is what makes liberal reality a danger to those not privileged in it.  It is a formula for the passivity that innocently deals out undeserved suffering, letting it flourish in someone else’s back yard.  Most of us, understandably, would prefer not to have revealed that which is denied; we prefer not to turn inward and encounter that forboding dark malice at the edges of consciousness, to see what it wants;  liberal reality conveniently gives us a pass on such honest self-reflection.   It provides the way for white people, unaware their truth is partial, to turn “whistling past the graveyard” into colonialism and empire building. And shopping.

Black people who’ve gained spiritual power through powerlessness, gained it through the death of hope, under centuries of oppression.  Jesus learned it on the cross.  Alcoholics gain spiritual power by confessing they cannot stop drinking by an act of will.  From what or whom can we learn what appears to be a necessary truth about transformation, about changing what can be changed, when Death is denied?   It seems now the answer to that question may have arrived in the form of Donald Trump.  He’s working away at destroying liberal optimism; its possible we can make this defeat, like a martial arts move,  work in our  favor,  if each of us can absorb the fearful message:  nothing can save us.

+++

The lessons of finality, the baby thrown out with the bathwater of religion, need to be relearned. Fortunately for us, even though liberal reality is a blanket over all unpleasantness except what sells insurance or news, a few (poetic, wholer) truths make it past its obliterating power and provide affirmation for the heart.  Besides in poetry, this truth exists also in fairytales, stories originally told commonly among common people who suffered. Unabridged (even allowing for the fact that no extant fairytale is the “original”), they are remnants from a time when consciousness included death.  I mean the tales many people find too dark to read their children, like discovering the hamburger was made from a large cud-chewing animal with kind eyes that was first stunned with an electric shock and then slaughtered.  If, as a parent, one were respecting the whole truth, the truthful response to a young child declaring herself a vegetarian would be, “Eat the chili con carne I made for you.” For, unless the parents are vegetarian, this is the moment to teach the child something she needs to know about finality.  But it would not be the liberal way.

Fairy tales take finality for granted. What they offer to children, the grittiness sparing the child nothing, possibly inducing nightmares, is a deeply knowing perspective that provides room – and invitation – for the child to trust her survival instincts and enlarge her imagination. They tell us that to take the irremediable darkness out of the story – “Disneyizing” –  is a bad idea.  It’s not the story that has to change, but ourselves. That some animal – or plant –  had to die in order for me to live is not just about me, but this is how organic life works.  Reality is larger than the self and one’s self-limiting, ego-supremacist-supportive neuroses.  This is a fact of grace.  It gives us some metaphysical headroom.

Such tales are important counter to liberalism’s compulsive smiley-face messaging: i.e., “things are a little rough right now but we’ll all be okay” (words spoken by President Obama at nearby Hamilton College in his recent visit). The reassurance works, but not to truly convince people.  It keeps them absorbed in shopping, messaging, and performing their jobs, instead of speaking truth that is whole.  

+++

One of the consequences of liberal innocence is that some of us – including myself –  learn to hold onto the benefit of the doubt no matter what, to disbelieve what our eyes see, ears hear, and to ignore the acute discomfort that comes from repressing anger in our prophetic, truth-craving soul. We can, like Mr. Morfin, “let everything go on, like a big machine.” Sunk in the relativism that comes with the denial of death, how can we tear away the veils of bamboozlement? How may we know who are our true heroes and saints? Who may give us heart? This is important, for the saints are the ones that remain faithful to the truth our souls know. Corporate mass media and corporate-dominated politics will never confirm whistleblowers Reality Winner (a documentary about whom we watched recently)  or Edward Snowden as heroes, nor will Vatican politics and mass media allow us to call Pope Francis a saint, as surely he was.  Must we wait one hundred years to celebrate them as  truthtellers?  

Fairy tales, which I refer to here because of their familiarity to everyone, can teach the child something liberal reality cannot teach – i.e., that there can be just  anger.  Reading children stories in which the animal protagonist is eaten by the wolf, or Jack faces the threat of becoming food for the ogre, or the horrific Baba Yaga nabs hapless children to cook them in her soup confirms truth the child’s soul already knows.  I have no PhD to credential my saying this (and few reputable PhD’s would say it anyway),  the unconscious, the soul, the organism, carries this awareness of nature’s rule – life feeds on life; it is ancestral and not escapable.  This is why, however terrifying may be the harshness portrayed in the fairytale,  the refusal of it is worse.  Denied, as it is in every corner of media-saturated liberal reality, we live under various threats of human-caused catastrophe that have grown “hidden in plain sight.”  We have lived to see the return of fascistic barbarity, the horror many of us – whistling in the dark –  believed was buried forever in a Berlin bunker in 1945.  Liberal reality, denying soul’s truth and its anger, by its bracketing of religious consciousness, poses no challenge to moral relativity.  

That is, unfaced, kept in the dark, refused, thanatos, Freudianism‘s death instinct, drives everything.  People feel helpless to make any choices other than those offered in ever-optimistic liberal totality, whether the choices bring misery or (material )abundance.  Spiritual abundance, the (Easter) joy of resurrection,  is not available in the world without limits, that, secretly, lives off the limitations (oppression) it imposes on others.  Kept “in the dark” about limitation, undetermined, white, liberal, good people are left with an insatiable spiritually-driven hunger,  vulnerable to addictions and compulsions that rob us of our freedom. The spiritual hole gets filled with conditions keeping us unconscious: neuroses, phobias, obsessions and depression, the new normal. They work – and work well – to keep the imaginative soul from nourishing us with the larger reality – love –  we might gladly serve.

 +++

Fairy tales, which recollect the truth of instinct and intuition, are reminders the soul, given in nature, is nature; it is our guide to life conscious of its own vulnerability, of our helplessness against the fact of death, but not helpless.   Help cometh from the soul; over centuries of institutionalized religion, hierarchy, racism, wealth-seeking heedlessness and bourgeois self-satisfaction, the personal relation to the soul has been severed.   Without it, we pretend contentment,  believe personal troubles are the sum total of what we must contend with, success or failure the only serious categories by which to measure a life. But it is in one’s power to restore it, by making strange life choices, by making the soul’s pain conscious. The soul caries the wounds of trauma,  but is also the means for transcendence (Easter!)  Fortunate for us, the means are not really objectionable.  The soul only asks that she be given her voice, through the transcendence of making art. 

Many times I’ve told people The Other Side, a non-profit arts space and adjunct to our Cafe, and still existing since the Cafe’s sale, shared the Cafe’s origin in Orin’s and my utopian idealism, what today I’ll call our  “resurrection optimism.” Earlier in April,  a young woman friend who’s on our Board scheduled a session of Ukrainian egg decorating to take place there.  I planned to go,  bringing granddaughter Cora, who loves arts and crafts.  Word about it had gotten out late; privately I thought it might be just the 3 of us.  In fact, over 20 came, ages from under 1 to mid-70’s, making it necessary to add on tables and chairs until the room was fairly full of people contentedly sitting, talking quietly, learning the somewhat complicated procedure.  It was not just another sip ‘n paint-type craft workshop, but felt, to my soul, like peace. Something new is unfolding after the loss from which, for many months,  I could not imagine myself recovering. 

This ritual of decorating eggs is not something I could have led.  Coming from this young woman, who mourns the loss of the Cafe as much as I do, I’m beginning to allow myself to feel its inspiration is from the same vision, in a different form.  Thus for those couple of hours, the space was filled with quiet joy.  Something died, something new so gently and reverently taking its place.

The post A Backward Look at Easter: The Possibility for White People to Lose Supremacy and Find Something Better appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kim C. Domenico.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/24/a-backward-look-at-easter-the-possibility-for-white-people-to-lose-supremacy-and-find-something-better/feed/ 0 529245 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/17/kiss-my-ass-im-irish-celtic-pride-against-white-supremacy/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/17/kiss-my-ass-im-irish-celtic-pride-against-white-supremacy/#respond Mon, 17 Mar 2025 05:50:43 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=357600 White supremacy remains a very potent weapon for the powerful in this country and I don’t think that the far left should stand alone in confronting it. Many of my more libertarian readers tend to cringe at such notions and I can’t completely blame them. Sadly, there are a good number of self-proclaimed leftists who More

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Image by Lukas Eggers.

White supremacy remains a very potent weapon for the powerful in this country and I don’t think that the far left should stand alone in confronting it. Many of my more libertarian readers tend to cringe at such notions and I can’t completely blame them. Sadly, there are a good number of self-proclaimed leftists who use combatting white supremacy as an excuse for building up the state, but this doesn’t change the fact that traditionally white supremacy has been a far more lethal excuse to do the exact same thing, and it still is.

It’s not even that the powerful in this country are necessarily racist, many are but for the most part bigotry is just an easy way to manipulate poor people into forfeiting their agency to authoritarian structures in the name of combatting other poor people.

Donald Trump’s current war at the border is probably the best example of this in progress. The economy is shit and Americans in general are getting fucked left and right in every hole that bleeds. In a sane world, Wall Street welfare queens like Donald Trump and Elon Musk would be the focus of their rage. Instead, these same vile gangsters have hoodwinked half the country into getting behind an insane conspiracy to quadruple the size of the federal police state so they can sic gestapo on itinerate border hoppers who we’re told are destroying this country with a massive crime wave that quite simply does not exist.

After surging during the economic shitstorm of the Pandemic, violent crime rates in this country have largely dropped back to where they were in 2019 and there is zero evidence that increased immigration at the time had anything to do with sparking that temporary bump. Quite the contrary, violent crime appears to have spiked across the Western Hemisphere because of the Pandemic, hitting hardest in the most impoverished nations of Central America and provoking many of their people to flee to safer sections of the map. All available statistics actually suggest that not only are undocumented immigrants less likely to commit violent crime than natives, but they are also more likely to be the victims of it too.

Sadly, none of these inconvenient facts stopped Donald Trump from using the potent imagery of increasingly dark vagrants spilling across the Rio Grande to get elected by wide margins of my fellow libertarians. However, I don’t take this shit so personally simply because my post-left anarchist inclinations have driven me to adopt increasingly libertarian tactics to combat the white power state.

I tend to take this shit a little more personally than your average libertarian honkey, especially around Saint Patrick’s Day, because I am a historically literate nerd of Irish Catholic ancestry, and I am well aware of the fact that my people were the original wetbacks in this country before we assimilated beneath a banner of white supremacy.

You wouldn’t think it by looking at a South Philly Trump rally, but Irish people weren’t even considered white when we first stepped foot on American soil. After centuries of violent colonial rule under the British Empire, my ancestors left their homeland in the mid-19th century to escape a blight that English authorities deliberately manipulated into a genocidal famine. About a million of us died and millions more flooded America’s shores aboard floating coffins, starving and riddled with disease, and when we got here, we faced a lot of the same perils faced by Hondurans and Guatemalans today.

We were subjected to alarmist tabloid headlines and baseless conspiracy theories. We were herded into squalid tenements and targeted by violent mobs. And we were singled out for the simple fact that there was just too damn many of us to assimilate into America’s cultural purgatory of Anglo-Saxon conformity all at once.  In fact, an entire political party was built on this hysteria; the so-called American Party, better known as the Know Nothings, who waged a holy war on Irish Catholics both literally and electorally beneath the banner of “Americans must rule America!”

This proto-MAGA sect swept the country in the mid-1850s, electing over 100 congressmen as well as mayors in major cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. They eventually even took the White House with our 19th president, Millard Filmore, being a former Know Nothing. During this time, these pseudo-populist despots passed egregiously anti-democratic laws that mandated teaching the King James Bible in public schools and barred naturalized citizens from voting unless they had spent at least 21 years in the country.

They also literally murdered people, especially at the ballot box, like they did at the Bloody Monday Riots of 1855 in Louisville, Kentucky, when Catholic homes were burnt to the ground and as many as 100 Irish people were killed in cold blood while thousands more were left with little choice but to flee the city for their lives.

So, what the fuck happened then? How did my people go from being called “white niggers” and digging ditches in the ghettoes alongside our darker counterparts to being a major part of the same system that was once devoted to expelling us from its shores by any means necessary? Well, we did the same thing that the Italians and the Jews did; we got busy being white. We achieved this dubious goal in a number of ways but most of them essentially amounted to us convincing our masters that we could be trusted to do their bidding for them.

We murdered our fellow Catholics during the Mexican-American War when 40% of the United States Army was made up of immigrants. We rose up the ranks of the New England chapters of the Democratic Party by becoming the loudest advocates for chattel slavery north of the Mason-Dixon Line. And we dutifully savaged the next influx of American refugees, leading violent race riots against Chinese railway workers accused of stealing our jobs.

So, now Irish Catholics can stand proud as white people but was it really worth it? What did we as a people really gain from this Faustian bargain beyond a slightly lower rank on the police state’s shitlist? The right to identify with the same globalist Anglo-Saxon monoculture that kept our people in chains for centuries and continues to divide our ancestral homeland?

For this we forfeited a proud culture of Celtic pride built around agrarian peasant resistance to colonial rule. We sacrificed everything that made us Irish just to conform to a crass commercial culture that still fundamentally hates us, that paints us as drunkards and mooks and turns our sacred holidays like Saint Patrick’s Day into an excuse for Protestant frat boys to binge themselves sick on green beer and vomit into plastic leprechaun hats.

This is the other side of whiteness that the left often forgets to acknowledge. The first ethnicities that the master race erased were actually the European peasant cultures that they reduced to a single color. There is no such thing as white culture. This is nothing but a purposely vague conglomeration of secular universalist Protestant hogwash that essentially amounts to little more than kneejerk conformity and an evangelical devotion to institutional power.

That and the constantly evolving demonization of the “other” which is basically just any outgroup that fails to comply with its own erasure and generally makes the world too diverse to govern. That used to be us, and as far as I’m concerned it still should be.

We were all minorities once, a million little tribes scattered to four corners of the wind. This only became a problem when a few powerful people decided that just one city state full of servants wasn’t enough to satiate their power lust and decided to build empires spanning many tribes so they could play God with the poor people in the next village too. From this rapidly expanding cesspool came America and from America came the concept of the white race, invented by the same imperialists who sacked Ireland so they could sack Virginia too.

During the early days of American colonialism there was no black or white. Slaves and servants came in a wide variety of colors and their status could evolve through subordination to the current puritanical traditions favored at the time by the royals back home in London. It wasn’t even totally unheard of to find slaveowners of African descent provided that they said their prayers and paid their taxes.

Then a wealthy landowner by the name of Nathaniel Bacon decided that he was tired of kicking up his fortune to the Virginia colonial elites and formed a militia made up predominantly of European indentured servants and African slaves to overthrow the government. Bacon’s Rebellion quickly got out of hand however and became something of a multicultural populist referendum on life under empire. The uprising was suppressed relatively quickly but not before Bacon’s unruly slave army had succeeded in burning Jamestown to the ground.

The planter class got scared and sought to divide the peasantry against each other. They did this by inventing whiteness as an ethnic concept. And just like that, all Europeans were spared the whip while those Africans deemed Black were reduced to a permanent slave caste.

But not every European embraced assimilation. Some of us wanted to remain ungovernable. And some of us were even insulted at the very notion of becoming complicit in reducing other human beings to property. This included a handful of Irish Catholic conscripts during the Mexican American War who deserted their posts to join the Mexican Army in resisting the Protestant expansion of chattel slavery in Texas. These unruly Micks ended up forming a ferocious artillery unit known appropriately as Saint Patrick’s Battalion and while many were captured and executed as traitors, they didn’t die white servants of American imperialism, they died free, and they died Irish.

I may be but a genderfuck heretic, but this is what I celebrate on Saint Patrick’s Day, a culture of proud peasant renegades who stood with the oppressed not just because it’s the honorable thing to do but because it’s the only way to break free from the shallow culture of our ancestral oppressors. So, if you’re truly as proud of being Irish as I am then you’ll join me in standing with the latest class of wetbacks and spit your ill-gotten whiteness back in the face of the Know Nothings of the GOP.

The only thing great about America is all the weird little tribes who resist it. So, you motherfuckers can keep your white power and kiss my ass, because I’m not white, I’m Irish.

The post Kiss My Ass, I’m Irish: Celtic Pride Against White Supremacy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/17/kiss-my-ass-im-irish-celtic-pride-against-white-supremacy/feed/ 0 519474 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/08/policing-white-supremacy/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/08/policing-white-supremacy/#respond Sat, 08 Mar 2025 17:35:17 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=f6b683bc6a0a5b3585aa453bb6b19bf4 First up, Ralph welcomes former FBI agent Mike German to discuss his new book (co-written with Beth Zasloff), Policing White Supremacy: The Enemy Within. Then, Ralph speaks to Dr. Bandy Lee about her psychological analysis of the second Trump presidency. Finally, Ralph talks about Trump's latest Congressional address.

Mike German is a fellow with the Liberty and National Security program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. He has worked at the ACLU and served sixteen years as an FBI special agent. He left the FBI in 2004 after reporting continuing deficiencies in the bureau’s counterterrorism operations to Congress. He is the author of Thinking Like a Terrorist, Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Our Democracy, and his latest book (co-authored with Beth Zasloff) is Policing White Supremacy: The Enemy Within.

It's important to understand that the white supremacist movement is quite fractured and I refer to it in the book as the white supremacist and far right militant movement because it does have a number of different factions that have specific goals that in many cases differ from one another. But as a movement, essentially what they're looking for is a return to a legally-supported racial caste system where white people dominate without question and impunity to act violently towards anyone who would challenge that racial hierarchy.

Mike German

It's fascinating because I think there's an assumption that many have that these white supremacists or far-right militant groups are Trump supporters, but I don't believe many of them are. They understand that right-wing populism, that those racist (I would have said “dog whistles” of previous administrations, but racist) rhetoric helps promote them and gives them media attention that allows them to recruit and expand their ranks. But they don't support Donald Trump. They don't support the Republican Party.

Mike German

You have a situation now where these people that led the movement into a ditch on January 6th (and they had to scramble and all go underground and then slowly restore these groups) all of a sudden these people who led them into the ditch come out ofprison and want to be the leaders again.

Mike German

There comes a time when the flattering of the citizens by rogue criminal politicians has got to be exposed for what it is. First, they flatter the citizenry, then they flummox the citizenry, then they fool the citizenry into supporting them. And the reaction to that has got to be: you’d better start doing your homework, voters, regardless who you vote for. You’ve got to spend more time on the records of these politicians, not their rhetoric.

Ralph Nader

Dr. Bandy Lee is a medical doctor, a forensic psychiatrist, and a world expert on violence who taught at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School for 17 years before joining the Harvard Program in Psychiatry and the Law. She is currently president of the World Mental Health Coalition, an educational organization that assembles mental health experts to collaborate with other disciplines for the betterment of public mental health and public safety. She is the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President and Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul.

This is a problem of mental pathology. That is why [Trump] has to place mental health labels on his opponents, why he has to call himself a stable genius, and why he has to take on the most powerful position on the planet (the US presidency). It is to hide his unfitness and his mental pathology. That's what it comes down to.

Dr. Bandy Lee

[Trump’s] been in the public arena and influential positions for a decade now, but we have to address it in mental health terms. His goal is to alter reality and through threats, intimidation and co-optation, he has not only taken over the press and is in the process of buying it out, but he has also subdued…corrupted the Supreme Court and the Congress, and he has figured out that with the speed with which he is wreaking his havoc, by the time courts can respond, the agencies that held our society together will be gutted, closed, and changed forever.

Dr. Bandy Lee

Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/08/policing-white-supremacy/feed/ 0 517528 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/07/btselem-in-the-crosshairs/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/07/btselem-in-the-crosshairs/#respond Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:21:15 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=156422 In early 2023, the most far-right cabinet in Israel’s history launched its war for “judicial reforms” to replace democracy with autocracy. In fall 2023, it began an obliteration war against Gaza. Now it is readying to decimate the last human rights defenders in Israel.

In view of the Israeli Prime Minister, amid his own corruption trial, the truth about the Israeli-occupied territories seems to be equivalent to treason. Hence, his determination to destroy B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

The effort to decimate the last defenders of human rights in Israel cries for effective external intervention.

The post B’Tselem in the Crosshairs first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> In early 2023, the most far-right cabinet in Israel’s history launched its war for “judicial reforms” to replace democracy with autocracy. In fall 2023, it began an obliteration war against Gaza. Now it is readying to decimate the last human rights defenders in Israel.

In view of the Israeli Prime Minister, amid his own corruption trial, the truth about the Israeli-occupied territories seems to be equivalent to treason. Hence, his determination to destroy B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

The effort to decimate the last defenders of human rights in Israel cries for effective external intervention.

Why are Netanyahu’s autocrats after B’Tselem?

B’Tselem evolved in early 1989, when it was established by a group of Israeli lawyers, academics and doctors with the support of 10 members of Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The name comes from Genesis 1:27, which deems that all mankind was created “b’tselem elohim” (in the image of God); in line with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As Jewish far-right extremism was spreading in Israel, B’Tselem reflected an effort to replace nascent Jewish supremacism doctrines with the original, universalistic spirit of social justice that had marked Judaism for centuries.

It was founded after two years of the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories and in Israel. After two decades of futile struggle for decolonization and increasing Israeli repression, Palestinians resorted to protests, then civil disobedience and eventually violence.

Instead of taking a hard look at the causes of the uprising, the hard-right Likud government – led by Yitzhak Shamir, Netanyahu’s one-time mentor and ex-leader of the violent pre-state Stern group – deployed 80,000 soldiers in response, which started with live rounds against peaceful demonstrators.

The brutal repression resulted in over 330 Palestinian deaths (and 12 Israelis killed) in just the first 13 months. The objective of the newly-established B’Tselem became to document human rights violations in both Gaza and the West Bank. Amid a vicious cycle of violence, it sought to serve as the nation’s voice of conscience.

Today, it is led by human rights activist Yuli Novak who had to leave Israel in 2022 due to mounting death threats, and chaired by Orly Noy, left-wing Mizrahi activist and editor of +972 magazine. Despite mounting threats from the government, the Messianic far-right and the settler extremists, B’Tselem has insistently recorded human rights violations in the occupied territories earning the regard of rights organizations and awards worldwide.

In early 2021, the NGO released a report describing Israel as an “apartheid” regime, which the Netanyahu cabinets have fervently rejected. Yet, the NGO simply codified, with abundant evidence, Israel’s apartheid rule that had worsened over time. Several Israeli military, intelligence and political leaders had used the same characterization since the 2000s.

B’Tselem warned that Israeli governance was no longer about democracy plus occupation. It had morphed into “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” – that is, apartheid. And the kind of military excess that led to the genocidal atrocities in Gaza.

How is the Netanyahu cabinet undermining B’Tselem?   

Recently, the Knesset passed a preliminary reading of two bills. They are an integral part of a broader shift from democracy to autocracy. The ultimate objective is to eliminate human rights (and other rights) groups from Israel, including B’Tselem, and to marginalize the autocratic harsh-right’s critics.

In its efforts, the Netanyahu cabinet is relying on two proposed laws involving NGO taxation and the ICC. In the former case, the proposal slaps an 80% tax on donations from foreign countries, the UN and many international foundations supporting human rights. This will effectively cut off the NGOs’ funding. The proposal was approved in a preliminary reading.

The second bill, which has now also passed a preliminary reading, seeks to criminalize any cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC). It could be seen as the Israeli version of the US Trump administration’s sanctions to undermine the ICC, its activities and members.

With its diffuse language, the Israeli ICC bill can be exploited to criminalize not only active assistance to the court but the release of any information indicating the government or senior Israeli officials are committing war crimes or crimes against humanity. According to Israeli scholars of international law, “the definitions in this dangerous bill are so broad that even someone sharing on social media a photo or video of a soldier documenting themselves committing what appears to be a war crime could face imprisonment.” More precisely, half a decade in jail.

If the “ICC law” criminalizes the work of B’Tselem and other human rights NGOs by making human rights defense a punishable offense, the “NGO taxation law” is intended to drain the meager financial resources of these NGOs.

Whose “foreign subversion”?            

B’Tselem is an independent, non-partisan organization. It is funded by donations: grants from European and North American foundations that support human rights activity worldwide, and contributions by private individuals in Israel and abroad. These donors do not represent the kind of “subversion” that the Likud governments attribute to human rights NGOs. Nor do they possess major financial resources. Even right-wing NGO critics estimate B’Tselem’s annual funding at most about $3 million per year.

Things are very different behind the donors of the Kohelet Policy Forum, led by neoconservatives with US-Israeli dual citizenship, and its many spinoffs. These have served as the Netanyahu cabinets’ thinktanks and authored many of their policies, including the “judicial reforms.” Totaling several million dollars, Kohelet in particular benefited from multi-million-dollar donations made anonymously and sent through the U.S. nonprofit, American Friends of Kohelet Policy Forum (AF-KPF).

For years, these money flows originated mainly from two Jewish-American private equity billionaires and philanthropists, Arthur Dantchik and Jeffrey Yass, the co-founders of Susquehanna International Group (The Fall of Israel, Chapter 6).

With a net worth of $7.5 billion, Dantchik is an active supporter of neoconservative Israeli causes. And so is Yass, with net worth estimated at $29 billion. Between 2010 and 2020, his Claws Foundation gave more than $25 million to the Jerusalem-based Shalom Hartman Institute, the Kohelet and other right-wing causes. As the publicity-shy Dantchik and Yass began to suffer from Kohelet’s negative PR, they took distance, while other money flows offset the difference.

By 2021, more than 90% of Kohelet’s $7.2 million income came from the Central Fund of Israel, a family-run nonprofit that gave $55 million to more than 500 Israel-related causes. It was run by Marcus Brothers Textiles on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, which sponsors highly controversial settlement projects in the West Bank, while supporting the far-right activists’ ImTirtzu and Honenu, which is notorious for defending Jewish far-right extremists charged with violence against and killings of Palestinians.

Toward a unitary, autocratic Jewish state     

Given the present course, the ultimate demise of human rights in Israel is now a matter of time. The Netanyahu cabinet will decide when to bring the legislative proposals to hearings in the relevant parliamentary committees, to prepare them for final approval.

There is no doubt about the final objective: the creation of a state “from the river to the water,” but not the two-state model enacted almost eight decades ago. Nor the secular-democratic Jewish state with a vibrant Arab minority. The goal is a Jewish unitary state in which both the rule of law and democracy will be under erosion.

B’Tselem is the harsh-right’s scapegoat for its own international isolation, but only the first one. There is more to come. Under the watch of and military aid and financing by the Biden and Trump administrations, the protection of human rights in occupied territories will soon be treated as a punishable crime, while the economic resources of the remaining human rights defenders will be decimated.

In Gaza, the international community failed to halt the genocidal atrocities. If it fails to protect the last defenders of human rights in Israel, it is likely to become complicit in new atrocities in the West Bank.

• Originally published by Informed Comment.

The post B’Tselem in the Crosshairs first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Steinbock.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/07/btselem-in-the-crosshairs/feed/ 0 517212 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/17/jewish-supremacy-is-a-bigger-problem-than-antisemitism/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/17/jewish-supremacy-is-a-bigger-problem-than-antisemitism/#respond Fri, 17 Jan 2025 15:19:41 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=155487 Fifteen months into Israel’s holocaust some leftists continue to uphold Jewish supremacy. Many supposedly on the side of humanity continue to boost an ideological stick enabling a genocide, authoritarianism and a movement promoting “mass deportation”. Recently Caitlin Johnstone posted: “First end the active genocide, THEN talk to me about your concerns regarding a rise in […]

The post Jewish Supremacy is a Bigger Problem than Antisemitism first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Fifteen months into Israel’s holocaust some leftists continue to uphold Jewish supremacy. Many supposedly on the side of humanity continue to boost an ideological stick enabling a genocide, authoritarianism and a movement promoting “mass deportation”.

Recently Caitlin Johnstone posted: “First end the active genocide, THEN talk to me about your concerns regarding a rise in antisemitism. This isn’t one of those ‘we can walk and chew gum at the same time’ things. No, we absolutely cannot, because ‘antisemitism’ is used to deflect criticism of the genocide. Even if everything Israel defenders are saying about rising antisemitism was true (and it most assuredly isn’t), genocide is an infinitely more urgent concern than hurt feelings and graffiti. Resolve that first, then we can talk about your far less urgent concerns.”

Johnstone should be applauded for her courageous statement. Premised on the notion that antisemitism is abhorrent, the post aptly captures the utter depravity of Israel, plight of Jewry and scope of Zionist deception. But pro-Palestinian former Ontario Coalition Against Poverty organizer John Clarke vociferously denounced Johnstone. On Facebook Clarke labelled it “a load of shameful nonsense”, concluding “That this person puts out such a message and links it to the Palestinian cause is sad. That the message resonates on the left is deeply depressing. It’s time for some clarity and for some principles on such fundamental issues as this one.”

The rest of Clarke’s post was more nuanced, but the point (and damage) was done. Clarke joins a litany of leftists boosting a genocidal, authoritarian, anti-left climate. As I’ve detailed, former Independent Jewish Voices communications lead Aaron Lakoff claimed a La Presse cartoon caricaturing Benjamin Netanyahu as a vampire was a “blood libel” while Dawson College professor Joseph Rosen complained his leftist friends failed to centre antisemitism. Many prominent leftists (Jim Stanford, Maude Barlow, Jagmeet Singh, etc.) have said as much about antisemitism as the Gaza holocaust their government and political culture supports.

How many leftists have employed the word “antisemitism” more than “Jewish supremacy” during a fifteen-month genocide to advance Jewish supremacy? That’s pretty racist, no?

Irrespective of what some leftists and basically every media outlet claims, Jewish supremacism is a greater problem on the left than antisemitism.

Clarke’s post contributes to the widespread fear of being labeled antisemitic, which kneecaps Palestinian solidarity and political discussion. Justin Trudeau’s chief fundraiser, Stephen Bronfman, highlights the issue. Bronfman brought the soon to be prime minister to Israel and openly linked his fundraising for Trudeau to Israel. But leftists largely ignore this damning fact, partly out of fear of reinforcing a stereotype.

Basically, no one who raises antisemitism is willing to discuss the subject dispassionately. On all but one of the twenty most commonly employed socioeconomic indicators to identify status/oppression Canadian Jewry actually fares better than the average. Jews are overrepresented as victims of hate crimes, but fare better on income level, educational attainment, life expectancy, home ownership, positions on corporate boards, etc.

Racism is not abstract. Yes, xenophobia is wrong in principle, but who cares if someone in Sudan is anti-Mayan. Racism is largely power determined or as Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) famously noted, “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.”

Another element in some leftists’ argument that deserves greater scrutiny is the role of antisemitism in the far right. It’s obviously been important historically and remains the case for many such as the Atomwaffen Division who targeted the Vice office in Montreal. But it’s also true those promoting mass deportations and anti-Muslim policy increasingly claim to be fighting antisemitism. Jewish Zionist influencer Daliah Kurtz is a major proponent of authoritarian “mass deportations” politics and Rebel News’ pro-Israel Deport Hamas is an important hub of the far right. Fighting ‘antisemitism’ has become a cover for white supremacy.

One respondent to Clarke correctly stated, “Even absent an active genocide in Palestine (the ending of which is the #1 concern of any decent human being), the slandering of decent people as antisemitic by liars and miscreants is a far greater problem than antisemitism itself. These lies also need to stop.”

In a quarter century of political activism, I’ve seen many more Canadians negatively impacted by smears based on their opposition to apartheid than individuals harmed by antisemitism. (A small reason I was pushed out of a well-paid research job at Unifor a decade ago was for writing a column critical of the racist Jewish National Fund and I’ve had a slew of speaking and writing opportunities shuttered due to various accusations.) If you repeatedly target people’s livelihood by misappropriating a concept, justice minded individuals are right to largely avoid that notion.

Zionists are eradicating Palestinians in Gaza and waging a war on the left in Canada but many on our side are wringing their hands over antisemitism. You don’t win serious political battles that way.

The post Jewish Supremacy is a Bigger Problem than Antisemitism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/17/jewish-supremacy-is-a-bigger-problem-than-antisemitism/feed/ 0 510066 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/11/20/solidarity-or-jewish-supremacy-judaism-at-a-crossroads-w-rabbi-cat-zavis-the-marc-steiner-show/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/11/20/solidarity-or-jewish-supremacy-judaism-at-a-crossroads-w-rabbi-cat-zavis-the-marc-steiner-show/#respond Wed, 20 Nov 2024 17:52:54 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=a7bc12006c996ad4ada2b42045f79c44
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/11/20/solidarity-or-jewish-supremacy-judaism-at-a-crossroads-w-rabbi-cat-zavis-the-marc-steiner-show/feed/ 0 502817 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/11/06/the-confederacy-won-why-donald-trumps-reelection-is-a-win-for-white-supremacy-xenophobia-hate/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/11/06/the-confederacy-won-why-donald-trumps-reelection-is-a-win-for-white-supremacy-xenophobia-hate/#respond Wed, 06 Nov 2024 13:15:42 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=eec9e3b0d0b1c67b7f0449111e2c82b1

Donald Trump has been reelected president of the United States. Ahead of Kamala Harris’s expected concession speech, we speak to professors Carol Anderson and Michele Goodwin to discuss Harris’s historic campaign — and historic loss. “The Confederacy won,” says Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University. “It paints a picture of what Americans are willing to embrace,” says Goodwin, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown and an expert on healthcare law, who warns of the public health dangers of a second Trump administration and discusses the election’s implications for reproductive rights.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/11/06/the-confederacy-won-why-donald-trumps-reelection-is-a-win-for-white-supremacy-xenophobia-hate/feed/ 0 500872 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/02/marjorie-kelly-on-the-capitalism-crisis-wealth-supremacy-is-killing-us-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/02/marjorie-kelly-on-the-capitalism-crisis-wealth-supremacy-is-killing-us-2/#respond Fri, 02 Feb 2024 20:33:26 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=a6608f10eabf544776767a8770b3b76b
This content originally appeared on Laura Flanders & Friends and was authored by The Laura Flanders Show.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/02/marjorie-kelly-on-the-capitalism-crisis-wealth-supremacy-is-killing-us-2/feed/ 0 456578 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/14/marjorie-kelly-on-the-capitalism-crisis-wealth-supremacy-is-killing-us/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/14/marjorie-kelly-on-the-capitalism-crisis-wealth-supremacy-is-killing-us/#respond Thu, 14 Dec 2023 14:00:29 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=998d3b98750e2262f1c40fabe5868dbd
This content originally appeared on The Laura Flanders Show and was authored by The Laura Flanders Show.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/14/marjorie-kelly-on-the-capitalism-crisis-wealth-supremacy-is-killing-us/feed/ 0 445692 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/15/end-wealth-supremacy/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/15/end-wealth-supremacy/#respond Fri, 15 Sep 2023 05:50:19 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=294323

Photograph Source: Harrie van Veen – CC BY 2.0

It’s been 15 years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

The investment firm’s startling downfall marked the beginning of a historic Wall Street crash that swiftly wiped out over $7 trillion in home equity and $2.8 trillion in retirement portfolios.

Wall Street hasn’t fundamentally changed its behavior. Since then, Big Finance has engineered an even more entrenched system of creating wealth mostly for the ultra-rich while spinning out crisis after crisis for the rest of us.

That system has led to insecure, low-wage contract jobs replacing stable work, staggering debt mounting for college graduates, and monopolies crushing family businesses. It’s entrenched a political system captured by billionaires and corporations and left society struggling to meet the challenge of climate change.

This anniversary is an opportunity to take a step back and look at the overarching problem here: “financialization.” While we used to have an economy that manufactured stuff, now it manufactures debt.

Before 2008, big banks financialized mortgages. Now they’re financializing houses, buying up single family homes and charging high rents, scrimping on maintenance, and pursuing aggressive evictions.

The same is happening from health care to the local news, as private equity firms buy up vital businesses, cut staff and services to pad profits, and then sell their assets for scrap when the businesses predictably fail.

The latest Wall Street game is to turn the planet into a new asset class, creating  “natural asset companies” to monetize “ecosystem services” from water, forests, coral reefs, and farms.

What drives financialization is what I call “wealth supremacy” — a bias ingrained in our economic system that tells us wealthy people matter most. It suggests the core aim of our economy should be delivering ever-increasing gains to their investment portfolios.

This bias is embodied in a series of myths. There’s the myth that no amount of wealth is ever enough. Another is that only shareholders and executives should have a say in corporations, while workers are disenfranchised and dispossessed.

Then there’s the myth of the free market, which tells us corporations and capital must be able to move freely throughout the world, while the freedom of people — democracy — must be subordinated.

Recognizing wealth supremacy helps us see our task: to build an economic system designed not for maximum investment returns, but for life to flourish. My organization, the Democracy Collaborative, calls it a “democratic economy” — and it’s rising all around us.

For starters, corporations don’t have to be owned by shareholders or executives. They can be owned by workers themselves.

Already workers in the U.S. own some 6,000 companies. Employees at worker-owned companies like the New York City-based Cooperative Home Care Associates and the San Francisco-based waste disposal and recycling company Recology enjoy more stable jobs and double the retirement savings of employees at conventional firms.

Nor do big banks need to do all the banking.

Roughly 1,000 community development financial institutions provide fair loans to marginalized communities typically shunned by Wall Street banks. For example, River City Credit Union in San Antonio, Texas helps immigrants set up bank accounts so they don’t have to rely on predatory payday lenders and check-cashing storefronts.

And what if more of us owned our utilities?

Eighty-five percent of Americans already get their water from public utilities instead of for-profit companies. Now there’s a growing movement from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Maine and New York for publicly and cooperatively owned energy utilities. Such companies could be more willing than for-profit utilities to transition quickly from fossil fuels and make investments to prevent sparking wildfires.

The models and pathways we need exist around us. But making the rapid, systemic change we need requires letting go of the myth that wealth-maximizing capitalism is the only system possible.

It’s not. And if we want to keep our society standing, we need to topple wealth supremacy.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Marjorie Kelly.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/15/end-wealth-supremacy/feed/ 0 427408 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/30/white-supremacy-at-the-center-of-a-shooting-that-killed-three-black-people-in-jacksonville-us/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/30/white-supremacy-at-the-center-of-a-shooting-that-killed-three-black-people-in-jacksonville-us/#respond Wed, 30 Aug 2023 07:57:26 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=45165254e825c8617e0f4a0632005a13
This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/30/white-supremacy-at-the-center-of-a-shooting-that-killed-three-black-people-in-jacksonville-us/feed/ 0 423847 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/15/resilience-amidst-controversy-unveiling-the-struggles-of-the-mountain-valley-pipeline-and-unearthing-adult-supremacy/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/15/resilience-amidst-controversy-unveiling-the-struggles-of-the-mountain-valley-pipeline-and-unearthing-adult-supremacy/#respond Tue, 15 Aug 2023 16:11:11 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=32458 The Mountain Valley Pipeline, a zombie fracked gas project that found new life in the dark corners of the debt ceiling relief bill continues to struggle through the rough terrain…

The post Resilience Amidst Controversy: Unveiling the Struggles of the Mountain Valley Pipeline and Unearthing Adult Supremacy appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/15/resilience-amidst-controversy-unveiling-the-struggles-of-the-mountain-valley-pipeline-and-unearthing-adult-supremacy/feed/ 0 419359 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/23/passage-of-israels-judicial-reform-entrenches-jewish-supremacy/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/23/passage-of-israels-judicial-reform-entrenches-jewish-supremacy/#respond Sun, 23 Jul 2023 21:18:36 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=3f23861c143b7d1ab5b68e876cf5916e The new law passed by Knesset will make it easier for the far-right government to pursue policies that harm Palestinians, experts say.

The post Passage of Israel’s judicial reform entrenches ‘Jewish supremacy’ appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

]]> Palestinians say a law passed by the Israeli parliament that limits some powers of the Supreme Court will make it easier for the Israeli government to pursue policies that serve its “far-right” agenda.

The law is part of a wider effort from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing allies to overhaul the judiciary and prevents the Supreme Court from vetoing government decisions on the grounds of being “unreasonable”.

The law “weakens and eliminates any form of supervision that the Supreme Court has over the decisions of the government,” Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Knesset or Israeli parliament, told Al Jazeera.

This is especially the case when it comes to “decisions that have to do with official appointments and other major decisions”, Tibi said.

Amjad Iraqi, senior editor of +972 Magazine, said these appointments determine who holds senior positions in the police, army, finance institutions, and more.

Such appointments directly affect Palestinian citizens of Israel, for instance, “how much money they get” and how police departments “pursue the vision of the far-right government”, Iraqi told Al Jazeera from Haifa.

The passage of the law on Monday removes the potential for Palestinians to challenge these appointments “legally and administratively”, he said, adding that governments can now implement their policies “much quicker”.

The bill passed by a 64-0 vote on Monday, as the opposition boycotted the vote and stormed out following a heated Knesset session.

“We don’t want the fascist government to gain complete control over the judiciary – even if the judiciary’s decisions are biased,” he added. “This will allow the government even more control over decisions that will have very negative implications towards Palestinians.”

The Supreme Court is viewed as the body that upholds the rule of law and is meant to play an important role in checking executive power in the country – which is largely in the hands of the government.

The government’s plans have sparked months of mass protests, which Tibi said would likely continue “for a while”. Protesters blocked a road leading up to the parliament ahead of the vote while many businesses including retail centres, banks and petrol stations, took part in a strike on Monday to oppose the legislation.

Police have used water cannon in a bid to disperse protesters, Israeli media outlet Haaretz reported, describing the latest developments as an “unprecedented crisis”.

Thousands of military reservists have said they would not report for duty if Netanyahu’s far-right government continues with the plans.

Military service is obligatory for most Jewish men and women above 18 and many volunteer for reservist duties well into their 40s.

Despite this “massive disobedience”, the far right is still “very set in its path”, Iraqi said. “The protests have not really made the dent to fully stop the government … the ruling coalition just doesn’t care.”

Supreme Court ‘in lockstep with Israel’

Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a US policy fellow at Al-Shabaka think tank, echoed Tibi’s concerns, saying that instead of acting as a “check and balance to Israel’s most extreme far-right currents”, the Supreme Court has only “served to further enable them”.

In 2021, the Supreme Court upheld a controversial law that defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, rejecting claims that the law discriminates against minorities.

The bill, which was passed in 2018, downgrades the status of Palestinians and the Arabic language and considers the expansion of illegal Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank as a national value.

The Supreme Court has also allowed Israeli authorities to continue placing Palestinians in administrative detention, a practice of holding them on secret evidence, without charge or trial.

Kenney-Shawa warned that the new law could lead to an “acceleration of policies” that further serve Israel’s agenda, and could “displace and ethnically cleanse Palestinians and further entrench Jewish supremacy”.

The post Passage of Israel’s judicial reform entrenches ‘Jewish supremacy’ appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Tariq Kenney-Shawa.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/23/passage-of-israels-judicial-reform-entrenches-jewish-supremacy/feed/ 0 414661 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/23/white-supremacy-and-the-bombing-of-hiroshima/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/23/white-supremacy-and-the-bombing-of-hiroshima/#respond Sun, 23 Jul 2023 05:48:47 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=289226 As I was born in Hiroshima, I visited the Peace Park there many times. It was a short walk from my grandfather’s house. I didn’t visit Nagasaki until I was an adult, when in 1999, my friend Gordon Greene and I were in Kyushu as visiting medical education faculty. After our visit to Nagasaki’s Peace […]

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The post White Supremacy and the Bombing of Hiroshima appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Seiji Yamada.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/23/white-supremacy-and-the-bombing-of-hiroshima/feed/ 0 413935 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/03/the-united-states-military-white-supremacy-and-affirmative-action/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/03/the-united-states-military-white-supremacy-and-affirmative-action/#respond Mon, 03 Jul 2023 05:57:37 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=287679

Photograph Source: PumpkinSky – CC BY-SA 3.0

The setting

On Thursday June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court of the United States Struck down the race-conscious admissions program policies of the US society (called affirmative action) that had been embarked on after the Civil rights uprisings of the sixties and seventies. This is how the headline of the New York Times carried the story on Thursday.

“The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful, curtailing affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation, a policy that has long been a pillar of higher education.”

What was being ratified in the highest court has been in practice for the past thirty years where the elite Universities of the United States have resorted to enacting policies to ensure that the Universities become enclaves of white privilege with black athletes as the entertainers of these institutions. The over drive for white power at elite colleges and Universities became so crude that some of America’s most elite colleges were charged with fixing prices, minimizing financial aid for students, and inflating their cost of attendance to maintain their reputation for exclusivity.

The lawsuit, filed in 2022 in Federal court in the Northeast District of Illinois, alleged that 16 schools colluded to set financial aid packages, while some colleges are also accused of discriminating against low-income applicants. Federal lawsuit accuses 16 elite universities of fixing prices and courting wealthy families – CBS News The lawsuit named 16 defendants: Ivy League schools Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, as well as California Institute of Technology, Duke University, Emory University, Georgetown University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Rice University, University of Chicago, University of Notre Dame and Vanderbilt University. All 16 institutions are, or have been, members of the 568 Presidents Group, a consortium that uses a common methodology to determine students’ financial aid.’

Already this question of white exclusivity is being felt not only in admissions, but in tenure, retention, admission of graduate students, faculty pay, outlays for research and the entire infrastructure and ideation basis of higher education in the United States. The Biden White House immediately issued a statement saying that , “While talent, creativity, and hard work are everywhere across this country, equal opportunity is not, and we cannot let this decision be the last word.” Every major University, even those 16 involved in the lawsuit issued statements declaring their goal of Inclusive education along with diversity and Inclusion.

Inclusive education, diversity, inclusion, access had become the buzz words for institutions that were closing schools of education and disinvesting in teacher education because these were not profitable in the corporate University. For sixty years the United States has neither signed nor ratified the UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education. The Supreme Court Ruling of June 29 is only catching up with what has been the reality for the past thirty years or more. This detail is important in the turn towards unapologetic white racism since the US Supreme Court is only making lawful what has been the practice of higher education for the past thirty years. The push to institute eugenic policies in higher education has been consistent with the eugenic past and present of most of the top universities in North America.

Exempting the military academies from the Supreme Court Decision on Affirmative action.

The interesting and key feature of the affirmative action decision by the Supreme Court is that the military is exempt from this decision that race-conscious admissions programs are unlawful.

Chief Justice Roberts exempted military academies from the ruling in light of “the potentially distinct interests” they present. There had been discussion of whether the military needed to maintain affirmative action in training its future officer corps based on a judgment that it would be bad for military discipline and cohesiveness if the leadership cadre did not reflect the diversity of the rank-and-file troops who do the bulk of fighting and dying in wars.

Here is the crude justification for the insurance needed for nonwhite persons to die to maintain white supremacy in the United States. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent noted,

The Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom (a particularly awkward place to land, in light of the history the majority opts to ignore)

This contradiction of diminishing equity in access to higher education while maintaining the recruitment of nonwhites to fight to defend the system of white racism is a contradiction that is coming to the fore in the United States.  Of the 1.3 million forces under arms in the US military structures, 43 per cent are nonwhite citizens. Yet only 19 per cent of the top officer corps are nonwhite. (73% white; 8% each Black and Hispanic; 6% Asian; 4% multiracial; and less than 1% Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native. Deep-rooted racism, discrimination permeate US military – OPB

On the same day that George Floyd was killed in Minnesota on May 25, 2020, Helene Cooper from the New York Times wrote “African-Americans Are Highly Visible in the Military, but Almost Invisible at the Top.” She reported, “some 43 percent of the 1.3 million men and women on active duty in the United States military are people of color. But the people making crucial decisions, such as how to respond to the coronavirus crisis and how many troops to send to Afghanistan or Syria, are almost entirely white and male. “

Chief Justice Roberts and the establishment understand that the society cannot remain stable if three fourths of the officer corps are white, especially when a sizeable number of these elements are open to the white supremacist ideas that are reproduced daily on the hate driven social media, conservative cable news, and other media platforms of the right wing in the USA.

The explosiveness of the white supremacist ideas was already revealed in the attempted coup of January 6, 2021 and the subsequent trials of those involved. Many of the middle of the road media putlets carried reports that a “Disproportionate number of current and former military personnel arrested in Capitol attack.” It is Helene Cooper of the New York Times who has been one of the tenacious journalist tracking the meaning of the place of the extreme right in the US military.

Top Generals implicated in the Coup attempt of 2021.

When Lt General Michael Flynn emerged as a key activist in the networks of white nationalists across the United States, the liberal media carried hand wringing articles entitled, “What Happened to Michael Flynn?”

The bye line in the Atlantic noted that as head of military intelligence, ‘he was renowned for his skill connecting the dots and finding terrorists. But somewhere along the way, his dot detector began spinning out of control.’

The authors of this article sought to see white nationalists in the military as an aberration, out of control and not the entire military apparatus in which he served. Barack Obama had warned the incoming Trump administration about Flynn, but the Trump presidency with known supremacists such as Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Peter Navarro and Stephen Miller needed elements such as Flynn, inside or outside the military and military intelligence. From time to time the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed the correspondence and musings of these supremacists.

Implicating the brother of Michael Flynn in the January 6 rebellion fell to Col. Earl Matthews and Major General William Walker. This insurrection revealed the open rift in the military between on one side Matthews and Walker and on the other side  – General Charles Flynn and William Piatt. The headline in Politico on Gen. Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt as ‘absolute and unmitigated liars’ exposed the deep rift in the US military over the interpretation of the US constitution. In this regard the Constitution referred to the question of whether the military should be subordinated to civilian authority. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz reminded readers in the book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment how the Second Amendment of the US Constitution allowed and legalized the “total war” against the First Nation Peoples.

US militarism and racial capitalism

The traditions and divisions within the top echelons of the military have thrown Wall Street and Silicon Valley in a quandary because they have depended on cohesion in the military for so long, that they cannot grasp the fact that they are now sidelined by the march of warfare, far beyond the scenarios of forward planners. One can see the challenges of this march to warfare in the changing rationale of the Biden administration in its relationship with China. The semantic gymnastics of the administration of whether there is a ‘de-coupling’ from China or a ‘de-risking’ relationship with China, represent the deep anxieties within the corporate establishment over the push to war with China.

Corporate elements in the USA were genuinely alarmed when Gen. Mike Minihan, who heads the U.S. Air Mobility Command, warned in a letter to the leadership of its roughly 110,000 personnel that it must speed up preparations for a looming conflict by 2025. Corporate leaders from JP Morgan Chase to Apple, Bill Gates, to the head of General Motors, Tesla and Stephen Schwarzman /Blackstone have all trekked to Beijing to intensify the struggles within the National Security Council of the United States over the push to war with China.

The European corporate elements have also pushed back on the Biden Administration plans to secure the allegiance of European political leaders to also follow a “de-risk/de-couple” strategy, because such a path fails to recognize the degree that European capitalists had become so interwoven with Chinese capitalism. This pushback from the Europeans were the first to formulate the concept of ‘de risking.’ German and French capital already hurting from the high costs of energy and the sanctions against Russia were not about to allow their global competitiveness to be further weakened by succumbing to the military will of the USA about the future of European relations with China.

But capitalist competition means war. No sugar coating of decoupling or de-risking can obscure the contradictions between the rise of China and the inability of the United States to maintain its dominance in the international economic system by increasingly resorting to “weaponized” foreign trade, financial and technology policies. Every aspect of the international system from reserve currency (dollar) to WTO rules, to control of space and control of scientific research depend on the dominance of the US armaments culture. This armaments culture is bonded by white supremacy. Hence, it was not by accident when during the Trump administration an official of the US state Department invoked race as a contributing factor for China being an unprecedented threat to the U.S. Under Donald Trump, Kiron Skinner, the State Department’s director of policy planning, said at the Future Security Forum that challenging “the long-term threat” of China is difficult because the country is “not Caucasian.”

“When we think about the Soviet Union in that competition [the Cold War], in a way, it was a fight within the Western family. This is a fight with a really different civilization, and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before. Nor has it had an economic competitor the way that we have. The Soviet Union was a country with nuclear weapons and the Red Army but a backwards economy.

….

“In China we have an economic competitor, we have an ideological competitor, one that really does seek a kind of global reach that many of us didn’t expect a couple of decades ago. And I think it’s also striking that it’s the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian,”

The fact that a nonwhite official of the US administration would repeat the talking points of the white nationalists expose the ways in which sections of the black bourgeoisie will tolerate racism and white supremacy as long as they are included in the boardroom as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson begged.

The misreading of the current global conjuncture by all sections of the US ruling circles conceals the reality that access to the military Wall Street nexus is central to the reproduction of racial capitalism in the United States.  The time will come when former intelligence officers fully disclose the relationship between the counter intelligence Department of the CIA under James Jesus Angleton and the fascists elements from Europe after the Second World war. In the current era, the intelligence organizations and DARPA are at the center of reproducing big profits for the billionaire class, (which is mostly white). The CIA company, In-Q–Tel  is the poster child of the relationships between military, silicon valley and Wall Street, in their world of, ‘connecting cutting-edge technology, strategic investments, and purpose: to enhance and advance national security.’  It bears remembering that the CIA is only one of the 16 intelligence agencies dominated by unaccountable intelligence functionaries. As the journalist Jefferson Morley wrote,

The CIA, with its $15 billion a year budget, is the largest. The NSA, with a budget of about $10 billion, is the second largest. The Defense Intelligence Agency is about $4 billion. Then, along with some other obscure but still very large agencies like the NGIA—never heard of the NGIA? I didn’t think so. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is a $4.9 billion-a-year agency. Collectively, these agencies spend probably $50 billion to $60 billion a year, which makes them a very small, but powerful, potent sector in the American scheme of power.

The adrenaline rush of this potent sector of white supremacy and chauvinism had become so intense the ideas of white nationalism had become a fetter to the future of capital itself.

American Abyss

After the involvement of the top brass in the January 6, 2021, uprisings, there have been a spate of commentaries on the ‘American Abyss’ and fact that the white supremacists dominate the institutions of the United States.  The one that we are clear on is the reality that, the white supremacists in the United States are not a marginal force; they are inside its institutions.

The ruling of the Supreme Court demonstrates that the top institutions: Military, University, Corporations, the Churches, and Police are dominated by the culture of systemic racism. Indeed, this contradictory nature of the anti-racist struggles in the United States is coming face to face with the conjunctural crisis of capital where military force is necessary to maintain the US economic hegemony. Trillions of dollars are being poured in a divided military force where numerous reports have stated explicitly that “Extremists in Uniform Put the Nation at Risk.”

Tepidly, there had been the resort to the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion band aid solution for confronting structural racism. More recently the Biden administration proposed to make General Charles Brown, head of the Airforce as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The press reports on his appointment specifically stated that one of his tasks will be to deal with the rampant racism in the military. The question that this commentary is posing, if the top brass of the military is so racist, can Charles Brown as one individual shake up this racist structure? The calls for demilitarizing US Society have increased since the end of the wars in Afghanistan and the upsurge in the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM). On the other side of the BLM has arisen the neo fascist Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.

Fifty years prior to the January 6 attempted putsch, the white extremists represented a fringe force in the US society where liberals in the Federal government had tolerated the crude Jim Crow realities of the Deep South. The complacency of the liberal establishment has been shattered by aggressive supremacist elements. The struggle between old line liberals and white extremists is being played out in the impeachment of the Attorney General of Texas.  With the deindustrialization of the society and the weakness of the organized working classes, the precarious nature of the white working classes has rendered them susceptible to the propaganda of white replacement theory.  Neo liberalism redistributed wealth to the top one per cent of the society, but with global competition, the neo liberalism of the past thirty years is now paving the way for outright neofascism. One simply awaits a cataclysmic switch in the international place of the dollar and the cohesion among the forces of the oppressed nations for the economic crisis to have a toll of wiping out the livelihoods of millions of working peoples in the USA.

One can see this white replacement theory being played out with the drastic culture war antics such as ‘social sorting, manufactured ignorance, and the deadening of the mind.’ As Henry Giroux noted,  these culture war antics are now celebrated as the organizing principles of education. These antics are then reproduced at the legal level through state legislatures seeking to disenfranchise blacks:

“45 states have considered 230 bills criminalizing protest, with the threat of violent leftist and Black rebellion being used to justify them. That this is happening at the same time that multiple electoral bills enabling a Republican state legislature majority to overturn their state’s election have been enacted suggests that the true aim of bills criminalizing protest is to have a response in place to expected protests against the stealing of a future election (as a reminder of fascism’s historical connection to big business, some of these laws criminalize protest near gas and oil lines). The Nazis used Judeo-Bolshevism as their constructed enemy. The fascist movement in the Republican party has turned to critical race theory instead. Fascism feeds off a narrative of supposed national humiliation by internal enemies.” (Jason Stanley 2021)

For more than thirty years Professor Gerald Horne had been writing about “US Foreign Policy and the General Crisis of White Supremacy.” Horne had been one of those scholars who highlighted the reality that the so-called Cold War had been a scam to support white supremacy. (Horne 1999) In the main, however, scholars of international relations with their studies on Great Power Competition have been cheerleaders for war. (Thucydides Trap) These scholars from the think tanks and international relations institutes have been complicit in overlooking the rise and prominence of white supremacist ideas and practices in the Institutions of higher learning. The rise of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) formation and the current war in Ukraine are providing the material conditions for a real shift in the global balance of power. Before this shift can be sealed the resort to open kinetic war will be attractive.

Abyss and the military budget, affirmative action for the rich and supremacists

Thus far, with the peace movement in the USA there has been numerous studies on the massive US military budget. Figures on the expenditures of the US military apparatus reveal that the U.S. by far is the biggest military spender on Earth, with 39% of the total of military expenditures for 2022 of US 2.240 trillion, exceeding the next 10 nations combined. (National Priorities Project 2023) These expenditures are analyzed in a context where global poverty levels and environmental degradation has intensified. Sections of the peace movement and intellectuals around the National Priorities Project lament the military expenditures pointing the urgency to address the needs of the environment; education and technology; infrastructure; and public health. The late Seymour Mellman had for a long time written about downsizing the military and converting the military industrial system for peace purposes. In the period of the struggles over reparative justice and environmental repair, the calls for the dismantling of the US military are now part of the demands of the peace movement. The ruling of the Supreme Court has the possibility of acting as a school for those who in the past dealt with single issues.

This author is arguing that instead of a single focus on ‘affirmative action’ it will be necessary to go to the core of the reproduction of white racism and violence and call for the dismantling of the military and the conversion of the military machine. The US is bounded by two oceans and mainland USA has not been attacked since 1812. This conversion of the armaments industry and investment in repair of the environment is most urgent in all parts of the world. The irony is that the question of the budget has been addressed more than a century ago by W.E.B DuBois who stated clearly that,

 “Hitherto the peace movement has confined itself chiefly to figures about the cost of war and platitudes on humanity. What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa? How can love of humanity appeal as a motive to nations whose love of luxury is built on the inhuman exploitation of human beings, and who, especially in recent years, have been taught to regard these human beings as inhuman?….. ‘Should you not discuss racial prejudice as a prime cause of war?’ (DuBois The African Roots of War, Atlantic May 2015)

 Big military expenditures and military management of the international system

The important scholarship on the Cost of War and National Priorities Project 2023 has been consistently chronicling the size and nature of US military spending. According to a report from the Costs of War project at Brown University in 2021, nearly 20 years after the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan, the cost of its global war on terror stands at $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths. (Brown University  Watson Institute 2021, Brown University, Cost of war Costs of the 20-year war on terror: $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths | Brown University

In their study the scholars noted that ‘“The war has been long and complex and horrific and unsuccessful… and the war continues in over 80 countries.”

These studies share the same conclusion that the US war on terror failed, and the US made the world more dangerous. (POOR PEOPLE’S MORAL BUDGET: EVERYBODY HAS THE RIGHT TO LIVE, Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival Institute for Policy Studies, Kairos Center / Repairers of the Breach, June 2019,Editors: Shailly Gupta.

 In its 2019 report the  center of International Policy’s “Sustainable Defense: More Security, Less Spending”  spelt out the savings that would be incurred if the United States eliminated the massive nuclear programs initiated by the Obama Administration. These studies provide details on a long list of conventional weapons, basing infrastructure and Pentagon military and civilian personnel programs that should be cancelled or reduced.  What many of these studies have neglected are the cultural and ideological implications of these massive sums. In one instance these studies point to the growth of private military contractors and their centrality in the military management of the international system. Last week the world was transfixed by watching the attempted military revolt of the private military group, the Wagner group in Russia. Many commentaries noted that the Wagner private military force represented a right-wing element in world politics. Many of these commentaries neglect to note that Wagner and the Private Military Contractors are babes in the woods compared to the military contracting system of the United States and NATO. The right wing and racist elements of the USA have joined forces with the very conservative leaders of Arabia. The Washington Post reported that, “more than 500 retired U.S. military personnel — including scores of generals and admirals — have taken lucrative jobs since 2015 working for foreign governments, mostly in countries known for human rights abuses and political repression.”

For over forty years a debate on ‘military expenditure and capitalism’ had raged within the scholarly community. It was the antiwar forces inside organs such as the Center for International Policy (CIP) who have gone beyond the figures on spending to identify the ideological and class affiliations of the beneficiaries of the massive military spending. They have mounted conferences on Dismantling Racism and Militarism in US Foreign Policy.  There is an awareness that the revolving door between the military industrial complex/ or military/information/ financial complex solidify the domination of the conservative elements with the higher ranks of the military dominated by whites.

Dismantling Affirmative Action for the racists at military installations

The reports on military expenditures neglect to give the historical context of how the United States military had been stationed primarily in the Southern States of the United States to prop up the Jim Crow laws and the oppression of black and brown workers. It was this racial proclivity that named most of the Southern military bases after Confederate Generals of the US Civil War. Most Confederate Generals and high officers of the Civil War 1861-1865 were ultimately pardoned for the crime of treason against the United States. It is noteworthy that it was after 1917 in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan when the bases were named after Confederate Generals and the Army began honoring them in southern states.

The best example of this fondness for former fascists in the USA is in the fact that Camp Forrest in Tullahoma, Tennessee, one of the U.S. Army’s largest training bases during World War II was named after the founder of the KKK. These traditions survive and thrive irrespective of the planned change of name of these installations by Congress. The change of names is not and will not change the racist culture of these military spaces for reproducing sexism, white Christian nationalism and white supremacy. The debates on the names of the military bases conceal the more profound fact, that in the counties and states where the bases are located, the military has been the main force for supporting racist and white supremacist elements. The military installations in Florida, (Ft MacDill), North Carolina, (Fort Bragg), (Fort Hood, officially renamed Fort Cavazos) Texas and (Fort Stewart and Fort Benning (Georgia) provide the matrix of linkages between the supremacists and Federal contracts.

An elementary evaluation of the counties within which Fort Bragg lay in North Carolina will expose how every area of life from engineering, computing, real estate, to education, media services, to local government, the racism of the military apparatus sustained local capitalists who are aligned with the MAGA elements. These connections between accumulation, military services and racism will illuminate why a psychological operations officer assigned to the 4th Psychological Operations Group, would lead a busload of 100 persons from Fort Bragg to the January 6 uprising.

Yet, these foot soldiers of white supremacy at the County level and at the level of the military installations are part of a larger class of accumulators who drive the armaments culture of the United States. On top of the more than 8 trillion dollars that had been spent on Overseas Contingency Operations (War on Terror), more than 60 per cent of all federal government contracts were obligated to the military. A county-by-county breakdown of the contracts of the federal government will expose how the networks of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee are integrated into the echo chambers of Fox news. The neo conservatives who dominate the Association of the United States Army reproduce and reinforce the network of military capitalists who serve both DARPA and Defense Policy Board. The keen researchers will then make the connections to Xe (Formerly Black Water), Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) and DynCorp.

The US military is a destructive force on the planet earth and in space enforcing the sanctions and bullying of the United States. This bullying has been made manifest in trade wars, embargoes, blockades and sanctions. According to media reports, US government sanctions designations soared by 933% between 2000 and 2021. The Trump administration alone imposed more than 3,900 sanctions, or three per day on average within four years. More than 9,400 sanctions designations had come into effect in the US by fiscal year 2021. The US has slapped unilateral economic sanctions on nearly 40 countries, affecting nearly half of the world’s population. For Americans, the international rules based-order is whatever they say it is. As such they are immune from violating it themselves for they define what it is. The US military is thus the arbiter of the current rules-based order.

The Cost of the War statistics do not usually take into consideration the centrality of the US military in enforcing sanctions that violate international law and reinforce white supremacy. From press reports on the recent book of Norman Solomon, War Made Invisible, How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, there is anexplicit link between the military, war and racism. Using the concept of national security, abusing export control, and taking discriminatory and unfair measures against foreign companies, the United States has also used its media influence to justify destructive interventions. Michael Hudson in his studies from Super Imperialism to Finance as War has been able to explain succinctly the centrality of these large expenditures for reproducing the powers of Wall Street over the global economy.  His most recent commentaries on the punitive sanctions against Russia and Europe in the era of the Ukraine War elaborated on the challenges of de dollarization and the need to control Europe. Ismael Hossen -zadeh came closest to explicitly making the racist linkages in his study of The Political Economy of US Militarism. By linking militarism in the USA with the neo conservative wing of Zionism his work clarified the differences between the competing wings of the US ruling classes. Hossen -zadeh did not drill down on the question of racism in the US military.  The current furor over Israeli apartheid and the inability of the Biden administration to stand up to the extreme right wing elements in Israel will have long term consequences for the global anti racist and anti-apartheid struggles.

Beyond affirmative action

The Supreme court strikes down affirmative action. Wildfires from Canada have polluted many states in North America to the highest magnitude recorded in the world. Stepping out for a minute without a mask equals chain smoking three cigarettes right now. The convergence of these challenges demand that the struggles for equal access to education are linked to wider social transformations. Chief Justice Roberts in granting an exemption to military academies is hoping against hope that the fissures in the US military can be contained. Those who have followed the curriculum of the military academies understand how these curricula can produce elements such as Michael Flynn. Taken together with the global economic changes, the responses to the Supreme Court Ruling of June 29, 2023 must be understood beyond this one ruling. Following upon their rulings on the rights to reproductive health and their rulings as corporations as citizens, the US Supreme Court is taking sides in a society where the rolling elements will go to war to preserve white supremacy.

It was more than twenty seven years ago when the State of California banned affirmative action in admissions in public colleges . The facts are clear in how that legal push has reinforced the class and racial divisions in that state. In many ways, the Supreme Court is catching up with the right-wing mood of the country, making national what has been made legal at the state to state level. In response to the ruling anti racist elements have vowed to fight this Supreme Court Ruling for the next thirty years. These activists ought to study the realignments globally in that coming era.

The struggles against racism and white supremacy at the global level demand that intellectuals and scholars be engaged at the local, national and global levels in the fight against neo fascism. Despite the statements from the White House and leading Universities about inclusive education and diversity, the reality is that the racists and neo fascist elements are the rising forces in the politics of the USA. Newly arrived Asians and Indian immigrants who want to excel within the present University structures are in for a rude awakening as the global competition intensify anti-Asian racism in the United States. The anti racist forces are taking the lead on the left to push for the wider struggles against capitalism, racism and imperialism. The resources of the Federal government, especially the military contracting system feed the network of Generals who are aligned in the armaments culture of financialized capitalism. The impressive studies on the military expenditure have detailed the waste of trillions but few highlight the need to dismantle racist ideas and structures. The studies that call for moral suasion to redirect military expenditures have not fully understood the linkages between militarism, the accumulation of capital, white supremacy, and the coalescence of the neo conservative forces of the United States.

Increasingly, as the shadow of fascism hangs over the society, the shadow brings back the warning 28 years ago when Toni Morrison reminded students ‘that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. (Morrison 1994) That argument about the specter of fascism in the United States was echoed by President Biden in Philadelphia in 2022. He explicitly stated that the Republican Party had semi fascists in its ranks. Yet, the Biden administration continue to feed the organs of semi fascism, especially the US military.

Henry Giroux correctly noted that, “the ugly grasp of fascist politics, culture, and education has moved from the margins to the center of American life and power.” Giroux should, however, rest assured that the long traditions from Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas to Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr will dictate that the fascists will surge but will not hold power for long in the USA.  The struggles against racism, police violence and destruction in the United States is bound up with the struggles for a New International Economic Order that breaks the military management of the international system.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Horace G. Campbell.

409016 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/white-protectionism-is-white-supremacy-a-bait-and-switch-as-old-as-history/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/white-protectionism-is-white-supremacy-a-bait-and-switch-as-old-as-history/#respond Fri, 26 May 2023 06:00:27 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=284186 In recognition of the institutional political biases operating against people of color, the NAACP has issued a travel advisory against Florida, lamenting Governor Ron DeSantis’s “aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools.”  The organization bluntly declares that “Under the leadership of Governor DeSantis, the state of Florida has become hostile to Black Americans…before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.” More

The post “White Protectionism” is White Supremacy: A Bait and Switch as Old as History appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Anthony DiMaggio.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/white-protectionism-is-white-supremacy-a-bait-and-switch-as-old-as-history/feed/ 0 398499 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/the-violent-urge-for-supremacy-in-the-worlds-two-largest-democracies/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/the-violent-urge-for-supremacy-in-the-worlds-two-largest-democracies/#respond Fri, 26 May 2023 05:45:19 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=284039 Are you worried about the rising political power of violent white nationalists in America? Well, you’ve got plenty of company, including U.S. national security and counterterrorism officials. And we’re worried, too — worried enough, in fact, to feel that it’s time to take a look at the experience of India, where Hindu supremacist dogma has More

The post The Violent Urge for Supremacy in the World’s Two Largest Democracies appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Priti Gulati Cox – Stan Cox.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/the-violent-urge-for-supremacy-in-the-worlds-two-largest-democracies/feed/ 0 398604 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/20/the-road-to-damascus-confronts-white-supremacy-with-theater-rattling-the-bars/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/20/the-road-to-damascus-confronts-white-supremacy-with-theater-rattling-the-bars/#respond Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:55:39 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=33ff0af4d13e93ffbd09e2f0a9385e68
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/20/the-road-to-damascus-confronts-white-supremacy-with-theater-rattling-the-bars/feed/ 0 380721 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/15/andrew-jacksons-face-is-a-meme-for-white-supremacy/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/15/andrew-jacksons-face-is-a-meme-for-white-supremacy/#respond Wed, 15 Mar 2023 05:59:35 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=276909 Andrew Jackson’s 256^th birthday is March 15, 2023. In recognition, we are posting this excerpt from Clarence Lusane’s new book, Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy. In the book, Lusane argues that not only should Harriet Tubman’s face replace Jackson’s on the front of the US $20, her vision of abolitionist democracy should replace Jackson’s racist patriarchal model.

Photo of some of the many families Andrew Jackson enslaved, including “Old Nancy” and two of her three daughters.

Negro Fort was a garrison that was abandoned by the British during the War of 1812 and subsequently became a refuge for people who escaped slavery, Native Americans, and free blacks. Located near what is now Sumatra, Florida, at the time it was an area that was outside the United States and became one of many autonomous maroon territories. Negro Fort—originally called Fort Magazine by the British—was left fully armed when the British fled in 1815. People on the run from their white enslavers came from as far away as Virginia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Andrew Jackson’s role in the brutal seizure of the fort in July 1816 would be one of the signature campaigns that built his military fame and ultimately propelled him to the White House.

Slavers in the region were fearful of Negro Fort and the message it sent about black autonomy. Many complained to state and federal authorities that residents of the fort were raiding their plantations for food and supplies. President James Madison looked to General Andrew Jackson to end this affront to white society. When Jackson’s request to the Spanish governor of Florida to destroy the fort was rebuffed, he sent instructions to Major General Edmund P. Gaines, commander of U.S. military forces “in the Creek nation,” to “restore the stolen negroes and property to their rightful owners.” Skirmishes began on July 15, 1816, when black and Indigenous fighters from Negro Fort killed several U.S. soldiers who had come ashore at Apalachicola Bay. Over the next two weeks, clashes took place in the thick woods surrounding the fort, at times descending into hand-to-hand combat. After a pause in the ground fighting, Jackson’s vessels attacked with cannon fire. The fort’s defenders held their own until the morning of July 27, 1816, when a hot cannonball struck Negro Fort’s stockpile of gunpowder. The impact set off a massive explosion that killed almost everyone inside the fort. The very few who survived were either executed or enslaved by Jackson’s men.

There is some controversy regarding how many people died that day. The official historical marker at the site reads: “It is hard to imagine the horrible scene that greeted the first Americans to stand here on the morning of July 27, 1816. The remains of the 270 persons killed in the magazine explosion lay scattered about.” However, a study by scholar Claudio Saunt argues that many had left before the decisive battle, and “probably no more than forty” had been killed by the blast and inferno.

In any case, Jackson’s willingness to wage war against blacks and Native Americans had no bounds. His obsession with expanding slavery westward at the expense of Native lands and lives would define the rest of his military and political career. “Andrew Jackson was the implementer of the final solution for the Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi,” writes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in her book An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. The Negro Fort episode was a harbinger of things to come.

Jackson was an anti-abolitionist and a slaver with a clear and brutal record of massacring Native American people. Old Hickory, however, is more often than not portrayed as a populist and national “father figure” of sorts. He is credited with being one of the founders of the Democratic Party in the 1820s and a successful advocate for the expansion of voting rights and political participation for working-class white men. His savagery and white supremacy have been played down or ignored for too long. As Ronald Takaki points out, in biographies like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Age of Jackson, African Americans and Native Americans are mostly erased, and Nat Turner’s 1830 rebellion and Jackson’s successful push for the Indian Removal Act simply go unmentioned. Some authors, like historian Robert V. Remini, have tried to have it both ways, but the result is to portray him as a badass hero:

He was one of the greatest of generals, and wholly ignorant of the art of war. A writer brilliant, elegant, eloquent, without being able to compose a correct sentence, or spell words of four syllables. The first of statesmen, he never devised, he never framed a measure. He was the most candid of men, and was capable of the profoundest dissimulation. A most law-defying, law-obeying citizen. A stickler for discipline, he never hesitated to disobey his superior. A democratic autocrat. An urbane savage. An atrocious saint.

This type of bromance with Andrew Jackson has certainly factored into his placement on U.S. currency and glorification in books, monuments, and official U.S. narratives. However, a more honest acknowledgement of the mass suffering and death inflicted by his racism and greed should dispel any notion that he continues to deserve to be uncritically honored on national platforms such as currency, or anywhere else.

 FROM ORPHAN TO PRESIDENT

As previously mentioned, Andrew Jackson was born on March 15, 1767, ironically sharing a birth date with Harriet Tubman. He was orphaned at the relatively young age of fourteen, and grew up poor, deprived, and rough. He joined the colonial army during the American Revolution, at age thirteen or fourteen. Stories of his bravado, perhaps exaggerated, describe personality traits of stubbornness, tenacity, and a dogged resilience that would shape his path going forward. He left the military after the Revolutionary War but would later return and ultimately rise to the rank of general and commander. In this role, the carnage at Negro Fort would be one of many massacres he would lead.

Jackson’s career zigzagged as he dipped into the legal field, business ventures, and political interests, as well as the military. Over the course of his life he became an enslaver, human trafficker, attorney, solicitor, U.S. representative, U.S. senator, land speculator, Tennessee Supreme Court justice, store owner, military commander, Tennessee governor, and president of the United States. He achieved all these positions with little education.

Like Donald Trump, Andrew Jackson was also involved in a disputed presidential election result. Jackson ran for president in 1824 against John Quincy Adams, the son of the nation’s second president. The two other candidates in the race were Henry Clay and William H. Crawford. Although Jackson won the popular vote, he did not win enough votes in the electoral college. As a result, the decision on the election went to the U.S. House of Representatives. After much debate and backroom deal-making, the presidency was awarded to John Quincy Adams and the vice presidency to John C. Calhoun, enraging Jackson.

Jackson abandoned the National Republican Party, helped to start the Democratic Party, and benefited from expanding voting rights to working-class white men. As a result, from 1824 to 1828, the voting population went from around 365,000 to over one million, launching what many historians have dubbed the era of Jacksonian Democracy. The rise of political parties and the end of property requirements drove the surge in voting among white men. Jackson’s anti-elite rhetoric openly excluded women, African Americans, and Native Americans without apology or regret. For First Americans, Jackson was the “Sharp Knife” that stabbed their hearts while slashing them apart from their ancestral land. For black families, he was another white slaver determined to keep them in chains.

JACKSON AND SLAVERY

One of Andrew Jackson’s slave plantations was known as “The Hermitage” and was located in Davidson County, Tennessee. Today, The Hermitage is a tourist destination that lures visitors with the call to “Experience the historic mansion and tranquil beauty” of the 1,000-acre plantation. In fact, Jackson’s livelihood was almost wholly dependent on the cotton produced by the people he enslaved and the income he earned by breeding and selling them. Jackson purchased his first human being when he was around twenty-four years old, a six-year-old boy named Aaron, and continued to purchase black people and engage in the slave trade itself. He brought people he enslaved to the White House from Tennessee and bought more during his presidency to serve his family.

At the time of his death in 1845, Jackson owned approximately 150 people, a significant increase from the nine he owned when he purchased the Tennessee land for The Hermitage in 1804. According to the White House Historical Association:

In January 1829, less than two months before he became president, Andrew Jackson ordered an inventory of his slaves. The inventory recorded the names, ages, and familial relationships of ninety-five enslaved individuals who lived and worked at The Hermitage, his Tennessee plantation. When President-elect Jackson left for the White House, he brought some of these enslaved people with him. The 1830 census listed fourteen enslaved individuals in Jackson’s household—eight women and six men—and many scholars suggest that his household grew during the course of his presidency.

Among the individuals he enslaved were “Seamstress” Gracy; “Cooks” Old Hannah, Betty, Maria, Mary, and Old Dick; “Body Servant” George; “Carpenters” Ned and Henry; and “Weavers” Eliza, Gincy, and Big Sally. People without specific jobs were listed as either “House Slaves” or “Field Slaves,” the latter constituting the largest number of those owned by Jackson. Many of the individuals were in families that were, of course, torn asunder when Jackson so desired.

By all accounts, he did not hesitate to work the people he enslaved as hard as possible. An example of Jackson’s cruelty could be found in how he attempted to capture a person who had escaped from his plantation. In 1804, Jackson posted an advertisement describing the person who had escaped to freedom as a “Mulatto Man Slave, about thirty years old, six feet and an inch high, stout made and active, talks sensible, stoops in his walk, and has a remarkable large foot, broad across the root of the toes.” Jackson speculated, “He will make for Detroit, through the states of Kentucky or Ohio, or the upper part of Louisiana.” He offered what was likely a normal reward of fifty dollars—about $1,202.19 in 2022 dollars. However, he included an additional incentive in his post. He pledged to pay an extra ten dollars, for a total of about $1,442.62 in 2022 dollars, “for every hundred lashes any person will give to the amount of three hundred,” encouraging others to do his dirty work for him. His maximum offer of a possible $300.00 was equivalent to $7,213.12 in 2022 dollars. Historian Robert P. Hay points out that many of Jackson’s biographers either did not know of this particular advertisement or ignored it in in an effort to try to dishonestly make that case that “he was the most indulgent, patient and generous of masters” and that he oversaw his enslaved with a “patriarch’s care,” or that he was “an ideal slave-owner.”

On Jackson’s plantation, violence was used to maintain the racial hierarchy. In 1815, one of Jackson’s nephews informed him, “Your wenches as usual commenced open war” against the overseer. The black women were “brought to order by Hickory oil,” wrote the nephew, a reference to being whipped. Understanding use of the term in this manner strongly suggests that Jackson may have been nicknamed “Old Hickory” as a reference to the hickory switches used on plantations to beat black people into submission. In the classic slave narrative Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, Ball writes, “If a slave gives offence, he is generally chastised on the spot, in the field where he is at work, as the overseer always carries a whip—sometimes a twisted cow-hide, sometimes a kind of horsewhip, and very often a simple hickory switch or gad, cut in the adjoining woods.” Being named after the simple weapon used by white enslavers to impulsively whip black people would have been fitting for Jackson, who was notorious for flying into violent rages.

But Old Hickory was also known for calmly ordering violence against the black people who resisted his and his wife’s dictates. For example, in 1821, the Jacksons were living in Florida while Andrew served as territorial governor. During one of his absences, his wife Rachel wrote to him that her slave, Betty, “has been putting on some airs, and been guilty of a great deal of impudence.” Her sin was washing clothes for individuals in the neighborhood without Rachel’s “express permission.” Jackson instructed his staff to punish Betty with fifty lashes at “the public whipping post” if she refused to obey his wife. Betty was “capable of being a good & valluable servant,” he wrote one of the men, “but to have her so, she must be ruled with the cowhide.”174

Jackson despised abolitionists and worked to perpetuate and expand slavery in the United States. In his multiple positions as an attorney, military officer, Congressmember, governor, and certainly as the nation’s seventh president, he did all he could to ensure lands seized or purchased westward would be welcome spaces for white people to profit from trafficking and enslaving people of color.

Jackson also supported efforts of other white supremacists to target the free speech of Americans active in anti-slavery networks. During his second presidential term (1833–37), the abolition movement organized a mail campaign to flood Southern states with anti-slavery literature. The campaign prompted widespread public protest and attention throughout the white South. In July 1835, a local postmaster in Charleston, South Carolina, Alfred Huger, discovered a cache of abolitionist literature mail en route from Philadelphia’s American Anti-Slavery Society. While not wanting to assist abolitionists, but hesitant about violating his responsibility to deliver the mail, Huger stopped the literature from going forward and wrote U.S. Postmaster General Amos Kendall, an enslaver himself, for some guidance. When white people in the community found out about the stalled mail, they took matters into their own hands. A mob formed, took the materials, and publicly burned them. At the same time, a committee of prominent Tennessee citizens formed and issued a statement that they would support banning anti-slavery mail and advocate that any similar materials be set on fire.

Postmaster Kendall sent Southern postmasters instructions to withhold abolitionist mailings unless recipients requested the literature. When he consulted with President Jackson about the situation, Jackson approved of the intervention even though it clearly violated Americans’ rights and the U.S. Constitution. In a private letter sent August 9, 1835, “Jackson himself denounced the ‘monsters’ who were using the items ‘to stir up amongst the South the horrors of a servile war’ and called for them ‘to atone for this wicked attempt, with their lives,’ ” writes Mark R. Cheathem in a 2020 article for the Washington Post.

He also recommended that Southern postmasters make a list of the people in their communities who wanted the material so that they could be “exposed” in the media “as subscribers to this wicked plan of exciting the negroes to insurrection and to massacre.” Jackson hoped that his fellow White Southerners would force those sympathetic to the abolitionist cause to “desist” in their support of freedom for enslaved people “or move from the country.” Instead of trying to be a leader for all Americans, Jackson used the language of an enslaver who saw the threat that holding out hope of freedom to enslaved people posed not just to his livelihood but also to his entire way of life.176

About five months later, Jackson spoke publicly about the issue in an address to Congress. Jackson proposed legislation that would “prohibit, under severe penalties, the circulation in the Southern States, through the mail, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection.” No bill was ever passed by Congress, so Jackson simply allowed Southerners to continue to illegally seize and destroy black freedom literature.

INDIAN REMOVAL

Howard Zinn described Andrew Jackson as “the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history.” His most infamous move as president was to push through the 1830 Indian Removal Act. When elected president in 1828, Jackson vowed that he would complete the work of President Thomas Jefferson, who in 1802 signed the “Georgia Compact” and in 1803 completed the Louisiana Purchase. Those two actions set the stage for the forced removal of the Creeks and Cherokees living in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The Georgia Compact was an agreement between the U.S. government and Georgia in which the latter agreed to cede claim on Alabama and Mississippi—states cut out of territory controlled by Georgia—in exchange for a commitment on the part of the federal government to purge Native Americans, specifically the Cherokees, from those areas, despite their titles to the lands. The understanding was that at some point the First Americans would be resettled elsewhere. The “elsewhere” was some of the vast territory acquired with the Louisiana Purchase. This agreement was accomplished without input or consent from the Cherokees, and naturally, they resisted. Jefferson would later state that he did not have the power to force them to relocate or surrender their titles to the land.

Jackson felt no such qualms or constitutional constraints. The situation had reached something of a stalemate until his election. He came into office determined to implement a removal plan. Southern congressmembers supported Jackson, as they wanted Native American land to expand their slave-based economy. On December 8, 1829, the top priority in Jackson’s first State of the Union address was pitching legislation for Native removal. Six months later, the bill came up for a vote in Congress. The vote was close—28 to 19 in the Senate and 102 to 97 in the House—but Jackson prevailed and signed the bill into law on May 28, 1830. With the bill’s passage, Jackson had the authority to “exchange” Indian lands in the South for some western territories, whether the Indigenous nations wanted to or not.

While the Indian Removal Act called for negotiations, it was clear to all that force would be used if necessary. Legendary frontiersman and U.S. Representative Davy Crockett voiced strong opposition to the bill. On May 26, 1830, he stated on the floor of Congress that he viewed “the native Indian tribes of this country as a sovereign people” and that “removing them in the manner proposed” would not protect them as the United States was bound to do. He said he did not trust the Jackson administration to efficiently spend the $500,000 that had been allocated, nor that appropriate land would be available. He contended that he personally knew of some Cherokees who vowed never to leave their ancestral land, and he thought they should not be forced.

Crockett’s passions notwithstanding, Jackson’s long record of bloody battles against Native peoples had already set the path he would follow. By the time of his 1828 presidential victory, Jackson’s attitude toward Native Americans was well documented. He referred to Indigenous people as “savage bloodhounds” and “blood thirsty barbarians,” a view perpetrated by white people in the Americas since the days of the conquistadors. As a military leader, Jackson personally initiated and led numerous atrocities, including massacres. One bloody conflict took place on March 27, 1814, at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River in what is now Alabama. Referring to the upcoming fight, he wrote to one of his generals, “I must destroy those deluded victims doomed to distruction [sic] by their own restless and savage conduct.” Historian Ronald Takaki wrote that Jackson’s stance was that “ ‘foreign’ governments could not be tolerated, and the Indians would have to submit to state authority.”

With a bloodlust that is difficult to fathom, Jackson and his men, which included some Cherokees and even a few Creeks, attacked and killed eight hundred Creek children and adults in a community of one thousand. After the slaughter, Jackson’s men skinned many of the corpses and removed the noses. The skins were then used to make bridle reins. Jackson took clothes off the bodies of women and, as he noted in a letter to his wife, took a “warrior’s bow and quiver” for their son Andrew.

Proud of the devastation that he caused, Jackson wrote, “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms . . . filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?” Following the massacre, the Creeks signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson, which forced them to cede 22 million acres, including a huge tract in southern Georgia. Jackson, some of his relatives, and some of his associates then began buying the seized land.185

In 1832, the Supreme Court, adhering to the 1802 Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, upheld the law that “states could not legally extend their jurisdiction into Indian territory.”186 They ruled that the federal government, not the states, had the authority to negotiate land issues. Jackson blatantly ignored that decision and through nonenforcement essentially gave states the green light to begin the process of dispossessing Indian Nations of their ancestral lands.

JACKSON AND THE TRAIL OF TEARS

“During the Jacksonian period,” writes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “the United States made eighty-six treaties with twenty-six Indigenous nations between New York and the Mississippi, all of them forcing land cessions, including removals.” The federal government often refused to honor its treaties guaranteeing that lands would not be violated or taken, as was the case with the Cherokee people. Jackson, as he had done on other occasions, forced negotiations that led to a treaty signing for Cherokee removal in 1835. Anti-removal tribal leaders and the vast majority of tribal members were marginalized and ignored. When the majority refused to budge, Jackson sent the military to drive the Cherokees off their land.

Before being forced to walk 1,200 miles in the dead of winter to current-day Oklahoma, Indigenous families were first rounded up and placed in detention camps—a legacy that echoed in the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s and migrant families in 2019. More than half of the sixteen thousand Cherokee children, women, and men forced to march on Jackson’s Trail of Tears died on the way.189 Some black families, who were enslaved to the Cherokees, were also forced to march. By 1835, as many as 1,600 black people were enslaved to the Cherokee nation.

Dunbar-Ortiz relates that, after the Civil War, journalist James Mooney interviewed people who had been involved in the forced removal. Based on firsthand accounts, Mooney described the scene:

Under [General Winfield] Scott’s orders the troops were disposed at various points throughout the Cherokee country, where stockade forts were erected for gathering in and holding the Indians preparatory to removal. From these, squads of troops were sent to search out with rifle and bayonet every small cabin hidden away in the coves or by the sides of mountain streams, to seize and bring in as prisoners all the occupants, however or wherever they might be found. Families at dinner were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets in the doorway and rose up to be driven with blows and oaths along the weary miles of trail that led to the stockade. Men were seized in their fields or going along the road, women were taken from their wheels and children from their play. In many cases, on turning for one last look as they crossed the ridge, they saw their homes in flames. fired by the lawless rabble that followed on the heels of the soldiers to loot and pillage. So keen were these outlaws on the scent that in some instances they were driving off the cattle and other stock of the Indians almost before the soldiers had fairly started their owners in the other direction. Systematic hunts were made by the same men for Indian graves, to rob them of the silver pendants and other valuables deposited with the dead. A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: “I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”

Some historians have tried to overlook Jackson’s atrocities against First Americans by pointing to his “adoption” of a young Creek infant orphan. They tend to underplay or not mention that Jackson was the reason the boy became an orphan in the first place. On November 3, 1813, Jackson and his soldiers attacked a small Creek Indian village, Tallushatchee. The assault was meant as vengeance for violence by the Red Sticks, a faction of Creeks, against whites in the area. The village became a killing field that has been called “beyond bloody,” a “massacre,” and a “revolting scene.” Babies, children, and adults were shot, burned, and beaten to death. Not one of the 186 men in the village was left alive. At some point after the slaughter ended, one of Jackson’s interpreters brought him a small child who had somehow miraculously survived. Jackson decided that he would take the child, whom he called a “savage,” and send him to his five-year-old son as a “pett” to “amuse him.” The Indigenous child was named Lyncoya. As Jackson wrote to his wife Rachel, Lyncoya was to be given to Andrew Jr. to replace Andrew’s previous pet, also a Creek child, Theodore. Jackson wrote, “He is about the size of Theodore and much like him.” According to the U.S. National Park Service, Theodore was likely captured when U.S. forces overran the Creek village of Littafuchee on October 27, 1813, and died soon after arriving at The Hermitage. A third Creek child, renamed Charley, was presented to Jackson as a gift by Jim Fife, a member of the Creek National Council.

As Slate researcher Rebecca Onion noted, “Defenders of Jackson have long used Lyncoya to finesse Jackson’s historical reputation in relationship to Native Americans.” Notably, there is scant record of Lyncoya’s views on the massacre of his family and village, adoption by Jackson, and life at The Hermitage. It is known that he ran away on several occasions in an effort to return to the Creek nation. When he was about ten years old, he wrote Jackson a letter in which he asked to be able to call him “Father” and wanted him to be proud one day to be able to say, “This is the Indian boy I [once] raised.” But that’s not how things went for Lyncoya. When he died of tuberculosis at age sixteen or seventeen, Jackson had him buried, like a pet, in an unmarked grave.

But Jackson’s pet was useful to him beyond the amusement of his son, Andrew Junior. As his political ambitions grew, Jackson presented himself as a strong fighter but with a soft edge, a counter to his well-known history as an “Indian killer.” Jackson worked the Lyncoya story to propagate a “benevolent father figure” narrative about himself. According to historian Dawn Peterson, in 1816 he went as far as to ask Tennessee senator George Washington Campbell to use his adoption of Lyncoya as an example to his congressional colleagues that stories of Jackson’s raging temperament toward Native peoples were overblown.

In his farewell address to Congress, Jackson spoke derisively and paternalistically about how Native Americans had fared under his presidential tenure. He stated:

The States which had so long been retarded in their improvement by the Indian tribes residing in the midst of them are at length relieved from the evil, and this unhappy race—the original dwellers in our land—are now placed in a situation where we may well hope that they share in the blessings of civilization and be saved from that degradation and destruction to which they were rapidly hastening while they remained in the States; and while the safety and comfort of our own citizens have been greatly promoted by their removal, the philanthropist will rejoice that the remnant of the ill-fated race has been at length placed beyond the reach of injury or oppression, and that the paternal care of the General Government will hereafter watch over them and protect them.

References to Native peoples as “evil” and “ill-fated” captured the genuine attitude of Jackson toward First Americans and his policies while in office. References to so-called “paternal” care were just treacle to mask racial conquest. Jackson’s near-pathological goal to seize Native lands was meant to enrich himself and the sprawling white enslaver class of which he was a part.

Charles C. Mann’s research indicates that that there were probably more people living in the Americas in 1491 then there were in Europe. The real history of the United States is not one of a “nation of immigrants,” Dunbar-Ortiz writes, but one of erasure and exclusion shaped by greed and white supremacy. For the millions of American people committed to justice and equality—not just those whose ancestors were butchered, enslaved, robbed, and left in unmarked graves like Lyncoya—the face that sneers out at them every day from their twenty-dollars bills is the vulgar embodiment of unfreedom, injustice, racial disunity, censorship, and death.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Clarence Lusane.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/15/andrew-jacksons-face-is-a-meme-for-white-supremacy/feed/ 0 379570 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/10/house-gop-refuses-to-denounce-white-supremacy-and-great-replacement-theory/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/10/house-gop-refuses-to-denounce-white-supremacy-and-great-replacement-theory/#respond Fri, 10 Mar 2023 16:01:26 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/republicans-white-supremacy