White Supremacy

17 I 2023: Do unregulated guns prop up white supremacy?

Among today’s headlines:

from St. Louis Today: “Guns in St. Louis are increasingly semi-automatic – with higher caliber bullets, too”

from huffpost: “Police: 8 People Shot, 1 Critical At Florida MLK Day Event”

I have read that black Americans make up 12.5 percent of the population, but have been the victims in 61 percent of gun homicides. And I wonder if the laxity or absence of gun regulation is intended to maintain white supremacy in the U.S.

Implementing a policy does not always mean making things happen, but can also involve letting things happen. I have long believed that America’s failure to prevent the importation, manufacture, and distribution of narcotics is not the result of chronic incompetence, but is an intentional neglect meant to disable America’s black communities.

So too I wonder if the laxity of firearm regulations and the utter failure to control the traffic in illegal firearms are similarly part of a plan to inhibit the development of a cohesive, economically strong, and politically powerful black community, and to instill contempt and fear of blacks in the wider population.

Is this paranoia?

24 VI 2020: Nazification of immigration policy

I have been reading some reactions to the latest white-supremacist effort from the White House. Obersturmbannführer Stefan Miller is taking advantage of the Covid-19 crisis to further restrict immigration, even to the point of barring entry into the U.S. of medical professionals who bring us desperately needed help and of technologists who help to keep us abreast of the latest foreign developments. The pretended excuse for this radical change is the old “Them furreners are gonna come in and take away your jobs!” I don’t know whose jobs would be taken, given that America is woefully short of fine scientists and skilled medical personnel. 

Aged as I am, I need the care of many physicians to keep me going. Now my urologist is an American, as is my cardiologist, but my internist is from Armenia, my nephrologist from Croatia, my psychiatrist from India, and my dermatologist from Pakistan. Where would I be without these physicians?

As we are not turning out enough physicians and nurses, so too are we lacking in well-trained scientists and technologists. Our public education system has collapsed. American students emerge from school ignorant of math and science in comparison to students in other developed countries. We need these foreign scientists and technologists to close the science/technology gap between us and our commercial and military rivals.

The new restrictions are designed to make it virtually impossible to obtain asylum and to obstruct all immigration with unendurable delays. This is simply a sneaky way of trying to end immigration altogether. Miller and his like are mono-maniacal extremists, like the Know Nothings and America Firsters of old. Their legally questionable obstructions and their SS tactics are continuing a shameful reversal of American immigration policy. I look forward to Trump’s resounding defeat and the return of these monsters into the jungles of the Far Right.

9 VI 2020: Is fear-mongering an abuse of free speech? Removing monuments.

Like our President, Tucker Carlson will say anything to please his base. Lately, he has been doing a bit of fear-mongering. He is quoted on CNN: 

“This may be a lot of things, this moment we are living through, but it is definitely not about black lives … And remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will. Anyone who has ever been subjected to the rage of the mob knows the feeling. It’s like being swarmed by hornets. You cannot think clearly.”

I think that perhaps Mr. Carlson, who can think quite clearly in his own self-interest, is trying to incite a “mob” to boost his ratings. What Carlson is doing is, in my view, the equivalent of shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.

When a society has gone terribly wrong, one of the things it is likely to do when it recovers is to get rid of the memorials of the persons and events of its shameful past.

Anyone who has spent any time in Germany has seen evidences of the thorough removal of Nazi symbols from public view. Monuments to the heroes of the Confederacy are not memorials of courage and devotion. They are, rather, the propaganda of unrepentant white supremacism. If the monuments of white supremacism in Germany had to go, so too must the monuments of white supremacism in the United States.