Uprooted Palestinians are at the heart of the conflict in the M.E Palestinians uprooted by force of arms. Yet faced immense difficulties have survived, kept alive their history and culture, passed keys of family homes in occupied Palestine from one generation to the next.
Canada’s pointless prime minister is a vacuous, self-aggrandising, borderline despot incapable of even keeping up the pretence he cares a jot about the people unfortunate enough to be governed by the privileged charlatan.
Just weeks post federal elections, the muppet PM of Canada, Justin Trudeau, has given up all pretense of being a serious politician and instead returned to his norm of idiocy, offensive gaffs, scandals, and increasing the authoritarianism Canadians have endured the past 18+ months (but which Trudeau and other leaders have flouted).
On September 30, the day of Canada’s newly-established National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, instead of himself abiding by the words of his (clearly-scripted and hollow) statement, Trudeau skipped off West to hit the waves and walk on the beach with his wife and kids.
The statement included Trudeau inviting Canadians, “to reflect on the painful and lasting impacts of residential schools in Canada, and to honour survivors, their families, and their communities,” and, “to remember the many children who never returned home.”
This he did by ignoring requests of Indigenous communities to visit, instead opting for family fun time in Tofino, a holiday town on Vancouver Island.
This is hardly surprising, given he is merely the face of the government of Canada, the same government which has paid lip service to caring about Indigenous peoples, but continues to allow many communities to boil contaminated water rather than solving the dangerous health issue.
Trudeau’s choice to go surfing on the very day of the first year of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, was, in my opinion, him revealing how little he cares for the issues he feigns concern over.
A week later, he donned his pretend-sincere face and uttered the empty words, “Travelling on the 30th was a mistake and I regret it.”
Nah. He doesn’t regret it, he regrets getting caught. Or as a survivor of the genocidal ‘residential school’ system said, “this just shows us survivors that he doesn’t actually want to meet with us. He’s just hoping that we will just disappear into the sunset.”
Last July I wrote of the sudden media attention regarding the horrific issue of the Canada-wide ‘residential schools’, where starvation, torture, and sexual, physical and mental abuse were rife.
In a follow up article, I cited an interview I conducted with Roland Chrisjohn, a PhD-educated clinical psychologist and head of the Native Studies department at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, who spoke of Canada’s long history of covering up the crimes against Indigenous children imprisoned in the ‘schools’.
Trudeau’s latest failure to show any semblance of genuine remorse over these crimes was noted in the backlash on social media, including in response to his virtue-signalling tweet after the fact.
From crass to crazy
More recently, Trudeau took to Twitter tweeting about “lighting candles to honour Indigenous women, girls,” and adding his own version of inclusivity, 2SLGBTQQIA, that left even the wokest confused, and many mocking his idiocy.
The 2SL of that Trudeauism apparently referred to ‘Two-spirit’, or “a person who identifies as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit and is used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe their sexual identity.”
Although Team Trudeau thought they were ahead of the woke game, he instead, once again, looked like an idiot in a suit pretending to be a leader. One whose Twitter settings should include parental guidance, for his own good.
Trudeau’s authoritarianism
While the PM might garner a tad of sympathy from charitably-minded people who perhaps, mistakenly, think the guy has his heart in the right place but keeps mucking up with his idiotic gaffes, many Canadians are rightly pissed off by his, and Canada’s, authoritarian streak over the past two years.
Ontario has had one of the longest and most brutal lockdowns in the world – though the tyranny in Australia has superseded that of Ontario.
Earlier this year, Canada decided to re-invent science and declare that natural immunity to Covid-19 isn’t acceptable, only the fast-tracked Big Pharma jabs, meaning that many Canadians, myself-included, cannot return to Canada.
In the leadup to the rushed election, Trudeau said unvaccinated citizens should be banned from planes, trains & buses, and called on the populace to shame and condemn the anti-vaxxers as a “danger.”
This week, Trudeau announced Canadians aged 12 and up will be forced to be jabbed in order to travel.
And Trudeau’s government will tighten the noose further, implementing prison-state rules about travel by the end of November: only fully vaccinated Canadians can travel.
This is unsurprising to those who have followed Canada’s not so subtle slide towards tyranny. Nor is it surprising after over a year of Covid-19-related psychological operations against the Canadian people, with the intent of “shaping and exploiting” information, discouraging civil disobedience, and boosting confidence in the government’s narratives on matters pandemic.
Although I believe that whoever the muppet leader of Canada is, the policies would largely be the same, the Trudeau brand is truly repugnant.
Canadians are doomed with years more fake, woke and authoritarian non-leadership, with no imminent solution in sight other than mass civil disobedience. But sadly, the combination of idiotic and distracting identity politics and the media fear mongering will ensure that this does not happen.
Absolutely brilliant article by Ian Jenkins, published at Off Guardian.
“George Monbiot is shocked.
But what has shocked George is not the rising tide of poverty and starvation in the world or the unprecedented transfer of wealth to a tiny number of oligarchs.
He is not shocked by the practical collapse of the rule of law or by the brutal actions of police officers in nations claiming to be liberal democracies.
It is possible that these things shock him as well, but if so, there is no sign of this in his recent article for the Guardian.
No. Monbiot is shocked by “leftwingers” being “lured” to the “far right” by “conspiracy theories” in the context of resistance to state measures in relation to Covid-19, including opposition to lockdowns, removal of basic civil rights, mass vaccination with experimental mRNA technology and the prospect of vaccine “passes” or even mandatory vaccination.
In employing these terms Monbiot’s article is a distillation of the familiar techniques used to attack dissenting voices on Covid during the past 18 months and for a considerably longer time on other issues such as climate change, Brexit and globalisation.
This form of attack –always in defence of dominant or mainstream narratives and the actions of governments and their corporate “partners” and always expressed in terms of “concern” – employs pejorative terms such as “far right”, “white supremacist” without defining them adequately or at all.
We are never asked to consider what we understand by the term “far right” or how the label “conspiracy theory” – itself a category with a fascinating back story and history for employment by state powers to attack critics and deflect legitimate questioning – is being used and no attempt is made to define where the line lies between legitimate questions and analysis and more fantastical or “extremist” explanations of events.
A detailed discussion of these terms goes beyond the remit of this response to Monbiot’s article – but it is worth noting that, as would be expected, they are not defined with any clarity by Monbiot.
[Eva’s note: This is precisely what this immoral shill did re matters Syria: Smeared those of us who took principled stances against the war on Syria, called us names “genocide deniers”, “conspiracy theorists”, etc…, and served the dominant narratives & their murderous agenda in Syria.]
However, regardless of what he means by these labels, his piece is so fundamentally based on logically fallacies and so scattergun in the way he employs them that it is sufficient to confront his claims on their own lack of coherence.
Monbiot opens his article with an anecdotal warning that acquaintances of his within the “countercultural movements where my sympathies lie” are “dropping like flies” from the deadly plague of Covid.
This opens of the question of how this assertion matches current data and whether Monbiot’s experience matches those of the public at large.
Whether this perception of sweeping pestilence is borne out by statistics or not, Monbiot states that this is not a general plague, visited randomly on all such acquaintances, but is one only affecting those with “anti-vax” beliefs.
These are the crazy folk advocating outlandish ideas like the benefits of “natural immunity” (which Monbiot places in scare quotes, presumably in case his readers might think that the human immune system was a real thing) or “denouncing vaccines and refusing to take the precautions that apply to lesser mortals”.
As a result of their sins against “the Science”, regardless of readily available statistics on the inefficacy of these “precautions”, some have been hospitalised Monbiot tells us – though where this is happening and due what underlying or operating causes is unclear.
It is worth noting at this point that Monbiot is at pains throughout this article to locate himself as part of a “counterculture” or “alternative scene” while devoting the entire piece to repeating mainstream narratives and attacking those who oppose them.
Quite how a Brasenose-educated mainstream journalist (whose previous “activism” earned him a visiting fellowship at Oxford’s Green College at the behest of a former UK ambassador to the UN) qualifies as a figure on the “alternative scene” is a question that could quite legitimately be asked.
Not content to bemoan that his “countercultural” acquaintances are putting their own lives at risk – Monbiot then accuses them of “actively threatening the lives of others”.
This shifts these non-complying leftists from a state of recklessness regarding their own health and into the realm of criminal intent.
This is a technique that anyone who has been questioning the mainstream Covid narrative will be familiar with – having spent 18 months being accused of wanting to kill grannies and murder the vulnerable: even in the face of mounting evidence that it is the state that has been engaged in the culling of these groups and which has certainly been responsible for their immiseration.
The thought process for this imputation of homicidal intent runs like this: masks, lockdowns and vaccines prevent transmission, transmission equals disease and disease equals death.
There is, of course, ample scientific evidence to question each stage of this chain of causation [see here], but Monbiot merely asserts each causal step as unassailable truth sufficient to impute murderous intent to all who fail to comply with the edicts of the biosecurity state.
It could be said in response that it would be possible to lay similar accusation of “threatening the lives of others” against those, like Monbiot himself, who advance the ideology of “net zero” – which would likely result in innumerable deaths from starvation and exposure to cold – but that would be to adopt the tactics of one’s opponent and as Marcus Aurelius put it – “the best revenge is not to be like your enemy”.
Having attributed murderous intent on those holding “anti-vax beliefs” Monbiot now casts his net wider to bemoan the passage of “conspiracy theories travelling smoothly from right to left”, including the claims of “white supremacists”, which he states the misguided children of the left are repeating without knowing their origin.
Monbiot does not trouble himself to identify the nature of these white supremacist claims before moving swiftly on to decry the tragic situation in which:
hippies who once sought to build communities [are] sharing the memes of extreme individualism […] spreading QAnon lies and muttering about a conspiracy against Donald Trump
And bemoan that:
the old boundaries have broken down, and the most unlikely people have become susceptible to rightwing extremism”.
There is no attempt to define what is meant by “rightwing extremism” at this point, with Monbiot finding it sufficient to present anecdotal evidence of muttering QAnon hippies – a group I must confess to have never encountered in the ranks of those opposing the Covid agenda, where the QAnon psyop is more likely to be mocked than embraced.
The reader is left none the wiser as to what “extreme individualism” means either. Maybe these “hippies” are inventing their own personal languages or choosing to live as hermits?
But despite the absence of any concrete examples that might act as a warning to the unwary, Monbiot is still concerned that this is a sign of something going “badly wrong in parts of the alternative scene”.
In fact, Monbiot is merely employing the fallacy of composition – the logical fallacy so beloved of many on the modern so-called “left”, in which an entire, highly diverse, group of people advancing versions of a particular idea can be represented by the most extreme individuals also advancing that idea.
Presumably what we are to believe here is that if a Qanon placard, hastily scrawled in crayon by some fringe nutter, is sighted at a protest or if some misguided basement-dweller comments on a Facebook thread then all attending the protest or commenting on the thread are of one mind with these outliers.
Such shoddy thinking has been the mainstay of those employing agents provocateur to discredit movements and campaigns in the past.
It is at this point – perhaps inevitably given the general adherence to Godwin’s Law amongst his milieu – that Monbiot, in an attempt to tie the ideas of these misguided counter-culturalists to the “far-right”, embarks on a rather woolly, cherry-picking and historically inaccurate identification of an “overlap” between “new age” and “far-right” ideas – specifically with Nazi ideology.
There has long been an overlap between certain new age and far-right ideas. The Nazis embraced astrology, pagan festivals, organic farming, forest conservation, ecological education and nature worship.
Monbiot draws attention to the Nazis’ embrace of “pagan festivals, organic farming, forest conservation, ecological education and nature worship”. But then seemingly not quite sure where he is going with this line of thought, and perhaps perceiving the possibility that as a “green” activist himself he is in danger of associating himself with Nazi ideology, he quickly regroups and states that the Nazis also…
promoted homeopathy and “natural healing”, and tended to resist vaccination.
At this point, Monbiot at least has the decency to point out that just because someone believes in natural medicine and ecology, they are not necessarily a Nazi, which is very good of him and is no doubt a comfort to many of his readers who would identify themselves as being part of the Green movement.
However, it is what Monbiot fails to say about the Nazis that is most telling.
After all, at the Nuremberg Trials, it was not homeopathic practitioners who stood trial for crimes against humanity, it was the allopathic doctors who had carried out medical experiments on the inmates of concentration camps.
And the Nuremberg Code did not set out prohibitions against “natural healing”, but rather against the administration of experimental pharmaceutical products to individuals without their informed consent.
Monbiot also fails to address the Nazi belief in population reduction as central to their views of ecology – especially the targeted removal of those deemed to be inferior and whose presence within the borders of the Third Reich was routinely represented as that of vectors of infection, an unclean influence endangering the health of the Good Germans.
It would not be difficult to find echoes of this Malthusian and eugenicist philosophy today – but Monbiot fails to do so.
It is quite a feat to take the example of the centralised totalitarian state of the Third Reich, obsessed as it was with racial purity, racial “hygiene” and conformity through the process of Gleichschaltung (coordination of all arms of the state around central narratives), and associate it with those who have concerns about matters such as individual rights, the Rule of Law and constitutionality.
Is Monbiot unaware that Nazi ideology was diametrically opposed to these values?
Monbiot also points to a process by which European fascists sought to reinvent themselves in the 1960s and 70s by entering the ecological movement to promote ideas such as ethnic separatism or indigenous autonomy. Though he again fails to explain where, and by whom, these ideas are being raised in the current situation.
Monbiot frames the anti-vaccine movement as:
a highly effective channel for the penetration of far-right ideas into leftwing countercultures”.
He then goes on to provide possibly the most bizarre non-example of this that could be imagined – even in a piece as poorly constructed and logically fragile as this – citing the invitation of “anti-vaxxer”, and well-known liberal, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr to the Trump Whitehouse as his example.
For several years, anti-vax has straddled the green left and the far right. Trump flirted with it, at one point inviting the anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr to chair a “commission on vaccination safety and scientific integrity”.
One is left wondering at this point whether Monbiot even knows who RFK Jnr is – surely he does – and how on earth he thought this example would be the best one to present to a Guardianista audience (who still see Trump as the personification of right-wing evil), as evidence of right-wing “anti-vaxxers” influencing the left.
Monbiot’s article now dissolves into an ill-defined attack on ‘conspiracy theories’, which he claims are bolstered by Facebook directing vaccine hesitant people towards “far-right conspiracy” groups.
None of these alleged right-wing groups are named or their views described, with Monbiot being content, to:
a) make a link, without evidence, between “wellness” movements and antisemitism
b) mock the idea of bodily sovereignty (without defining or arguing this as a legal and/or ethical concept) and
c) make a vague derogatory reference to beliefs in a “shadowy cabal … trying to deprive us of autonomy”.
Here Monbiot blurs the concept of some form of biological purity with the legal idea of bodily sovereignty, a piece of linguistic and conceptual legerdemain that he employs again later in his conclusion.
To be fair, in his talk of “shadowy cabals” Monbiot doesn’t mention pan-dimensional lizards or the Illuminati – but he may have just run out space to include these.
He is also not clear on where there leads people criticising high-profile globalist organisations such as the World Economic Forum – who far from being “shadowy” publish all of their plans on a glossy website and upload talks and panel discussions from their glitzy annual meetings at Davos.
Of the censorship of legitimate opinion on Facebook, which will be far more familiar to most than being steered to a neo-Nazi group, Monbiot makes no mention.
Monbiot then surrenders any pretence at argument and reminds the reader that they “should never discount the role of sheer bloody idiocy” amongst critics of the biosecurity state and brings up the “Pureblood” meme.
There’s a temptation to overthink this, and we should never discount the role of sheer bloody idiocy. Some anti-vaxxers are now calling themselves “purebloods”, a term that should send a chill through anyone even vaguely acquainted with 20th-century history.
If you are unfamiliar with this fringe social media phenomena, it is one in which the unvaccinated borrow a term from Harry Potter to distinguish themselves from those who have received an mRNA injection. This is, without doubt, a distasteful and counterproductive meme – though its origin is difficult to establish – and provides an open goal for Monbiot (and others) to link those opposing vaccine mandates with the racial pseudoscience of the Nazis.
Ironically here Monbiot states that one cannot expect people this stupid to “detect the echo of the Nuremberg laws”, while being completely blind himself to the other striking contemporary echoes of these discriminatory laws.
It is clear that the current parallels with the Nuremberg Laws do not proceed from those using the “Pureblood” label, who do not seem in any way interested in discriminating against the vaccinated or in excluding them from normal participation in society or from accessing basic services.
In addition, though quick to raise the spectre of the Nuremberg Laws, it is worth observing that Monbiot appears have no interest whatsoever in the Nuremberg Code.
It is in the next section of his article that Monbiot comes closest to touching on something approaching truth, as he describes, without explicitly stating it to be the case, the breakdown in the relevance of a left/right divide experienced by so many over the past 18 months.
I believe this synthesis of left-alternative and rightwing cultures has been accelerated by despondency, confusion and betrayal […] there has been an almost perfect language swap. Parties that once belonged on the left talk about security and stability while those on the right talk of liberation and revolt.
He accurately describes the disillusionment of many who would have considered themselves to be on the ‘left’ as they watched “left-ish” political parties become acquiescent or even supportive of corporate power, while a libertarian right has arisen which rails against excessive corporate control, resulting in what he describes as a “perfect language swap” in which “parties that once belonged on the left talk about security and stability while those on the right talk of liberation and revolt”.
Putting aside the complete lack of evidence for this in the actions and language of the Conservative Party that governs his own country – there is still some truth to what Monbiot says here. In the past 18 months the most unquestioning and aggressive support for Covid policy has been found on the left, a position Monbiot proves as eager to defend as any other member of the “Lockdown Left” – as they have come to be known by many disappointed and outraged people of the left (myself included).
Monbiot then seeks to utilise necessity, the “tyrants plea” as Milton put it, to override the objections that some on the left may have to the criminal record of Big Pharma or their potential revulsion at the “coercive political control” of the responses to Covid.
Mass vaccination is “needed” and lockdown and other measures are “required to prevent Covid-19 spreading” – though ample data points to none of this being the case.
He then extends this free pass to tyranny to the fight against “climate breakdown” and the “collapse of biodiversity”, which he tells his reader have made “powerful agreements struck by governments” necessary – something which he admits can be hard to swallow for a left, particularly an environmental left, resistant to such power plays and instead focused on the “local and the homespun”.
Doubtless such cottage industry approaches to the environment do exist, but there is also a multi-billion dollar oligarch-funded environmental lobbying and PR industry which promotes the case for heavy-handed and society-changing ‘climate action’, and which has brought to the attention of the world such pre-fabricated prophets of doom as Greta Thunberg and funded astroturf movements such as Extinction Rebellion.
Notably Monbiot makes no mention of this whatsoever.
Feeling that he has made his case – though in fact no case has been made at all – Monbiot now arrives at his solutions, which he finds in the “hippie principle” of “balance”. (Though quite where this principle is expressed and who the particular “hippies” are Monbiot does not trouble himself to relate).
Monbiot is careful not to lose his “left” audience at this point, and emphasises that this “hippie principle” is not the ”compromised, submissive doctrine that calls itself centrism” as this leads to “extreme outcomes” such as the “Iraq war, endless economic growth and ecological disaster”.
Instead, he proposes the “balance between competing values in which true radicalism is to be found”.
Remarkably he locates this “balance” in “reason and warmth, empiricism and empathy, liberty and consideration” having demonstrated scant evidence of any of these values throughout the rest of his article.
Presumably it’s this ‘reason, warmth etc ‘ that leads to outcomes such as curtailment of civil liberties, mandatory vaccination and depopulation through pursuit of utopian goals such as zero carbon.
But it is Monbiot’s penultimate paragraph that contains his most dangerous piece of (un)reasoning. We might seek “simplicity” he regretfully opines, like some modern-day Mrs Merdle, but…
the human body, human society and the natural world are phenomenally complex and cannot be easily understood.”
All things which may be true, but which do not imply that we should not seek to understand them.
The conclusion that Monbiot draws from this is chilling:
Life is messy. Bodily and spiritual sovereignty are illusions.
The consequences of this statement cannot be overstressed. If bodily sovereignty is an illusion, where does the bar exist to the intervention of the state or any other coercive force on the individual?
There would, for instance, be no bar to rape, or to forced abortion, sterilisation or any other surgical or medical intervention on the human body.
After all, where there is no sovereignty there can be no consent.
It is to defend the idea of “bodily sovereignty” that the Nuremberg Code was drafted, and it was the discarding of this fundamental ethical concept that gave license to the experiments of Mengele.
Yet Monbiot does not pursue this idea to its logical conclusion, content to dismiss its potentially horrific consequences with a shallow and unsubstantiated statement: “there is no pure essence; we are all mudbloods”.
Here Monbiot, as he does earlier in his article, possibly wilfully, appears to confuse some biological idea of bodily purity (or absence of contamination), to which he attributes connotations of racial purity, with the legal/human rights notion of bodily sovereignty. What he means by “spiritual purity” is, again, anyone’s guess.
Monbiot concludes with a nakedly hypocritical recipe for “enlightenment” as coming from…
long and determined engagement with other people’s findings and other people’s ideas”.
Having displayed absolutely no interest in engaging in any such activities himself. “Self-realisation” he tells us, “requires constant self-questioning” – though he clearly deals in unchallengeable absolutes – and that
true freedom emerges from respect for others”.
Ignoring the inverse case that true tyranny comes from demonising, misrepresenting and disrespecting other people and their views, or by lotting together diverse individuals and ideas under ill-deserved labels such as “far-right” or “conspiracy theorist”.
It is hard to overstress how dangerous the ideas in Monbiot’s article are – a fact made worse by their seeming ubiquity in current mainstream publications and by the casual way they are introduced in relation to a range of issues to discredit legitimate questioning of dominant narratives.
The true danger we face comes not from those on the left being “seduced” by the ideas of the “far right” – a phenomena for which little evidence seems to exist. But rather that anyone would be seduced by the faux-left and superficially “spiritual” and “equitable” concepts offered by Monbiot and others.
Ideas which, when their ill-evidenced assumptions, spurious reasoning and hypocrisy are exposed, potentially light a path to horrendous destinations.”
Ramin Mazaheri (@RaminMazaheri2) is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.
As a daily reporter, columnist and author it seems I have developed a reputation for unparalleled bravery in exposing truths which the 1% want to keep hidden.
That is the only reason I can think of to explain why an anonymous whistleblower chose me to release this shocking internal memo from embattled Smith College.
The memo demands that their White workers, “admit to White privilege, and work on my so-called implicit bias as a condition of my continued employment”, to nick a phrase from a recently resigned employee of the school, Jodi Shaw.
A thorough recap of the Smith College saga (and the above quote) can be found by reading this article from The New York Times, “Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College”. To summarise: In 2018 an 18-year old Black female student at Smith College (which is part of the nation’s elite “Seven Sisters” historical women’s colleges) wrongly accused several White service workers of racism, “misgendering” and other threatening behaviors. The workers were later found innocent of all accusations, but they still lost their community standing, personal safety, privacy and socioeconomic well-being, and all without apology or compensation.
The case has remained in the American spotlight mainly because it serves as an example of fake-leftism run amok. In order to distinguish the real from the fake, I agreed to publish this leaked form which White Smith College employees must now sign in order to avoid another embarrassing incident.
—RM
From: Smith College Board of Trustees
To: White Smith College employees
Re: Work Sets You Free (sign or be fired)
We at Smith College are committed to providing these United States of America – excepting the states which swung for Donald Trump in either 2016 or 2020 – with the highest quality of education possible in order to create a more perfect and enlightened union.
This is why our annual tuition is set at $78,000 per year – in order to deny any sort of deplorable infiltration by the non-elite – be they financial, sexual, ethnic or ideological non-elite – into the upper echelon of American society.
Therefore I, the undersigned and guilty White defendant/employee, hereby agree with, consent to, and admit the following in order to continue my employment with Smith College:
By being White I benefit from “White privilege”.
Repeat and internalise the following:
“Whether I am a tenured professor who cannot be fired or a longtime janitor, as a White person we Whites are all the same. This is true in ideas, speech and – of course – looks.”
“I confirm that Whiteness is our only important socioeconomic characteristic. By being White we have undoubtedly reaped enormous financial and social benefits from being White.”
“Even if we are signing this pact from our single-wide trailer home while our neighbour is having yet another meth-induced psychotic episode, our Whiteness has always guaranteed prosperity and social success.”
“By being White I cannot possibly have an intelligent analysis of racial and social relations in the United States and/or beyond. I hereby swear to stop reading books as it will just confuse me further, due to my Whiteness.”
The White workers in the service sector who were falsely accused in this case by must additionally admit: “My experience being falsely accused, dismissed from work, socially harassed and/or unfairly shunned has no bearing on anything at all, nor should it, because these problems happened to a White person.”
By being White I have an implicit bias.
Among White people an implicit bias is universal. It includes but is not limited to: White supremacism, Nazism, the supremacy of Whites, race-based totalitarianism, White supremacy and the Confederacy.
Smith College is in Massachusetts, but any service sector worker whose ancestors died for the North in the Civil War must still admit their bias in favor the defeated Confederate States of America who killed their ancestor.
Being non-White means never having to say you are sorry.
The 18-year old Black student who accused our uppity hired help was not at all just another overdramatic, socially brutal and self-centered 18-year old for the following reason: she was Black.
Also: because she was a “she”. Smith College trustees fully support #MeToo’s “Believe all women” motto, yet we even more strongly support, “Believe all rich liberal arts college students”.
In fact, Smith College – a hallowed, 145-year American institution – has always had the same motto: “The customer is always right.” Thus we commend The New York Times for accurately reporting that we have lived up to that very demanding slogan: “We used to joke, don’t let a rich student report you, because if you do, you’re gone,” said Mark Patenaude, a janitor.” We proudly note that Smith College gives as many as six scholarships to non-rich students over every three-year period.
Smith College will immediately implement the following, as relayed by The New York Times: “…the creation of dormitories — as demanded by (the accusing student) and her A.C.L.U. lawyer — set aside for Black students and other students of color.” Smith College employees must ignore complaints from Smith College students who find a cross burning in front of their dorm room in order to expedite this “re-segregation” plan.
Being White means you are an obstacle to any and every “social justice mission”.
We hold such a truth to be self-evident in enlightened 21st century America, where – with the recent restoration of Joe Biden – a true leftism now reigns supreme. It is one which must be ruthlessly implemented in all non-American nations.
This is why we denounce The New York Times’ introduction of pernicious class warfare – which is not at all acceptable in “leftism with American characteristics” – and so very, very early in their article: By relaying the following intellectual concept proposed in the 61st paragraph of a 66-paragraph article (and from someone from the untouchable janitor class, no less!), all Smith College employees are now banned from talking to The New York Times.
“He (Patenaude) recalled going through one training session after another in race and intersectionality at Smith. He said it left workers cynical. (Editor’s note: such classes were not for teaching faculty but only for workers.) “I don’t know if I believe in white privilege,” he said. “I believe in money privilege.”
This worker will soon be fired for suggesting that economic class is even close to being as important as race, gender, sexuality, religion, ableness, handedness, hair color, height, weight, eye color, favourite sports team or shoe size in modern American society.
And to prove there is no “money privilege” at Smith College: White Smith College service sector workers who additionally pay the $78,000 yearly tuition are hereby exonerated from signing this agreement.
Your signature here _______________________________
As beneficiaries of the country’s imperialist system, supposedly progressive Americans have never truly sought radical change
Ever since I arrived in the United States to begin my university education in 1982, I have been baffled by arguments used by white (and some Black and Latino) American progressives, leftists and socialists to justify voting for Democratic presidential and congressional candidates.
Unlike mainstream liberal and conservative Americans, who believe their country is God’s gift to the world, the arguments of progressives often stress that Democrats are the “lesser evil” of the two contending parties.
The Democratic commitment to the rich was made amply clear with the major subsidies given to them by Clinton and Obama
Many agree that, in the words of Gore Vidal: “There is only one party in the United States, the Property party… and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt – until recently… and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”
Still, progressives always proceed according to the “lesser evil” theory. If I raised the question of US imperial policy, dubbed “foreign policy” in the US liberal mainstream media, I would be told by the more astute progressives that both parties were “equally imperialist”, and therefore their vote for the Democrats was justified by distinctions in their “domestic” policies.
Still, because the elected Democratic presidents after Ronald Reagan, namely Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, were as neoliberal as Reagan and proceeded with his agenda of mercilessly dismantling the US welfare state, I remained at a loss as to what magnitude of difference existed between the two parties.
The more class-conscious socialists assured me that they were under no illusions that either party defended the white poor, let alone the downtrodden, impoverished racial minorities of Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans. Indeed, they insisted that both parties defended the rich, with the Democrats also defending the middle class in a limited way, although that commitment had declined measurably since the Clinton years.
So what, I asked, are the essential benefits to middle-class Americans that you are defending as progressives, socialists and leftists? Their sober responses highlighted issues of healthcare, social security and women’s reproductive rights. I replied that all of the above had been weakened by the neoliberal Democrats.
Enriching the rich
Support for women’s right to abortion declined considerably when the Clinton administration declared that abortions should be “safe, legal and rare”. Obama acknowledged the arguments of pro-lifers and called for reducing the demand for abortion, while Joe Biden, until his recent campaign, was a regular supporter of the 1976 Hyde Amendment (he changed his position in 2019), which prohibits federal healthcare programmes from directly funding abortion procedures except to save the life of the woman, or if the pregnancy arises from incest or rape.
As for Social Security, a bipartisan effort began the war on it in a set of 1983 congressional amendments, which Reagan signed into law. Both Clinton and Obama attempted to cut Social Security and government health benefits to Americans during their respective administrations, but were prevented from doing so by the Monica Lewinsky scandal in Clinton’s case, and public opposition in Obama’s.
Biden and former President Barack Obama have been described as a ‘lesser evil’ (AFP)
As for health services, attempts to offer universal healthcare to all Americans were obstructed by Clinton and later Obama, who adopted a Republican plan to subsidise private, for-profit health insurance companies, rebranded as “Obamacare”, and who paved the way for the horror that Americans found themselves in with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. The US empire is falling apart. But things can always get worseOscar RickettRead More »
While President Donald Trump also proposed cutting health benefits, which he did not do, anti-Trump propagandists accused him of proposing to cut Social Security, which he never did.
What about the Democratic policies of enriching the rich? Yet again, the party’s commitment to the rich was made amply clear with the major subsidies given to them by Clinton and Obama. The latter subsidised them to the tune of $350bn in his bailout of the banks at the expense of middle-class homeowners whose houses were foreclosed upon. Obama did not hold Wall Street firms accountable for the economic meltdown, which followed Clinton’s 1999 repeal of New Deal-era banking regulations, but rewarded them instead.
Ideological blindness
So what justifies progressive, leftist and socialist Americans voting for the Democrats as the “lesser evil”? Is it ideological blindness, or attachment to the cosmetic political language of Democratic politicians, whose actions might have been worse than Trump’s, but whose style of delivery tends to be “kinder and gentler”?
Why did the policies of Clinton, which transformed the criminal justice system in 1994 to expand the mass incarceration of African Americans, not cause a public outcry among liberals? Indeed, it was none other than Biden who helped to write the crime bill – the same Biden who opposed the racial integration of schools in Delaware back in the 1970s. And what about Kamala Harris, the grand incarcerator, who may succeed Biden in the 2024 election, assuming he does not step down due to ill health before then?America Last: Coming to terms with the new world orderRead More »
Why did Obama’s deportation of millions of “illegal” immigrants not garner the kind of popular opposition that Trump’s policy, which is a mere continuation of Obama’s atrocities, has encountered? While the American Civil Liberties Union challenged Obama in the courts, such legal opposition never translated into a public outcry against the “Deporter-in-Chief”.
Why was there no outrage over the fact that it was only in the last few months of Obama’s eight-year term that his Justice Department finally prosecuted one lone white cop for the racist murder of an African American?
In four years, Trump’s Justice Department did not prosecute a single white killer-cop, but this was a continuation of Obama’s practices. Yes, Obama’s Justice Department pursued “pattern of practice” investigations against police departments, which Trump discontinued – but that is hardly a major achievement on Obama’s part.
Hypocrisy and propaganda
And, yes, the so-called “Muslim ban” – yet another of Trump’s racist policies against some Muslim-majority countries – which people forget was based on a list of countries prepared by none other than Obama.
A legitimate feeling of horror was expressed on account of the 13 federal executions of convicted criminals carried out by the Trump administration in recent months, but these were never compared with the thousands of people that Obama killed by checking targets off his weekly drone kill list. Does it not matter to US progressives and leftists that unlike his Democratic predecessors, Trump, while continuing some of the subcontracted wars that Obama started – and presiding over a rise in civilian deaths as a result of US actions – did not launch a single new all-out war on some hapless country?
There is no such thing as American ‘foreign’ policy when US power controls the entire globe, making foreign policy ‘domestic’ policy
Could all these people who voted for Biden (slightly more than half of those who voted) – especially the benighted, white liberal intelligentsia – not know that many of the things they complained about during Trump’s rule were in fact done by their own beloved liberal presidents?
Most of them know, and their campaign against Trump was nothing but hypocrisy for the sake of propaganda, so that the poor and downtrodden would believe that Trump was evil while Obama, Clinton, Biden and Harris were good – or at least, the “lesser evil”.
Complicit in imperial crimes
In my conversations with progressive, leftist and socialist Americans over the decades, I have tried to point out that the US is not just the “leader” of the world, as asserted by liberal and conservative Americans equally committed to US jingoism, but that the US has been since 1991 the primary ruler of the world.
I explain to them that as US citizens, they are the only people on Earth who have the right to vote for a government that rules the entire globe, and that they are thus complicit in American imperial crimes when they decide, based on some illusory domestic agenda of the “lesser evil”, to vote for a government that would launch wars and kill hundreds of thousands of people. I add that there is no such thing as American “foreign” policy when US power controls the entire globe, making foreign policy “domestic” policy.
Iranians burn a US flag during a rally in Tehran on 12 April 2019 (AFP)
Like their liberal and conservative “patriotic” and imperialist compatriots, many progressive and socialist Americans are not moved by such arguments. Indeed, they enjoin poor white Americans (“the deplorables” as former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called them), along with downtrodden Black, Latino and Native American communities to join them in celebrating the Biden victory.
Why do they expect these Americans to celebrate with them, let alone the rest of the Third World – where millions have been killed by US firepower and covert operations since 1945, in wars launched by both Democratic and Republican leaders – when they know the US will probably initiate more wars against them? The reason is that these “progressive” and leftist Americans, like their liberal and conservative compatriots, are beneficiaries of the racist, classist and imperialist US system, which has always prevented them from seeking any real radical change.
The most they are willing to do is vote for a leftist imperialist Democrat, such as Bernie Sanders – who, like them, commits to changing very little, yet presumably also represents “the lesser evil”.
Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, Desiring Arabs, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated to a dozen languages.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Deal is always nigh
-
The fucking ‘Canadian’ Jews are going apeshit about this article about
discrimination - btw, what do you call discrimination based on the fact the
person d...
Report on Beth Israel vigil 07-04-26
-
*1A Rights under combined attack from local government plus media*
Ann Arbor City Council is at it again. Right before the long 4th of July
weekend, they ...
-
Hello all,
It is with great sadness that I share with you the passing of our beloved
sister, Mother, and Grandmother, the individual that you all knew ...
Best Horror Podcast
-
Best Horror Podcast Introduction: Horror podcasts […]
The post Best Horror Podcast appeared first on Copper Shock Horror Podcast.
Ikhras Endorses Muntadhar Al-Zaidi
-
“Oh parties of banditry and sectarianism and corruption, we have come and
our goal is to destroy you.” Ikhras formally endorses Muntadhar al-Zaidi,
Iraqi j...
Prince Charles: Foreign Jews behind bloodshed in ME
-
In May, 2017, British Crown Prince Charles declined an invitation from
Zionist entity’s president Reuven Rivlin‘s to attend the 100th anniversary
of the no...
Palestinian Women – One for All, All for One
-
Honouring All Palestinian Women by Honouring Three: Hanin Zoabi, Ahed
Tamimi, Samah Sabawi Vacy Vlazna “Palestinian women have always stood side
by side ...
US’s Saudi Oil Deal from Win-Win to Mega-Lose
-
By F. William Engdahl Who would’ve thought it would come to this? Certainly
not the Obama Administration, and their brilliant geo-political think-tank
neo-...
-
*Mordechai Vanunu wins human rights prize of Brazilian Press Association *
* http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/features/updates/7038-mordechai...
Abdul Aziz Rantissi:
"My ultimate wish, my God, is to attain martyrdom,"...God granted him his wish on April 17, 2004, at the hands of Israeli assassins.
