Quote; "What
an unfortunate "coin-incident" ladies and gents..We agonise here
over the complex algorithms which drive the "Deep State's"
mechanisms of social control incl. esp. the possibility of the creation or "encouragement"
of terrorist events around the world but the simple application of Divide and Rule seems to have escaped the chattering-classes'
attention..Look at it this way...."Look at them kicking Saddam (ha, ha),
they're not laughing now!"...To a Utilitarian; "oh they're
kicking the statue of General Lee who is laughing now?!" I'm
not..as with the ritual immolation of human effigies these things should be
left to the past....some might compare it to Soviet Russia but there were how
many statues of Stalin? We need to be able to see our pasts (whatever they
are), and these places can become iconic symbols of healing and
rapprochement..what is left otherwise is a cultural void that can provide
succor to no-one...Brits should consider very carefully the history of the
Union (because that is what this is about..controlling and dividing
same), ..and the so-called radicals, who are (as usual), so concerned
with justice and freedom, just what effect the Yankee victory had on the Amerinds.....!" Post to The Lifeboat News message board.
Nb. In the case of the icons of social engineering* when they become ubiquitous the balance must be re-addressed but this is an attempt (ostensibly although it is the intent of those participating -or "being manipulated"-, here that is of import), to bury the past....never a good idea. Neither does it appear that these same chattering classes have considered (or acknowledged), the aping of fundamentalist terror attacks that this tragic incident represents...
Heather Heyer #RIP
"..another has been sacrificed to the corn deities;
her motives were clear and laudable in that she felt the Right Wing protest was
something that given the current, "shoot first ask questions later" NRA
lead policy (that tries to allow Americans to continue to live an undeclared
civil war), which is wedded to the continuance of what is essentially a political motivated policy of
exclusion, not just for Afro-Caribbeans but disaffected whites also, that criminalises
dissent and makes addicts of conformists (Mr.Trump), she must make a stand against (for those concerned advocate -one way or another-, for the continuance of same)." Post to The Lifeboat News message board.
*This was an easy cause to use to ignite a
forest-fire of confrontation nevertheless the erection of
mass-produced images is an attempt (at least), to indulge in
social engineering by the disaffected southern whites, however balance
does not admit to a Year Zero type approach in response, the U.S
Government should be in control let it make sensible policies instead of stoking the fires of hate. History is written by the victors..
"The truth behind most of the Confederate monuments being torn down tells an even larger story than you'd realize"Go to: https://twitter.com/mic/status/898941499550736384 for video. Statues of medical racist who experimented on slaves should also be taken down
Quote; "protesters gathered in New York City’s Central Park to call for the removal of a monument to James Marion Sims – the “father of gynaecology” – a doctor who bought, sold and experimented on slaves.
There are two other Sims statues on state-owned property. One is in Columbia, South Carolina, and the other in Montgomery, Alabama. In an interview with MSNBC,
Steve Benjamin, the mayor of Columbia, recently agreed that the local
Sims statue should come down “at some point”. Now the New York Academy
of Medicine has reissued a statement supporting the removal of Sims’ effigy from Central Park.
Over the past five decades, a small army of academics – including
social historians, feminists, African American scholars and bioethicists
– have reached a consensus that Sims’ medical research on enslaved
patients was dangerous, exploitative and deeply unethical – even by the
standards of his times. And doctors at the Medical University of South
Carolina, in Sims’ home state, have publicly acknowledged Sims’ overt medical racism.
James Marion Sims.R. O'Brien/Wikimedia Commons
The ongoing removal of statues that celebrate the Confederacy and
other forms of white supremacy, is an opportunity to also correct the
problem of Sims’ troubling presence on the symbolic landscape of
America’s past.
1)
Where did all the guys with baseball bats come from?
2) Having been involved in organising demonstrations and marches under police
control I can tell you that the chances of getting a march authorised when
there is another march planned for the same time and place is zero. How then
do these fascist vs anti-fascist (that is, fascist of the other tribe) get
authorised by the police? If one march is not authorised then why is is not
closed down at the early stages as normally happens? Post to; "The Lifeboat News" message board.
Dear America: If You Want to Stop Racism, Tear Down the Drug War—Not Statues
Quote; “In America, the area of government that is most responsible for
maintaining a racist system, allowing racist actors to oppress their
targets with impunity, and perpetuating the suffering and plight of
millions through the persecution of morally innocent individuals — is
the war on drugs. Without a doubt, the war on drugs fuels the racist system by targeting minorities and the poor. It serves to increase interactions between police—who are often caught joining the force to act out their racist desires—and the citizens.
The drug war, from the police departments to the court systems,
unequivocally targets and punishes minorities harder for the same
victimless crimes for which their white counterparts receive slaps on
the wrist.
As TFTP reported last year, a scathing report in Harper’s Magazine, written by Dan Baum set
the record straight and relieved all doubt over the intentions of the
drug war. John Daniel Ehrlichman, counsel and domestic policy chief to
President Richard Nixon, came clean on the real reason behind the war on
drugs — to criminalize blacks and hippies.
According to Baum, he tracked down Ehrlichman in 1994 at his engineering firm in Atlanta, Georgia.
"You
want to know what this was really all about?" Ehrlichman bluntly asked
Baum of the war on drugs. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White
House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You
understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either
against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies
with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily,
we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their
homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the
evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did""* Go to: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/dear-america-want-stop-racism-tear-drug-war-not-statues/
For full article.
*Italics mine.
The Story of Charlottesville was Written in Blood in the Ukraine
Quote; "What I find interesting about the current discussion around what many
are referring to as the emboldening of the radical white supremacist
right is how easy it is to mobilize opposition against the crude and
overt white supremacists we saw in Charlottesville. So easy, in fact,
that it’s really a distraction from the more difficult and dangerous
work that needs to be done to confront the real right-wing power
brokers.
The white supremacy that some of us see as more insidious is not
reflected in the simple, stereotypical images of the angry,
Nazi-saluting alt-righter or even Donald Trump. Instead, it is the
normalized and thus invisible white supremacist ideology inculcated into
cultural and educational institutions and the policies that stem from
those ideas. That process doesn’t just produce the storm troopers of the
armed and crazed radical right but also such covert true believers as
Robert Ruben from Goldman Sachs, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Tony
Blair and Nancy Pelosi – “decent” individuals who have never questioned
for a moment the superiority of Western civilization, who believe
completely in the White West’s right and responsibility to determine
which nations should have sovereignty and who should be the leaders of
“lesser” nations. And who believe that there is no alternative to the
wonders of global capitalism even if it means that billions of human
beings are consigned permanently to what Fanon called the “zone of
non-being.”
This is the white supremacy that I am concerned with. And while I
recognize the danger of the violent right-wing movement, I am more
concerned with the right-wing policies that are being enacted into law
and policy by both Democrats and Republicans at every level of
government. Go to: http://dissidentvoice.org/2017/08/the-story-of-charlottesville-was-written-in-blood-in-the-ukraine/ For full article.
Quote; "For many, the Confederate memorials continue to represent this
repression. They are a celebration of southern identity as white. Since
the rise of the Black Lives Matter
movement, the slogan “BLM”, as well as the names of victims of police
shootings have appeared on memorials around the country. “Black Lives
Matter” was sprayed on Charlottesville’s Lee statue in the days
following the Charleston church shootings
in 2015. Along with calls for the removal of Confederate flags from
civic buildings there have been increasingly vocal, and successful,
demands to reconsider the place of monuments in public spaces.
Who was Robert E. Lee?
The statue in Charlottesville is of Lee atop his horse, Traveller.
The Confederate general and native of Virginia holds a hat in one hand
and his horse’s reins in the other, his sword ready at his side.
It was unveiled by Lee’s great-granddaughter at a ceremony in May
1924. As was the custom on these occasions it was accompanied by a
parade and speeches. In the dedication address, Lee was celebrated as a
hero, who embodied “the moral greatness of the Old South”, and as a
proponent of reconciliation between the two sections. The war itself was
remembered as a conflict between “interpretations of our Constitution”
and between “ideals of democracy.”
Here was the states’ rights argument. The south fought a noble war
over its right to self-determination, rather than an effort to keep
millions enslaved. Lee, claimed one of the speakers, “abhorred slavery”.
In his position as commander of the Confederate Army of North Virginia,
Lee represented military endeavour rather than a political struggle to
uphold human bondage.
This has made Lee a powerful symbol of the Confederacy. He allowed
white southerners to ignore the central role of slavery in the war. They
could forget that the southern states seceded in order to uphold
slavery and that their defeat meant freedom to millions of enslaved
people. There was no space for black memories of emancipation in the
south’s public spaces. Confederates were white and their monuments were
celebrations of whiteness.
Lee is one of the most frequent figures to be memorialised in statues, aside from the common soldier. In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center
catalogued all publicly supported spaces dedicated to the Confederacy,
finding 203 examples named for Robert E. Lee. Streets, highways,
counties, cities, parks, monuments and 52 public schools are named for
the Confederate general. Up until 2015, Lee’s birthday was officially
marked in five states.
The same year as Lee’s statue appeared in Charlottesville, Virginia
passed laws which strengthened definitions of who was “colored” and who
was “white”, and which reinforced the law prohibiting interracial
marriage. Then, two years later, the state passed a law to enforce
racial segregation in places of public entertainment.
The monument to Lee served the same purpose as the legislation – to
remind African Americans of their perceived place and inferiority. White
nationalists gathered to protect the statue in 2017 because they wanted
to celebrate its message. Like the original creators and supporters of
the Lee monument, they sought to celebrate a white supremacist vision
not just of the past, but of the present." Go to: http://theconversation.com/charlottesville-virginia-the-history-of-the-statue-at-the-centre-of-violent-unrest-82476?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitterbutton For full article. Arafel: This statue however was unveiled by his great-granddaughter and therefore was a known "sensitive site". Also see; "The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down!" Go to: http://www.arafel.co.uk/2015/06/the-night-they-drove-old-dixie-down.html
& "American "Justice" re: #Ferguson." Go to: http://www.arafel.co.uk/2014/11/american-justice-re-ferguson.html
Quote; ""Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals
and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other
hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans,"
Mr Trump said in a statement at the White House.".."
Who was General Robert E Lee?
"Robert Edward Lee was an American general who commanded the Confederate Army forces during the US Civil War between 1862 and 1865.
Historical
documents show that Lee was exceptionally cruel towards his
subordinates, with one slave describing him as the meanest person he had
ever met.
The Robert E Lee statue in Charlottesville sparked violence in the town
Robert Edward Lee was a Confederate general in the American Civil WarIn
1856 he penned a letter where he described slavery a “moral and
political error”, while at the same time believing that slaves were
better off in America than they were in their homeland.
“In this enlightened age, there are
few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an
institution, is a moral & political evil in any country. It is
useless to expatiate on its disadvantages,” he wrote.
“I think it
however a greater evil to the white than to the black race, & while
my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies
are more strong for the former." Go to: http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/841050/Robert-E-Lee-statue-US-Charlottesville-who-is-confederate-civil-war-general
Tear down statues? At this rate, we’ll have to rename New York
Quote; "Columbus cost indigenous peoples dear. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. As
Oxford University was recently reminded, Cecil Rhodes was an
imperialist. Prior to 1960 or so, every celebrated man in the Western
world would probably qualify in today’s terms as a ‘misogynist’ (a
strong word thrown around with well too much abandon).".. .."This campaign is potentially limitless, not to mention anti-historical.
More, any drive for ideological purity is flat-out creepy. Can we have a
little more ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’? This
rampage against any regard for ancestors who didn’t tick every modern
political box has a totalitarian texture, and would leave Americans a
sterile public environment with only statues of Eleanor Roosevelt and
Harriet Tubman — until, that is, some eager beaver unearths, say, their
insensitive remarks about cross-dressers." Go to: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/tear-down-statues-at-this-rate-well-have-to-rename-new-york/ For full article.
