A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Sixteen, Rewriting History

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About 53 minutes in, an unidentified commentator says "Black abolitionists are the first abolitionists. No one needed to tell enslaved people that 'You know what slavery is wrong, this is bad for you.' Like they knew that and they were the first to speak out about their grievances...and about the evils of this institution."

Presumably she's referring strictly to the US/colonies, and I don't know who the first abolitionists were. According to Google AI, and a tiny bit of research beyond that, Francis Daniel Pastorius, Benjamin Lay and Benjamin Rush, all White, were the first to organize protests and write abolitionist tracts.

Whatever the case may be, directionally this glib comment is dead wrong. There are multiple problems here, but to play the racebot game by racebot rules: neither here in the New World nor in the Old have Blacks been the driving force for abolitionism. Quite the opposite! The only friends slavery has left on this planet are Black. Africa is the only continent left where elected officials are willing to stand up publicly and in the halls of government and advocate for slavery. If we must divide the world into races, as the woman in the video does, then it is undeniable to say that the Black race has not been abolitionism's greatest friend, but its greatest enemy. White people are massively more responsible for its eradication from our world than Blacks. What this deluded woman claims is absurd!

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Fifteen, The Lexicon of Jim Snow Shibboleths, a Racebot Training Course

 Netflix 15       The Lexicon of Jim Snow Shibboleths, a Racebot Training Course     

About 50 minutes in we get a discussion of "White saviorism." In it the philanthropic efforts of White people are belittled. As images of Whites engaged in charity with Blacks appear on screen, Raquel Willis, described as an "author, activist, and media strategist," glibly states of White anti-racists, "If you are really doing something in a truly altruistic manner, you really don't have to use me up as a receipt." Apparently Willis cannot conceive that the Whites and Blacks in these photos became fond of each other and wished to commemorate the moment for the same reasons everyone takes photos. Such moments are frequently concocted for the political capital they may afford the Whites and/or Blacks involved, but, critically, she targets those who are engaged in genuine altruism for ridicule. 

As an anarchist, I despise this world of haves and have nots and the need for charity of any kind, however, one would think that those making personal sacrifices to alleviate suffering should be lauded, at least not mocked. Putting aside Willis' narcissism, does she really care about the Black people in those images? Really? Or are they political capital for her in the age of the Great White Bogeyman? Career boosters? Stage props? Means to an end? She's described as a media strategist, which means she's in the perception management business.

But enough of misanthropes, it's time for racebot vocabulary. If you want to go far in Jim Snow America, you must master the following.

1) White saviorism. The point of this one is to deny credit to any White person no matter how deserving they may be, and to subaltern Whites in political activism. 

When your whole Jim Snow line is based on the theory of White villainy and Black innocence--the Whites who purchased ten million slaves are evil, and the Blacks who kidnapped those ten million, yoked them, marched them to the coast, held them in "slave farms" and sold them to Whites, are innocent victims--what can you say about those Whites who act in an undeniably admirable way? When you have Adandozan of Dahomey on one hand and John Brown on the other, whatever is a erstwhile racebot to do? You suppress Adandozan--the whole myth of Black innocence goes up in smoke--and you lie and depict John Brown as a racist. White saviorism is a theoretical dodge, a prophylactic against honest inquiry, the kind that would demolish the House of Race.

My Blog Stats

I've gotten 22 hits so far today and only three from the US. 

Why does this is this so, and why does it gall me so?  

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Fourteen

 Netflix 14

About 49 minutes in, we hear that Black abolitionists were the "center of the movement," which is false in America and farcical in the global context. And from Lynae Vanee we learn that White abolitionists were "problematic." She complains that there were several White abolitionists who, while sincerely opposed to slavery, didn't believe in racial equality.

Indeed so, there were racists a century and a half ago, as there are now. In my experience with antira activism, and as someone whose work took them into daily contact with Black people, I can tell you that there are no shortage of Black racists, of Blacks who believe that they belong to a superior race. Yes, even here in the 21st century! In fact, it's common. Vanee herself may not be guilty, but the hypocrisy! Racism is a binary phenomenon. Making "documentaries" about White people in which no White person appears, and slandering White people for 90 minutes, with much of the calumny ranging from the meretricious to the fraudulent, creates racism where it doesn't already exist and fortifies it where it does. Stamped does the devil's work. The point of racism, its benefit to the ruling class which birthed it and perpetuates it, is mutual racial antagonism. It's aim is a racially divided, antagonistic work force. And in that effort, people like Vanee play a crucial role for the plutocracy. Unilateral racism doesn't work, it cannot. Stamped is a 90 minute, non-stop attack on a race. With respect to White people, it is entirely pejorative, there is throughout a tone of racial censure. Not a single word of respect or friendship is offered--for an entire race of people! Black virtue, White villainy. Jim Snow racism in a nutshell.

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Thirteen, a New Theory of Slavery

 Netflix 13
 

About 40 minutes in, Kendi: "White enslavers tried to cover up their sexual assaults of Black women."

This is more of the same nonsense, and racist nonsense. Did Black enslavers publicize their depravities? And, if it were legal to rape in the colonies/states, why would enslavers of any color try to conceal their sexual abuses if there were no legal consequences to be faced? Slavery, over time, became almost fully racialized, so in the end Black enslavers lost access to White enslaved/indentured women, but initially they had it, do Kendi and the other "experts" in Stamped believe that no Black slaver sexually assaulted White women? If they do they are racists imbeciles, if not there goes their thesis. We'll never know what they believe because Stamped isn't "a definitive history" by any means, and the thousands of American Black slavers and their sexual assaults remain cloaked in silence.

Kendi's comment is racist not only for omitting the Black rapist, but also because he paints all the White enslavers with the same brush. Anti-slavery sentiment is new in human history, and pro-slavery sentiment still exists. One need only look at how impossibly difficult it has been to eliminate the accursed practice in Africa. The latest anti-slavery legislation anywhere was passed in Mauritania only 17 years ago! Good people of all races owned and/or traded slaves. However incongruous that may sound, however challenging it may be to accept, it is nonetheless true, and there is an important lesson to be learned from it. Human beings are extremely suggestible, inordinately malleable. One can argue for the existence of a fixed, common, infrangible, human morality, but you are not going to find it in the pages of history books, certainly you won't encounter it in the African slave supermarkets of Quidah, Goree or Dahomey.

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Twelve, the Racial Aporia

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Lynae Vanee says "There are so many different ways in which Black women were violated that makes their experience as enslaved people different, and makes the scholarship surrounding their struggles different."

Here we come to the nub: how so? The labor and/or sexuality of Black female slaves were exploited, in what other ways were these women violated? And precisely how did it differ from the exploitation of non-Black female slaves? Presumably, she's referring specifically to New World slaves, but even in this limited case, what evidence does she have for this bizarre claim? If we broaden our scope and look at slavery throughout its history, her assertion becomes even harder to justify. Did they have their melanin harvested for transplant for the benefit of White beach-goers? Used in over-the-counter sun block lotions? What is she talking about?

Female slaves everywhere have been used for sex and labor, if there is some especial form of exploitation that Black female slaves have had to endure then she should at least identify it. That she doesn't feel the need is indicative.

There is a long history of Africans, including Black Africans, raiding coastal European nations for slaves. Attractive White women, particularly blondes and red-heads, were targeted as they would fetch a good price, their being in high demand as concubines. African elites, including Black African elites, would strip them naked to be gawked at by onlookers, and the more generous slave owners would pass them around for others to use as their whores. How did the sexual exploitation of Black women in the Americas differ in nature from that experienced by these White sex slaves in Africa? Do tell, Lynae Vanee, do tell.

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Eleven

 Netflix 11

About 35 minutes in, we hear a discussion of issues surrounding slavery which are central to the race-versus-class debate. It begins with a vilification of Thomas Jefferson.

Dr. Stephanie E Jones-Rogers asks, "You really want me to talk about Thomas Jefferson?...there are few people I despise more."

That is telling. "Despise" is an emotional word, so "Dr." Jones-Rogers abandons any pretense to scholarly objectivity, rather, she is going to tell us just how she feels. And that, of course, is of zero analytical value.

Kendi follows calling him "Thomas 'Contradiction' Jefferson." Then Lynae Vanee says that "Thomas Jefferson was full of shit."

These comments betray an immensity of superficiality. They are wholly negative in regard to a man who has many accomplishments to his credit. While I don't wish to valorize Jefferson, or to minimize his failures, here only his vices are discussed, and with no small amount of presentist hauteur and racial condescension. He does not get anything like a fair hearing in Stamped, he is subjected to ridicule by each and every commentator. Nothing good is said of him--nothing. No effort at balance is hinted let alone attempted. He is the Great White Bogeyman incarnate. Black womanhood has rendered its judgement, nothing more need be said. 

Stamped's depiction is not of a real human being, but a one-dimensional, racist stereotype, nor is it a scholarly examination of his zeitgeist and his relation to it. It's a hatchet job conducted by people who admittedly despise him. 

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Ten, Recap

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Since this review has grown so long, I'd like to recap the main topics.

In my youth, there were two great myths surrounding Africa and Africans. These existed in a time when The Great White Benefactor was the official, state-sponsored racism in America 

1) The myth of African backwardness. That is that Africans, on their own, could not progress beyond tribalism, that Black Africa was a land without a history, one which never produced any advanced civilizations.

I looked into this and learned that this was quite obviously, conspicuously false. 

2) The myth of Black innocence in the TAST, American slavery and attendant injustices. It was widely believed, and astonishingly still is, that the TAST was something Europe did to Africa, White people victimizing Blacks. The deception went that Europeans fanned out across Africa kidnapping millions of Black people.

As my research had shown me that African backwardness was a myth, that same research revealed that Black Africans, far from being innocent victims of the slave trade, were its indispensable perpetrators. Without massive African participation--they were the slave catchers and suppliers--the TAST does not occur.

The two myths create a capacious racial divide. African backwardness gives to Whites a belief in their intellectual superiority, their greater urbanity, and African innocence bestows upon Africans a claim to moral superiority and anoints them with the sanctity of faultless victimhood. Both foster enmity, and that is the plutocratic goal--mutual racial antagonism, a divided workforce.

What am I doing wrong? America, Why won't you Hear me?

Yesterday, 7 of my 57 hits came from the US. So far today it's 4 of 49. 

I am deeply flattered by my foreign visitors, but vexed by my inability to draw attention from Americans.

 Just about all of my American hits are people I know--probably.

What am I doing wrong? 

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Nine

 Netflix 9

At about 34 minutes in, an unidentified commentator, in reference to slavery, says "People want to erase American history as it truly was. White supremacy has been embedded in this country since its founding." While she narrates, we see images of some Founding Fathers and the number of slaves they owned. She describes American slavery and its history as filthy and as she does we see images of a dirty, neglected house front--folks, you can't make this shit up!

I have spent more time than I should wondering why such rhetoric as this appeals to people even when it is risibly false. The simplest answer is that the great majority of people don't think critically. Few who hear this postulate will take the basic step of evaluating its veracity, consider whether there actually are "people" who seek to suppress this history. And like all good propaganda it is vacuous and almost impossible to refute in its base iteration. There are about 8 billion people in this world, if you can find two who wish to erase this history then she is undeniably correct. However, directionally, it is nothing short of insane.

Most people don't think, they feel. If something resonates with them, pushes the right buttons, they will accept it without due contemplation. After the revolution in Russia, a group led by Lunacharsky, then Soviet head of education, tried to identify those buttons. They looked primarily at religious sentiment and tried to understand it with an eye towards channeling such spirit into socialist conviction. They became known as the God Builders, despite their atheism. In the church I was raised, that religious feeling was identified as the Holy Spirit. I early on rejected this interpretation, but I know that feeling. What this woman is saying induces, on a smaller scale, this same kind of cognitive preemption. 

Bakunin wrote: "People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, happy and free." Propaganda works in a similar way. The rudderless buffoonery offered by this commentator serves to stupefy, inoculate, provide some level of political comfort. Better a genial lie than an unpleasant truth. Lunacharsky never figured it out, and that's a shame.

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Eight

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About 24 minutes in, Jennifer L. Morgan tells us that "In the 18th century, European and American philosophers are arguing that Black people should only be working...are only good for brute labor, because the highest form of human expression is European and the lowest...African...that the only place where good art and higher thinking is happening is in Europe or among people of European descent. They are so accustomed to the stories they've been telling about Black people that they literally cannot imagine that a Black woman could produce art."

The "documentary" then proceeds, in a racist way of course, to tell the story of Phyllis Wheatley. [sp?] 

This is Jennifer L. Morgan's second bit of commentary, and she is wrong again.

But first, this is disgusting racism. Can you imagine had a White said anything so contemptuous of Black philosophers, so demeaning and dehumanizing, the kind of condemnation it would provoke? A key element of racism, I would argue a necessary one, is to reduce the targeted group to an undifferentiated mass. Without such, it's difficult if not impossible to essentialize human beings as Morgan has done. As should be clear by now, Stamped's purpose is not anti-racism. There is no person, White or not, who will counter Morgan's blanket racial defamation, and certainly there will be no discussion of what Black Africans were thinking in century 18. That would be honest inquiry, but that is not what Stamped is for. There is no balance, no real search for the truth. That is not its mission. It's purpose is to cast this history in an unapologetically racist, anti-White way, and no deception will be abandoned in the effort.

Why is it I Have so few Hits from the U.S.?

 Why is it I have so few Hits from the U.S.?

I am profoundly grateful to anyone who takes the time to read what I've written. Thank you.

However, only eight of my last 84 pageviews have been from my own country. The ratio is usually better than that, but it's always more from abroad. The Netflix series is getting hit pretty well--for my blog that is--but it's written primarily for an American audience. This weekend I got more hits each from Singapore, Vietnam, and Russia (thank you) than the US on a topic which hardly relates to those countries.

Why is that? 

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Seven, Ghetto Racism

Netflix part 7, Ghetto racism

As mentioned earlier, in the media offerings of contemporary race theorists, there's almost always a gratuitous nod to class conflict, and we get it about 19 minutes in: Kendi proclaims that "What Whiteness does is blind [Whites] to who the real robbers are." Then the screen fills with images of rich Whites.

And this from a man who received most of his funding for his CAR institute from the Rockefeller Foundation! Has he bitten the hand which feeds him? No, don't be silly, the assertion is quickly bent to the racial narrative, just the way the Foundation wants it. 

While Kendi's observation is correct, he's drawing a bogus color line, and an intrinsically racist one. Blacks are no less blind to this reality. In my experience, Blacks cling to their racial identity more ferociously than any other racial grouping and dismiss non-racial theories of social phenomena more readily. Blacks are--again, in my experience--less receptive to Kendi's class argument than are Whites--much less! The racist trope which Kendi endeavors to substantiate is that it is only Whites who have been fooled by racism, succumbed to it, whereas Blacks know better and/or are better. This belief that a given race has greater access to truth in any circumstance, but particularly in regard to interactions between races, is incontestably racist and vapid. However, it is common among Blacks, even among activists. A great many Blacks believe that they belong to a superior race. When put in these terms, it's almost always denied. Nevertheless, ghetto racism is quite real and reactionary.

It's an often insuperable problem when people of all races amass to take action against racism. I have met many  Black activists who believe they understand race by virtue of their Blackness and Whites do not, very simply, because they are White. One doesn't have to be a genius to see the problem presented by racist "anti-racists," particularly when they claim privilege based on their racial identity. And if you, dear reader, are at all surprised by this, then you have obviously not been engaged in antira activism. Many Blacks view race as their bailiwick, their fiefdom, their area of unique expertise. And efforts to disabuse them of this racist lunacy is often met with condescension. Black racism, like its White counterpart, plays a vital, indispensable role in the reproduction of American racism and global capitalism, neither could exist without their cooperation. Blacks hold up half the bourgeois sky.

What Kendi is propounding is the myth that American racism is unilateral, that it has penetrated and compromised only White minds and Blacks have been uncorrupted by racist ideas, have seen through them. Nothing could be farther from the truth. White and Black racisms are a matching set, they operate in a feedback loop. They are different, but mutually dependent. We are all affected by race. We all live in its vortex. Racepolitik is how the ruling class rules here in the land of the presumptive free. All of us in the US are racialized subjects, we are all are racially programmed. From birth, we are fitted to race like contour sheets to a mattress. And melanin affords no protection, neither does standpoint epistemology, and if you think they do then you have succumbed to racial ideology. You have not seen through it, you have fallen for it. The reality is racism is designed to affect everyone, and it does, much to the advantage and delight of Kendi's patrons. In order for racism to be defeated, Blacks need to recognize their racial programming and reject their supplementary role in American Racepolitik, just as Whites do. 

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Six, Special Edition, Janusz Walus and the Murder of Chris Hani

Netflix part 6 Janusz Walus and the Murder of Chris Hani.

I've gotten some push back on Part Five, and I would like to address some of it. However, this will be the second part of a review which doesn't deal directly with the its subject. Beyond that, I really don't have anything to add to the topic. Walus has been repatriated to Poland, and Derby-Lewis is dead. I'm responding here to the anger that some people feel about my insinuating ugly things about an icon like Nelson Mandela, and as to whether the defeat of apartheid in and of itself constitutes a victory for the people of SA and a triumph over racism. The central point of my review of Stamped is that racism has not been defeated in the US, only redesigned, and that Stamped is an example. In SA too, racism hasn't been defeated--not if political protest in the country whose working people are the most exploited in the world takes the form of protesting that a White artist sculpted a statue of a Black activist. It is farcical to say that race/race-ism/racialism/racism has been defeated. Class consciousness and struggle is what has been defeated! The working class has been defeated. And it was so by the old ploy of race. Many SAs put their faith in a political party which betrayed them mercilessly (I'll save my anarchist critique for another time) and were duped by race into believing that a Black government would treat them better than the White minority government. What they didn't understand--those that didn't--was that race is a ruse, a smokescreen, a canard, and that the racial composition of their government didn't really matter. Race never was what was driving the agenda, which only an idiot could gainsay now. The White and Black governments were capitalist governments, and that is what really matters and the reason they govern in the same lethally ruthless way.

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Five, Special Edition, The Political Economy of Race: South Africa

 Netflix, part 5 The Political Economy of Race: South Africa


Race-ism, that is the theorizing of race, the belief in race as a/the method of conceptualizing history, now dominates Left discourse in the US to a degree that 50 years ago would not have seemed possible. So complete is the victory of the race-uber-alles lobby that the mere introduction of the term "class conflict" is enough to draw suspicion and, frequently, condemnation (if one is White. If not, you may get a respectful hearing).

In practical terms, so effective has the race template been in controlling the American proletariat, in suppressing Black and White workers both--if dissimilarly and  disproportionally--that the methodology is being put into practice elsewhere. In the UK, Blacks were imported in large numbers after WW2 ostensibly due to a labor shortage occasioned by the war. One does not have to dig too deeply to see that there was no such shortage. In fact, in the few years between the war and mass Black immigration, production had normalized and nearly returned to prewar levels. It's as though they were waiting for the economy to re-stabilize before admitting the Black migrants.  

I believe that with the unexpected survival of the UK's nominal ally, the USSR, the British bourgeoisie designed to recreate the American model of a racially tiered, mutually antagonistic proletariat to avert precisely that sort of labor agitation as occurred after WW1. The UK had long had the Irish to abuse, but they look too much like Brits. For the purpose of American-style, dissimulative racialization, the darker peoples offer an advantage over the hopelessly melanin-poor Irish--should anyone lose the plot.

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Four

 [Note: Some of you may read this before I have a chance to learn the name of the woman in question. I prefer to take the vid in its chronological order as it's less tedious. I will return to this page and identify the woman in due course.

Her name is Brittany Packnett Cunningham]

Part three ended with my rebuttal of Kendi's racist depiction of White ex-unfree betraying their former Black comrades. On screen under Kendi's narration are images of Whites and Blacks cooperating in struggle. Then we see a White hand reaching for the White unfree and literally pulling him up out of indenture (you can't make this shit up) and making him a slave owner. And then we see the new White slave-owner enslaving his former Black brother in arms.

One could be forgiven for assuming that this signaled the end of White unfreedom and Black ownership of the unfree, but one would be incorrect in both cases. The makers of Stamped have no conscience. There's nothing honest or fair in this documentary. It is a piece of propaganda designed to create and perpetuate mutual racial antagonism. When have you ever seen a documentary about the huge slave states of W. Africa? The world's largest slave owners were Black. The largest, the all-time great, the slave-owning GOAT, is Mansa Musa. He used to give them away as gifts. "Welcome to my kingdom, have a few slaves." When he went on pilgrimage to Mecca, it is said he gave away thousands of slaves. 

An honest look at African slavery would put American slavery in perspective, and might make Blacks and Whites look at each other differently. However, that is precisely what pseudo-documentaries like Stamped are designed to prevent.

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Three

Ibram X. Kendi tells us that the Portuguese historian, Gomes Zurara, invented Blackness. That is incorrect, which brings us to another great myth. In his book Kendi goes into more detail as to why Zurara should be considered the first anti-Black racist as the latter was the first to issue a defense of slavery based on the myth of Black inferiority. There are a couple of problems.

In the modern world we are outraged by slavery, but that is a recent development, one occasioned by the industrial revolution. Slavery doesn't work in an industrial setting--it was tried. In order to drive people into "manufactories" in the early days of capitalism traditional ways for commoners to sustain themselves had to be eliminated, so fields were enclosed, food-rich swamps drained, common lands privatized, and a series of prohibitive laws enacted. The powers that should not have been created precarity, now you needed something called a "job." You had to sell your labor for a wage. This is what drove people into factories and initially Europeans across the sea to the New World. 

There is copious literature on this subject, for our purpose it suffices to say that our now heart-felt, liberal ideas evolved in parallel with the industrial revolution, capitalism and economic liberalism. The people of Europe and Africa aren't better people, more human, than they were 500 years ago. The means of production changed, society changed, and that spawned new values.

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part Two

E. P. Thompson said something to the effect that in order to understand history, we must first liberate it from the condescension of posterity. No such rescue is attempted in Netflix' Stamped from the Beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. It is 90, aggrieved minutes of presentist hauteur, directed at an undifferentiated race, existing in a semi-mythical past. Where, of where, to begin?

As I argued in part one, identity politics is a counter-insurgency strategy of the ruling class, it's prevarication, obscurantism. It is racism and fascism in disguise, the same old ideas which defeated the workers' movement a century ago carefully repackaged and presented anew. The point is to sow divisions among the working class so as to keep us ever at war amongst ourselves. Stamped serves this propagandistic purpose.

In the US, race is not only a prophylactic, it has become a epistemic synonym for oppression. Race has ceased merely to identify a particular set of somatic characteristics and/or the different social relations which can be constructed upon them, but has been inscribed with an almost preternatural power to configure aspects of society beyond that which can readily be assumed to fall within its ambit. Just about all now agree that race is a reification, but a new class of racemongers, like the fascists of old, insist that race is a transhistorical phenomenon that has an agency in human affairs greater than any other. Not a few believe that capitalism devolved from racial antagonism, was created by it, and could not survive without the social reproduction of these antipathies. One can only wonder how slavery can exist without racism--and nobody is audacious enough to argue that it can't, not yet anyway--then how is it you can't have capitalism without it. This is the kind of theoretical conundrum which doesn't get broached in Stamped, let alone resolved. 

A Review of Netflix' Hideous "Stamped from the beginning: a Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," Part One

It has been my sorry lot, in my dotage, to try to alert the Left to the counterrevolutionary dangers of identity politics. It is, I have long argued, racism and fascism in disguise. As I put it elsewhere:


"With the defeat of the Axis troops, the liminal surface of fascism withdrew, but the class which commissioned them remains in place--different window dressing, same shopkeepers. And the basis of fascist ideology, race theory, has not only survived but proliferated. That central fascist trope of the fixed, pertinacious agency and power of race in history--that people act as they do because of their racial identity, and the world is as it is as a result--receives more interest and less condemnation than ever before. Fascism and CRT serve the same political purpose, occupy the same reactionary space on the political spectrum. Both adamantly reject class antagonism as the origin and cause of racism, and each prioritizes race to such a degree that it dominates not only political discourse but social parlance as well. CRT is the new enemy of the working class." 

What to Make of the Crusades

A refreshingly honest and objective look at the Crusades, quite uncommon these days. Compare this to Geraldine Heng's hyper-tendentious, error-dense account found in her hideous, award-winning book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. I reviewed that book, although I didn't deal with the Crusades. Read it here.

Is Marxism Euro-centric?

This is a comment I posted at this youtube page:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPvSaIVgMyg

 Revisiting this page as the comment I made here in response Sithlordprince I also posted on my blog and it has received alotta hits--at least for my humble blog. I'd like to make one other point I didn't in the earlier comment.

Of all the nonsense said about Marxism the worst is that it is Euro-centric. Accusing Marx of being Euro-centric is like accusing a marine biologist of being hydro-centric, it's utterly ridiculous. Don't such critics read Marx? What is Robinson's excuse?

However one feels about his theory, it is this: Marx believed that material conditions were the engine of history, and in feudal Europe, he opined, those specific productive forces, social relationships and means of exchange which existed there and nowhere else, enabled the rise of capitalism and with it the working class. Further, that capitalism would colonize the globe eliminating pre-capitalist modes of production and social relationships and pave the way for socialism.

So, Europe is the focus of his work because it was there, according to his theory, that these social forces were at work. He contrasts the European mode of production with the Asiatic and postulated why capitalism can and did arise in the former and couldn't and didn't in the latter. This is a big topic, not worth detailing here, but the relevant point is that Marx did not attribute these to the cultural or intellectual or ethical superiority of one race/nation or another, but to historical forces which affect everyone. 

To choose an example of my own: the Mongolian Empire was a holocaust for China (and many others), and, paradoxically, a benefit to western Europe as it was not ravaged and many global producers were, which occasioned a boom in western commodity production. China's economy and industrial growth was massively retarded during the Mongolian occupation. When it ended, the Ming dynasty tried to catch up and fast, but it had lost so much ground that it wasn't fully successful. If instead of a destructive empire which spread from the Pacific overland to central Europe there occurred an equally repressive empire which spanned from Ireland to Afghanistan, perhaps China would have developed those specific productive forces, social relationships and means of exchange which were born in western Europe and China and not Britannia would have ruled the waves. And our dear professor might be delivering his excellent lectures in Chinese and not English. Marx did not contend, as fascists a century later would, that the supremacy of Europe and Whites in world affaires occurred due to the latter's innate superiority. 

The point is that Marx--unlike Cedric Robinson--is not attributing the rise of capitalism to the unique venality of a particular race/ethnicity/region/religion. In fact, he explicitly lampooned Hegel when the latter slouched in that direction. Marx' theory is not a racial one!, he focused on Europe as that is where the object of his study was occurring.

We can debate what Marx got right and wrong, but the charge of Euro-centrism is just reactionary propaganda  

A Comment upon Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism

Below is a comment I made in response to another. The vid can be found here:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPvSaIVgMyg

 The comment in question was made by Sithlordprince, and begins providentially with "An African descendant of American slavery here."  

 Racist drivel. Beyond the scope of reason of Pakistanis? Wow.

Spain Before the Islamic Invasion

This is the last in a series of comments I made at a Islamic history Youtube channel. My objection was that the host lambasted the Greeks for fabricating anti-Turkish folklore about the Ottoman invasion and centuries-long occupation. The video's ugly title is "Is Greek Nationalism built upon a Lie?"

 The subject turned to Spain, and I posted the below. It was written quickly without fact-checking, which is why detail and depth is sparse. It's a Youtube comment, not meant to be an exhaustive history. Here it is with link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fGGia6Ogsc&lc=UgwT6KZOtHfP3HzQsWF4AaABAg.AZ7wMW5EStQAZAo_xK-XLx

I can see that there is little use in going on with this as some people, probably most, cannot deal with reality. Most people see themselves as belonging to an innocent race or religion or whatever, few have the desire or strength to confront the atrocities their race/ethnicity, their religion have perpetrated. All prefer to believe they are victims, not victimizers; always the good guys, never bad guys. And reading the comments on this page it is crystal clear, crystal clear, that there are Muslims who refuse to acknowledge that the Islamic expansion was a bloody and brutal affair, that the religion was spread by conquest, by armies of mercenaries, not by evangelists, and I know that I'm not going to change that. So this is my last post here.

Walter Rodney: Race and Class

Land of the Unfree: California, Israel, and Palestine

Censorship in America 

 [For some reason, this vid doesn't want to embed. Here are two links which bring you to the same video and the respective embed codes neither of which seem to work:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGmx9007fZU   

 https://youtu.be/OGmx9007fZU?si=f6hAhGldO4JLmFMS

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