Monday, May 11, 2015

Savant's words on Politics, Baltimore, Etc.





It is commonplace for someone to start talking about "black crime" whenever the issue of racism or police brutality against Africans Americans is raised. Mainly this is a deflection. But actually, police brutality and crime are related; though not in the way reactionaries imagine. The fratricidal activities in oppressed communities are actually the dysfunctional reactions to oppression itself. Oppression breeds dysfunction (which is why you also find some much of the same problems in poor white and Latino communities.) Moreover, the police are the armed enforcers of the oppressive power structure of racism and economic exploitation--whic h is one of the reasons that talk about good vs bad cops is largely irrelevant. Moreover, every kid in the ghettoes knows about the criminality of the police themselves. For examples, open air drug markets--unimagina ble in affluent white communities--opera te within full view of the cops in the ghetto; and everyone KNOWS it. Hence the one of the reasons (aside from racism and brutality) for the widespread contempt in the hood for the police. Actually, the issue is justice; and the only other side is injustice. The system of injustice, of structural racism and economic exploitation and dispossession, is the roots both of crime and police terror. Moreover, history has shown that whenever there is a high level of social activism, of progressive and revolutionary struggle, crime tends to drop. The black cirme rate dropped 60% during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In sections of NYC where the Black Panthers and similar groups exerted great influence, prostitution and dope peddling tended to dry up as youth were engaged in liberatory struggle. I PERSONALLY observed this as a youngster in the neighborhood in East Baltimore (an area similar to the one in which Freddy gray lived). When the Black Panthers and others moved into the area where we lived and began to form educational programs, clinics, breakfast for children, and community patrols of police (which were also quite effective against dope dealers and pimps) the neighborhood became safer for us. As for most black leaders ---opportunistic poseurs of the black bourgeoisie--they can't effectively address issues of crime, poverty, police brutality or anything else because they're not committed to any liberation struggle to end oppression. They mainly about furthering their class interests. And like Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Barack Obama who denounced our kids as "criminals " and "hugs" (but were not so denunciatory of the fascist pig cops, or the predatory corporate elite which created the social misery we see in the ghetto and elsewhere), we see that when their own class interests are threatened by the masses of Black folk, they are just as contemptuous of the people as the most rabid white racist. No, the entire police system must be dismantled and replace by a force democratically controlled by the community itself, and we must curtail (eventually terminated) the powers of the racists and corporate predators whose piratical system created this crisis to begin with

-Savant

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The term reactionary fits a good number of people, as do terms such as racist, and so forth. As for the extraordinary affluence you think is available to the average person, you need to be better informed about the USA, and maybe even about Europe. Everywhere there is a growing divide between the haves and have nots; and this may be greater in America than in Europe. You say that the average person has more to protect than every before. Maybe there's something to that in Scandinavia. In America, people are generally poorer than they were one or two generation ago. More people have lost homes and jobs than ever since the Great Depression. The average standard of living is lower than it was 40--50 years ago. The old working class has been virtually destroyed by the electronic revolution in national and global capitalism. And the new proletariat is increasingly LESS like the working class that Marx and others envisioned and more like the ancient Roman proletariat, a class increasingly forced out of productive work altogether. What important about this is that WHITES in America have been impoverished to an extent unimaginable since the Depression. Blacks, on the other hand, have lived under Depression like conditions in this racist corporate regime even during periods of relative economic stability. Even former Pres. Clinton acknowledged that America could not tolerate the general level of poverty among whites to reach the depths it has in Black and Latino America. And as Noam Chomsky once noted, if the police and the judiciary were allowed to operate within white America as they do as a matter of course in black and brown America, the USA would already be regarded as a fascist state. The impoverishment of the American people, the global deprivation of people nearly everywhere by growing divide between haves and have nots, is generating a situation in which massive progressive movements are becoming possible and appealing again. Unfortunately, reactionary movements from Golden Dawn to America's Christian Right are also enabled by these tendencies. So fascism is still possible. It's partially already operable in Black communities. But something new is also happening, from Occupy to the Black Lives Matter Movement, to militant labor in Wisconsin. Interestingly, enough it was recently noted in one study that about 60% of American WHITES now believe that America has an unjust income system and class system. About 75% of Blacks believe the same. But this recognition is actually more RECENT among whites, whereas Blacks have perceived this system as unjust for as long as anyone have recorded our views of the matter. It may be that the rest of America is coming slowly but surely to our point of view. And it may not be a coincidence that the black lives matters movement is drawing so many whites, Latins, Asians, Jews, Arabs (in ferguson Jews and Palestinian Americans who hardly talk were marching together against police terror is a movement started by young black women) , East Indians and others have been marching with us against police, and that this may even be larger than the Occupy Movement.

-Savant

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There are still many whites who resent a "successful " Black man or woman, i.e.,, a black who has achieved what this materialistic society counts as success. Many whites resent Blacks who've achieved a high level of academic education, largely because such achievements run counter to the racist myth of Black intellectual inferiority. But if these formally educated Blacks are quiet, unassuming, conservative an conformist, then many whites find them more palatable (though perhaps still resenting their achievements). The educated Blacks whom at least racist whites fear are the INSURGENT intellectuals, thinkers, scholars and dissidents. A non-conformist, insurgent educated Black person is seen as a threat. Historically such persons (e.g. Paul Robeson, Dr. King, Angela Y. Davis, and others) have paid dearly for their dissent.

-Savant

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This ignorant rant by the racist buffoon Dony Brook inadvertently offers from the horses (or ass's) mouth some confirmation of the point I just made in my previous post. Not all academically educated Blacks are feared. If you're quiet, conservative and conformist reactionary whites may find you quite palatable. So they may offer their seal of approval to a Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson or Condie Rice. Only the dissident, insurgent Black thinkers, intellectuals are feared. Actually, even the conformist educated Black person may be resented for his accomplishments, but is still palatable because he or she conforms and tows the line. Your are feared if you DISSENT, which in part means if you THINK. If you're insurgent, then you're dangerous.

-Savant

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Desole. Mais beaucoups de l'histoire de Christianism est tres laid--Protestant et Catholique. Les massacres des Indian of North America by Protestants, and South American Indians by Catholics are crimes that will live in infamy. What Catholic and Protestant imperialists and racists have done to the Black peoples of Africa and the Americas are unspeakable abominations. And both Catholics and Protestants are guilty for their alliances with Fascism in Europe--the Catholics more so in Spain than in Germany. I've read that there was more Catholic than Protestant opposition to Hitler in Germany, but both Catholics and Protestants have been guilty of collaboration with that monstrous regime.


-Savant

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Probablement, le pope believed that the Mongols would destroy le christianisme as well as Islam. The Mongols did invade Europe, conquering Russia, and penetrating as deep as Poland and (I believe) eastern Germany. Neither Christendom nor Islam had seen such a relentless and seemingly invincible invader as the Mongols. However much Muslims and Christians despised each other they probably thought that: better the devil we know than the devil we don't know. Once the Mongols were gone the Abrahamic religions could return to slitting each others throats, and the throats of those in their own ranks whom they viewed as heretics and apostates. Espece d'idiots!!!

-Savant

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Interestingly enough, there is growing poverty in the suburbs and the ranks of the middle classes is being decimated by poverty. The Black middle clssses, even when making salaries comparable to their white contemporaries, are less likely (thanks to centuries of racial caste) to have the intergenerational accumulation of wealth or capital as do their white peers. They have thus lost even more ground financially than have white middle classes (which have also been damaged by economic crises). I grew up in the poverty of the ghettoes of East Baltimore, and I am now a university professor and homeowner. Aside from love, I inherited nothing from my family because they had nothing else. When my dad (formerly a rural laborer from North Carolina) was dying, he said to an old friend: "I came here with nothing and I'm gonna leave with nothing. But my son is a professor, and my little girl is a nurse. And they're doing OK. So, I guess it was worth it." I recall that when I think of all those white fellow students at Vanderbilt who talked about their trips to Cancun or the Riviera; or their complaints about daddy being too busy with his accumulated properties, professions and businesses. I've no capital or accumulated wealth inherited as do many of my white peers. Hence the racial-economic inequality continues even when our salary individual salary gaps begin to shrink. But I've better sense than to assume, as white racists have long done and many bourgeois and petty bourgeois blacks are increasingly doing, that the problems of the poor is mainly their own "misconduct " or pathologies of their own making. The problem lies deeply in a pathological social order, a racist and plutocratic social order committed to racial and economic inequality and oppression, and which has never been able to understand a simple humanistic truth---that a single human life is worth more than all the gold in Fort Knox.

-Savant

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There's no place in the world--or precious few places--in which the majority of people--black, white or other--are well educated members of society. And "productive " of what. Increasingly, capitalist societies hardly produce at all. Wall Street pirates getting wealth by wheeling and dealing, and the sector of the economy they dominate, has been displacing manufacturing where at least SOMETHING (occasionally something worthwhile) was actually produced. And what has any of this to do with how people speak? What we call "standard English" is mainly the standard of the professional, business and intellectual classes--not of the common people of any race or ethnicity.

-Savant

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Irrelevant consideration. What I said was that black men and women who disdain their own people need to be RE-EDUCATED. And it doesn't matter whether or not they're in college or posses degrees. One can be miseducated even in schools. Or you can be a conscious sister or brother who has been to school. Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Sojourner Truth, and numerous others who had little or no schooling had a higher level of consciousness than many sisters and brothers with degrees. If you disdain your own people that usually means you've been subject to a degree of psychological colonization to the point you're mentally warped. My initial blame goes to the System of structural racism and exploitation which created this alienation. But it is still the community's job to correct this. Also, the vast majority of Black men and women do not become college educated although nowadays most at least reach (and eventually complete) high school. It is the shape of consciousness that interests me. As for black men who hate black women (or vice versa) they need to be RADICALLY re-educated, probably with the aid of psychological counseling.

-Savant

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I COMMEND YOU I especially commend those young sisters and brothers who are standing together against injustice, against oppression, against militarized police with tanks in Ferguson, and against police terror in my hometown of Baltimore. I commend those of you who are committed to each other and to community. You are reminiscent of the spirit of Angela Davis and George Jackson of a previous generation. Angela to George: "I love YOU and I love MY PEOPLE." George, when asked what would he do if he saw 10 fascist pig cops about to attack Angela: "I would ATTACK all ten of them! And there may eleven people hurting, but you, Angela, would not be one of them." In reconstructing our community, in reconstructing community, we must reconstruct ourselves and our lives.

-Savant

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