Friday, August 28, 2020

Black Lives Matter

 


Recently I posted about cops misbehaving, “Bad Cop, Bad Cop” and addressed the racial issue tangentially.  In doing so I noted that apologists for police misbehavior are de facto fascists, even if they don’t wear swastikas or worship Mussolini – the way their beloved leader, Donald Trump, apparently does.  Here I’d like to directly address a very related topic, racism.

 First off, I’m white, and always have been.  I don’t expect anything to occur which will retroactively change my ancestry from 75% Polish and 25% English to something else.   I had a Facebook dispute with another white person, whose name will remain anonymous.  This guy posted a meme, obviously a response to the BLM movement, which showed white victims of violence opposite their alleged killers (all of whom were black, of course) and asked if THEIR lives mattered.  So I asked the guy, is someone alleging that the killers in question were released, let go, or not prosecuted for some reason – which would make the meme an appropriate response to BLM.  Instead of answering the question – because he could tell I was challenging the obvious disingenuousness of the meme – he then attacked me as having some sort of “white guilt” and being a liberal social justice warrior.  Whites, it seems, have no business or prerogative to call out other whites for racism.  I suppose Gentiles can’t criticize anti-Semitism, etc., and men can’t call out sexism.  This is not a position I agree with.  It’s a position asserted by racists, anti-Semites, and sexists.  [Apparently, four white males from Birmingham, England, consented to allow their Master of Reality album logo to be used for Black Lives Matter.  Throw your “white guilt” BS at them, huh? LOL.]

 The larger issue is this.  From 1861 to 1865 we had a war in this country, aka the US Civil War, in which the Union states fought to keep the country intact without slavery, and the Confederate states fought to secede so as to retain slavery, a position consistently maintained by Confederate leaders at the time.   Several decades later, apologists for the Confederacy sought to rehabilitate that rebellion by retroactively changing its motivation to “states’ rights”.   Note that some non-CSA enthusiasts like to make a similar argument, doing so less out of latent racism and more out of some misplaced attempt to appear intellectually superior by contradicting “conventional wisdom” (i.e. that the Civil War was about slavery) which in this case happens to be accurate. 

 Anyhow.  Since the Confederacy was defeated in April 1865, there has never been a time in this country when bringing slavery back was even remotely politically feasible.  However, the Union’s military defeat of the Confederacy didn’t instantaneously convince the Racists that blacks should now be equal to whites in every respect.  Rather, the focus of the Racists then switched to a determined effort to put blacks in as close a status to slavery as can be politically managed under the existing climate.  Segregation was the first attempt, even upheld by Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896) (“separate but equal” – and almost never equal in practice) which was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education (1954).   

 With segregation shut down, now the Racists seem to be using the police to clamp down on blacks, which ties into my earlier argument.   What they want is to give the police unfettered authority to arrest, shoot, and oppress blacks, denying them equal protection and due process of law.  Blacks carrying guns – which would otherwise be protected by the Second Amendment – somehow runs afoul of their sensibility, so they attempt to unilaterally assert, tacitly and through police action, that the Second Amendment only applies to whites.  The end result is a fascist regime which exclusively victimizes blacks, leaving whites, Asians, and other racial groups alone, presumably eliciting support from the majority non-black population.  Would you, as a white (or non-black), be acceptable with a fascist government if it allowed non-blacks the full benefits of a free democracy and exclusively oppressed blacks? [A novel form of selective fascism, I suppose you could call it.]  Reducing blacks to non-people, sounds very similar to treating them as property…  Hmm, that sounds like… slavery?   There we go:  the same outcome pursued by different means.

 Returning to Black Lives Matter, any sensible person can ascertain its meaning: not that black lives matter MORE than whites, or that ONLY black lives matter, but simply that they do matter.  To the extent extravagant and bizarre claims and demands are attributed to the movement, that sounds to me like false flag nonsense asserted by someone not associated with the movement (almost certainly white) who wants to discredit it somehow.  With regard to looters and rioters, it’s less clear whether these are legitimate protestors, or criminal elements who considered it expedient to take advantage of the chaos and disturbance to help themselves to merchandise with a 5 finger discount.  Under the circumstances I would expect the BLM movement people to try to exercise more control over their own people and keep their protests peaceful.   We’ll see what happens.  

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