Netflix 16
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!
Let's take a moment to reflect on the inanity of that comment. Honestly, dear reader, I do not enjoy insulting people, but intelligence, or rather its want, is essential to my argument. Stupidity and racism go hand in hand, you can't have the latter absent the former (more below).
First, incomprehensibly, she makes no distinction between abolitionism and a desire to be free. Literally thousands of Black indentures/slaves became slave owners (not to mention the Blacks in W. Africa which were running the largest slave markets the world has ever known). Individual Blacks in the US/colonies became some of the best fugitive slave bounty hunters in the land, and were much appreciated by White and Black slave owners alike. They played an important role in the maintenance of slavery. In the Carribean and Brazil, whole Maroon societies gave themselves over to refugee slave retrieval and were well compensated for it. These Blacks made a handsome living hunting down runaway slaves and returning them to their captivity.
Some Blacks, in America and Africa, got quite rich from the labor, trade or recapture of slaves. Were they abolitionists? What this woman is doing is creating a moral divide around the issue of slavery, and, unconscionably, drawing a fictional color line through it. In so doing, she perpetuates the foul racist myth that White people, with a few exceptions, were pro-slavery and Blacks were innately abolitionist, predisposed to it. Essentially, that Black people are more ethical that Whites, which is obscene racism.
Pity the poor bourgeois! Science has destroyed biological racism. One has to be an idiot to believe nowadays that one branch of the family tree is superior to another. Moreover, the incentives and causes of race-based, economic stratification are ubiquitous and conspicuous--one has to be blind not to see them. How to keep his wage slaves fighting amongst themselves and from turning on him? Answer: stupidify. As Dutt noted, stupidity is an essential part of the campaign of reaction. In his Fascism and the Social Revolution, Dutt reproduces correspondence among German captains of industry just after WW1. The Bolsheviks had just seized power in Russia, and in Germany there was a great deal of revolutionary activity. These correspondents, very much in fear that their bourgeois world was in danger of collapse, discussed concocting a social movement which would purport to be pro-worker, but would in reality counter socialist principles, protect capital and avert social revolution. This is the birth of fascism.
Among the stratagems they hit upon was to inundate political discourse with as much torpid nonsense as it could host, much of it dealing with race. A part of their campaign is the theory of stupidity for stupidity's sake. To the extent that you can get people to accept inanities, to the extent that you can dishabituate them from rational thought, any thought, you distance them from revolutionary class activity. CIA Director William J. Casey once said: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." Indeed so, and we're almost there, but what the fascists were discussing was deeper than just the mass injection of falsehoods, it's the disabling of ideation, or at least its corruption. It's the de-activation of one's critical faculties. Deluge people with enough dumb stimuli and you will not merely occupy their minds with trivialities, but you will actually make them dumb. Fill people's heads with logical fallacies in sufficient volume and the human mind will re-pattern itself to them, and actual physical changes will occur in the brain. Stupidity enfeebles.
I don't have the expertise to assess whether it's possible to literally shrink somebody's IQ. However, empirically, it's difficult to dismiss. The FBI counterinsurgency manual had/has a chapter entitled, "Intentional Stupidity," which I call "brain-jacking." It deals with specific ways of disarticulating social movements by injecting refractory issues, aporiae, theoretical conundrums and the like knowing they will splinter the movement. (They are really good at that!)
As I wrote elsewhere (again please forgive the capitals):
THE POINT OF PROPAGANDA IS NOT ONLY TO DECEIVE, BUT ALSO TO ENFEEBLE. THERE IS A SECTION IN THE F.B.I. COUNTERINSURGENCY MANUAL ENTITLED "INTENTIONAL STUPIDITY." THE IDEA IS TO NOT ONLY TO CREATE DIVISION...BUT ALSO TO INDUCE THE ADOPTION OF INANITIES SO BENUMBING THAT SOCIAL MOVEMENTS CAN BE EASILY BROUGHT DOWN BY CONTROLLED DEMOLITION...THE GOAL IS TO KEEP THE DISCOURSE MULTIPOLAR, CENTRIFUGAL, IRRECIPROCAL AND JUST PLAIN DUMB, AND HENCE FETTERED TO FICTIONS AND IMPASSES WHICH CONSTRAIN IT. THE ADVANTAGE THIS AFFORDS IS THAT SUCH FRAGMENTED MOVEMENTS CAN BE DISARTICULATED BY EXPOSURE OF THE INADEQUACY OF ITS THEORETICAL CONSTRUCTION (I.E. LACUNAE, PARADOXES, APORIAE, ANTIMONIES), OR CLOVEN SECTIONALLY BY EXPLOITATION OF THE DIFFERENCES IN IDEOLOGY AND ASPIRATIONS OF ITS FACTIONS. MARGINS BECOME DISPUTATIONS BECOME BOUNDARIES BECOME CONFLICT BECOMES PARTITIONS BECOME IRRECONCILABILITY BECOMES ENMITY...
Needless to add in Jim Snow America, these clefts are often hewn along racial lines, the ones patrolled by critical race theorists such as appear in Stamped.
What this Woman said should have launched a Fourth-of-July level explosion of red lights. There is a virtual palisade of red flags here. Screeching wheels and blaring sirens should have been heard. What she contends is racist and risible, but somehow it made it onto Netflix' documentary. The leitmotiv here is the myth of Black innocence in thr TAST, and in the development of slavery in the United States and its subsequent racialization. The veracity of her position hinges upon and reinforces the fictions that all the unfree were Black; that all of those were abolitionists; that no Blacks were engaged in slave ownership; that in the thousands and thousands of years in the history of unfreedom, Blacks were the first unfree who wished to abolish slavery; that there were no White abolitionists "from the beginning"; that there is some deeper egalitarian proclivity among Black people than exists certainly in Whites, which is racist and absurd.
Her claim is a veritable clusterfuck of imbecility, if she's not working for the Bureau already she should give them a call because she's missing a paycheck. This is blue ribbon buffoonery. If you can lay people so low that they cannot see the manifold, conspicuous incongruities of her thesis, stupidify them to that degree, then politically you own them. The great French anarchist and Paris Communard, and inspiration to me, Louise Michel, said “The task of teachers, those obscure soldiers of civilisation, is to give the people the intellectual means to revolt.” The point of Stamped, intersectionality, postmodernism, race theory--fascist or critical, is to deprive them of it. They will believe any nonsense you tell them because they have been conditioned for compliance. They have been docilized, infantilized, neutralized. They will vote, work for a wage, pay taxes, and credulously watch Stamped without giving any of it a moment's real thought.
In America, race is how the ruling class rules. Sundering the work force by race is an end in itself--the end, however it is also a prescriptive methodology for the evisceration of any social movement. Racepolitik provides a ready-made, counterinsurgency framework with its own nomenclature, taxonomy, disquisition protocols, discourse boundaries, and established disinformation channels. Counterinsurgency techniques, whatever the nature of the insurgency, now follow the template of race. As I wrote earlier, in the US, race is not only a prophylactic, it has become the universal referent and mother of all cross-contaminants. No activism, be it based in gender, class, or sexuality, is untouched by race as all the participants come pre-packaged in these racial "identities," thus the corrosive racial dynamics which confound all social life in the US intrude upon the effort to eliminate them. This may seem abstract and theoretical, however, it is not. Whenever people gather to take political action, these problems can manifest quickly, and they are often impossible to avert or overcome.
Thus, when some dimwit says Blacks are the original abolitionists it will induce no critical response because our input receptors have atrophied, and we have neither the inclination nor capacity to interrogate it. What about all the Black slave owners in America? Were they abolitionists too? The desire to be free and abolitionism are two very different things. Slavery was accepted in pre-industrial times just as capitalism is now, just as Stamped and the raft of racist inanities it purveys is accepted. History is full of Black slave owners on both sides of the Atlantic. Is she unaware of this? The father of American chattel slavery was a Black man named Anthony Johnson. He is the man, figuratively speaking, who built the Africa-to-America, slave pipeline. He is, arguably, the single most important figure in the history of slavery in America. Does she not know this history? Or is she trying to suppress it?
And does it matter? Probably not, because the FBI's intentional stupidity program really works.
Her next comment was that "Black people freed themselves," which is nonsense. After the Civil War began, the personnel needed to enforce slavery in the South were used to prosecute the war. Slaves then began to walk off their plantations and into the North. They did not free themselves, in fact, it took a war between Whites to do it.
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