ethnicity – praag.org

President Putin welcomes collective human rights

By Wayne Madsen

Russian President Vladimir Putin has redefined the cause of international human rights to include the concept of «collective human rights». Putin rightly argues that in addition to individual human rights, which are being used by various special interests to advance such «boutique causes» as rights got lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, pedophiles [as seen recently by the German Green Party’s defense of members of Green Party-run pedophile communes], groups of people have the right to protect their social, religious, linguistic, and cultural identities against forces that seek to undermine such distinctions.

In recent years, the interventionists of the U.S. State Department, backed by George Soros and his ilk, have sought to destroy the character of various aspirant nations and ethnically- and linguistically-based regions that have striven for cultural and social independence. Putin has recognized such besieged peoples and that him to recognize the independence of the Republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from the CIA- and Soros-infested Republic of Georgia; the autonomy of and referendum in Crimea that saw it reunite with Russia; and the right of Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, and Novorossiya to determine their own futures without oppression and violence directed from Azerbaijan, Moldova/Romania; and Ukraine, respectively.

Putin has international law on his side in his argument that collective human rights do, in fact, exist. Such rights were outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1989 Convention of the International Labor Organization, and the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

In June of this year, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted in favor of a resolution that recognized group human rights. The global homosexual lobby, as represented by the U.S. State Department, Soros-funded NGOs, and such media outlets as The Daily Beast, cried foul. They claim there are no collective human rights, only individual human rights with an overarching focus on gay rights. The U.S. position that there are no «traditional values» associated with human rights was rejected in a council vote of 26 for, 14 against, with 6 abstentions.

Voting with Russia and against the United States was South Africa, India, Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam, nations with religious majorities and minorities that are constitutionally protected from domestic or foreign dictates that they submit to the whims of the globalized special interests of Soros and his lackeys within the State Department. Other nations that voted with Russia included Algeria, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, China, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gabon, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Maldives, Morocco, Namibia, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, and Venezuela. The Soros NGOs and The Daily Beast cried foul and suggested that these nations did not reflect the will of the international community.

Russia stood accused by the Soros types and their State Department facilitators of opposing «diversity». Yet, Russia’s support for the rights of indigenous rights of groups to their own language, religion, and cultural and social values is at the very essence of recognizing diversity, whether it is in Abkhazia, Donetsk, the Serbian districts of the contrivance called the «Republic of Kosovo,» or the Alawite and Kurdish towns of Syria.

All the minions of Soros and the global gay lobby could do was condemn the 26 countries that voted for the collective human rights resolution as nations having «appalling» human rights records. The gay rights lobby would gloss over the dismal records of individual human rights witnessed in such «gay rights» havens as the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand with their panoptic electronic surveillance societies, general acceptance of police brutality, harsh suppression of racial minorities (an issue that is ignored by many gays so long as it is racist and not homophobic-related oppression), and curtailment of free speech.

The Russia-promoted UN human rights resolution also protects children and women from sex slave trafficking. It is no surprise that The Daily Beast would condemn a resolution targeting a revolting global sexual slave trade that is largely centered in Israel. After all, The Daily Beast appears to take all of its editorial directions from the power centers of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, along with their subservient political and financial cells in New York, London, Miami Beach, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC.

The gay lobby and its supporters are flat out wrong when they reject Putin’s doctrine of collective human rights. Enshrined in international human rights law is the «communal right of privacy,» in addition to general collective human rights, especially as they relate to the rights of indigenous people to be free of wanton exploitation and abuse by neo-colonial or economic interests. In many oppressed regions, dubiously-collected national census information has been used to forcibly assimilate and transfer indigenous populations from their historic lands.

Western corporations and interests, including those of Soros, have eagerly backed Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi because they realize that with her in charge of Myanmar (Burma), western exploiters will be free to displace the ethnic Shan, Kachin, Karen, and other peoples from their resource-rich lands in northern and eastern Myanmar. The Democratic Republic of Congo serves as a case in point where Western corporations have disregarded collective human rights in order to pillage native lands of their precious natural resources. The rise of the «blood diamond» industry in central and western Africa is directly linked to the blatant disregard by the West for «collective» or «group» human rights.

In the early 1990s, before the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), an alternative «United Nations» for indigenous peoples lacking representation at the UN, was taken over by Soros-controlled NGO bureaucrats and «Eurocrats,» the organization based in The Hague conducted a survey of 32 of its then-47 members. The survey discovered that many of the UNPO peoples sat atop highly-coveted natural resources. After UNPO organization was subsumed by the global network of Soros NGOs, which saw to it that Karl von Habsburg of the Austro-Hungarian royal pretenders was appointed UNPO’s director-general, the organization no longer points out the dangers posed to indigenous peoples by unscrupulous corporations and hedge funds like those controlled by Mr. Soros and his Rothschild and Rockefeller colleagues. It was also no coincidence that Von Habsburg served in a senior executive position for the NGO World Vision, an organization with historical ties to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Hapsburg family are influential promoters of a federalized Europe that stands opposed to the concept of collective human rights as most recently seen in the European Union’s sharp opposition to Scottish and Catalonian independence. The cause of collective human rights received a sharp body blow by the takeover of UNPO by the Soros and Habsburg interests and the collapse of the Scottish and Catalonian independence movements.

The very same promoters of individual human rights, which is nothing more than State Department and Soros code for «gay rights,» would deny collective rights to Kurds, native Americans, and Asian tribal peoples because their cultures and creeds may oppose the promotion of homosexual life styles. Therefore, in the eyes of the gay movement, it is better for such groups to remain suppressed if they refuse to accept the «foreign» life styles imposed from abroad. Putin, by advancing the concept of collective human rights, has seen through the Soros and gay liberation smoke screen as he has called out their main promoters for their abject hypocrisy.

Little America at the tip of Africa

In this interview, two South African authors have a conversation about important issues affecting the country, the USA and society generally. They both grew up in and around Johannesburg and, thanks to the internet, discovered each other’s work a few years ago. Ilana Mercer lives in Washington State, in the north-western corner of America.

ILANA MERCER: There’s an elephant in the courtroom in which Oscar Pistorius is being tried for the murder of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. It is the unidirectional, black-on-black and black-on-white violent crime in South Africa. The fear of being butchered was likely behind the blade runner’s irrational, irresponsible actions. I had hoped that Pistorius would speak up. For all his privilege, Pistorius knows the rapacity and invincibility of the criminal class in his country. Like every other Afrikaner, he knew in his gut what infiltrating gangs would do to a legless Boer. The world is praising the proceedings in that court. However, “making sport of a caged animal that has confessed” is how a South African reader described this courtroom Colosseum. What do you think?

DAN ROODT: I largely agree with that. One of the columnists on our Praag.org site described the trial as a “canned hunt and a legal travesty.” Most people watching it probably do not know that only 8 percent of murder cases in South Africa result in a conviction, so killers have a 92 percent chance of literally getting away with murder! South Africa is both the murder and especially the rape capital of the world. Usually the statistics are massaged in such a way that only murder proper, called “first-degree murder” in the United States, is included in the absolute number of murders. But if one also counts other homicides with a lesser culpability, we are the world champions, even above India’s 43,000 homicides. But, of course, India has over 1 billion people, whereas we have just over 50 million. Even for first-degree murder, we have more of those per year (16,000) than the U.S. (14,000), which has six times our population.

Regarding the court procedures, Pistorius is spending a lot of money on his legal team, and the state is using an experienced Afrikaner prosecutor, Gerrie Nel. However, there has been large-scale affirmative action applied to the appointment of judges, so that many of them lack the knowledge of the law and the experience to do their job properly. In many cases, black offenders, especially, get off very lightly and in practice do not serve more than 10 years for first-degree murder.

The government is also applying pressure on lawyers to apply affirmative action in their own ranks as most of the top-level senior lawyers, or advocates, as we call them, are still white. They are preferred by the big-spending corporate clients in civil cases, especially. A lawyer friend of mine recently told me of one tedious corporate court case in Pretoria that has lasted 10 years and consumed $5 million in legal fees, also swallowing up her whole life. Ironically, even the president, Jacob Zuma – who has had more than 500 charges of corruption against him and was also accused of rape in December 2005 – used white Afrikaner lawyers to get him off, using their technical knowledge of the law and court procedures.

There is also rampant corruption in the criminal justice system, with policemen and petty court officials being bribed to make documents and evidence disappear, so the kind of televised court-room soap opera of the Pistorius trial is not at all representative of the vicissitudes of the average trial.

Unlike in the U.S., South Africa does not collect crime statistics broken down by race anymore, but we know that the vast majority of prison inmates serving time for violent crime are black. White offenders – which include white-collar crimes like fraud or insider trading – only constitute 1.8 percent of the prison population, while whites make up under 10 percent of the total population. A recent reliable survey showed that whites are disproportionately victims of house robberies, constituting about 50 percent of the victims, while the perpetrators are almost invariably black.

The image of South African blacks disseminated by the global media is of a population of kindhearted, forgiving people like Mandela, whereas the reality demonstrates something entirely different. There is something inexplicably sadistic about murders and assaults by black perpetrators on their white victims in South Africa, which often include lengthy and dehumanizing torture sessions, mutilation of bodies, sexual violence, and so on. Often the victims are children, including toddlers and babies. Every week we read about farm murders in the press where the victims are normally elderly white farmers, regularly ambushed on a Sunday morning when they return from church attendance.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

MERCER: The South African Constitution, naturally, sanctions the prosecution of individuals based on the things they say. Conversely, Americans are supposed to enjoy a constitutional right to speak freely. The freedom gap is, however, narrowing. The establishment – politicians, journalists, jurists, educators and academics; “conservatives” as much as liberals – trip over one another in a collectivist, concerted effort to ruin an “offender.” The latest individual to be crucified for committing America’s original sin – harboring impure racial thoughts – is Donald Sterling. You’ve written that, while “few people in the U.S. have had any direct experience of racism, they nevertheless discern racism in other people’s body language, in their use of euphemisms or in being patronized by others.” Explain how this “metaphysical racism” now works as an “engine of history.”

ROODT: Unfortunately, ever since the 1960s, South Africa has been influenced by America in a very bad way. Instead of looking to the U.S. for lessons in self-reliance, the right to self-defense, or how to finance start-up tech companies, we have simply imported your liberal, pathological political correctness. That includes the sensitivity around language and terms with a racial connotation. I cannot begin to tell you how many words there are in South Africa to describe people of various races including, of course, pejorative terms. I seem to recall that my generation was very sensitive to using some of those words, and there was a famous case in 1978 when the old government’s censors banned a satirical novel entitled “Magersfontein o Magersfontein!” for containing a piece of dialogue in which the word “kaffir” was used in an ironic way. This is our equivalent to what you call the “N-word” in the U.S. In print these days, most people here also refer to the “K-word,” as there is just such a taboo against using it. However, if you go to any school playground or university campus in South Africa, young whites are using it as a way of rebelling against the system. How long this will last, I do not know, because the government and mainstream, politically correct society are clamping down on it and even giving people suspended prison sentences for a first offense after being found guilty of using the “K-word.”

So in South Africa you can torture an elderly white lady and maybe get away with it, but you will be prosecuted for speech crime for using racial epithets. I would not be surprised if all telephone conversations will be monitored, NSA-style, at some point in the future to ensnare those who use so-called racist language.

When it comes to “metaphysical racism,” that is at a far more subtle level. Someone who first alerted me to this was the documentary filmmaker Craig Bodeker from Denver, Colorado, with his piece “A Conversation About Race.” Many people in the film say that “racism is everywhere,” surrounding us like sin or some invisible element. Also, in “A Conversation About Race,” I learned that some American blacks think that a compliment from a white could be a sign of racism. So either an insult or a compliment could be construed as racism.

In South Africa, some of the liberal commentators such as Steven Friedman who writes in the Johannesburg Business Day claim that blacks were damaged by apartheid and therefore cannot be expected to perform at the same level as whites. In the U.S., this claim is made about slavery, that the insidious effects of slavery are still present, which would explain the academic achievement gap, but also differences in wealth and income. Colonialism also comes into it, as far as other African countries are concerned. The fact that Africa has remained underdeveloped for so long is almost always blamed on colonialism, notwithstanding that it was colonialism that had introduced Africa to the wheel and to writing, not to forget science and technology!

Whereas about a decade ago, the British magazine The Economist had described Africa as “the hopeless continent,” it now sees Africa as a fast-growing continent, not very different from countries like China, Hong Kong or South Korea. Even Goldman Sachs thinks that Africa will soon be a developed continent competing on an even keel with Europe, North America or Asia.

The flipside of the new optimism about Africa, including South Africa, is that every failure or missed growth target is somehow backwardly rationalized in terms of racism, colonialism and apartheid. In short, “metaphysical racism.” So even when it comes to technology, the economy and education, there is always a cloud of racism somewhere that the developed world has to address by offering aid money or some form of expiatory confession from Western leaders.

I always wonder: If Africa is now standing on its own two feet and growing so fast, why do so many countries still need development aid? Why do South African blacks still need affirmative action, including racial quotas in sports?

ILANA MERCER: The dominant-party state that is South Africa is steeped not in an African creed but in an American one. One of your most astute observations has been that post-apartheid South Africa is very much a creature of the Anglosphere. In the U.S., centrally planned and enforced multiculturalism is twinned with open borders for Third World peoples. How has South Africa fallen in line?

DAN ROODT: Many people see South Africa as an experiment in multiculturalism and open borders. Almost robotically, we’ve adopted most of the American liberal precepts in a very naïve, knee-jerk fashion. Some people are even urging that we abolish borders completely, to allow any of the billion Africans north of our country to come and settle in South Africa, much like your government is doing vis-à-vis Central American dependents. However, our experience of the massive illegal immigration we have had since 1994 is that it increases intolerance, especially among the poor and the unemployed. Locals regularly kill foreigners, and we have had so-called xenophobic riots.

In some towns close to the border, the foreign population is about 80 percent. Foreigners have access to public health-care facilities, so many are “obstetrical tourists” who come here to have babies – “anchor babies,” as you call them in the U.S. Generally speaking, state hospitals are getting worse and worse, also as a result of being overburdened with foreign Africans.

Recently, there was a court decision that foreign children that have been orphaned or separated from their parents, for example in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, also qualify for free public education in South Africa. After Lawyers for Human Rights had sued for the privilege, the government did not oppose their petition to the court.

Open borders will lead to even more ethnic strife, and we may even import some of Africa’s civil wars as the belligerents pursue their combat in South Africa. In your country, it’s gang warfare.

MERCER: Under the Afrikaners, South Africa was a European-style nation-state – Christian and biracial, in the main. Under Mandela’s African National Congress, it has adopted multiculturalism, which subsumes an “American radicalism that aims at abolishing the nation-state and replacing it with a kind of global corporatism and welfarism,” to quote your work. South Africa is now an “Afro-Saxon” nation. Explain, please.

ROODT: Yes, I think those remarks of mine are borne out by what is happening in Europe right now. There is some kind of revival of the Western spirit going on in places like France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Austria and Hungary. It is something of a truism that Afrikaner nationalism in the 20th century was based on European-style ethnic nationalism. If you look at it more objectively and free of the moral hysteria and distorted accounts, apartheid or separate development was an attempt to impart European-style ethnic nationalism to South Africa’s African tribes. To some extent, it worked, and it still has an effect to this day. For example, there has been a resurgence of Zulu nationalism in South Africa, and to some extent the ANC under Jacob Zuma has become a vehicle for Zulu aspirations and advancement. With the difference that it is no longer limited to the old homeland of Kwazulu. The whole of South Africa has now become “one big Bantustan,” as the liberal commentator R.W. Johnson has characterized it.

But in other respects, South Africa has become a colony of the USA, culturally speaking. Blacks identify with African-American culture. You hear American rap music wafting from their cars, and they have adopted the same kind of victim’s discourse that you find in the USA. There is actually a Kenyan professor who teaches in the USA., as far as I know, Ali Mazrui, who coined the term, “Afro-Saxon” for the English-speaking blacks in Africa, the USA, the Caribbean, in Britain, and so on. In fact, they outnumber the original English-speaking population of England! The black elite in South Africa identifies with this global Afro-Saxon culture, and they see themselves as being an important part of it, using South Africa’s wealth and developed infrastructure to advance the Afro-Saxon cause.

Talking about the welfare state, one of the worst fears of the old apartheid theorists was that ultimately the productive, developed part of the economy would have to subsidize the unproductive, impoverished, undeveloped part, dragging both down into an equally distributed poverty. This is more or less what is happening in South Africa now as we have a welfare state for 50 million people, supported by only 2 million real taxpayers. The funny thing is that multiculturalism and affirmative action actually disguise this process completely, so that you can no longer really tell who the producers are and who the consumers of wealth are.

In the same way, knowledge and expertise also end up being distributed in such a way that you no longer know who really has it: Is it the person who does the job, or his secretary or assistant or deputy or whoever? The other day I heard that an ex-taxi driver was appointed to a top job in our central bank, but he is barely able to write an email and knows nothing about banking. Yet he has some outside white mentor or adviser who actually helps him do his job and is also his business associate. So everybody tries to exploit this made-in-America spoils system.

Unfortunately, the USA seems to be in imperial mode, and so it wants to export its multicultural model everywhere, including to Europe where there are still real nation-states in which people speak the same language, have a common history and identity and have not been transformed by immigration. You only have to come to South Africa to see the American model in its most extreme form, where race and political correctness dominate everything.

When it comes to issues of race and ethnicity, we have also imported the sensitivity around language and ideas that pertain in the USA. Once I actually quoted a black columnist complaining about the low scores in math recorded in black schools in Soweto. The next thing I was denounced as a racist. Even if you just try to defend your language and culture, or the right of free association, that is also seen as racist. Too much criticism of government corruption or affirmative action is likewise deemed racist.

Welcome to Little America at the tip of Africa.

Gaza: France experiencing ‘torrent of internet hate’

Given the many threats of violence and murder they have to deal with, moderators struggle to cope psychologically.

The deadly Israeli offensive in Gaza has unleashed a torrent of hate on media websites and social networks in France that moderators find increasingly difficult to contain.

The bombardment by land, sea and air that has killed at least 425 Palestinians has enflamed tensions far afield from the Middle East, especially in France with its large Muslim and Jewish communities.

Paris protests in support of Gaza residents have degenerated into violence on several occasions.

“As soon as you talk about Israel, it crystallises all passions, with up to 20 000 or 30 000 comments sometimes after an article, of which we will only let five to 10 percent through,” said David Corchia, head of Concileo, a firm of moderators that counts the dailies Le Figaro and Liberation as clients.

Helped by software that automatically reports suspect keywords, online moderators can filter comments in accordance with special legal requirements in France as well as client requests. Those laws ban racist, anti-Semitic or discriminatory messages among others, as well calls for violence.

The moderators have little time to decide whether to let a remark through, and generally block 25 to 40 percent of comments.

But on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the rejection rate can reach 95 percent.

“There are three times as many comments than normal, all linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Jeremie Mani, head of Netino, which looks after the websites of the Le Monde daily, Europe 1 radio and major French television channels.

Netino’s 250 moderators, most of them based in Madagascar, deal with tens of millions of comments every month.

“We see racist or anti-Semitic messages, very violent, that also take aim at politicians and the media, sometimes by giving journalists’ contact details,” Mani said.

“This sickening content is peculiar to this conflict. The war in Syria does not trigger these kinds of comments.

“On the pro-Palestinian side, identical messages are posted on dozens of sites. On the pro-Israeli side, there are fewer messages but they are better organised,” he said.

The vitriolic messages about the conflict come up not only after content about the conflict itself — but can be found under any subject.

“On an article about the Tour de France, after four comments it’s about Gaza,” said Mani.

“On one story about salmon fishing, I saw a comment saying: ‘Stop talking about this, the problem is there are too many Jews’.

“Without any moderation, these hate messages would invade everything, particularly as they quickly breed followers.”

Media sites are not the only platforms that fall victim to violent messages. Public spaces on social networks such as the Facebook pages of famous people are targeted, and those comments are first published before they can be removed.

And while the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict may generate a large amount of vitriol, other issues with a racial or ethnic element do too.

Corchia said that when a teacher was stabbed to death by a student’s mother in front of her young pupils earlier this month, racist messages began pouring in as soon as the foreign-sounding name of the assailant was revealed.

And when a former local election candidate for the Front National was given a nine-month jail sentence this week for comparing France’s black justice minister, Christiane Taubira, to a monkey, Corchia said that on one story, moderators were only able to publish 500 comments out of 10,000.

“We watch for word associations. For example, any allusion to World War II is eliminated,” he said.

Pierre Duhau-Laurent, marketing director for Atchik Services, which moderates the websites of the French presidency and the Le Parisien daily, said “organised propaganda” was currently sweeping social networks at night.

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has bought sponsored tweets for his messages. And Hamas’s response is just as organised,” he said.

Given the many threats of violence and murder they have to deal with, moderators struggle to cope psychologically.

Oprah Winfrey is delusional about racism, white and black

by Gregory Kane

Ah, the tenets of Libthink, one of which is that anyone opposed to the policies of one President Obama is, by definition, a racist.

A second is that only whites can be racist. Another is that no black person, anywhere, at any time and under any circumstances, can be a racist.

And now, courtesy of none other than Oprah Winfrey, those white racists need to die for America to enter racial Shangri La.

Oprah’s on a tour. She was recently in Great Britain to promote her movie “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.”

A correspondent for the BBC asked her if she felt that racism was the reason some Americans opposed Obama and his policies. Oprah, the one person responsible, more than any other, for Obama being president, of course said yes.

But she said much more than that. Specifically, she said this when asked if the problem of racism in America had been solved:

“Of course the problem [of racism] is not solved. … As long as there are people who still— there’s a whole generation — I say this, you know, I said this, you know, for apartheid, South Africa, I said this for my own, you know, for my own community in the South — there are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die.”

In one quick, thoughtless breath, Oprah added another tenet to Libthink: Not only are all racists white, but they also need to “just die,” every last one of them.

Once all those old, white racists “who were born and bred and marinated in it” have died, then America will be forever purged of racism.

Make that “white racism,” and remember, according to Libthink doctrine, that’s the only racism worth mentioning.

The racism that blacks might hold for non-blacks, that Latinos might hold for non-Latinos and that Asians might hold for non-Asians won’t go away of course, no matter how much adherents of Libthink doctrine might wish it were so.

There will continue to be the attacks that black thugs make against white victims, some of which (if not all) have to be at least partially motivated by race.

That black vs. Latino racist conflict won’t end after all those old white folks “bred and marinated in racism” die.

Said conflict has been going on for years. You might have seen an episode about it on Oprah’s show when it was on the air.

What’s that? You never heard about what happened to Cheryl Green on Oprah’s show? Well, there might be a reason for that.

Oprah, her brain steeped in Libthink as it is, probably didn’t figure this tale of Latino-on-black violence was worth doing a show about.

Green was only 14 years old when a Latino gang member fatally shot her in the Harbor Gateway area of Los Angeles on Dec. 15, 2006.

Four years later, Jonathan Fajardo was found guilty of Green’s murder. He was also found guilty of a hate crime, which means Green’s murder was racially motivated.

This wasn’t a murder carried out by some old, “bred and marinated”-in-racism white person Oprah holds in such disdain. At the time of Green’s murder, Fajardo, a Latino man, was only 18 years old.

So Oprah’s notion that racism is the exclusive worldview of the old and the white appears to be utter nonsense.

In the early 1990s, a Korean-American named Joel Lee was fatally shot on the streets of Baltimore.

Witnesses identified a distinctly not old and distinctly not white African American male as the shooter. At his trial, witnesses also told of the utter hatred he had for Asians.

A predominantly black jury acquitted him. In spite of Oprah’s delusions, racism won’t end once all those old, “bred and marinated in racism” whites die.

Gregory Kane, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.

First published in the Washington Examiner.

Who’s killing whom? Speak up, Bill O’Reilly!

by Ilana Mercer

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Beggars can’t be choosers. Those who’ve never hesitated to tell the truth about the hue of hatred in America are elated. Someone more powerful has stepped up to help do the work so few will do.

In 2010, Bill O’Reilly became the first member of mainstream media to briefly broach a taboo topic: the color of crime in the US. In his July 13th “Talking Points” memo, the famous talker alluded to rates at which blacks commit violent crime proportionate to their numbers in society.

Then as now, Mr. O’Reilly came straight out andsaidthis:

“African-Americans make up 13 percent of the population, but according to the Justice Department, they comprise 39 percent of violent crime convictions. Thirty-six percent of all murders in America are committed by African-Americans, and 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks.”

The Bureau of Justice’s statisticians confirm the long-standing trends to which Mr. O’Reilly alluded. The report,“Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008, “states: “Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders,” and were eight times more likely to murder than whites.

Everyone is, however, tripping over one another to show-off their admiration for Bill O’Reilly. That’s premature.

So elatedare the truth-tellersthat some have even missed that Bill and the blond brigade of Fox News—in the person of Kirsten Powers and others—are beating on breast about “intraracial” crime-patterns only. Or black-on-black crime. In so doing, these comfort-zone commentators deflect from the white-hot issue of black-on-white violence. You see, blacks are also more likely to murder whites than the reverse. This likelihood is a trend which O’Reilly and the gang are submerging by emphasizing only the “intraracial” nature of most murders.

They are in “good” company. The Bureau of Justice Statistics does the same—and worse: It often inflates white violent crime by conflating whites with Hispanics.

Thus while 84 percent of white victims were killed by whites, and 93 percent of black victims were killed by blacks; a hell of a lot of whites are killed by blacks, while few blacks are offed by whites.

As regards“stranger homicide,”blacks murder whites four times more often than whites murder blacks. Put differently, black-on-white murders constituted 20 percent of the known sample of “stranger homicides.” White-on-black murders constituted 5 percent of the same sample. (Given the direction of the aggression, one wonders whether some in the white cohort were not engaged in self-defense.)

When, then, will Bill O’Reilly and the simple-minded Ms. Powers pipe-up about interracial violent—”the ugliest form of racism in America,” in Pat Buchanan’s always-candid assessment?”

After researching the FBI numbers for ‘Suicide of a Superpower,'”Mr. Buchanan concluded: “An analysis of ‘single offender victimization figures’ from the FBI for 2007 finds blacks committed 433,934 crimes against whites, eight times the 55,685 whites committed against blacks. Interracial rape is almost exclusively black on white – with 14,000 assaults on white women by African Americans in 2007. … Though blacks are outnumbered 5-to-1 in the population by whites, they commit eight times as many crimes against whites as the reverse. By those 2007 numbers, a black male was 40 times as likely to assault a white person as the reverse.”

In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” this writer went back to the 2005 Bureau of Justice’s Statistics of “Homicide trends in the U.S.” Despite blacks comprising a mere 12.3 percent of the population, to whites’ 75.1 percent, in 2005, there were 10,285 black murderers to 8,350 white murderers. The crime of rape is most certainly anything but “intraracial.” As the BJS’s 2005 “Criminal Victimization Statistical Tables” reveal, blacks, at 12.3 percent of the population, were responsible for 36 percent of the 111,490 incidents in which whites were raped. And blacks committed 100 percent of the 36,620 incidents in which blacks were raped.

The legendary miscegenation of the much-maligned white male: could that too be a myth? Not one black woman or man—0.0 percent—was ravished by a Caucasian.

These unidirectional victimization patterns endure behind bars, seconds Human Rights Watch. “White inmates are disproportionately targeted for abuse.” A report titled “No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons” found that, “Inter-racial sexual abuse is common only to the extent that it involves white non-Hispanic prisoners being abused by African Americans or Hispanics.” “A form of revenge for white dominance of blacks in outside society” is how Human Rights Watch dignified the sexual subjugation of white by black inmates.

To counter evidence of the color of crime, America’s own self-styled anti-racism activists will typically claim that whites make up most of the population and are therefore natural targets for crimes. The probability of a black encountering a white is simply many times the reverse, their argument goes. However, interracial encounter rates do not account for the sheer hatred manifested in the appalling attacks on vulnerable white Americans. Interracial encounter rates fail to explain away what was done to the white American couple from Knoxville, Tenn., in 2007. Or to the four whites from Wichita, Kans., who were slain by blacks in 2000.

It is the “deep and dark reality buried in the hearts of the individuals who butchered twenty-one-year-old Channon Christian and twenty-three-year-old Hugh Christopher Newsom in Knoxville,” to which “American jurists and journalists, politicians and pundits are oblivious, for the most.” Or so I contended in“Into the Cannibal’s Pot.”

“Five blacks—four men and a woman—anally raped Hugh, then shot him to death, wrapped his body in bedding, soaked it in gasoline and set it alight. He was the lucky one. Channon, his fair and fragile-looking friend, was repeatedly gang raped by the four men—vaginally, anally and orally. Before she died, her murderers poured a household cleaner down her throat, in an effort to cleanse away DNA. She was left to die, either from the bleeding caused ‘by the tearing,’ or from asphyxiation. Knoxville officials would not say. She was then stuffed in a garbage can like trash.”

White trash.

Similarly, probabilities belie the stalking and savaging, in 2008, of a Columbia University student at the hands of Robert Williams; he black, she white. Her nineteen-hour ordeal ended with Williams setting the twenty-three-year-old student on fire. It began with Williams raping the girl orally, vaginally, and anally, pouring bleach in her eyes, boiling water on her body, slicing her face and slitting her eyelids with a carving knife.

The telltales of racial hatred were seared into the mangled white bodies of these victims andmany more like them. This the swirl of statistics conceals.

In the context of black-on-black violence, the self-celebrating media—Mr. O’Reilly and the parade of T & A that goes for commentary on cable—are currently breathing fire over the black family’s demise. To get my attention, they’ll have to get as fired-up about the white-hot hatred behind black-on-white menace and murder.

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Blacks impose English on coloured children of N. Cape

Mr. Zolile Prusente is the curriculum specialist with the regional education department in Upington. Recently, he sent a complaint to the South African Human Rights Commission regarding a problematic shift in language policy in the past year.

He alleges that the school principal and the school management team implemented a language policy that designated English as the first language of instruction for all subjects against the advice of the law or parental preference. Afrikaans, isiXhosa and Setswana were set aside and offered as alternative languages. The decision was an abrupt change from the former policy which provided for instruction in the students’ first languages rather than English.

For Prusente, the shift in policy is most harmful for the students. “[This situation] clearly shows that the SGB [school governing board] is not in control of language policy and that language policy is dictated by educators to suit their needs,” he wrote in his statement to the Human Rights Commision. Prusente believes that the students’ constitutional rights are violated by the “one-way” decision to teach primarily in English. Those responsible, he said, acted “without… taking cognisance of the additive bilingual approach promoted by the language-in-education policy.” In his statement, he refers to the Northern Cape Education Department circular 37 which also highlights “the importance of mother tongue instruction in the Foundation phase.” In their response, the principal, Ms. AB Silwana, and the chairperson of the SGB, Mr. Themba Smith, denied Prusente’s claims and said that the “overwhelming majority of parents” voted for their children to be taught in English.

While most teachers have agreed to the change, there are some who doubt the validity of the vote and who have consequently received “warning letters” from Silwana. Mrs. Thembisa Magodi, who is an SGB member and one of the two grade two teachers who refused to implement the English-only medium, said she and her colleague were not aware of any parents meeting or voting. They have refused to acknowledge Silwana’s warnings and stated that any policy “that [asks] us to teach in a foreign language [English] is not reasonable [and] unlawful because the Law encourages mother tongue teaching.”

Magodi and her colleague point to the 2007 whole school evaluation report that “has shown that learners do not understand English” as further proof that the new policy is not beneficial to students. Both teachers have announced that, ignoring the new policy, they “will continue in the third quarter to teach in the home language of learners and English only as an additional language.”

Silwana and Smith contend that the South African schools act No. 84 of 1996 gives the SGB the power to determine the language policy. They state that, since 2009, the SGB has engaged in thoughtful deliberations regarding “the complexity of formulating a language policy” for a “multi-cultural and multi-lingual learner population.” Furthermore, they maintain that the adoption of English-only policy is based on a “research/survey” taken during the 2011-2012 year that demonstrated that “parents preferred English as the language of learning and teaching.”

Prusente believes that the policy change is rooted in the SGB’s biased aversion to multi-lingual education. He claims that the boards sees “many languages spoken by learners as a problem instead of a resource.” This leads them to favor English instruction, he explained, and makes them “guilty of killing [the home] languages of the learners and community.” He challenges the SGB to provide evidence of the minutes and attendance register where the language policy was decided upon.

Mrs. Miriam Gatyeni (54) is the grandmother of a grade two and grade three learner. She remembers the survey looking into language preferences, but denies that English was the overwhelming favorite. She, for one, chose Afrikaans. “Another parent chose isiXhosa and another man preferred English,” Gatyeni recalled.

The new language policy has forced her to consider different options for her grandchildren’s schooling. If the mother tongue of her grandchildren is not used to teach them, she will be forced to take them to an Afrikaans school in Blikkies, known as Progress, which is “far” from her home. “Home language is the best. It is [the] language [in which] I talk to them at home, just like it was with my mother,” said Gatyeni.

When asked for a copy of the language policy, Silvana referred this writer to Smith who said that while the policy “is not closed or classified information”, it has to be handled “carefully”. He also said that only the documents guiding the policy formulation process can be availed.

The site steward at Vela-Langa, Mr. Daniel Mokopi, said they reported the language policy chaos to the South African Democratic Teachers Union and decided that they “don’t want to interfere in individual school matters.”

The South African Human Rights Commission will hold a meeting regarding the matter today. – groundup.org.za

How should we respond to calls for white genocide?

by Dan Roodt

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This week on Twitter a former UKZN student representative council member, Sfiso “Mabhiza” Mbatha, tweeted: “We gonna kill every white cockcroach that breath(es) SA’s air”, while adding, “Would rape every 13yr old white girl after Mandela finally kick that bucket. Just for control.”

These tweets caused a lot of reaction, but no official complaints were laid. If any such statement were made about blacks, it would have provoked a far larger furore. The tweeter would have been charged with hate speech at the SA Human Rights Commission and MSM journalists would have “shamed” him with negative publicity about his “racism”.

As Mbatha explained afterwards, he thought it was something of a joke: “It was just a joke at the end of the day. But now I realise that they were uncalled for, they went overboard and pushed the limit. I did say that I was joking, but people responded by insulting me, so I insulted them back.”

A large number of whites did not react at all. This is typical of so-called “advanced groups” all over the world who almost expect to be resented and even hated by the less successful groups. The well-known ethnic expert and author of the book, Ethnic goups in conflict, David Horowitz, distinguishes between “advanced groups” and “backward groups”. I think it would be fair to say that South African whites fit the definition of an “advanced group” and therefore typically react like one. Advanced groups are more educated, entrepreneurial and occupy the higher social classes in an ethnically divided society. As Horowitz explains:

“Where backward groups seek proportionality in government employment, advanced groups seek only assurances of nondiscrimination. Where backward groups attempt to keep ethnic strangers from government service in their region, advanced groups affirm the principle of unrestricted mobility.”

Advanced groups are reluctant to secede if they find themselves living in diaspora in a “backward territory”. Significantly, Horowitz notes that advanced groups are “disproportionately victims of ethnic violence”. South Africa’s brutal farm murders are a case in point, targeting a specific language and racial group that is perceived to be in a better socio-economic position than the surrounding “backward” population.

If we are honest, we should admit that some form of white genocide or anti-white violence has always been at the core of the ANC’s “liberation strategy”. The ANC is essentially composed of elites identifying with the less successful ethnic groups in South Africa. It is therefore normal that, according to the laws of ethnic conflict, it should heap opprobium onto whites which it perceives as “the enemy” and responsible for the relative deprivation of South African blacks. It is also telling that the principle of proportional employment has been implemented, not only in the public sector, but also in the private sector in a clear attempt to curtail white social and economic prowess.

However, it would be too simplistic to transpose Horowitz’s theory of ethnic conflict onto South Africa as one might onto Nigeria, Sri Lanka or Malaysia. In addition to the ethnic dynamic at work in the South African conflict, there is also the ideological dimension in the form of political correctness, Western decadence and generalised anti-white attitudes to be found in the global mainstream media.

Against this backdrop, calls for a white genocide in South Africa seem almost normal or normalised. Foreign correspondents in Johannesburg from the BBC, the New York Times and the London Guardian who have been casting whites in the role of evil racists for years, are likely to report on anti-white animus among blacks with “understanding”. In the light of the aforegoing narrative, these correspondents might suggest: who can blame them?

White South African liberals and leftists who are loyal to Britain and share left-wing Anglo-American perspectives on their own countrymen, take an equally sanguine view of such manifestations of anti-white “racism”. Liberal Britons are indifferent to the killing of whites in South Africa, if not supportive of any would-be black genocidaires. I once spoke to an official from a London NGO who explained to me that we should not complain about being killed by blacks as “they were only getting their own back”, as if white leaders in the past had proceeded to similar public appeals to “exterminate the kaffirs”!

As we saw during the court case around Julius Malema’s “hate speech” against Afrikaner farmers, there was little media sympathy for white victims of ethnic and racial violence. Even though Malema was prohibited from singing the song, “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer”, the song kept on being sung all over the country. In fact, the governing ANC opposed the legal prohibition of the song, with its advocate Gilbert Marcus, brother of Reserve Bank governor Gill Marcus, arguing for the party’s “freedom of speech”. Singing such songs were part of “black culture”.

It may be, therefore, that calls for white genocide in South Africa are examples of the “free speech” that Marcus and many other leftists and liberals would argue are “harmless” and “not to be taken literally”. In the words of the young black tweeter from Natal, Sfiso “Mabhiza” Mbatha, it is “just a joke at the end of the day”.

It is also true that black Africans often joke about killing. “I’m going to kill you,” is quite an everyday saying. Also, killing is invoked many a time as a universal method of meting out justice for all sorts of crimes and misdemeanours.

However, as the saying goes, “many a true word is spoken in jest”. Robert Mugabe is one of the most admired black leaders in South Africa and there is no doubt that his “final solution to the white problem” by simply confiscating their assets and expelling most of the white population, would also be wildly popular in this country. There not being another country south of South Africa towards which whites could flee, a broad desire “to get rid of whites once and for all” could lead to widespread killing, massacres or even systemic genocide of the kind hinted at in “jocular” black tweets.

How then should we answer my initial question in the title above: “How should we respond to calls for white genocide?” I think there would be at least two approaches. The one would be a kind of laissez faire approach in line with leftist white responses of “not taking it literally”. That would also constitute the most typical reaction of Horowitz’s “advanced group” that sees its salvation not in mass mobilisation and ethnic agitation, but in avoiding conflict – or at worst, moving away from it. The most common reaction of whites after escaping from an armed robbery, farm attack or other form of black-on-white violence is not to join the local chapter of the AWB’s Ystergarde (Iron Guard), but to call an Australian immigration consultant.

I have just had a visit from a friend who had recently emigrated to Australia. He misses South Africa, family and friends, especially the warmth and hospitality of Afrikaners. But he does not contemplate ever returning to South Africa, because, as he put it: “I feel safe in Australia. I would be scared to live in South Africa again.”

Many whites simply ignore ethnic slogans directed at them. I once listened to a talk show on the Afrikaans radio RSG where many of the callers stated quite frankly that they had adopted a kind of ostrich-like, head-in-the-sand approach. They would simply avoid reading newspapers and websites or even listening to the news on radio because it upsets them. They choose not to know. The average white professional woman or housewife shopping at Woolworths does not care either that the chain has an anti-white employment policy. She buys the fantasy of eating well, dressing well and decorating her home in the latest mix of white and earthy, African colours.

Ever since my Afrikaans high school days, I have often heard the typical injunction from teachers and many others: “Don’t be so negative!” Within the Afrikaner mind, every problem has a solution and “being negative” is a cardinal sin. In that sense, what can be more “negative” than imputing genocidal urges to South Africa’s black majority? Or even responding to a call for white genocide that is made every so often by some tweeter or black politician?

Among my many criticisms of the Afrikaans schooling system, although one of the best in the world for churning out straight-A students in maths and science, or good writers, artists, actors and so on, is that it does not teach one the art of critical thinking. Disagreeing with someone, especially publicly, is often seen as “bad manners” or even worse, as displaying that nefarious “negative” attitude. Often I have sat in meetings with especially elderly Afrikaners who used to occupy positions of authority in the old system and, upon voicing my disagreement on some point, they would simply ignore me as if they had not heard me!

Similarly, many Afrikaners out there, including the editors of newspapers, radio stations and pay-TV channels, are “simply not hearing” any call for white genocide. Call it denial or what you will, but just as their culture predisposes blacks to easily talking about killing, local white culture tends to make them hard of hearing.

We have been educated and programmed to be decent, cooperative, “positive” in Afrikaans parlance, so behave like a typical “advanced” ethnic group, eschewing ethnic solidarity in the face of danger.

However, there is one “advanced” group, probably due to past experience, that does not take calls for genocide lying down. Here I am referring, of course, to Jews. South African Jews enjoy arguably the highest standard of living of any ethnic group in the world and a perusal of the weekly South African Jewish Report will tell you about their huge socio-economic success, as well as media and political influence.

Unlike such dreadful appeals directed against Afrikaners and Boers, no-one in South Africa has ever called for the extermination of Jews. In fact, South Africa’s much-maligned National Party government was probably responsible for the good relations not only between Jews and the rest of the white population, but also between Jews and South African Muslims.

To my surprise, I recently discovered the construction site of Johannesburg’s Holocaust Centre, with another one having been in existence in Cape Town for some years already. These centres, apart from educating the public about the history of Jewish persecution, tend to preach tolerance towards Jews and between ethnic groups generally.

There is also the international Anti-Defamation League which, according to one of its own documents, “fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects civil rights for all,” doing so through “information, education, legislation, and advocacy”.

I can only imagine the international outcry, notably from Germany, that would ensue if any South African black leader had to start singing “freedom songs” about “Kill a Jew, kill a plutocrat”. Charges of hate speech would immediately be laid against the offender and he would become persona non grata in many quarters. I doubt very much whether anyone at the Johannesburg Bar, least of all Gilbert Marcus SC, would defend his “freedom of speech” and colourful metaphors.

The so-called South African Human Rights Commission is a suspect body, in itself prone to anti-white sentiment. It was created to harass whites, not to uphold their rights. As far as I know, it has never responded to complaints about anti-white hate speech, apart from acknowledging the receipt of such a complaint. For that reason, many Afrikaner groups do not even comtemplate complaining to the SAHRC about calls for white genocide.

But if we are looking for models to deal with the growing chorus calling for a white genocide in South Africa, we could do worse than to imitate the Jewish community. Either one lets these comments and invocations to kill whites slide, like the ostriches that we are, or one should draw a line and respond to each and every one of them. Even if the SA Human Rights Commission will do nothing to stop hate speech against whites, the mere fact of documenting such complaints might come in handy at some later point when our struggle for survival gets even more intense than it already is.

The current mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, made a bizarre statement in 1992 when he said: “Gays are the next Jews of fundraising.” Many people have recently quoted this.phrase to point out the vast support for Obama’s Democrats among US gays.

But in a more fundamental sense, I think we could say that Afrikaners – and by extension white South Africans – are “the next Jews”. We are already subject to vicious propaganda campaigns, vilification, hostile media reports, legal and official discrimination, stereotyping and random ethnic attacks, even pogroms.

Our famous Afrikaner poet, N.P. van Wyk Louw, once wrote: “If the Afrikaner had to lose political power in South Africa, he would be as helpless as the Jew in Nazi Germany.”

Recent history has vindicated Louw. It is high time that, while we are being treated like Jews in Czarist Russia, we should respond like modern Jews who not only react vehemently against any suggestion of genocide, but also preempt it through, in the words of the Anti-Defamation League: “information, education, legislation, and advocacy”.

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We need a new story

Every culture has a Story of the People to give meaning to the world. Part conscious and part unconscious, it consists of a matrix of agreements, narratives, and symbols that tell us why we are here, where we are headed, what is important, and even what is real. I think we are entering a new phase in the dissolution of our Story of the People, and therefore, with some lag time, of the edifice of civilization built on top of it.

Sometimes I feel intense nostalgia for the cultural mythology of my youth, a world in which there was nothing wrong with soda pop, in which the Superbowl was important, in which the world’s greatest democracy was bringing democracy to the world, in which science was going to make life better and better. Life made sense. If you worked hard you could get good grades, get into a good college, go to grad school or follow some other professional path, and you would be happy. With a few unfortunate exceptions, you would be successful if you obeyed the rules of our society: if you followed the latest medical advice, kept informed by reading the New York Times, and stayed away from Bad Things like drugs. Sure there were problems, but the scientists and experts were working hard to fix them. Soon a new medical advance, a new law, a new educational technique, would propel the onward improvement of life. My childhood perceptions were part of this Story of the People, in which humanity was destined to create a perfect world through science, reason, and technology, to conquer nature, transcend our animal origins, and engineer a rational society.

From my vantage point, the basic premises of this story seemed unquestionable. After all, it seemed to be working in my world. Looking back, I realize that this was a bubble world built atop massive human suffering and environmental degradation, but at the time one could live within that bubble without need of much self-deception. The story that surrounded us was robust. It easily kept anomalous data points on the margins.

Since my childhood in the 1970s, that story has eroded at an accelerating rate. More and more people in the West no longer believe that civilization is fundamentally on the right track. Even those who don’t yet question its basic premises in any explicit way seem to have grown weary of it. A layer of cynicism, a hipster self-awareness has muted our earnestness. What was once so real, say a plank in a party platform, today is seen through several levels of “meta” filters to parse it in terms of image and message. We are like children who have grown out of a story that once enthralled us, aware now that it is only a story.

At the same time, a series of new data points has disrupted the story from the outside. The harnessing of fossil fuels, the miracle of chemicals to transform agriculture, the methods of social engineering and political science to create a more rational and just society – each has fallen far short of its promise, and brought unanticipated consequences that threaten civilization. We just cannot believe anymore that the scientists have everything well in hand. Nor can we believe that the onward march of reason will bring on social utopia.

Today we cannot ignore the intensifying degradation of the biosphere, the malaise of the economic system, the decline in health, or the persistence and indeed growth of global poverty and inequality. We once thought economists would fix poverty, political scientists would fix social injustice, chemists and biologists would fix environmental problems, the power of reason would prevail and we would adopt sane policies. I remember looking at maps of rain forest decline in National Geographic in the early 1980s and feeling both alarm and relief – relief because at least the scientists and everyone who reads National Geographic is aware of the problem now, so something surely will be done.

Nothing was done. Rainforest decline accelerated, along with nearly every other environmental threat that we knew about in 1980. Our Story of the People trundled forward under the momentum of centuries, but with each passing decade the hollowing-out of its core, that started perhaps with the industrial-scale slaughter of World War One, extended further. When I was a child, our system of ideology and mass media still protected that story, but in the last thirty years the incursions of reality have punctured its protective shell and have ruptured its essential infrastructure. We no longer believe our storytellers, our elites. We don’t believe the politicians, we don’t believe the doctors, we don’t believe the professors, we don’t believe the bankers, we don’t believe the technologists. All of them imply that everything is under control, and we know that it is not. We have lost the vision of the future we once had; most people have no vision of the future at all. This is new for our society. Fifty or a hundred years ago, most people agreed on the general outlines of the future. We thought we knew where society was going. Even the Marxists and the capitalists agreed on its basic outlines: a paradise of mechanized leisure and scientifically engineered social harmony, with spirituality either abolished entirely or relegated to a materially inconsequential corner of life that happened mostly on Sundays. Of course there were dissenters from this vision, but this was the general consensus.

When a story nears its end it goes through death throes, an exaggerated semblance of life. So today we see domination, conquest, violence, and separation take on absurd extremes that hold a mirror up to what was once hidden and diffuse. The year 2012 ended with just such a potent story-disrupting event: the Sandy Hook massacre. Even realizing that far more, equally innocent, children have been killed in the last few years by, say, U.S. drone strikes, it really got under my skin. No one was immune. I think that is because its utter senselessness penetrated every defense mechanism we have to maintain the fiction that the world is basically OK. Unlike 9/11 or Oklahoma City, and certainly unlike the horrors that go on around the world, there was no convenient narrative to divert the raw pain of what happened. We cannot help but map those murdered innocents onto the young faces we know, and the anguish of their parents onto ourselves. At the base of our Story of the People is separation, of humanity from nature, of me from you, of each from all, and this event united everyone, of whatever culture, nationality, or political persuasion. For a moment, we all felt the exact same thing. For at least a moment, I am sure, most people were in touch with the simplicity of what is important; I am sure many people had that fleeting feeling, “It doesn’t have to be that difficult, if only we could remember what is so obvious now, that love is all there is.” We humans have made such a mess of things, forgetting love. It is the same realization we have when a loved one is going through the dying process, and we think, “Ah, how precious this person is – why couldn’t I see that? Why couldn’t I appreciate all those moments we had together? All the arguments and grudges seem so tiny now.”

Following that moment, of course, people hurried to make sense of the event, subsuming it within a narrative about gun control, mental health, or the security of school buildings. Maybe I am imagining things, but I don’t think anyone really believes deep down that these responses touch the heart of the matter. Gun culture, we know, is a symptom of something deeper, and the violence that finds expression through guns would, even in their absence, come out in some other way. Mental illness too is a problem so vast that it is essentially unsolvable in our current system; it too comes from a deeper source. As for school security, a Chinese saying describes all the measures proposed: they stop the gentleman but not the villain.

No one would say that Sandy Hook was more horrible than the Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, or the imperialistic wars of the 20th century and 21st, but it was less comprehensible. Try as we might, we cannot fit it into our Story of the World. It is the anomalous data point that unravels the entire narrative – the world no longer makes sense. We struggle to explain what it means, but no explanation suffices. We may go on pretending that normal is still normal, but this is one of a series of “end time” events that is dismantling our culture’s mythology.

The evident futility of the responses that we are capable of imagining also points to this deep ideological breakdown. The responses are all about more control. Yet control, as we may or may not realize, is a key thread of the old story of humanity rising above nature, imposing technology and reason on the wild world and the uncivilized human. All around us, we see our efforts at control backfiring: wars to fight terrorism breed terrorism, herbicides breed superweeds, antibiotics breed superbugs, psychiatric medications lead to explosive outbursts of violence.

Looking back on the community schools a couple generations past, where children and parents could walk in and out of any door, can we say that the inexorable trend toward fortress schools in a fortress state is something anyone would have chosen? The world was supposed to be getting better. We were supposed to be becoming wealthier, more enlightened. Society was supposed to be advancing. Here I am in America, the most “advanced” nation on Earth, yet even as our financial wealth has doubled and doubled again in fifty years, we have lost wealth of a more basic form; for example, the social capital of feeling safe, feeling at home where we live. Is more security the best we can aspire to? What about a society where safety does not equal security? What about a world where no human being wields an assault rifle? What about a world where we mostly know the faces and stories of the people around us? What about a world where we know that our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people? We need a Story of the People that includes all of those things – and that doesn’t feel like a fantasy.

Various visionary thinkers have offered versions of such a story, but none of them has yet become a true Story of the People, a widely accepted set of agreements and narratives that gives meaning to the world and coordinates human activity towards its fulfillment. We are not quite ready for such a story yet, because the old one, though in tatters, still has large swaths of its fabric intact. And even when these unravel, we still must traverse the space between stories, a kind of nakedness. In the turbulent times ahead our familiar ways of acting, thinking, and being will no longer make sense. We won’t know what is happening, what it all means, and, sometimes, even what is real. Some people have entered that time already.

I wish I could tell you that I am ready for a new Story of the People, but even though I am among its many weavers, I cannot yet fully inhabit the new vestments. In other words, describing the world that could be, something inside me doubts, rejects, and underneath the doubt is a hurting thing. The breakdown of the old story is kind of a healing process, that uncovers the old wounds hidden under its fabric and exposes them to the healing light of awareness. I am sure many people reading this have gone through such a time, when the cloaking illusions fell away: all the old justifications, rationalizations, all the old stories. Events like Sandy Hook help to initiate the very same process on a collective level. So also the superstorms, the economic crisis, political meltdowns… in one way or another, the obsolescence of our old mythos is laid bare.

We do not have a new story yet. Each of us is aware of some of its threads, for example in most of the things we call alternative, holistic, or ecological today. Here and there we see patterns, designs, emerging parts of the fabric. But the new mythos has not yet emerged. We will abide for a time in the space between stories. Those of you who have been through it on a personal level know that it is a very precious – some might say sacred – time. Then we are in touch with the real. Each disaster lays bare the real underneath our stories. The terror of a child, the grief of a mother, the honesty of not knowing why. In such moments we discover our humanity. We come to each other’s aid, human to human. We take care of each other. That’s what keeps happening every time there is a calamity, before the beliefs, the ideologies, the politics take over again. Events like Sandy Hook, for at least a moment, cut through all that down to the basic human being. In such times, we learn who we really are.

How can we prepare? We cannot prepare. But we are being prepared.

Charles Eisenstein is an essayist and author of the books Sacred Economics and The Ascent of Humanity. He is a contributor to Shareable, where this article first appeared.

US and Canada lock up blacks, Indians

By Matt Moir, The Tyee

Idle No More is forcing many Canadians to be Willfully Blind No More.

Ostensibly, the movement spearheaded by Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence is about the protection of First Nations’ treaty rights. At its core, though, might be something more profound, perhaps best described as a demand for all of us in this country to re-think the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. The relationship is, of course, an uneven one, though it might be far more uneven than most of us in this country care to acknowledge.

Against this backdrop, policy makers and average Canadians alike would be well advised to ring in the New Year by considering the lessons Michelle Alexander highlights in her important book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindedness. The context is American, but the lessons may hit closer to home. In the book, Alexander writes the following in regards to African-Americans and the United States’ criminal justice system:

“It is fair to say that we have witnessed an evolution in the United States from a racial caste system based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by marginalization (mass incarceration). While marginalization may sound far preferable to exploitation, it may prove to be even more dangerous. Extreme marginalization, as we have seen throughout world history, poses the risk of extermination.”

It’s a narrative equally provocative and compelling. Alexander argues that Americans’ obsession with ‘law and order’ began as a conservative attempt to breed white opposition to the burgeoning civil rights movement. Politicians on the right labeled civil disobedience a precursor to criminality, and branded supporters of civil rights legislation as promoters of lawlessness. Exploiting the fears of poor and rural whites, Republican politicians invented and propagated the ‘War on Crime’ and, more specifically, the ‘War on Drugs’ as a means to incarcerate, and thus control, the black population.

The scheme was so successful that any politician that questioned the effectiveness or morality behind the supposedly colour-blind ‘War on Drugs’ was accused of being ‘soft on crime’ — the death knell for one seeking public office. In 1992, Bill Clinton recognized that Democrats could peel off right leaning white voters by outflanking the Republicans on issues like crime and welfare reform, and promptly advocated for a number of policies that resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in the history of the United States, the overwhelming majority of which were people of colour. The normalization of racial marginalization, according to Alexander, was finally, quietly complete.

The book is more than a lament; it’s a warning. Alexander paints a bleak portrait of a future in which the majority of African Americans — increasingly economically vulnerable in a nation of skyrocketing inequality — being under the control of the criminal justice system is not entirely inconceivable. It’s an ugly commentary on contemporary American society. Canadians should pay attention.

One in five Canadian prisoners are Aboriginal

Troublingly, there are significant parallels between the plight of African Americans in the United States, and the Aboriginal population in Canada.

As American history is steeped in institutional savagery toward African Americans, Canada’s history, too, is pockmarked by the white majority’s mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. Most notable among a litany of gross violations of justice are the permanent occupation of ancestral lands beginning in the 18th century, the noxious attempt to ‘civilize’ Aboriginal people in residential schools in the early 1900s, and the refusal to recognize Aboriginal Canadians as legal ‘persons’ until the middle of the 20th century. And the similarities, unfortunately, are not only historical.

Though Canada doesn’t yet lock up the same percentage of its citizenry as its southern neighbor — the most heavily incarcerated society in the world — measures passed by Prime Minister Harper’s Conservative government have resulted in a steady increase in the number of Canadians behind bars. Canadians of Aboriginal ancestries have borne the brunt of the surge of prisoners.

The proportion of African Americans and Aboriginal Canadians in prison far exceed their representation in the U.S. and Canada, respectively. In the U.S., black Americans account for 12 per cent of the total population, but represent nearly 40 per cent of the prison population. In Canada, Aboriginal peoples make up four per cent of the total population, but 20 per cent of the prison population.

These significant discrepancies are not shrinking. In the U.S., over 40 per cent of new offenders to state and federal prisons are African American. In Canada, more than one in five new admissions to men’s prisons are of Aboriginal descent. Among women offenders, over one in three are Aboriginal. In the U.S., one in three black men can expect to be incarcerated at some point in their lives. In Canada, young Aboriginal men are more likely to go to prison than complete a high school diploma. And once in custody, a significantly larger proportion of African American and Aboriginal Canadian prisoners are recommended for maximum levels of security than white prisoners charged with similar crimes.

Structural discrimination

While it might be unfair to claim that Canadian politicians and the Canadian criminal justice system have joined forces to consciously ensure that our Aboriginal communities remain repressed and disenfranchised, it cannot be denied that Aboriginals across the country suffer from poverty, injustice and lack of opportunity more than other type of Canadian. One in four Aboriginal children live in poverty.

The life expectancy for Indigenous people in Canada is eight to 20 years less than non-Aboriginal Canadians. On First Nations reserves, 60 per cent of children do not graduate high school, and the lack of suitable housing and access to clean water is endemic. To be Aboriginal in Canada today is to be a second-class citizen.

As a new year begins, we should take this opportunity to look closely at the society that we have created, and address the appalling inequalities of our criminal justice system. There is still time to prevent the prison state of our southern neighbors, but only if we hurry.

No Canadian should be idle.

Whites’ ‘waning influence’ among US electorate

President Barack Obama’s election victory exposed tectonic demographic shifts in American society that are reordering the U.S. political landscape.

The 2012 presidential election likely will be remembered as marking the end of long-standing coalitions, as voters regroup in cultural, ethnic and economic patterns that challenge both parties—but especially Republicans.

Older voters and white working-class voters, once core elements of the Democratic Party, have drifted into the Republican column. Rural and small-town voters, whose grandparents backed the New Deal, now fill the swath of the U.S. that leans reliably GOP.

But in cities and dynamic suburbs, a rapidly growing force of Latinos, Asian-Americans, African-Americans and higher-income whites emerged this week as the strength of Mr. Obama’s winning Democratic coalition.

“The Democrats now own a coalition of emerging metro areas where the whites and minorities live together, and where they vote Democratic,” said Robert Lang, a demographer who directs the Brookings Mountain West, a research center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

In northern Virginia’s Fairfax County, for example, Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly represents a district where 20 years ago, he said, 3% of residents were born outside the U.S. Now, it is nearly 30%, with the majority Asian immigrants.

What County-by-County Results Tell Us About the Election

The most detailed results from the 2012 election show the voting patterns for each county in the country. Changes from the previous election give us an idea of what geographic and demographic trends are impacting national politics.

Mr. Obama won big there Tuesday, helping him to tally the once reliably Republican state of Virginia for the second straight general election.

Similar shifts throughout the U.S. help explain how Mr. Obama was returned to the White House on support from young people, minorities, women and upscale whites, a coalition virtually identical to the one that carried him to victory four years ago.

Some political analysts thought that coalition came together only because of the historic nature of Mr. Obama’s 2008 victory and wouldn’t prove durable. That belief didn’t hold up this week.

The question now is whether Mr. Obama and other members of his party can solidify this coalition into a foundation of the Democratic Party.

Republicans said their party won a smashing victory in congressional elections just two years ago, when they took control of the House of Representatives, illustrating that there is no clear claim for either party.

Decision Day in America

Voters headed to the polls Tuesday in a presidential contest defined by its intensity and razor-thin margins.

The 2010 election, they said, shows that even with modest inroads among Latino and Asian-American voters, the GOP can build a solid majority on the foundation of its strong white support. Republicans enjoy historically high levels of control over governorships and state legislatures, which they say shows the party’s potential if it can improve its message to minorities.

In any case, both Democrats and Republicans see new contours of a split electorate.

Twenty years after supporting former President Bill Clinton, a majority of white voters have returned to where they were during the Reagan administration, firmly planted in the Republican camp. Nearly six in 10 white voters told exit pollsters Tuesday that they sided with Republicans, up from 40% during Mr. Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory.

More striking is the GOP’s loose grip on minority voters: just 29% of Latinos, 25% of Asians and 8% of African-Americans said Tuesday they identified with the Republican Party.

The trend has strengthened the Democrats’ hold in cities and extended a new reach into once-white suburbs now filling with successful Asian and South Asian immigrants, as well as Hispanics.

Mr. Obama scored a big win, for example, in Denver’s Arapahoe County, a bedroom community of family farms and high-tech firms. The county, in turn, helped propel Mr. Obama to victory for the second time in Colorado, formerly a Republican-leaning state.

The presidential election also cast a spotlight on a generational shift under way.

Senior citizens, who swung to the Democrats during the Medicare and Social Security fights of the 1990s, have swerved to Republicans. Close to six in 10 seniors backed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, according to exit polls Tuesday, up from the 51% of the group siding with Sen. John McCain in 2008.

The split by age reached even deeper: A majority of voters age 40 and older sided with Mr. Romney. The majority of every younger age group voted for Mr. Obama, according to exit polls.

When former President George H.W. Bush, Mr. Reagan and Mr. Clinton won their respective elections, they won among all ages. But no Republican presidential candidate has won a majority of voters under age 30 since Mr. Bush in 1988.

Polls earlier this year showed cooling interest among young voters in the Obama re-election campaign. But turnout among voters ages 18 to 29, in fact, eclipsed the 2008 election, with nearly 60% siding with the president.

The robust turnout by younger voters boosted Democrats nearly as much as the strong showing among Latinos.

Concerns grew Wednesday among some Republicans that the party’s base will be hobbled in national elections if it becomes too old, too rural and too white. “What worries me is that the GOP is about to become the WOP—the White Old Party,” said Norm Coleman, a former Minnesota senator.

Nothing casts more fear in the GOP than estrangement with the swelling U.S. Hispanic population, which now accounts for 10% of the electorate.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Republican presidential candidates routinely received a third or more of the Latino vote. Former President George W. Bush garnered just over 40% in 2004. That share has since plummeted amid sometimes harsh debate over legislation to deal with millions of illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico, living in the U.S.

Mr. Romney got 29% of the Hispanic vote Tuesday, the lowest share since Sen. Bob Dole ran for president in 1996.

“The party has hit a new floor,” said Al Cardenas, the head of the American Conservative Union and former chairman of the Florida Republican Party. “The reality is we face a very big, very important shifting demographic in the country, and we saw how it played out in Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Virginia.”

Mr. Obama beat Mr. Romney among Latinos by 58% to 40% in Florida; 87% to 10% in Colorado; 80% to 17% in Nevada; and 66% to 31% in Virginia, according to an ImpreMedia/Latino Decisions poll.

“Texas probably has a huge potential to trend Democratic if the Democratic Party engages the electorate there,” said Matt Barreto, co-founder of the Latino Decisions polling firm.

The Romney campaign devoted attention to Asian voters, particularly in northern Virginia. Exit polls showed the Asian vote expanding to 3% of the total U.S. electorate—an all-time high—with 75% of those votes cast for Mr. Obama. – WSJ

A racial revolution in France

by Timothy Spangler

When the Socialist Francois Hollande took over the French presidency this spring, many French voters hoped that his new government would bring about a distinct change in direction from the “bling-bling” administration of his predecessor, Nicholas Sarkozy. By filling his Cabinet with many fresh faces, Hollande seems committed to looking at complex and contentious issues from new perspectives.

This week, one of the most awkward and inviolate elements of the French political foundation – the issue of race – was explicitly called into question by one of Hollande’s new ministers.

Article Tab: In this June 19, 2009, file photo, two women, one wearing the niqab, a veil worn by conservative Muslims that exposes only a woman's eyes, walk side by side in downtown Marseille, France.

In this June 19, 2009, file photo, two women, one wearing the niqab, a veil worn by conservative Muslims that exposes only a woman’s eyes, walk side by side in downtown Marseille, France.

ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO

According to the philosophic orthodoxy that cuts across partisan politics in France, there is only one type of Frenchman. Everyone is equal in France because in France every Frenchman is equally French. As a result, the “hyphenated identities” prevalent in the United States and a key feature in contemporary Britain have not been officially sanctioned in France.

Although there are “African Americans” and “Black Britons,” in France there is no such thing as a “French Algerian” or a “French African.”

This week, however, Yamina Benguigui, Minister of the French Language, made the radical proposal that the French government should recognize and accept that the concepts of ethnicity and race actually exist in the French Republic. To date, no official statistics are compiled based on ethnic or racial backgrounds, so no formal attempt to analyze the French nation, or any problems it faces, from this perspective can take place.

Benguigui, a film producer whose father was from Algeria, argues that France should recognize the effects of decades of immigration and the failure of assimilation has had on many communities. Despite the importance of “equality” and “fraternity” to successive generations of French government officials, a lack of pragmatism has meant that abstract ideals about how the French state should be constructed have limited the government’s ability to address important race-relation problems.

The television images of burning cars and nightly violence that regularly emerges from the dire suburbs that encircle Paris and other large French cities are a constant reminder that many men and women, born in France as the children or grandchildren of immigrants, still do not feel included in the Cartesian perfections of the French Republic.

According to Benguigui, the time has come for the government to take off its blindfold and begin to recognize that communities based on ancestry have always existed in France and will continue. Only then could a pragmatic new approach be fashioned to address the challenges France faces.

Unfortunately, for any French politician to stand before television cameras and say that France should look to America or Britain for inspiration on how to solve its problems is either the very definition of “political bravery,” “political suicide,” or both.

Will President Hollande back his minister’s controversial views on race relations?

His new government faces many pressing challenges, so it will be interesting to see how much political capital he is willing to devote to what is certainly a controversial new position on an intractable problem.

Hollande’s honeymoon period ended this week when he received a stark warning from the French government audit department, the Cour des Comptes, that he will need to cut more than $40 billion from government spending in order to meet stringent deficit-reduction targets. Hollande had campaigned on a platform for shifting the country away from austerity, but the reality of France’s spiraling debt and empty coffers may be superseding his personal political priorities.

Even if Hollande manages to increase taxes to 75 percent on every French citizen earning over 1 million euros (about $1.25 million), as he has proposed, he will still not have anywhere near the revenue necessary to close the budget gap.

In the face of such negative economic prospects, it remains unclear how much of a priority Hollande will give to Benguigui’s radical new rethinking of how French citizens should define themselves and, consequently, how the French government should develop policy to address the challenges facing this diverse country.

Like much abstract thought, there is something intellectually appealing about a government structured to deal with its citizens solely as philosophically undistinguished units devoid of individual characteristics and “back story.” If such an approach could work, it would satisfy the desire that many have for highest-possible level of equality before the law.

However, the reality of life in France shows that, rather than facilitate assimilation and integration, France’s inability to recognize or adapt to the ethnic and religious backgrounds of its citizens is causing more harm than good. Discussion of these issues is coded and indirect and awkward, but these issues are arising again and again, regardless of the intoxicatingly abstract desire that they did not.

As France tries to climb its way out of its deep fiscal hole, millions of its citizen remain excluded from the economy and society. At times like these, a country need all hands on the oars, in order keep the country moving forward as fast as possible. Hopefully, the French government eventually will recognize that there are times when the direct results of pragmatism trump the aesthetic pleasures of abstract idealism.

Read the whole article here.

Obesity affected by surrounding race groups

The racial and ethnic composition of a community is associated with the obesity risk of individuals living within the community, according to a study led by researchers at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings, published in the June 14 edition of the American Journal of Public Health, may help explain disparities in obesity rates among racial groups and point to some of the environmental factors that may contribute to obesity in the United States.

For the study, the researchers analyzed data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, which represented a cross-section of the U.S. population. The data were matched with geographical information from the U.S. Census. Obesity was calculated based on each study participant’s body mass index (BMI), a measure of weight in relation to height.

Analysis of the data found that community ethnic composition might affect residents’ likelihood of being obese, and the effect varied by the residents’ own ethnicity, for example, living in a community with a Hispanic population of 25 percent or greater was associated with 21 percent higher odds for obesity for Hispanics in that community. Non-Hispanic whites had 23 percent higher odds for obesity living in the same community.

The opposite was true for communities with high concentrations of non-Hispanic Asians. In those communities, the odds for obesity were 28 percent lower for non-Hispanic whites in those communities. While non-Hispanic blacks have the highest rates of obesity in U.S., living in a community with a high concentration of non-Hispanic blacks did not raise the odds of obesity even among non-Hispanic blacks.

“Obesity is one of the nation’s most pressing health problems, and our findings suggest that community characteristics related to racial and ethnic composition may have an important effect on residents’ weight,” said James B. Kirby, PhD, of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, who was the lead author of the study. “This study will enhance understanding of the disparities in the U.S. obesity epidemic and how certain racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected.”

“Social and built environments play an important role in influencing individuals’ health outcomes including obesity. Future research needs to better understand the mechanisms, but clearly interventions are needed to reduce obesity disparities in the United States,” said Youfa Wang, MD, PhD, MS, coauthor of the study and director of the Johns Hopkins Global Center on Childhood Obesity and Associate Professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Source: redOrbit (http://s.tt/1g8TE)