Freedom versus Slave Mind

Posted on December 16, 2021 by manuelgarciajr

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Freedom versus Slave Mind

White Supremacy will end with human extinction. The angry rage of conservatives and fundamentalists, in the face of godless skepticism, is really an anguished cry of: “don’t make us question our bigotry!” For working class people who can’t think better, White Supremacy is a psychological compensation for an inferiority complex. That complex is learned from infected parents, and indoctrinated into one by a capitalist class society intent to exploit and enslave people by controlling their minds with a programming for obedience to higher authority, a sense of inadequacy and neediness, and with race- and ethnicity-based prejudice, to cause disunity among the great mass of the working class. Working class white supremacists are simply abused children passing on their abuse to younger generations and lower seniority workers and employees: ignorant slaves seeking to compensate for their hidden lack of self-respect by trying to depreciate and enslave others “below them”. The capitalist upper class propagates this mass psychology illness of low self-esteem, neediness and bigotry, because it is the method by which the union of the rich few control the disunion of the poor many. “Divide and conquer” was how the Roman Empire was ruled, and so with America today. Ending White Supremacy before human extinction occurs would require a Marxist Revolution to full Communism. A first step to that political goal is Labor Union organizing so the Labor Union Movement expands to the point of controlling the national economy. Then a Social Revolution can occur, which ends all interpersonal prejudices. Such a political-social progression is the only way militarism-imperialism can be overcome, and Climate Change finally seriously confronted. Such a Paradigm Shift is deemed “impossible” by capitalist indoctrination in the Slave Mind. And it may be unlikely in your lifetime, but that does not prevent you from working toward that Paradigm Shift — The Revolution — beginning with your own transformation out of Slave Mind, and then with the activism and organizing you may choose to do. The Revolution is not merely a desired socio-political event at some time in the future during the course of human history, it is a living process carried within the individual lives of people who have freed themselves from Slave Mind, and by their living examples push back against the oppressors’s imposition of Slave Mind and its White Supremacy illness, even onto the last day of human existence if that is to be our collective fate. Be joyful in your freedom.

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Salvation

Posted on December 26, 2020 by manuelgarciajr

Painting of the Roiling Ocean, by Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky

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It is sad indeed to see an oppressed people destroying itself through factionalism and civil war, while a far more powerful enemy squeezes them out of their land and lives. I have read of such in Thucydides, but it is too painful to watch in my own time. And, such a sad spectacle turns foreign eyes away, withdrawing their compassion and respect, and leaving “the lost” to their fate of ultimate disappearance. You and I, Nadia Issam Harhash, know that a universal solidarity among humans is the only salvation for all of us, but you and I also know the unfortunate truth that too many of those humans will resist contributing to that salvation to the bitter end: a death cult. What is left to people like you and I is to speak out against the death cult (and hope we are not silenced), and then also retreat into care of our families and immersion in being creative artists, so as to keep our sanity while we live. As an engineer, I always look for solutions to problems, but here as in so many other times and places the “solution” is purely one of choice: unrestrained compassion, respect and solidarity for and with the other members of the homo sapiens species. To me, all politics and all religions are madness, and should disappear. Heraclitus (~500BC) said “Bigotry is the disease of the religious,” and politics is so obviously the mechanisms of organized greed. Salvation will NOT come down from some Sky God in Heaven, nor from Hell out of the barrels of guns; salvation can only come from human hearts and souls who have come to realize that they each are merely momentary wave crests in a sea of humanity flowing within an ocean of Life. Peace.

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Non-Violent Protest vs. Riot Violence, to Change Society

Posted on June 9, 2020 by manuelgarciajr

Grace Hudson sketched this amazingly subtle and detailed portrait of an expert Pomo basket weaver, and friend, with bitumen (which I think of as a coal/tar crayon).

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Non-Violent Protest vs. Riot Violence, to Change Society

Some say: “Promote non-violent civil disobedience. Violence is hurting the George Floyd protests at this point.” Well, yes and no. Without violence the U.S. media won’t cover protests against our neoliberal paradigm and its occupation forces. Look at the Bernie Sanders campaign and his huge “unseen” rallies; and the large protest marches by Rev. William Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign, also “unseen.” “A riot is the language of the unheard” (MLK,Jr.).

By some Cheyenne accounts, when the U.S. Army of 1876 found the bodies of the dead 7th Cavalry soldiers at the Little Big Horn two days after the battle, General George Armstrong Custer’s eardrums would have been found to have been punctured (by two Cheyenne women) with awls so he could hear better in the next life. Custer (whose body was found with two gunshot wounds: one to his left chest and from which he had bled, and the other to his left temple and likely due to a post-mortem stray bullet), and the many American non-Indians like him, were so intransigently deaf to the cries of pain and pleas for peace and freedom from the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and all the other Indian nations and tribes, that the ear-piercing symbolism may rest on now-unrecoverable historical fact. That symbolism was certainly not recognized in 1876 nor heeded if it was, as the corralling of Indians and the murder of Crazy Horse in 1877, and the continuing Indian Wars all the way to the ‘final’ massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, showed.

Non-violent protests and waiting for “inevitable” social change didn’t do anything for the American Indians between 1492 and 1890 (the American Indian population reached its nadir in 1900). So, I understand where violent protest can come from with some anti-Trumpers. But I think most of the tide of violence comes in from the right, from cops desperate to keep exerting their Custer-like dominance (for, what else have they got in life to feel “big” about, being mere enforcers just like the legally deputized Lincoln County Regulators of 1878 in New Mexico, and which Billy the Kid was a member of), and from Trump-allied provocateurs and violence-hero wannabes, and certainly also some assholes just taking advantage of disorder. All that surrounding and threatening violent agitation during these May-June protest marches, plus well-justified and long-standing grievances, push some protestors over the edge of polite behavior.

Remember that Trump — our illustrious genius president — has repeatedly called for violence by his goon squads because the idiot thought it would only be inflicted on an eternally cowering “untermensch” population that he despises, and that he could control that violence. Well, now he’s got his violence and it’s out of his control, and it doesn’t seem to be helping his reelection campaign. An increasing number of mainline Republican “intellectuals” are now openly calling for a Biden electoral near-sweep (of Trumpy ideologues only), which I guess means they are completely confident that Biden and the usual gang of DNC-Democrats are seen as reliably loyal partisans to the preservation of corporate capitalism, which is what they all really only care about anyway. So, they’re looking to Slow Joe as their savior-of-the-year for their precious neoliberalism.

I hate violence — with its resulting injuries, deaths and destruction — and never encourage any of it; but how else do the poor, oppressed, disorganized and unmilitarized “lower classes” (everywhere and throughout history) frighten their rich and disdaining overlords to get those Big Brother boot-heels off their necks, and give them decent chances of living in physical safety and economic security?

I think of the American Indians, the Palestinians, and the Jewish fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 (against the Nazis, who were immune to non-violent protests) for historical perspective. You can also throw in the American Civil War to that list, because in essence we are still fighting it.

As many wise commentators have already said: the only redemptive outcome of riot violence today would be if it sparks the creation of a large, organized and self-sustaining mass social and political movement against the entire neoliberal regime (and takes it down!) — a substantial, continuing, non-violent and effective socio-political force that aims far beyond just cop-reforms, Trump-tumbling, and the electoral reining in of Republican politicians for a couple of years.

The riot injuries, deaths and destruction that Americans are suffering today are at best a societal forward payment — like a first month’s advanced rent deposit — before we get the chance to “move in” to a better paradigm of American society.

May the battles and bleeding in the streets stop as soon as possible, and the sweeping transformation (and rebirth) of our society commence immediately.

Thoughts on the George Floyd Riots

Posted on June 2, 2020 by manuelgarciajr

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Thoughts on the George Floyd Riots

Yesterday, a friend wrote me: “I really don’t know how we are going to come out of this. For a while I was okay. Over the last week I have grown more desperate with each day as the news develops.” I am trying to answer him here.

Many of my social media friends have expressed their anger, outrage, sadness and disgust at the lynching of George Floyd by a white supremacist cop in Minneapolis on May 25th (8 days ago as I write this). That lynching was carried out by an arresting cop kneeling for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on the right side of George Floyd’s neck while the handcuffed Floyd was lying face down on a city street. Floyd kept pleading for relief because he could not breathe, but the killer cop continued his kneeling choke-hold for 2 minutes and 53 seconds after Floyd had become unresponsive. Three other cops participated in the lynching: one holding Floyd’s back, another holding his legs, and the third looking on and preventing intervention by a person who stood nearby, watching in horror. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd)

The country has blown up, large protests and riots now fill the streets of many cities and towns in America, and have for the last week. “A riot is the language of the unheard,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. said about the expressions of that truth in 1965 (Watts, Los Angeles CA) and 1967 (Newark NJ, Detroit MI, and 157 other places). That truth again erupted into view in over 100 cities in the United States after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on 4 April 1968, with “the greatest wave of social unrest the United States had experienced since the Civil War,” before it finally flamed out on 27 May 1968. And that truth was again acted out during 6 days of riots (29 April to 4 May) in Los Angeles CA in 1992, after the four cops who had savagely beat Rodney King in 1991 were acquitted of any crime.

“We are witnessing America as a failed social experiment,” Dr. Cornell West said on 29 May, as he preached on CNN television with crystal clarity on the massive and systemic failure of America — as a society, an economy and a tangle of governments — to protect and defend all of its people. Listen to Cornell West for yourself to unflinchingly face the reality of America (https://youtu.be/cs3jdyfx_fo), a reality that had been made plain by Malcolm X by 21 February 1965, when he was assassinated.

People are in the streets because the George Floyd murder was the last straw on their unbearably strained patience in waiting for justice in America. They blew up because they saw that justice in America will never arrive. Their many pent-up disappointments and frustrations came to a head on seeing the video of the George Floyd murder. Those disappointments and frustrations include experiences of victimization — many fatal — by racist policing, as well as economic victimization by a structurally racist and fundamentally rigged economy.

So, the victim populations of the race war against Blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and others disfavored by white supremacists; and the class war by the rich and powerful against: wage slaves, the unemployed, youth without prospects, and the 99% of Americans who are outsiders from the con games and self-aggrandizing capers of the economic insiders, just went ape-shit on seeing the Floyd murder and its obvious acceptability to the Trump-led bipartisan power structure. That is why I call it a lynching.

All this is happening during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has paralyzed society with its obvious deadliness, and that in turn has collapsed any hope of financial security for so many people who were already in the bottom tiers of the fundamentally heartless American economic system.

Many of these people are faced with sudden devastating losses: of health and life to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and of being cast into bankrupting debt by the medical bills for having survived COVID-19; of confidence in remaining healthy while on jobs they need for economic survival; of income when their jobs disappear, and with it their health insurance if those jobs even provided it; of housing with the inability to pay rent; and even of ready access to food. The pandemic has also interfered with the most fundamental source of solace we all rely on in our times of despair: sharing the company of our families and true friends. So going out into the streets now to protest is natural for many who want relief from the unbearable suffocation of the choke-holds on them, and for some of those people who feel they have nothing left to lose, to even riot.

Unfortunately, there are rotten malevolent scumbag bigots who are taking advantage of the street protests to act violently and destructively in the hopes of provoking a much wider race war of oppression by white supremacy. And there are too many cops and government people (the cop employers) who are obsessed with control and domination instead of public and individual welfare, and they too create more hurt and provoke more reactive rioting by their heavy-handed cop-riot “law enforcement” actions.

So we get a vicious cycle of violence begetting violence. The best way to break that cycle is to quickly legislate substantive social and economic improvements that clearly address the underlying distresses of the people protesting visibly, and the people despairing silently and invisibly. The blinded-by-bigotry Trump-type people don’t want to enact those long-needed reforms because it would mean cutting back on their money-making schemes and their biased administrative actions.

I am guessing the current cycle of unrest will wind down simply because of exhaustion on the part of most of the people in the streets, coupled with heavy suppression by militarized police and federal troops. That won’t end the problem, but just make it more “invisible” to the authorities and simply delay its resolution, which if not forthcoming will simply mean another outbreak is inevitable.

I think things will get back to “normal” in time (within weeks?), but the “normal” that we had before late May was toxic. It carries within it the makings of more, longer and worse future riots if we let it return and continue unchanged.

A Bernie Sanders presidency aided by a helpfully supportive Congress would have been a potentially mild reform of our toxic “now,” but that reform was forbidden by the corporate-owned bipartisan power structure through its Democratic Party wing, with the full concurrence of its Republican Party wing. So now we have the George Floyd riots because people don’t feel like compromising any more, or of waiting for the Godot of American justice, or of turning the other cheek of a failed Christianity.

I don’t know and can’t really guess what’s coming next, or of how things will play out for the rest of this year.

We need a lot of wise leadership — which is obviously entirely lacking from the Trump Administration, from the U.S. Congress, and from many governors and elected politicians — and we need a lot of steady confident calmness that holds off from violent actions, by governors, mayors and police forces, who would in turn all be supported in that type of compassionately wise response by those wished-for intelligent and unbiased Federal authorities, for this national crisis to be calmed down quickly and humanely; and to then be permanently resolved by essential social and economic reform legislation, which was assiduously enforced thereafter.

The slogan “no justice, no peace” says it all. We’ve always known that, and the Kerner Commission Report spelled it all out after the riots in 1967 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerner_Commission), but it was ignored.

This crisis will be fixed for real when justice in America is established for real. I don’t know when or if that will ever happen. But I just wish it would soon.

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For America today: shamrock = lily; Erin = Freedom.

Thoughts After Charlottesville 2017

Posted on August 13, 2017 by manuelgarciajr

Trump is the best wake-up call Americans have had in decades. America has always been this way, but American politicians and capitalists have tried to mask it to keep the wheels of profitability: business, pork barrel and graft, turning smoothly. “Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness” for that overarching purpose (Orwell quote). But Trump has dispensed with that, which is why the professional Republicans and Democrats hate him (for pantsing the long-standing corporate-run bipartisan con-job on the public) and most of the public hates him (for stating the crude heartless reality crudely; embarrassing, frightening and insulting them, a tough blow after eight years of Obama’s soothingly elegant and inspirational lying). Trump has the fool’s witless honesty of parading the leprous body of white-supremacy-capitalist-controlled government naked in public for all to see (because he’s a narcissistic true-believer in his religion: Mammonism). People who say “America has changed” or “America has degenerated” are actually reacting to the fact that the core reality of American government and capitalism (particularly since Ronald Reagan, 1980, but generally since far back) has finally broken through their benign wishful fantasies about American society. Trump’s overt and inadvertent ripping back of the curtain hiding the rotten truth has dispelled those innocent illusions, and that in turn has excited his religion’s worse elements to act out.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, resentful White knuckleheads torch-marched protesting against the demographic dilution of White Supremacy in America, shouting: “We will not be replaced!” Yvette Carnell (a Black woman political commentator) continues voicing the protests of resentful only-African-American-descendants-of-slaves against African and Afro-Caribbean Blacks and Hispanics prospering in America: “We should not be displaced!” These are two sides of that most popular American thousand-sided counterfeit coin: “My race uber alles!” Race-love and race-hate are both the opium of the discards from American capitalism.

Black men are 6% of the US population, and that group “contributes” 40% of the killed-by-police dead. Not all of those dead were armed and/or significant threats to society. Police in America have a very difficult job to do (because Americans are so efft-up, and on opoids and all kinds of other street shit, as well as alcohol, and are TV-addled dopes, sports fans, and even domestic abusers; besides so many just normal drama-queens wanting attention). And, by and large, our police are doing a meh job. Most cops are so-so, but too many are total shit. It would be good for Americans if their cops were unarmed (no guns). Those cops who didn’t like that would quit (good) and those who accepted that challenge would probably do okay. Knuckleheads seeking power-by-association do not make the best cops. Bigotry exists in America because most Americans find it comforting (they feel scared and inadequate), “business” finds it more profitable to tolerate than reject (don’t contradict the richer customers, and take advantage of the hungry workers), and most people are too chicken to go beyond their ethnic-racial-‘cultural’ clannishness, especially if it impedes attending to their greed/self-interest. America hasn’t changed, it’s just that in the Trump “era” no effort is being made to mask the reality: it’s all about the money. If you REALLY wanted to see racism disappear (at least in actions) in the USA, we would have to do what the Cuban Revolution did: full socialism (all in for the benefits and opportunities), and inflexible laws for inclusion and anti-discrimination (regardless of the “cost” to “business”). Americans aren’t there yet, they’re too wrapped up in their stupid, selfish fantasies.

It got so bad in Charlottesville, VA (where the whiney white supremacists were yowling about not being uber-special anymore, roughing people up, and in one case committing automobile homicide of a counter-protester), that President Trump had to give an almost Bernie-like speech, that “regardless of your race, color or creed, we are all Americans.” Wow, he had to push back on his base for his own political survival. What the proportions of hypocrisy and sincerity were in Trump’s speech, I’ll let you judge (and I believe there is some degree of sincerity in it) [15 August 2017, I now believe there was zero sincerity], because ALL Americans are race-conscious (that is to say, racist!!). Bigotry in our country will not die in our lifetimes, because it is so comforting. Bigotry will live in America as long as it is good for business (money beats morals every time). The popular attitude is: “I’m perfect, all my problems are caused by other people.” My vision of America is unachievable: fairness, support and equal opportunity for all, regardless: “to each according to his and her needs, from each according to his and her abilities.”

POWER & REVOLUTIONS

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Trump Liberates American Bigotry From Shame

Posted on February 25, 2017 by manuelgarciajr

Pogo

The reason Trump is so popular is that he liberates Americans from being ashamed of their bigotries. This is even true for more American blacks, Jews, Asians, Hispanics (but not Latinos) and even Muslims than you might imagine. We can see this in the many instances of overt and expanded persecutions: the white man who two days ago shot three people in a Kansas bar in an anti-Middle East hate crime murder (“get out of my country!”), killing an Indian engineer and wounding two other men; the many video-recorded instances of excess brutality (and killing) by usually white police officers against usually non-white and usually unarmed civilians; the recent mass vandalism of Jewish tombstone toppling (in response to which Muslim Americans raised $100k to help fund restoration work); the more militarized and less humane (pulling people awaiting surgery out of hospital beds) round up of undocumented aliens, and increased harassment of legal resident aliens, citizens and travelers – all with significant popularity among a rainbow spectrum of Americans who claim “their” jobs are being stolen by “illegal immigrants”; the militarized police attacks on anti-pipeline protesters on Native American land (effectively an invasion against supposedly sovereign territory); the belligerence against potheads in legalized marijuana states (even poor white people can be persecuted for seeking alternatives to opioid addiction and overdose death); the official resurgence of and approval of bias against alternative sexual identity and non-heterosexual orientation; the eagerness of many careerist bigots to spew out Neo-Nazi propaganda publicly (with official tolerance and even approval), and of bigoted cowards to scrawl Nazi graffiti on monuments of groups targeted by Neo-Nazis (I’ve seen such myself, in Oakland!); the resurgent bigotry against females generally and reproductive rights in particular (individual sovereignty of their own bodies by females); and the orgy of unrestrained greed skyrocketing the Dow Industrial Average right now: the rush to privatize the $620B public education money stream (and then later be able to skyrocket tuition at “good” primary schools parents desperate for “successful” children will want to get their children into); the rush to capitalize on yet-to-be-extracted fossil hydrocarbons (quarterly capital gains trump climate change and even the hastening of the end of the world); the fury to deny socialized healthcare in favor of your-money-or-your-life profitability for the already rich; and the enjoyment of the self-righteous satisfaction in an “America first” attitude of being able to bomb all the other “darkies” on Earth. The remedy for all this depends on the collective actions of the American people over the next (few?, many?) years.

manuelgarciajr

energy, nature, society

Tag Archives: bigotry

POWER & REVOLUTIONS

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Trump Liberates American Bigotry From Shame