#like they were a society that embraced slavery. they were imperialist

[intersex-support]

Hi! I’m not intersex so feel free to ignore or answer other questions first.

I am curious about how eunuchs tie into intersex history. There seems to be a lot of similarities, but I’m not sure how or if it’s related. And I’m curious if ideas around eunuchs tie into how society treats intersex people today, or if perhaps some eunuchs were intersex people? I don’t want to speculate becuase I don’t think it’s my place, but I definitely see similarities with what you talk about.

I’m not totally sure how to frame this question because it is incredibly broad, and covers vast swaths of time and many parts of the world, but I would appreciate any information you could provide that would allow for further research or understanding.

Thank you, I hope you have a lovely day.

Hey! So it definitely is a broad question and really, really depends on the region. I can speak a little about some of the relationship between eunuchs and intersex people in Ancient Rome and Greece because I can read those languages, but I’m not an expert on there or anywhere else.

So there’s quite a few sources that talk about intersex people in conjunction with eunuchs. The Pandects, Roman laws collected by Justinian I, used eunuch as an umbrella term to describe both eunuchs by nature and eunuchs who were made (there also does seem to be some distinction between the language use of eunuchus and castratus, but I’m not convinced that eunuchus was only used to described intersex people.) At a similar time, Pliny the elder was going around recognizing that there were multiple sexes, and indeed spent a lot of time trying to classify what intersex was and how many intersex variations there were. Philostratus, who was a Greek writer who spent some time at the Roman imperial court, wrote an anecdote about this intersex person named Favorinus who was tried for adultry, and we know he’s intersex because Philostratus refers to him as “ἀνδρόθηλυς” (intersex), but he also refers to him as “εὐνοῦχος” (eunuch). There’s a few other examples, but basically, at different points in Ancient Rome it’s clear that intersex people were distinctly recognized as different than eunuch, yet often were lumped in with eunuchs in terms of legal treatment, although some of the Latin can kind of best be translated as “congenital eunuch.”

In the Archaic period, the Roman legal treatment of intersex people viewed intersex births as “prodigies” which is…not a great thing in Roman law. Trigger warning for horrific intersexism, but there’s sixteen primary sources that show some proof that some intersex children were drowned at birth as a way of appeasing the gods. This is obviously not going to be the same treatment that adult eunuchs received under Roman law, so that’s defintely a departure. There were also some reports of people who discovered that they were intersex in adulthood being killed as well, but that’s a lot fewer. Once we start getting into later eras of the republic the legal status of intersex people changes again, and the last reported intersex execution is 95 BC. After 95 BC, there’s a lot more mentions of intersex children in sources, which also shows proof that fewer are getting killed at birth. There is a gradual shift in Roman society and intersex people start getting classified as either male or female under the law, with responsibilities and rights determined by their assignment. Pliny specifically argued that intersex men should be considered semiviri and given the exact same legal rights as eunuchs. Eunuch Roman law is complex as has a lot of specific things about the extent to which someone is a Eunuch and whether or not you can marry, write a will, all of that, so it’s clear that some intersex people were legally limited in similar ways to eunuchs. Eunuchs in Roman society had a complicated role, and often times were enslaved, although some eunuchs/intersex people like Favorinus were able to have aristocratic success. So basically Roman society was really pretty bad for eunuchs or intersex people.

When it comes to the Greeks, the most information around intersex people is about the mythologic god Hermaphroditus, child of Hermes and Aphrodite, who was a beautiful, divine, and celebrated figure. We do have more positive descriptions of intersex people from sources of that time, Phlegon of Tralles, a Greek writer, described an intersex person near Antioch who was known as a beautiful maiden but than turned into a man at puberty. There’s also another intersex person who lived at Epidaurus who was described as spending his life gardening, which I think is neat. I’m not as familiar with intersex people in Ancient Greece, but it seems to be more positive. Eunuchs also had a bit of a different reception in Greek society, and I couldn’t find a lot of sources on intersex people and eunuchs and I’m just not as familiar with Greek history as Roman.

So overall, I can say confidently that in Ancient Rome, the history of eunuchs and intersex people is very intertwined, and societal response was also filled with stigma, prejudice, and violence. I’d say that it’s probably pretty likely that in other cultures and times through the world, eunuchs and intersex people have been related. I don’t know enough history about other regions, but if anyone does know I would love to hear some more. I’m not sure how much of an affect that the treatment of eunuchs really has on intersex people in the contemporary world, but I definitely think that at certain times in world history, eunuchs and intersex people were associated with each other. I listed a few sources for what I summarized about Roman law, but massive trigger warning for slurs and descriptions of violent intersexism. Here’s also a link to a post I made about the treatment of intersex people in medieval Europe (with similar trigger warnings.)

https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/unromantest/chapter/transgender/

https://www.academia.edu/45639485/The_Legal_Treatment_of_Hermaphroditism_in_Ancient_Rome_From_Persecution_to_Integration

https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2015/09/15/favorinus-was-a-hermaphrodite-tried-for-adultery-philostratus-lives-of-the-sophists-489/amp/

[evilelitest2]

Why is it that ancient Greece is always mega-sugarcoated with all their flaws like uber-misogyny and slavery(plus ritual murder of slaves in the case of Lakonians) being swept under the rug in all period pieces across media? Rome was even more influential to the western world and their more problematic aspects are never erased! (ps. the persians were the good guys and both Athens and Sparta can eat shit)

I wouldn’t necessarily say the Persians were the good guys, for all of their admirable support for local support and having the first bill of rights in history, but its still a violent imperialistic dictatorship that took over all of the kingdoms around them basically because...fuck you I want your stuff.  Even if we (correctly) read The Histories as propaganda that is justifying the Greeks, it still seems like Persia invaded an independent series of states because they supported a revolt.  I mean if you forced me to live in a pre Alexander Near Eastern/Middle Eastern Empire, I’d pick the Persians because they were a lot less awful, but its still a brutal autocracy who indulged in mass slavery, massacres, torture, and the occasional genocide.  There is a reason why they were always having to put down rebellions, though compared to the Neo Assyrians they look great.  

But you are right, the Ancient Greeks weren’t exactly the good guys as the last 2,500 years of “western” socialization have been pretending they are, both were slave owning aristocratic imperialist states of racist hypocritical pederast.  Though they did product the tradition of democracy (sort of).  Sparta was almost the worse though, like apart from their being the least sexist of the Greek States, Sparta is just awful.  

So to me, the Greek/Persian Wars don’t really have a good guy or bad guy, its a cruel imperialistic autocratic empire fighting against a smaller number of cruel imperialistic city states.

But to answer your question about why the Greeks get remembered so positively despite being such pricks, it comes down to three things.  

1) Thanks to Alexander the Great’s conquest and Rome’s embrace of hellenism, the Greeks basically win the Ancient world for awhile, and stamp their image everywhere, meaning their side of the story gets a lot more attention.  Most of the Persian records were destroyed by Alexander himself (possibly in a drunken rage) or in subsequent conflicts, so there is just a lot more information from the Greek perspective than the Persian or anybody else

2) Credit where it is due though...the Greeks were really good writers.  Like Herodotus is a really fantastic storytelling, he doesn’t just recite the facts, he adds characters, dramatic irony, strategy you know its a story.  The Greeks had a fantastic story telling tradition and unlike many of their rivals, their stories survived.  And while it is not the only game in town, I do think the Greek Philosophy and plays actually deserve most of the praise they get.    

3) Also a lot of post Greek societies really want to define their legitimacy by basing it on Greece, which means that there are a lot of societies who are very determined justify their existence by glorifying ancient Greece.  

[reviewpri]

Beware-Alt Right is claiming GoT

I do not think DnD set out to do that...no, but it is happening.

and I do not think that all the people coming out to give a positive spin on season 8, in particularly, justifying Mad Dany are Alt-Right inserts- but some are.

How is Alt-Right claiming GoT? Well, they are spreading misconceptions about Daenerys solely based on the show in order to convince people that fighting for a more just society is misguided.

(not the same people, but on the same level of those who keep crying over the fact that selfish Dany is going to these places, liberating slaves while ignoring their culture...whatever that means.)

Note those claims are wide enough to convince normies and some leftists also that being a revolutionary equals being a tyrant.

1- Daenerys is a white savior.

Wrong. The trope that we are dealing with is actually “ going native”- a white person embracing and being embraced by other people/culture.

(in this case, Dothraki- and that they were presented as almost irredeemable savages is on GRRM )

Moreover, she rules over a very racially diverse population who had been ruled by a racial elite that Daenerys is no part of- meaning, she does not think her race makes her superior to the underclasses-  the Ghiscari, on the other hand..

2- Daenerys is an imperialist.

Wrong.

I am not going to touch on the fact that we are speaking of a 20th-century concept when speaking about a piece of fiction depicting a magical medieval world.

Daenerys' intentions have never been set up an Empire with her as Head. What she wants is to end slavery. Period. This will also explain her taking over the Dothraki, not only because she wants an army, but because the Dothraki are great suppliers of slaves.

She stays in Meereen because first if she leaves before the transition is way underway, they Ghiscari Elites will enslave the people she freed again. And, she wants to learn how to rule.

3- Daenerys is bloodthirsty

Wrong.

This is a show invention. Daenerys first impulse is NEVER to “ burn cities to the ground”, but she is constantly advised to do so.

4- Embracing Fire and Blood is the first sign of her tyranny.

Doubtful. 

Daenerys is compared to Aegon, the Conqueror.

Aegon was not a lunatic who kept burning things. Quite the contrary- despite having the obvious advantage of three dragons, Aegon would give his enemies a fair warning before he went to war.

Most probably, Daenerys will repeat the two events that set Aegon to be King: the Field of Fire ( season 7) and burning the Red Keep ( as an analog for Harrenhal)

5- Daenerys going crazy is GRRM ending.

Doubtful.

First, DnD cited the “ she is a Targ and they are crazy” reason for her meltdown, which is bullshit. 

Second, they retconned the whole thing in addition to changing the dynamic of Daenerys and her advisors. 

SEASON 8 HAS NOT BEEN METICULOUSLY PLANNED SINCE SEASON 5- the retroactively going through scenes, changing their meaning or actually inverting their meaning, show just that.

Examples that impacted the story:

a- Theon did not make fun of Tyrion when they met in season one- it was the opposite- They retconned it because they made Tyrion, who is a bloodthirsty man with daddy issues who cares nothing about the smallfolk ( and was portrayed as that for four seasons) to be a pacifist. In that scene, they wanted to remind us that Tyrion is a nice guy, who can be a bit emotional. A turn for the character who, at season 4 had screamed that the populace of KL should have died during Stannis attack.

b-Daenerys did not force Jon to give up his Crown for her to go North- the one who made this demand was Cersei. But this is the version of the story that is in the mouths of the northern Lords- and neither Daenerys nor Jon rectify the mistake because, voilá---the writers decided that Daenerys IS Cersei now.

c- Targaryens never went North to fight against Starks, like Tyrion said they did, so really, the northerners could not still remember it because the fact never happened. ( and this episode, of the King Who Knelt, is in the History and Lore section- so, it is TV Canon)

d- Jaime had already told Brienne the truth about his actions during Robert´s rebellion when they weer at Harrenhal and why he killed the Mad King, but by season 8, that scene never happened- or Jaime had lied back then for no reason whatsoever.

e- Daenerys and Jon never spent time together during their childhood, but by season 8 she is telling him about when they were young and she could not count till 20...something that would only make sense if the dialogue was written for Jaime and Cersei.

f- The House of Undying vision of Daenerys had already been fulfilled by season 7. Daenerys had literally the chance to take the Iron Throne, but she chooses to go cross the Wall and go North. She gives up her plan to blow up the Red Keep- shown in the vision with a Seven-Pointed Star, meaning it was a “what could have been” they elected to retcon ( which can be attested because Daenerys, in the original version of the scene, mentions it as a difference between her vision and the reality.) to save Jon Snow North of The Wall.

Season 8 they inverted the chronological order of the vision to fit their plot- Daenerys is North and, instead of resting her troops, she goes South and for some reason ( madness) she destroys the whole thing with dragon fire, but miraculously, The Iron Throne remains. Drogon then sets fire on the Throne, which melts? ( why has not melted before? same reason Tyrion manages to find and recognize the corpses of his siblings- because logic does not matter.)

As their infamous Austin panel shows, DnD confirmed they were interested in writing scene for scene, not necessarily characters arcs or themes. They also said that they divorced the books since season 5, that they made GoT theirs, that the magical elements were downplayed and finally that they simplified the scope of ASOIAF to a “ Power is everything” mentality.

Power being their concern explains why the series is called “ Game of Thrones”, which is just the name of the first book. 

GRRM is often quoted as not believing in heroes...but in fact: he does. What he does not believe in are in perfect, never at fault heroes:

“My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.” 

Note that DnD gave this definition of hero- the ones who try to make the world a better place- a sentence that Daenerys repeats at least a couple of times during seasons 6 and 7.

and again..while GRRM gives space for his heroes to “win or lose” ...and admits that most heroes “ had mixed results”...he does qualify them- the dreamers- as heroes nevertheless.

Therefore this vision...this black and white vision of Daenerys as Hitler with Dragons (incidentally- Alt-Right has been known to make claims that nazism- as in national socialism- was, in fact, a far-left movement.) that just because she started out freeing slaves by force, it never meant she was in fact, a hero, but a misguided despot in the making...is not GRRM, but Dave Benioff and Dan Weiss.

To place things in context, the producers of GoT are members of the Elites. Of course, they sympathize with characters like Sansa and Tyrion ( their admitted favorites) who are members of Elite- in case of Sansa, the Starks are what one could call benevolent aristocrats- but aristocrats nevertheless- and to them...it does make incredibly sense that a person who is willing to go as far as to challenge the Elites for the well being of the underclass by using violence ( Daenerys) would be a step away from being a Tyrant.

Am I saying that GRRM does not intend to make Dany crazy? I am not saying that. I cannot say what his intentions are. What I can say is that, in his own words, not only Daenerys, but most of the characters are going to be Darker in the next book. Possibly, keeping with the tone of the series, this means Daenerys will go grey. 

Grey could very well choose to go for the Red Keep, as Aegon went to Harrenhal, despite innocents are being held there. Some people will call her crazy...others will see the actions as simply a part of a war.

I think he intends to allow readers to decide.

Personally though...I am not sure I am up to it anymore. By making Daenerys a victim of rape, one who not only survives and thrives, but chooses to fight against such inequalities instead of becoming the abuser ( Cersei) that he might use such character to discuss the limits of being a hero...I find it distasteful.

As of now, ASOIAF is shaping out to be one of many standard fantasy series. It has been sold as nothing of the sort, but as an inclusive, realistic portrayal of a generational saga where the main characters would have to contend with the mistakes of their fathers...but GoT leaves the impression that ASOIAF is, indeed, just white men´s wank.

[nightcoremoon]

I don't like the song amazing grace or what it stands for in the context of african post-slavery cultural genocide juxtaposed with white western european colonialist christian values.

so like, african cultural heritage is what it is, right? it's heavily important to world history and obviously every ethnic group is valuable in its own way because humans are worthy of respect and stuff. that's a given.

so when slavery happened and the africans were stripped of their individuality and heritage and nationality and basically underwent mass cultural AND ethnic genocide. that fuckin sucks because a) slavery is bad and b) genocide is bad and c) being denied your birthplace and stuff is bad. I can't simplify this any further.

so what happened in history? many african slaves found solace in christianity and the bible because it gave them hope and distracted them from the hellish existence that is slavery. that continued throughout the generations past abolition through the civil rights movements and continues today. black christianity derived from slavery is the root of 90% of music we listen to today; it's heavily influential on today's cultural climate and the contributions of the black american cannot be denied. even now a significant portion of christianity in america is heavily attributed to african descended black people.

there's just one thing about that that really bothers me:

american christianity is heavily rooted in white western imperial european colonialism. oh no.

there are so many black christians with no idea where their ancestors lived or what cultural heritage they're derive from. they were robbed of their history. while white europeans have the privilege of being able to know so many things about their great great great etc grandparents. in this context white americans count because we're here because of european invasions. we can trace our lineage back for generations. so many of us know that we're 17% Italian or 17% Irish or 17% French or 17% Swedish n shit like that. most black americans don't know if their parents are part Kenyan or Ethiopian or Congo or Sudanese or whatever. that's why they refer themselves as black because all they have to go by is the color of their skin, because the people who owned their great great grandma sure as fuck didn't write down what country their slave came from because they didn't care because they treated black people as property because life was a godawful hellhole back then for most people. they don't get to know what country they're from like most white people do.

so when they turn to not only christianity but a specific form of christianity, protestant sects, it's like another step of cultural genocide. by embracing a religion created by white people to control minorities and women, regardless of how much they change it to make it their own, it's still rooted in the same bloody soil. they turn further from their own roots in the many different varying mythologies i can't talk much about because society values the mythology of nonblack people so much more: Greek, Norse, Egyptian (well the Egyptians were black but society loves to ignore that fact and whitewash them), Shinto, etc.

now I'm not saying that all black christians are directly responsible for participating in their own cultural genocide. that's an asinine claim. there are plenty of black jews, black muslims, black atheists, black pagans, black greek/norse/egyptian/shinto/etc followers, and surely there are lots of modern black euroamericans who still keep in touch with their cultural roots. the religious decisions of every individual are their own through mental autonomy and the ownership of their own consciousnesses.

what I AM saying is that christianity is a lot more insidious and evil than it appears to be on the surface. it was used as a defense of owning slaves- "africans deserve to be slaves because they're sons of ham, descended from the son of noah god cursed because the bible". it was used to protest abolition. it was used to uphold segregation. it was used to protest black votes. it's used to defend cops who kill unarmed men. it is, always has been, and always will be used as a weapon by white people against black existence. and the fact that throughout all of that, the exact same failed system of belief [speaking from a historical perspective of course because white christianity in the 16th century and beyond is massively poisoned by the bloated and corrupt papacy further than what it already was during the medieval and dark ages] was embraced so readily by the people that it oppressed...

it's just really concerning to me.

& it's not even a black thing. the prevalence of catholicism in mexican and other latin american culture is the same way. east asia is ripe with larger cultural superpowers eating the smaller ones and pretending they don't exist, just like china with taiwan, except not in a religious way. the holy roman empire did the same thing. and don't even get me started on the armenian genocide committed by the ottoman empire. and the fucking holocaust: hitler was christian. people say he wasn't a good christian since a good christian wouldn't try to kill the jews, the romani, the black, but are you sure about that? looking at all of history are you ABSOLUTELY SURE that white western imperialist european christian colonialism wouldn't try to murder everyone who didn't conform? naziism is on the rise again and it's masquerading as christianity. the president is a nazi and a christian.

no, this has nothing to do specifically with african and black populations and everything to do with christianity. except through "amazing grace" and its prevalence in that community.

also the man who wrote it manned slave ships. he was conscripted into it, became a slave in sierra leone for a while, and eventually became an abolitionist, but still :/ imagine if rommel the kraut of africa wrote a song and a hundred years later it became a celebrated jewish hymn. that would be incredibly fucked up and wrong.

but whatever, maybe I'm looking too far into this, maybe there's no illuminati boogeyman trying to erase black and jewish culture from world history, maybe it's all just a big goddamn coincidence that the victims of colonialism embraced the religion that the imperials used. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe just maybe it's a fucking fluke.

anyway black people can like the song if they want. they can be christians.

I just hate the song and won't be a christian. you do you and I'll do me and we'll all get along happily.

[rootsooman]

Acknowledging the Beauty of European Tribal Roots: Yes you can be Proud without being "racist"♡ And how does Animal Identity Veganism apply here + help fight oppression?

There is nothing inherently wrong with or racist about being proud of ones roots. The Vikings, Celts, Saami etc were/are tribal people who, interestingly, never took part in the Corporate Industrial created Chattel Slavery and Colonialism that England, France, Spain and Portugal etc did. Before being tainted by the poisons of Supremacy, which pits women, animals and other "races" on the bottom rungs of an imaginary ladder, there were Europeans who were deeply in touch with nature, spirituality and respect for other life. I do believe that if colonialism and Racism were never imposed on the world by the British and their American colony the USA in the 1700s, that the Celts and other European pagan tribes and many West African tribes would have been trading freely and even joining forces against larger powers if they had known about each other, just like Bini nations of West Africa traded with the Portuguese before the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

The only reason why someone shouting "white pride" is considered racist (which includes speciesism and environmental destruction) is because the "white" identity was a construct invented by imperialist colonizers, not the nature-adoring European tribes that were stripped of their sovereignty and cultures by imperialists. No one identified as "white" until colonizers invented a "black" race. Color obsession was not a thing.

Some similarities between Viking mythology and Yoruba mythology are so glaring, that the deities Thor and Shango would have probably been seen as the same force manifesting itself in different ways to different peoples in their own images. I do believe that a *misuse* of Abrahamic religions helped this Supremacy Paradigm to fester into what it is today. Not to say there wasn't tribal warfare & degeneracy amongst pagans, but the approach was completely different, and the amount of power the "backwards" nations had was not bolstered on a belief that they were divinely Superior or a "chosen" group based on Science or Religion.

Integration and exchange usually took place between the conqueror and the conquered, and slavery (indentured servitude) was often finished with normal integration into the captor's society. This was the norm before American (Colonizer) Chattel Slavery, the predecessor to factory farming and hyper-capitalism.

Also, not all Christian societies are ongoing imperialist: examples of peaceful Christians are the Egyptian Copts, Ethiopia and post-classical Greece. So Christianity is not the culprit. "White" Christianity is. There is a difference between the "white" identity and strong, beautiful European identity, which in the past was NOT color-based but ethnicity based.

Tribal people despite their hunting traditions, had a deep LOVE and respect for non-human animals and a deep reverence for life and spirit. Even the Vikings who were known to pillage and raid always left behind something useful and never totally enslaved or wiped out other people with the same arrogance and science-religious angle of the imperial powers. They never created a Racial Hierarchy or Scientific Racism to justify their actions. That is the key difference.

Imagine how peaceful and green the world would be, and how easily veganized it would be too in this modern era, if all these non-colonizer European groups had never had to inherit the baggage of their colonizer neighbors? There is a beauty in embracing the ancient wisdoms of people who live in accordance with the environment. Even today in modern times, the places of the Celts, Vikings and Roma have some of the most welcoming and ecologically sound countries, with a right to maintain them. But they are suffering the consequences of their neighbors' destructive history. England deserves to be changed in the same way it permanently changed Africa, America and Australia. Deal.

Not all people of European descent subscribe to supremacy paradigms, so I want to call out any of my fellow vegans of color who mistakenly group all "white" people into that colonizer category. Tell me when in history a Finnish Saami has ever colonized you? Never. These are our allies in that they to this day face similar struggles (Celtic groups have been oppressed by Anglo groups etc) and so it would actually do better if we could see beyond the farce and dig to the root of modern systems of oppression, which is the colonial-industrial corporate matrix that relies on subjugation to thrive. This matrix hates self-sustaining societies that opt out of the "free market" and instead choose localized lifestyles. Not to say globalization doesn't have its perks. Technology and such have allowed me to use Tumblr, so I always see the positive in the negative as well. That is the holistic approach to life. We can use what chaos gave us and turn it into something better for all. Example: electric cars, or using computers to spread awareness.

Now,

This does not mean it is okay to derail intersectional voices in veganism though, nor is this the Oppression Olympics, because we all know only 1 set of "races" are considered animals (African, Australian & Melanesian types) by the Supremacy Paradigm. Only 1 set of races were oppressed in the name of legitimized institutions (Science, Religion, Anthropology) to this day on a MASS scale for 500+ years. This also does not ignore the Holocaust, but again, different issue (similar animalization scheme though, which is VERY important here).

The acceptance of veganism comes naturally to those who seek to reconnect with their roots and protect the planet we all call home. The real desire is to get back in touch with nature and live harmoniously and harmlessly with other beings. The only issue is that modern incarnations of primitivism do not have the same amount of reverence or respect for non human animals as indigenous tribes worldwide had. But we can use the vibe of paleo as a gateway that can present sustainable hunting a good alternative to factory farming, the way native Amerindians have done it for years.

Along this journey, I invite people of all walks of life to partake in animal identity veganism if they know how to use their voice for abused and oppressed animals while acknowledging the animalization of humans that has resulted in parallel abuses. Animal Identity veganism can be embraced by any religion, any color, any creed, any lifestyle. If you are Pagan or Christian or Jewish, that's not the issue. If your heart feels at peace when you connect yourself to those who suffer in an attempt to liberate, you have a right to walk this path but know that you cannot be the face of it, because you are already free.

The poisonous ideas that were seeded within the powerful empires of Europe and tainted innocent people, who, presented with scientific and religious justifications for racism, were tricked into putting their anger and problems onto people groups who wanted nothing to do with their world, are the driving force behind division.

[watchmebitch]

New Noxus and the Paradox of “Tolerant” Imperialism

Riot is moving in an entirely new direction with Noxus after the retcon of 2014. That, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. Old Noxus was flawed, relatively one-dimensional, and subject to a fair share of complaints - chief among them being the exaggeratedly “evil” nature of the state, from the necromancy, to the demonic possession, to the actual, literal skull mountain.

(Goodnight, sweet prince)

The problem is not that Riot has made Noxus into a fun-loving, puppy-hugging, benevolent bastion of love and acceptance in its rework. This post isn’t about any personal objections to the new direction of the lore. It’s about a fundamental misunderstanding, rooted in long-standing European cultural norms and history, of the nature of imperialism and - and - oh no, you’re already scrolling past this, aren’t you.

In simpler terms: The problem isn’t that Riot has turned Noxus into a bastion of love and acceptance. The problem is that Riot has turned Noxus into an aggressively expansionist war-machine, and seems to think that it is still, simultaneously, a bastion of love and acceptance.

Here are the facts. First, Noxus is still, in Riot’s own words, an aggressive expansionist empire - that hasn’t changed, although it has been upgraded in the new lore from “city-state” to full fledged “empire”. Its expansion strategy resembles that of several historical empires, in that it either allows cities or civilizations in its path to surrender to Noxian rule or conquers them by force. Once a people have been conquered, Noxus does not allow them to continue going about their business as usual while simply levying taxes or taking other benefits, but instead restructures them to align with Noxian ideals and customs, up to and including establishing literal monuments to Noxian dominance in their cities. This is important. A people conquered by Noxus do not remain separate or distinguished from the whole, but instead are immediately considered Noxian, and are expected to adopt Noxian culture and customs accordingly. That comes with Noxus’s rule. These are not arguments - they’re facts, drawn strictly from material on the official Universe site.

Also on the official Universe site is the proposition, repeated multiple times, that the people and cities conquered by Noxus are afforded the opportunity to grow and become better or stronger by virtue of becoming part of the empire. The argument that a conquering nation is somehow doing right by, or doing good things for, a conquered people is older than dirt. There are several different terms for it, pertaining to different time periods and areas of the world. A commonly known one, “the white man’s burden”, specifically refers to the erroneous, imperialist argument that the titular white man has an obligation to rule over non-white people (often colonized nations) in order to “civilize” them or somehow give them a better life. Variations on this ideology were used to justify all sorts of horrendous things, from aggressive missionary endeavors, to the conquest and subjugation of indigenous peoples, to slavery. But the white man’s burden is a relatively new idea, in the grand scheme of world history, while imperialism and the concept of a "benevolent” conqueror are very, very old. 

There’s nothing wrong with Riot casting Noxus as an imperialist empire. It’s an interesting historical context to have and it opens the doors to a lot of different storylines. It’s also relatively faithful to the original design of Noxus as the premiere warmonger in Valoran. The problem is what Riot’s doing with the other half of Noxus’s rework.

Once again, I’ll start with facts. In the same sentence where Riot described Noxus as “warlike” and “expansionist”, they added that the empire is also “unusually inclusive”. In a section labelled “culturally inclusive”, they describe that conquered people can “embrace[] their conquerors’ way of life” and be judged on their worth... or be “crushed without mercy”.

(I took a screenshot because I was afraid that you wouldn’t believe me.)

The problem here is that that isn’t what culturally inclusive means. A culturally inclusive society is one in which people of different cultures are treated equally, not one wherein people of different cultures are forced to assimilate to a dominant one to avoid being crushed without mercy. To get even more granular, a culture can be defined as a set of social behaviors and norms upheld and practiced by a group of people. Some very simple elements of American culture might be consumption of fast food, or the coming-of-age ritual of learning to drive a car. Some not-so-simple elements are a belief in the “American dream” (aka the idea that if you work hard enough for long enough, you will rise in economic status) or a sense of American exceptionalism

A basic element of Noxian culture is the belief in strength (which, to Noxians, means any sort of physical or non-physical prowess in a valuable skill, valuable being defined as “something that can make Noxus better”) as the primary valuation of a human’s worth. Another appears to be tolerance of originally non-Noxian people, as long as they adequately assimilate to Noxus’s regime.

That is an interesting idea for a fictional culture. It is not, however, in any way compatible with 'cultural inclusivity’. In order to continue expanding, building its army, and existing as it wants to, Noxus needs the people it conquers to abandon their own cultures and adopt Noxus’s own. Maybe they don’t have to abandon small rituals from their own cities like, for example, eating fast food - at least, we don’t have evidence of that. But they do have to abandon whatever fundamental value systems they already have (and yes, every people in every society already have one, I promise) and adopt Noxus’s. 

Or be crushed. 

Without mercy.

The problem here isn’t Noxus as a culture, or as a fictional state. It would actually even be acceptable for Noxians specifically to believe that they are a highly inclusive, tolerant state - that’s very common of people living in imperialist nations, and thus very believable. The problem is that Riot is writing the lie of the “benevolent, culturally sensitive conqueror” as a fact, when it’s not only patently false in Noxus’s case but also shows a staggering sort of ingrained cultural bias in the draftsmen. 

The problem is not with the subject of the art, but rather with the perspective. The problem is the artist.

[lankosi]

The oppressor’s approach is aggressive, mainly because he is the most fearful. Yes, he fears the *oppresed* black man because it is, he who dominates the earth.’

The white man has castrated black people enough because of Black's hunger for glamour and prestige, nowadays children of the soil talk black, they live white and think green. We have been conditioned to self-destruct. *To colonize a peoples’ mind you must first demonize their culture*, followed by their traditions.’

The thing with imperialism is, Imperialism uses religion to condition our way of thinking and living as children of the soil. Religion is a cultural understanding of religion. In order for us to reconstruct our way of thinking and to rid ourselves of the false image painted in our heads, a cultural revolution would be key- for if there is no cultural revolution then we must forget the idea of a political revolution. We should stand up and reconstruct the society. We at-least owe Chris Hani and Steve Biko that much.

One of our biggest weaknesses in Africa is in fact ‘Tribalism’, what we forget is the fact that imperialism does not attack based on your tribe but because of the resources on the land (your land). So tribalism must be kicked off the top of our buckets. In fact, Muamar Gadaffi, in his Green Book equals tribalism to class antagonisms. Tribalism feeds directly into the stomach of the imperialist and his capitalistic mode of life.

Secondly the sooner we accept the reality and identify with our true selves the better for all of us and future generations. As Assata Shakur would say: ‘No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history if they know that knowledge will help set you free’ Stop teaching your young to be like the white man so they too can succeed and start teaching them about their own capabilities and about the importance of embracing their true selves and not alienating themselves from their roots. It is the history they aren’t taught that needs to be told to them- sit your children down and school them about the system itself and who it is meant to benefit, the sooner the better. Rather have children of the soil who learn but question than to have a child of the soil mimicking the white man and forgetting their own thus throwing their fellow brothers and sisters under the bus for their own selfish desires and hunger for a false freedom promised to them by the system and its handlers. In fact, John Henry Clarke covered this phenomenon very well when he said, *The powerful cannot afford to educate the poor because once educated you will not ask for the power, you will take it*. Keep questioning, keep learning about your culture, above all else, remember that you as the oppressed, you are on your own, and therefore you have yourselves to unite and fight for the benefit of people of your color and human race in its entirety.

It is time we stopped viewing our own through the lens of the racist white man. *The time has come for children of the soil to stop criticising and judging one another according to the criteria drafted for us by the oppressor*- we all have our faults. It is time we viewed our fellow brothers and sisters of the soil beyond the image painted by the pain inflictors and slave makers. Black people have always resolved their challenges, even long before the formalized type of schooling was introduced. However, today in order for a black person to speak and be listened to, he will be viewed by the number and level of the school certificate he holds and not the quality of the argument he brings to the table. Formal education is great, but education is greater, no matter the lenses it is acquired.

Thirdly let me pump more fuel into the fire mainly by making this clear: ‘There is nothing wrong with removing the white man from your mind, we need to re-Africanise our mind, body and soul. We have failed to realize that white supremacy and racism remained and have advanced over the years’ and the ugly truth which is that slavery itself hasn’t ended but continues to be practiced and we are still victims of slavery. Our economy was in the hands of the white master during slavery and the economy is still in the hands of the white previlleged few today. Same rubbish, different dustbins.

Those of you who continue to sing the praises of the white man and continue to feast at the same table your own people are forced to set are no different from the inflictors of pain- you continue to parade as the heroes and ‘peace-makers’ whilst in actual fact you are also a part of the problem and it is because of you that we are where we are today, yes those who point fingers and shift the blame to fellow children of the soil for being hard headed and stubborn, how many more years do you think this your luxurious life will continue or have you forgotten that Racism may have started a long time ago but it never ended? Or is your head too full of false hopes and altered stories about your history to where you accept everything that is given to you and never question its accuracy?. The only relationship between light and darkness is when one has transformed into the other. So, should we then not think of you as complacent or perpetrators of racism? Betrayal is evil, betryal by your own is treasonous.

Ever since the beginning of democracy how many white ‘south Africans’ came forward and said they wanted to be a part of those who bring about a positive change in South Africa? Come to think of it, the white man in South Africa never went through punishment, you were never made to be held accountable for the atrocities committed by your people and your leaders instead we were rather too forgiving – stuff that akho lonto apha, the TRC may have worked in your favour but it sure as hell made no difference in the lives of those who were demonised by the apartheid government. Truth be told, white people have the incapacity to understand racism, because they enjoy the fruits of white privilege. In Tshivenda they say, *Asa shumi asingola* (those who do not work, should not eat). Then, how is it that we have delegated the black race to work the land and the white race to eat for free?, cry my beloved Africa.

In case you were wondering what racism is:

Racism is the exclusion of one group from the other on the base of race, with racist oppressing the other. However, it is more about power and economic harvesting. Therefore, the rise of blackness, is about historical redress.

#africa #afrika #racism #blacklivesmatter #blackpower #blackfreedom #oppression #imperialism

[antoine-roquentin]

In many ways, Coates’s career manifests these collateral trends of progress and regress in American society. He grew up in Baltimore at the height of the crack epidemic. One of his own friends at Howard University in the 1990s was murdered by the police. Coates didn’t finish college and had been working and writing for small magazines when in 2008 he was commissioned by the Atlantic to write a blog during Obama’s campaign for president. Three books and many blog posts and tweets later, Coates is, in Packer’s words, ‘the most influential writer in America today’ – an elevation that no writer of colour could previously have achieved. Toni Morrison claims he has filled ‘the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died’. Philip Roth has been led to histories of American racism by Coates’s books. David Brooks credits him for advancing an ‘education for white people’ that evidently began after ‘Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings’. Even USA Today thinks that ‘to have such a voice, in such a moment, is a ray of light.’ Coates seems genuinely embarrassed by his swift celebrity: by the fact that, as he writes in his latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power, a collection of essays published in the Atlantic between 2008 and 2016, ‘I, who’d begun in failure, who held no degrees or credentials, had become such a person.’ He also visibly struggles with the question ‘Why do white people like what I write?’ This is a fraught issue for the very few writers from formerly colonised countries or historically disadvantaged minorities in the West who are embraced by ‘legacy’ periodicals, and then tasked with representing their people – or country, religion, race, and even continent (as in the New York Times’s praise for Salman Rushdie: ‘A continent finding its voice’). Relations between the anointed ‘representative’ writer and those who are denied this privilege by white gatekeepers are notoriously prickly. Coates, a self-made writer, is particularly vulnerable to the charge that he is popular among white liberals since he assuages their guilt about racism.

He doesn’t have a perch in academia, where most prominent African-American intellectuals have found a stable home. Nor is he affiliated to any political movement – he is sceptical of the possibilities of political change – and, unlike his bitter critic, Cornel West, he is an atheist. Identified solely with the Atlantic, a periodical better known for its oligarchic shindigs than its subversive content, Coates also seems distant from the tradition of black magazines like Reconstruction, Transition and Emerge, or left-wing journals like n+1, Dissent and Jacobin. He credits his large white fan club to Obama. Fascination with a black president, he thinks, ‘eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he’d awakened about American identity.’ This is true, but only in the way a banality is true. Most mainstream publications have indeed tried in recent years to accommodate more writers and journalists from racial and ethnic minorities. But the relevant point, perhaps impolitic for Coates to make, is that those who were assembling sensible arguments for war and torture in prestigious magazines only a few years ago have been forced to confront, along with their readers, the obdurate pathologies of American life that stem from America’s original sin.

Coates, followed by the ‘white working classes’, has surfaced into liberal consciousness during the pained if still very partial self-reckoning among American elites that began with Hurricane Katrina. Many journalists have been scrambling, more feverishly since Trump’s apotheosis, to account for the stunningly extensive experience of fear and humiliation across racial and gender divisions; some have tried to reinvent themselves in heroic resistance to Trump and authoritarian ‘populism’. David Frum, geometer under George W. Bush of an intercontinental ‘axis of evil’, now locates evil in the White House. Max Boot, self-declared ‘neo-imperialist’ and exponent of ‘savage wars’, recently claimed to have become aware of his ‘white privilege’. Ignatieff, advocate of empire-lite and torture-lite, is presently embattled on behalf of the open society in Mitteleuropa. Goldberg, previously known as stenographer to Netanyahu, is now Coates’s diligent promoter. Amid this hectic laundering of reputations, and a turnover of ‘woke’ white men, Coates has seized the opportunity to describe American power from the rare standpoint of its internal victims.

As a self-professed autodidact, Coates is primarily concerned to share with readers his most recent readings and discoveries. His essays are milestones in an accelerated self-education, with Coates constantly summoning himself to fresh modes of thinking. Very little in his book will be unfamiliar to readers of histories of American slavery and the mounting scholarship on the new Jim Crow. Coates, who claimed in 2013 to be ‘not a radical’, now says he has been ‘radicalised’, and as a black writer in an overwhelmingly white media, he has laid out the varied social practices of racial discrimination with estimable power and skill. But the essays in We Were Eight Years in Power, so recent and much discussed on their first publication, already feel like artefacts of a moribund social liberalism. Reparations for slavery may have seemed ‘the indispensable tool against white supremacy’ when Obama was in power. It is hard to see how this tool can be deployed against Trump. The documentation in Coates’s essays is consistently impressive, especially in his writing about mass imprisonment and housing discrimination. But the chain of causality that can trace the complex process of exclusion in America to its grisly consequences – the election of a racist and serial groper – is missing from his book. Nor can we understand from his account of self-radicalisation why the words ‘socialism’ and ‘imperialism’ became meaningful to a young generation of Americans during what he calls ‘the most incredible of eras – the era of a black president’. There is a conspicuous analytical lacuna here, and it results from an overestimation, increasingly commonplace in the era of Trump, of the most incredible of eras, and an underestimation of its continuities with the past and present.

In the sentimental education of Coates, and of many liberal intellectuals mugged by American realities, Obama is the culmination of the civil rights movement, the figure who fulfils the legacies of Malcolm X as well as Martin Luther King. In Jay Z’s words, ‘Rosa sat so Martin could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run; Obama is running so we all can fly!’ John McCain, hapless Republican candidate in 2008, charged that his rival was a lightweight international ‘celebrity’, like Britney Spears. To many white liberals, however, Obama seemed to guarantee instant redemption from the crimes of a democracy built on slavery and genocide. There is no doubt that compared to the ‘first black president’, who played the dog whistle better than the saxophone, a hip-hop enthusiast and the son of a Kenyan Muslim represented a genuine diversification of America’s ruling class. Obama offered his own ascent as proof that America is an inclusive society, ceaselessly moving towards a ‘more perfect union’. But such apparent vindications of the American dream obscured the limited achievement of the civil rights movement, and the fragility of the social and political consensus behind it. The widespread belief that Obama had inaugurated a ‘postracial’ age helped conceal the ways in which the barefaced cruelties of segregation’s distant past had been softening since the 1960s into subtle exclusions and injustices.

A ruling class that had been forced to make partial concessions to the civil rights movement subsequently worked, as Nixon blurted out, to ‘devise a system’ to deal with the black ‘problem’ without appearing to do so. With the wars on crime, drugs and welfare queens, the repertoire of deception came to include coded appeals to a white constituency, the supposedly ‘silent majority’. But the cruellest trick used by both Republicans and Democrats was the myth that America had resolved the contradiction at the heart of its democracy. For the conviction that African-Americans were walking and running and would soon start flying, enabled by equal opportunity, paved the way for an insidious ideological force: colour-blind universalism. Its deceit was summed up best by the creepy Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia: ‘In the eyes of the government, we are just one race here. It is American.’ The rules of colour-blind equality and the ‘level playing-field’, as they came to be outlined in the 1980s and 1990s, created a climate in which affirmative action came to look like reverse racism: unacceptably discriminatory against whites. With structural injustice presented as a thing of the past, what appeared to deform the lives of black people was their culture of single-parent households, scant work ethic, criminality and welfare dependency. This widespread attitude was summed up by a New Republic cover in 1996 urging Clinton to slash welfare: it showed a black woman, or ‘welfare mom’, bottle-feeding an infant while smoking. Blacks, in this politically bipartisan view, needed to get with the American programme just as various immigrant communities had done. As the original exponent of centrist liberalism, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, charged, they had become too prone to ‘nourishing prejudice, magnifying difference and stirring up antagonism’ – in other words, blacks were guilty of identity politics.

The detractors of ‘identity liberalism’ are still prone to the fantasy that the end of de jure racial inequality ushered in a new era of opportunity and mobility for African-Americans. In reality, even the black people admitted into the networks of prosperity and privilege remained vulnerable compared to those who had enjoyed the inherited advantages of income and opportunity over several generations. This became gruesomely evident during the financial crisis of 2008, when African-American families, deceived into home-ownership by banks peddling subprime loans, found themselves in economic freefall, losing half their collective wealth. When Coates and Obama simultaneously emerged into public view in 2008 the political and ideological foundations of racial progress ought to have looked very shaky. But this structural weakness was obscured by the spectacular upward mobility of an Ivy League-educated black lawyer and constitutional scholar.

There were signs during Obama’s campaign, particularly his eagerness to claim the approbation of Henry Kissinger, that he would cruelly disappoint his left-leaning young supporters’ hopes of epochal transformation. His actions in office soon made it clear that some version of bait and switch had occurred. Obama had condemned the air war in South Asia as immoral because of its high civilian toll; but three days after his inauguration he ordered drone strikes in Pakistan, and in his first year oversaw more strikes with high civilian casualties than Bush had ordered in his entire presidency. His bellicose speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize signalled that he would strengthen rather than dismantle the architecture of the open-ended war on terror, while discarding some of its fatuous rhetoric. During his eight years in office, he expanded covert operations and air strikes deep into Africa; girding the continent with American military bases, he exposed large parts of it to violence, anarchy and tyrannical rule. He not only expanded mass surveillance and government data-mining operations at home, and ruthlessly prosecuted whistleblowers, but invested his office with the lethal power to execute anyone, even American citizens, anywhere in the world.

Obama occasionally denounced the ‘fat cats’ of Wall Street, but Wall Street contributed heavily to his campaign, and he entrusted his economic policy to it early in his tenure, bailing out banks and the insurance mega-company AIG with no quid pro quo. African-Americans had turned out in record numbers in 2008, demonstrating their love of an ostensible compatriot, but Obama ensured that he would be immune to the charge of loving blacks too much. Colour-blind to the suffering caused by mortgage foreclosures, he scolded African-Americans, using the neoliberal idiom of individual responsibility, for their moral failings as fathers, husbands and competitors in the global marketplace. Nor did he wish to be seen as soft on immigration; he deported millions of immigrants – Trump is struggling to reach Obama’s 2012 peak of 34,000 deportations a month. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, he had eloquently sympathised with the marginalised and the powerless. In power, however, he seemed in thrall to Larry Summers and other members of the East Coast establishment, resembling not so much the permanently alienated outsider as the mixed-race child of imperialism, who, as Ashis Nandy diagnosed in The Intimate Enemy, replaces his early feeling for the weak with ‘an unending search for masculinity and status’. It isn’t surprising that this harbinger of hope and change anointed a foreign-policy hawk and Wall Street-friendly dynast as his heir apparent. His post-presidency moves – kite-surfing with Richard Branson on a private island, extravagantly remunerated speeches to Wall Street and bromance with George Clooney – have confirmed Obama as a case of mistaken identity. As David Remnick, his disappointed biographer, said recently, ‘I don’t think Obama was immune to lures of the new class of wealth. I think he’s very interested in Silicon Valley, stars and showbusiness, and sports, and the rest.’

Embodying neoliberal chic at its most seductive, Obama managed to restore the self-image of American elites in politics, business and the media that had been much battered during the last years of the Bush presidency. In the updated narrative of American exceptionalism, a black president was instructing the world in the ways of economic and social justice. Journalists in turn helped boost the fantastical promises and unexamined assumptions of universal improvement; some saw Coates himself as an icon of hope and change. A 2015 profile in New York magazine describes him at the Aspen Ideas Festival, along with Bill Kristol, Jeffrey Goldberg, assorted plutocrats and their private jets, during the ‘late Obama era’, when ‘progress was in the air’ and the ‘great question’ after the legalisation of gay marriage was: ‘would the half-century-long era of increasing prosperity and expanding human freedom prove to be an aberration or a new, permanent state?’ Coates is awkward among Aspen’s panjandrums. But he thinks it is too easy for him to say he’d be happier in Harlem. ‘Truthfully,’ he confesses, ‘I’m very happy to be here. It’s very nice.’ According to the profile-writer, ‘there is a radical chic crowd assembling around Coates’ – but then he is ‘a writer who radicalises the Establishment’.

For a self-aware and independent-minded writer like Coates, the danger is not so much seduction by power as a distortion of perspective caused by proximity to it. In his account of a party for African-American celebrities at the White House in the late Obama era, his usually majestic syntax withers into Vanity Fair puffs: ‘Women shivered in their cocktail dresses. Gentlemen chivalrously handed over their suit coats. Naomi Campbell strolled past the security pen in a sleeveless number.’ Since Clinton, the reflexive distrust of high office once shared by writers as different as Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald has slackened into defensiveness, even adoration, among the American literati. Coates proprietorially notes the ethnic, religious and racial variety of Obama’s staff. Everyone seems overwhelmed by a ‘feeling’, that ‘this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing.’ Not so incomparable if you remember Tina Brown’s description of another power couple, the Clintons, in the New Yorker in 1998: ‘Now see your president, tall and absurdly debonair, as he dances with a radiant blonde, his wife.’ ‘The man in a dinner jacket’, Brown wrote, possessed ‘more heat than any star in the room (or, for that matter, at the multiplex)’. After his visit, Joe Eszterhas, screenwriter of Showgirls and Basic Instinct, exulted over the Clinton White House’s diverse workforce: ‘full of young people, full of women, blacks, gays, Hispanics’. ‘Good Lord,’ he concluded in American Rhapsody, ‘we had taken the White House! America was ours.’

A political culture where progress in the air was measured by the president’s elegant bearing and penchant for diversity was ripe for demagoguery. The rising disaffection with a narcissistic and callous ruling class was signalled in different ways by the Tea Party, Occupy, Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders’s insurgent candidacy. The final blow to the Washington (and New York) consensus was delivered by Trump, who correctly read the growing resentment of elites – black or white, meritocratic or dynastic – who presumed to think the White House was theirs. Writing in Wiredmagazine a month before Trump’s election, Obama hailed the ‘quintessentially American compulsion to race for new frontiers and push the boundaries of what’s possible’. Over lunch at the White House, he assured Coates that Trump’s victory was impossible. Coates felt ‘the same’. He now says that ‘adherents and beneficiaries’ of white supremacy loathed and feared the black man in the White House – enough to make Trump ‘president, and thus put him in position to injure the world’. ‘Every white Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist,’ Coates writes in a bitter epilogue to We Were Eight Years in Power. ‘But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.’ This, again, is true in a banal way, but inadequate as an explanation: Trump also benefited from the disappointment of white voters who had voted, often twice, for Obama, and of black voters who failed to turn out for Hillary Clinton. Moreover, to blame a racist ‘whitelash’ for Trump is to exculpate the political, business and media luminaries Coates has lately found himself with, especially the journalists disgraced, if not dislodged, by their collaboration in a calamitous racist-imperialist venture to make America great again.

*

As early as 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois identified fear and loathing of minorities as a ‘public and psychological wage’ for many whites in American society. More brazenly than his predecessors, Trump linked the misfortunes of the ‘white working class’ to Chinese cheats, Mexican rapists and treacherous blacks. But racism, Du Bois knew, was not just an ugly or deep-rooted prejudice periodically mobilised by opportunistic politicians and defused by social liberalism: it was a widely legitimated way of ordering social and economic life, with skin colour only one way of creating degrading hierarchies. Convinced that the presumption of inequality and discrimination underpinned the making of the modern world, Du Bois placed his American experience of racial subjection in a broad international context. Remarkably, all the major black writers and activists of the Atlantic West, from C.L.R. James to Stuart Hall, followed him in this move from the local to the global. Transcending the parochial idioms of their national cultures, they analysed the way in which the processes of capital accumulation and racial domination had become inseparable early in the history of the modern world; the way race emerged as an ideologically flexible category for defining the dangerously lawless civilisational other – black Africans yesterday, Muslims and Hispanics today. The realisation that economic conditions and religion were as much markers of difference as skin colour made Nina Simone, Mohammed Ali and Malcolm X, among others, connect their own aspirations to decolonisation movements in India, Liberia, Ghana, Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine. Martin Luther King absorbed from Gandhi not only the tactic of non-violent protest but also a comprehensive critique of modern imperialism. ‘The Black revolution,’ he argued, much to the dismay of his white liberal supporters, ‘is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes.’

Compared to these internationalist thinkers, partisans of the second black president, who happen to be the most influential writers and journalists in the US, have provincialised their aspiration for a just society. They have neatly separated it from opposition to an imperial dispensation that incarcerates and deports millions of people each year – disproportionately people of colour – and routinely exercises its right to assault and despoil other countries and murder and torture their citizens. Perceptive about the structural violence of the new Jim Crow, Coates has little to say about its manifestation in the new world order. For all his searing corroboration of racial stigma in America, he has yet to make a connection as vital and powerful as the one that MLK detected in his disillusioned last days between the American devastation of Vietnam and ‘the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society’. He has so far considered only one of what King identified as ‘the giant American triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism’ – the ‘inter-related flaws’ that turned American society into a ‘burning house’ for the blacks trying to integrateinto it. And in Coates’s worldview even race, despite his formidable authority of personal witness, rarely transcends a rancorously polarised American politics of racial division, in which the world’s most powerful man appears to have been hounded for eight years by unreconstructed American racists. ‘My President Was Black’, a 17,000-word profile in the Atlantic, is remarkable for its missing interrogations of the black president for his killings by drones, despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia, mass deportations, and cravenness before the titans of finance who ruined millions of black as well as white lives. Coates has been accused of mystifying race and of ‘essentialising’ whiteness. Nowhere, however, does his view of racial identity seem as static as in his critical tenderness for a black member of the 1 per cent.

As long as Coates is indifferent to the links between race and international political economy, he is more likely to induce relief than guilt among his white liberal fans. They may accept, even embrace, an explanation that blames inveterate bigots in the American heartland for Trump. They would certainly baulk at the suggestion that the legatee of the civil rights movement upheld a 19th-century racist-imperialist order by arrogating to the US presidency the right to kill anyone without due process; they would recoil from the idea that a black man in his eight years in power deepened the juridical legacy of white supremacy before passing it on to a reckless successor. The intractable continuities of institutional brute power should be plain to see. ‘The crimes of the American state,’ Coates writes in one of the introductions to We Were Eight Years in Power, ‘now had the imprimatur of a black man.’ Yet the essays themselves ultimately reveal their author to be safely within the limits of what even a radicalised black man can write in the Atlantic without dissolving the rainbow coalition of liberal imperialism or alienating its patrons. Coates’s pain and passion have committed him to a long intellectual journey. To move, however, from rage over the rampant destruction of black bodies in America to defensiveness about a purveyor of ‘kill lists’ in the White House is to cover a very short distance. There is surely more to come. Coates is bracingly aware of his unfinished tasks as a writer. ‘Remember that you and I,’ he writes to his son in Between the World and Me, ‘are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that. Remember that this consciousness can never ultimately be racial; it must be cosmic.’ Nowhere in his published writings has Coates elaborated on what this cosmic consciousness ought to consist of. But his own reference to the slave trade places the black experience at the centre of the modern world: the beginning of a process of capitalism’s emergence and globalisation whereby a small minority in Europe and America acquired the awesome power to classify and control almost the entire human population.

The black slave, captured early in this history, presaged the historical ordeal of the millions yet to come: dispossession and brutalisation, the destruction of cultures and memories, and of many human possibilities. Today, the practices of kidnapping, predation, extraction, national aggression, mob violence, mass imprisonment, disenfranchisement and zoning pioneered in the Atlantic have travelled everywhere, along with new modes of hierarchy and exclusion. They can be seen in India and Myanmar, where public sanction drives the violent persecution, including lynching, of various internal enemies of the nation. They can be seen in Africa and Latin America. They have returned home to Europe and America as renewed animus against migrants and refugees. All this reproduces to a sinister extent the devastating black experience of fear and danger – of being, as Coates wrote, ‘naked before the elements of the world’. Coates’s project of unflinching self-education and polemic has never seemed more urgent, and it has only just begun.

[96thdayofrage]

What is the state? This is a critical question for revolutionaries to understand and grapple with as the US imperialist system flounders in a state of perpetual decline. Some readers on social media have called the theory of imperial decline “fascist entryism.” However, the theory of imperial decline is not fascist at all. In fact, it stems from Vladimir Lenin’s theory of the general crisis of capitalism . Lenin posited that the general crisis of capitalism would occur in stages, of which the final stage is the total collapse of imperialism and the transition to socialism. While Lenin is no longer alive to update the theory, victorious revolutions in Korea, Cuba, and China and the current struggles of the people to defend their self-determination in Syria and Venezuela have updated it for us. Each has demonstrated through resistance that US imperialism has only one development path: collapse. The collapse of imperialism has been restrained by the military state, which wages endless war on progressive and radical forces at home and abroad.

“Lenin posited that the general crisis of capitalism would occur in stages, of which the final stage is the total collapse of imperialism and the transition to socialism.”

Revolutionaries such as Assata Shakur and Michael Parenti have analyzed the function of the state. In her analysis of the prison industrial complex, Shakur placed the mass imprisonment of Black and other peoples of color in the United States in the context of the social containment of the most rebellious segments of the population. She acknowledges that prisons also serve to super exploit Black and other oppressed communities to the benefit of neoliberal capital. Parenti describes the state as an apparatus that makes the world safe for corporate power and plunder . The state under imperialism is wielded by the rich to protect the interests of the rich.

Both Shakur and Parenti were inspired by Vladimir Lenin to varying degrees. Shakur was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, two socialist organizations that drew heavily from the foundations of Marxism outlined by Lenin and others, before being driven into exile in Cuba in the early 1980s. Lenin synthesized the works of Marx and Engels in a period of revolutionary upheaval. He wrote The State and Revolution in 1917 just prior to the great October revolution that brought the first socialist state into existence. Lenin defines the state as follows:

The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The State arises where, when, and insofar as class antagonism cannot be reconciled . . . According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order,” which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes.

“The state under imperialism is wielded by the rich to protect the interests of the rich.”

The state is not a static or monolithic entity. Its character is dependent upon the historical moment and development of a given social order. There are many who understandably view the state as “government.” Governments are often seen as the arbiters of the “rules” of society and thus stand above it. Historical materialism challenges the notion that “government” is synonymous with the state. The study of “government” through the lens of historical materialism unmasks the function of all levers of state power.

The history of the United States is riddled with examples of how the state functions to protect the wealth and property of the capitalist class. US capitalism is unique in that its emergence was rooted in the system of white supremacy. As Gerald Horne notes, the US capitalist state legalized white supremacy on a national basis to protect the interests of the slave owning capitalist class. This class saw the British Empire’s flirtation with abolition of the slave trade as a threat to its existence. George Jackson stated it simply in Blood in My Eyewhen he remarked that, “the work of framing the new nation’s constitution [in 1787] proceeded with fifty-five persons and only two were not employers!!!!”

“US capitalism is unique in that its emergence was rooted in the system of white supremacy.”

The development of the US capitalist state into a global imperialist power has been met with much resistance, both globally and domestically. Such resistance among the oppressed classes has forced the state to institute reforms without losing its essential character. Slave rebellions, labor strikes, and peoples’ movements of all kinds have forced certain concessions from the elites. However, none of these concessions included political power. In fact, because the US capitalist state emerged from slavery and colonial exclusion, it codified special laws against the “tyranny of the majority” to ensure that political organizations like labor unions and so-called “third parties” were barred from participation in “government.”

An analysis of the historical development of the US state could fill the pages of several books. This analysis focuses on what Michelle Obama’s comradery with George W. Bush tells us about the US state. First, it must be said that the era of Trump has brought about profound political confusion in relation to the state. Many see Trump as the state rather than one of its critical aspects. The truth is that the US state possesses two layers. There is the “government,” such as the Presidency, legislative, and judicial branches, that publicly deals with the contradictions of imperialism through the enforcement of public policy. Then there is what some call the “Deep State” or the “covert state” which handles the contradictions of imperialism in secret. These layers of the state often work together, although it isn’t guaranteed.

“Slave rebellions, labor strikes, and peoples’ movements of all kinds have forced certain concessions from the elites.”

Michelle Obama and George W. Bush provide a quintessential example of what ruling class unity in the governance of the imperialist state looks like. In response to the wall-to-wall media coverage that her hugs with George W. Bush received, the former First Lady told the corporate media that “I love him to death.” Michelle Obama’s love for Bush is proof that the state manages not only the class antagonisms of the system but also the contradictions within the ruling class. The state enforces the unity of ruling class interests; namely, profit, plunder, and the power necessary to obtain them. George W. Bush and Michelle Obama’s sweet exchanges are thus much more than just a public relations stunt. They represent the dangerous forces that are unleashed when consensus between competing elements within the ruling class is achieved.

The Bush and Obama families are loyal servants to Wall Street and the military industrial complex. Bush’s Administration helped facilitate the murder of over a million people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama added to the murder toll and expanded the scope of US imperial warfare to Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan. Bush founded the U.S. African Command (AFRICOM) only to see a Black Democrat expand the U.S. military apparatus into nearly every African country. Bush ruled when the capitalist crisis of 2007-2008 emerged but it was Obama who bailed out the banks by siphoning trillions of dollars in wealth to the top 1 percent. Bush collaborated with the CIA to run torture programs throughout the Middle East region as part of the War on Terror. Obama opposed torture rhetorically while allowing the CIA and the Pentagon to relay billions in support to Saudi Arabia and Al Qaeda to commit acts of torture on the people of Yemen, Syria, and Libya.

“George W. Bush and Michelle Obama’s sweet exchanges represent the dangerous forces that are unleashed when consensus between competing elements within the ruling class is achieved.”

The history of the US state is riddled with similar examples. It is important to recognize that contradictions are always present within state apparatus. Often, these contradictions are the product of class struggle and the objective development of the system. The system of imperialism is predicated upon competition among profiteers who eventually turn to monopoly to superexploit the oppressed classes. However, class struggle often forces the state to provide concessions to oppressed people. The U.S. state formally “abolished” slavery in the 19thcentury after over a century of resistance on the part of Black Africans, but the rulers then denied liberty to Blacks through Jim Crow and mass Black incarceration. Strikes and other labor actions on the part of the working class forced the state to provide a modicum of state assistance and labor rights only to reverse the gains in the aftermath of the global capitalist crisis of the mid to late seventies. In this period of reaction, what we are witnessing is the crumbling of the US state. The era of Trump has further pushed competing forces within the ruling class to unite not only against elements of the Trump Presidency but also against oppressed people everywhere. This explains why mass murders like Colin Powell are treated like “resistance” figures when they defend NATO or why George W. Bush is now adored by those who once chanted, “anyone but Bush.”

“Bush ruled when the capitalist crisis of 2007-2008 emerged but it was Obama who bailed out the banks.”

The following analysis is by no means exhaustive. The dirty dealings of the US state are reflective of the dirty dealings of an imperialist system in its final stages. Ruling class conflict between Trump and his opponents in both corporate parties has exposed the disaffection that much of the planet feels toward the US state and all that it represents. US imperialism hopes to correct itself by swiftly getting rid of the symptom, Trump, and escalating dangerous wars that target the rise of Russia and China. What the US state can do nothing about is the impending economic crisis of capitalism. Unmentioned by the actors within the U.S. state is that most working-class Americans, especially Black Americans, have yet to recover from the 2007-2008 crisis. We thus need to analyze the state under imperialism as an organ for the oppression of one class, one people, and one nation by another to fully grasp the challenges that stand in the way of putting the slogan “power to the people” into practice.

[ara-la]

Prisoner Study Group Q & A from Sehu-Kessa-Saa-Tabansi (PA)

The following is from a Pennsylvania prison system study group on Black social movements from civil rights to Hip Hop. these are questions by Address This, and answers by Sehu-Kessa-Saa-Tabansi after studying "Readings for Session 1: War, Empire and Internationalism". Martha Biondi, "Anti-Communism and Civil Rights," in To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Harvard University Press, 2003) pp. 137-163. Robin D. G. Kelley, "Stormy Weather: Reconstructing Black (Inter-)Nationalism in the Cold War Era," in Is Its Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism (University of Chicago Press, 2002)  pp. 67-90. Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure), "The Black American and the Palestinian Revolution" in Stokely Speaks (Lawrence Hill Books, 2007/1971), pp. 97-114.

Q: What if anything, surprised you in these essays?

A: In "To Stand and Fight" I already knew about the red scare of McCarthyism but I was surprised how extensive it was just like the later COINTELPRO of J. Edgar Hoover. Also I was able to see how directly affected the individual members. The names of those who turned on Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois enlighten me that traitors and infiltrators predated the 1960s and 1970s movements and need to be sought out and studied. I learned that Paul Robeson was not a communist according to the reading. The treatment of W. E.  B. DuBois was new to me and I did not expect the US to target him that early in his career as I knew about later US counterrevolutionary tactics. In "Stormy Weather" by Robin Kelley, I appreciated the more detailed history on RAM which I was familiar with by Muhammad Ahmad (Max Stanford)'s book 1965 to 1975 Black Radical Armed Struggle Organizations. I did not already know RAM California history related to Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. On "The Black American" I was surprised because I never knew the BPM put forth written solidarity back then with the Palestinians, which is historical going forward in today's terms of the same challenges exist.

 Q: Martha Biondi's article focuses on the history of political persecution of civil rights and communist activists in the 1940s and 1950s. Can you think of any other political persecutions that have occurred in US history that are similar? Please describe and explain the answer you have in mind. What makes it similar?

 A: The FBI war against the radical left; AIM (American Indian Movement), BPP (Black Panther Party for Self-Defense), SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), Puerto Rican Nationalists, La Raza, Brown Berets, Young Lords Party, Young Patriots Party, and the antiwar activists against the Vietnam War all were persecuted and infiltrated under J. Edgar Hoover's infamous COINTELPRO. It was alleged that communists influenced the leaders of these radical organizations, and the government of the USA sabotaged and destroyed them through criminal acts, including burglaries and murder being orchestrated.

 Q: Many sectors of the civil rights movement embraced anti-Communism, believing that by throwing black leftists out of their organizations they would gain the kind of legitimacy that would enable them to earn some successes against segregation. Did this work as intended? Was the price worth it? Why or why not?

 A: No! The cultural assimilation into white supremacy integration did not work. No so-called civil rights act and 13th amendment has been the price of why New Afrikans are not considered a nation, but rather as Blacks. New Afrikan nation is about independence not dependence on US land but our own. A separate statehood is required for national identity for colonized oppressed New Afrikans.

 Q: How did larger global perspectives and events shape black social movements during World War II and the Cold War?

 A: I believe World War II influenced New Afrikans to militarily defend themselves in the South and elsewhere after they returned to Jim Crow. I believe the Cold War shaped revolutionaries to put in context global oppression, indigenous and colonized peoples internationally. The Cold War era shaped non-aligned governments' opposition to imperialism as well as revolutionary movements.

 Q: Reflecting on the history of black nationalism that Robin Kelley describes, how would you define the "nation" in black nationalism? What does "nation" mean in this context? Is it different in any way from how we usually understand "nationhood"?

 A: I would define New Afrika as a distinct group of descendants from the West Afrikan slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean that now resides in the US as a colonized people who are black. Usually integrationist assimilationists attempt to say we are all Amerikan as a nation. So New Afrikan nationhood is independent of Amerikan white supremacy and imperialism.

 Q: Think about the current global political climate in which contemporary black social movements are taking place today (including contemporary wars, occupations, and economic transformations). What kinds of shifts or changes in foreign policy or foreign relations do you think black social movements in the US should be pushing for today?

 A: New Afrikans should be striving for New Afrikan autonomy. After slavery, New Afrikans under the Reconstruction wanted a New Afrikan Republic. Reconstruction was about self-rule government for the ex-slaves, but the Ku Klux Klan and US government conspired to perpetuate modern Slavery.

 Q: Stokely Carmichael (later, Kwame Toure)'s speech in support of Palestine was an early, important statement of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. What connections, if any, do you see between anti-black racism in the United States and Israeli occupation of Palestine?

 A: There is a deeper connection in the fact the Palestinians are refugees in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and they have been killed and dehumanized in similar ways. We have Black August, the Palestinians have Black September. We both were removed from land.

 Q: Stokely Carmichael insists that the Black power movement of the 1960s must include the demands of other Third World movements around the globe within its own list of demands. Are there any demands from justice movements located outside the US that you think we need to take up as our own today? If so, what are they, and why do you believe we need to incorporate them?

 A: Because of globalism/imperialism, the imperialist powers are united against the non--colonial countries. Therefore, there can only be success by a worldwide revolution. Dr. John Henrik Clarke summarized this up with scholars like Dr. Ben Jochannan and Cheikh Anta Diop. They stated there has to be a united Africa and a united Latin America. The proletariat has to have an internationalist perspective and approach to socialism in order to defeat capitalist imperialism.

 Notes

RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement)

BPM (Black Power Movement)

Address This! Correspondence course via Books Through Bars and One Hood United in Pennsylvania

 Sehu Kessa Saa Tabansi

neo-colonial government name Alfonso Percy Pew #BT-7263

SCI Houtzdale

PO Box 1000, Houtzdale PA 16698-1000

www.GTL.net/PADOC