Posted on August 17, 2017
America is extremely divided right now, but whose fault is it? Does the blame lie with the alt-right and alt-left protesters punching and clubbing each other in the streets, or does the fault possibly lie elsewhere?
Below are a couple of items–one is a video featuring an interview with former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney that was posted back in April of this year; the other is an article posted just a couple of days ago by Gilad Atzmon and commenting on last weekend’s events in Charlottesville. Both–Atzmon andMcKinney–offer essentially a very similar view: that the destructive societal divisions we are seeing now have been deliberately engineered.
McKinney shares some quite interesting and worthwhile observations on 9/11 as well as the US deep state, but my main reason for posting this video pertains to her reflections on the necessity of finding common ground with one’s ideological opponents. Dialog, she says, is everything–and in that regard she relates a story about her years of service in the Georgia State Legislature, where she served with white conservatives. This was in the 1980s, and she recalls a debate going on at the time over the Georgia state flag–which in those days incorporated an image of the Confederate flag into its fabric.
Legislative debates on the flag were held, in the course of which McKinney learned a valuable lesson: that whites are not the enemy. And that even in the case of white conservatives who were in favor of keeping the Confederate markings on the state flag, it was possible, through dialog, to achieve understanding.
And in 2008, when she was running for president on the Green Party ticket, a similar lesson hit home to her–at a town hall meeting in Oklahoma that turned into a remarkable confab between blacks and whites in attendance. “Through the process of dialog we were actually able to reach each other; we were actually able to communicate with each other,” she comments. And then she goes on to utter the words which I have used as the title to this post: “Divide and rule is a mechanism of repression.”
A little background here is worth mentioning. The Durban Conference on Racism McKinney talks about took place in 2001, right before 9/11. Israel and the US got up and angrily stalked out of the conference after a measure was introduced equating Zionism with racism. I recall it quite well. It was big news at the time, although the furor over the measure was quickly swept out of the news by the events of 9/11, which occurred just three days after the conference ended.
“I didn’t know what a Zionist was when I first got elected to Congress,” McKinney states.
It’s interesting that all the social justice warriors who have gotten themselves so worked up over perceived white supremacism seem to have no complaints with our annual gifting of billions of dollars to a racist apartheid state which has Jews-only settlements and Jews-only roads.
In the overall scheme of things, what would you say is of greater detriment–a few statues in a few city parks here and there…or an ongoing occupation which results in deaths, home destruction, and which has robbed an entire people of their land? How is it the alt-left hasn’t protested this? How is it their entire focus of attention has been deflected from Palestine to the spectacle of a small number of moonstruck misfits showing up at a protest wearing Ku Klux Klan robes?
“I didn’t know what a Zionist was when I first got elected to Congress.”
No, but she quickly found out.
As McKinney relates, she was a member of Congress when the 9/11 attacks occurred, and she offers some interesting information on certain things she personally observed in Washington at the time. One of these was a set of “talking points” members were given on how to respond to the attacks in interviews with the media. Who drew up these talking points and distributed them? We don’t know.
She also discusses a “joint congressional briefing” she attended. Top Pentagon brass, as she tells it, came to Capitol Hill to brief members of both houses on the attacks, and the meeting had specifically been designated for Congress members only. But just as the session was getting under way, a freshman House member commented on the curious presence of a group of people who were not members of either the House or the Senate. The people in question, as it turns out, were guests of Tom Lantos, a Jewish congressional representative from California, and McKinney believes now that they were Mossad agents.
The former congresswoman’s comments on the deep state are also quite instructive. The deep state, as she defines it, is comprised of a group of people who are able to command and utilize the powers of the state for their own interests. “After 12 years in Congress I came to know the names of many of these people who were using the apparatus of the state for their personal gain.”
Do “white supremacists” control the Federal Reserve? Do they own the media? Doubtless there are those on the alt-left convinced this is the case. Just as there are those in the alt-right convinced the media are controlled by “liberals.” Both sides are barking at straw men.
The media and the Federal Reserve (two very key components to the deep state, I would contend) are controlled by an extremely small group of people who, as McKinney puts it, are “using the apparatus of the state for their personal gain.” They are not “liberals.” They are not “white supremacists.” They are overlords who have learned that “divide and rule is a mechanism of repression.”
By the way, the year 2001 was pivotal in one other respect. In addition to the 9/11 attacks and the Durban conference, 2001 was also the year the Georgia State Legislature voted to change its flag. Below is the Georgia state flag today. This is what is achieved through dialog and understanding:
Watching the alt-left and alt-right protestors punching, pounding, and pepper spraying each other reminds me of nothing so much as a cloud of gnats swarming and colliding aimlessly with each other in midair. I suspect there are those in the deep state who got a huge chuckle out of the events in Charlottesville.
The media deceptions have been like a battering ram, a series of punches in the face, the pain from which has wracked through the entire body politic. Trump as much as anyone else has fallen prey to these deceptions–Trump, who evidently believes the media are spreading fake news when they report on his presidency but somehow must be telling the truth on everything else, including chemical weapons attacks in Syria.
In the article below, author and jazz saxophonist extraordinaire Gilad Atzmon discusses the destructive impact that identity politics is having on western societies, particularly here in America. Identity politics–the tendency of people to identify according to their gender, sex orientation, skin color, etc., rather than as working class people in general–is a major part of the problem. It is a problem that has been deliberately embroidered and stitched into the collective consciousness to the extent that people now see themselves as fighting a war on behalf of their particular group–something which of course eliminates the possibility of wider unity. As Atzmon puts it, “ID politics is a very dangerous political game,” one that is “designed to pull people apart.”
The hatreds are manifest. They are a dark presence in the American soul, and the sort of dialog that served McKinney so well in the Georgia Legislature seems nowhere to be found these days. I’m reminded of a passage from the first letter of John:
Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness; he does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded him. [ I John 1:9-11]
The remedy is clear, says Atzmon. We have to break away from identity politics. And he also issues a call for “a radical spiritual, ideological and metaphysical transition.” Indeed, such a transition is much to be desired, but until it catches on and sweeps the country, Americans will continue to walk blindly in the darkness.
Being in Virginia in Time
By Gilad Atzmon
In my recent book Being in Time – a Post Political Manifesto, I pointed out that the West and America in particular have been led into a disastrous Identity (ID) clash. This week in Virginia we saw a glimpse of it.
In the book I argue that the transition from traditional Left ideology into New Left politics can be understood as the aggressive advocacy of sectarian and divisive ideologies. While the old Left made an effort to unite us all: gays, blacks, Jews or Whites into a political struggle against capital, the New Left has managed to divide us into ID sectors. We are trained to speak ‘as a…’: ‘as a Jew,’ ‘as a black,’ ‘as a Lesbian.’ The new left has taught us to identify with our biology, with our gender, sex orientation and our skin colour, as long as it isn’t ‘White’ of course.
In Being in Time, I noted that it was question of time before White people would also decide to identify with their biology. And this is exactly what we saw in Virginia last weekend.
Tragically, ID politics is a very dangerous political game. It is designed to pull people apart. It is there to introduce conflict and division. ID politics doesn’t offer a harmonious vision of society as a whole. Quite the opposite, it leads to an increasingly fractured social reality. Take, for instance, the continuous evolution of the LGBT group. It is constantly expanding to include more and more sectarian sexually oriented social subgroupings (LGBTQ, LGBTQAI and even LGBTQIAP ).
In the New Left social reality, we, the people are shoved into ID ghettos that are defined by our biology: skin colour, sexual orientation, the Jewish mother, etc.
Instead of what we need to do: fight together against big money, the bankers, the megacorporations, we fight each other, we learn to hate each other. We even drive our cars over each other.
I am opposed to all forms of ID politics, whether it is White, Black, Jewish, Gender or sex oriented. But, obviously if Jews, Gays and others are entitled to identify with their ‘biology’, white people are entitled to do the same. I think that universalism is what we used to call it when we still cared about intellectual integrity.
The problem created by ID politics is extremely grave.
ID politics doesn’t offer a prospect of peace and harmony. Within the context of ID politics, we cannot envisage a peaceful resolution of the current ID clash. Can anyone foresee the LGBT community embracing KKK activists into their notion of ‘diverse society?’ The same can be said about the KKK, are they going to open their gates to cultural Marxists?
ID politics equals ID clash, an irreconcilable conflict with no end, the complete destruction of American and, to a certain extent, Western civilisation. This may explain why George Soros and his open society are invested in this battle. As long as the working people are fighting each other, no one bothers to challenge the root cause of our current dystopia, namely the banks, global capitalism, wall street, Mammonism and so on.
The remedy is clear. America and the West must, at once, break away from all forms of ID politics. Instead of celebrating that which separates us, we must seek what unites and makes us into one people. I am advocating a radical spiritual, ideological and metaphysical transition. Whether or not we like to admit it, these moments of unity are often invoked by waves of patriotism, nationalism and religious figures. But they could also be inspired by the spirit of justice, equality compassion and love. Neither the New Left or the Alt Right offers any of the above. They are equally invested in Identitarian ideologies. The electoral success of Trump, Corbyn and even Sanders or Le Pen points at a general human fatigue. Readiness for change is in the air.
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Click here to read an excerpt from Being in Time.
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