Friday 29th of March 2024

of english architecture and slavery...

BMBM

Before the catastrophe of 1914-18—before “architectural education” became controlled by lefty apparatchiks whose heads were stuffed with poverty-stricken Modernist humbug, dictating a narrow brainwashing curriculum rather than rounded education embracing humane, civilized values—there were places where Vitruvian Firmness, Commodity, and Delight informed the design of buildings and areas where people lived, happily and contentedly, without crying out to be rescued from a dystopian hell on earth. 

That was a time when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (as it was then) was immensely rich, a major creditor on the world stage: there were many aspects of its governance, political stability, and what it produced that were globally admired. In those far-off days, all over the world Britain’s power and prestige counted for something. There were, however, cracks beginning to show: there was unrest in Ireland, and by 1918 not only was Britain a debtor rather than creditor, ruined by the Great War, and having to bankroll France and Imperial Russia to keep fighting it (Russia, of course, left in 1917), but 26 counties of Ireland opted out of the Kingdom to become the Irish Free State.



Before 1914, however, there was much to admire, especially on the architectural front, and notably in relation to the design of dwellings fit for human beings. When domestic architecture was designed by sensitive, gifted architects who drew intelligently, creatively, imaginatively, and tastefully on historical precedents, it was invariably realized by builders who employed properly trained craftsmen taught by earlier generations in apprentice systems. In addition, such craftsmen worked with natural materials, often from local sources, so new buildings harmonized with the landscape from which those materials were taken, and respected other structures already erected in the vicinity. Indeed, British craftsmen were educated and highly skilled, able to produce work of the highest quality, something that is still obvious when we visit late-Victorian churches, where the workmanship is breathtakingly fine, and the design wondrous, exquisite, and glowingly beautiful. There was pride in such work well done.
Read more:https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/when-british-domestic-architecture-was-humane-civilized-and-beautiful/



Gus:

Yes. Of course. The serialised fiction by Charlie Dickens did not help convey this magical civilised message of wondrousness, exquisiteness and of glowing architectural beauty. It appears that democratisation of ideas destroyed this architectural wondrousness, exquisiteness and its glowing beauty, with concrete slabs and aluminium windows. 

We all know that, before WW1, everyone lived in a 47-rooms mansion with a lily-filled water pond in front, on a sprawling 100 acre block, with separate quarters for the help and the horses… But we also all know that after having watched The Block and Moving to the Country a few too many times, the maintenance of these houses are murder on the purse and demand a 24/7 army of skilled handymen and pool attendants. Ask any rich dude in America, they will also mention the enormous cost of security. Security in England is not such a problem because everyone owns a mansion with a gloriously painted ceiling — and envy is not an English sentiment.

Now democratisation has diminished the size of bricks and increased occupancy per room. Taxes on windows to pay for the British EU contribituis are horrendous. The decline of grand architecture has been in proportion to the number of Cecil Rhodes' statues having been decapitated. There is still some great buildings such as the British Museum, but it is under siege, as the anti-slave history revisionistas are taking over the management. They demand equality of squalor before exclusive grandeur. There are some exception though. The “Cornichon” (thank you, Jules), also known as the gherkin building, is a fine example of modern architecture for the suppository manufacturing industry, while the “Shard”, also known as the Splinterama, reminds us that some pyramids are thin at the base. 

With Brexit, the future of architecture for England, a future that had been side-tracked by European cottages in the Dordogne bought by architecturally frustrated British rich pseudo-gardeners/lawyers, can fully recover with its famous fake-gothic for all. Drab and sombre stones shall pepper the landscape under a glorious grey sky. The Stonehenge revival comes in next.

Here, the decline of British architecture rests squarely with the French trying to avenge Waterloo by exporting the boxy Corbusardier HLMs to Londinum — and with the Irish Catholics seeking revenge from the potato famine that sent many of their relatives to Australia. There, in the antipodes, the fate of the doric columns shared much of the same fate as that of the Poms, but the weather is blue sky which make the Sydney’s own Crown Cornichon, look spectacular.

the erasure of the enlightenment...

The removal of a bust of the British Museum’s founder is no trivial issue. It is a step towards the erasure of the Enlightenment...


The wrong-headed decision to give the activists a victory by ‘toppling’ Hans Sloane will not end their campaign, but boost it. These people will not stop until they have destroyed the very principles of Western society.

The British Museum has moved the bust of its founder from its prominent position. Hartwig Fischer, the museum’s director, this week announced that due to social media pressure from Black Lives Matter, the sculpture of Sir Hans Sloane had been moved to a cabinet, where it is surrounded by contextualising material. Activists state that Sloane benefitted from owning slaves. Fischer took up the iconoclastic imagery of social-justice rioters by stating, “We have pushed him off the pedestal, we must not hide anything.”


Sir Hans Sloane was a leading physician in London. He saved countless lives from the 1680s onwards through pioneering smallpox vaccination and malaria treatment. He travelled widely and sought to understand the natural world and human culture, which led to him form a large collection of historical and man-made artefacts.


He believed that material should benefit humanity, so, upon his death in 1753, he bequeathed it to the British nation. It was an act of philanthropic generosity which led to the foundation of the British Museum, British Library and Natural History Museum (originally in one body) in 1753.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/499130-hans-sloane-british-museum-removal/

 

Picture at top: a mural of the British Museum in Newtown, Sydney, Australia, that has now disappeared — gone to the dogs of redevelopment... Note: the TV set and the VCR made of concrete shows the antiquity when the gizmo was painted...

living on different planets...

“The Americans never use the word ‘peasant,’” Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “because they have no idea of the peculiar class which that term denotes.” Nor do Americans use “noble” or “aristocrat” or “barbarian.” However, the basic phenomena endure, even if the class structure and therefore the terms have evolved. 

Shortly after Tocqueville published his thoughts on the democratic experiment in America, Benjamin Disraeli published Sybil¸ a novel in which he argued that England was essentially divided into two nations, “between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy [and] who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, are not governed by the same laws.”

These two groups were, Disraeli wrote, “the Privileged and the People.” These words could be written of America today, though with a twist that might shock even Disraeli: It is our privileged classes that bear the features of barbarians, whereas common Americans are civilized.

Many might regard the terms “peasant” and “barbarian” as interchangeable — both denoting a person of rough mores or depraved sensibilities. But they used to have precise and, in fact, opposite meanings. They reflect social classes in history that came into being during the Neolithic age and endure into the era of modern, industrial societies — even our own. The end of history was supposed to give rise to a final industrialized, bourgeois, democratic society, but history — like peasants and barbarians — proved to be more enduring than expected. (There is even a Journal of Peasant Studies published in the UK that examines questions of rural society “that confront peasants, farmers, rural labourers, migrant workers, indigenous peoples, forest dwellers, pastoralists, fisherfolk and rural youth, both female and male, in different parts of the world.”) 

There are four essential characteristics of agrarian peoples: they are rural (tied to the soil), stable (not nomadic), religious (especially devoted to gods of cultivation), and generally peaceful (not given to organized violence). Rural peoples, formerly peasants, can be found today all over the world, from Ecuador to Austria to Egypt. They are spread out geographically, which historically made them susceptible to conquest by invading foreigners — that is, by barbarians. This sparseness also made it difficult for peasants to defend their interests politically, and so aristocracies and later the state assumed that role, though both could be either indifferent or exploitative. 

Agrarian life was bound up in place (geography, soil), and peasants found purpose in the permanent things: God, family, community. In primitive societies, peasants lived to cultivate these three things, whereas barbarian conquest invariably meant the destruction of all three. 

“Barbarian” typically meant a person or group that was uncivilized and foreign. In every age, barbarians sweep through, exploit, dominate, and either assimilate — that is, become civilized — or move on to conquer elsewhere. The essential characteristics of a barbarian are the opposite of those of agrarian society. Barbarians consume and plunder rather than produce; if they worship beyond the self, they worship gods of conquest rather than cultivation; they are unstable or nomadic, not rooted to a geographic place; and they tend to achieve their objectives through violence or coercion. Some of the barbarian plunderers of Europe settled into the agrarian or town life, thereby transitioning to peasants; some moved on to the next plunder. 

Likewise today, barbarians are predatory, destructive, and nomadic: they consume and exploit, but don’t produce. There is no need for a Journal of Barbarian Studies. Just look around: their realm is the entirety of the public culture. 

Both peasant peoples and barbarians have their origins in pastoral society. The peasant domesticated animals and used them to cultivate the land; the barbarian used domesticated animals to conquer that which the peasant had cultivated. This all occurred in Neolithic Europe. The tension between peasants and barbarians thereafter played out in a variety of contexts in Western history, especially in Europe. The Graeco-Roman world fought for centuries to fend off the barbarians. When the barbarians finally conquered Rome, they were gradually absorbed—through Christianity—into Europe. 

Immigrants to America, primarily from England at first, were often from rural or small town communities of countries as varied as Ireland, Italy, Germany, Poland, Greece, the Levant, and elsewhere. They quickly became landowners and citizens — equal citizens, invested in their small towns and communities, which Tocqueville saw on his trip through America. But that world was already giving way to the pressures of industrialization by the mid-19th century. Disraeli was joined by Dickens, Hugo, and others, who wrote about the wretched urban poverty that we still witness — not only in Africa, Latin America, and Asia but also here in America. That poverty is both rural and urban. Across the generations, the barbarians have been busy. 

America has generated a new class of barbarians today, of the bourgeois variety. The American barbarian dominates the elite institutions of the public culture: government, academia, corporations, and the media (news, entertainment, Internet). They exclude from these institutions those who wish to preserve the things loved by the common American — usually conservatives and Christians. The bourgeois barbarians are as rootless and nomadic as their predecessors — one of the most transient, “unstable” populations on the planet. They don’t plunder rural America’s farms, small businesses, and communities as the barbarians of antiquity did, with physical violence; instead, they use banks, global corporations, rent-seeking, and the severest puritanism on ever-evolving moral issues. 

These new barbarians strip away and bundle up the modest assets of the working classes and sell them off to other barbarian elites. In academia, they spread impersonal ideologies that wage a relentless war on the permanent things: God, community, and family — those things the common American loves. They pressure young people, mostly through marketing, to jettison the things their ancestors loved and suffered for without the slightest reflection. They worship violent gods of ideology or greed, whatever their claims to atheism or agnosticism. They plunder the wealth of the provinces and send back welfare checks and opioids. As bureaucrats, they use their power to compel commoners for the commoners’ own good, which they define anew at their whim. The commoner waits patiently, hoping that the barbarians will move on. 

Today, the bourgeois barbarians’ ideologies have spilled over from the campuses of our universities to the streets of our cities — a revolt led by and mostly consisting of the decadent bourgeois. Many of the would-be revolutionaries have been indoctrinated by modified Marxists. Marx, like his progeny, was himself a bourgeois barbarian, consuming without contribution, inciting to revolution but never to building anything. He saw everything through the lens of impersonalism and ideology while waging war against the permanent things. 

One of Marx’s many errors, as Francis Fukuyama has observed, was to assume that agrarian society was nearly obsolete, having transitioned to the proletariat. (It was, ironically, in heavily agrarian and pre-industrial Russia and China, not England or Germany, where Communist revolutionaries actually seized power.) In America, as in the Industrial-Age Europe that Marx targeted, there has been a massive uprooting and relocation from rural America to its cities. This lured poor whites, African Americans, and immigrants into urban contexts. The jobs they came for frequently disappeared, but they remained in cities, severed from their roots and dislocated from community. For poor whites and others, this dislocation was new. For African-Americans, it had already happened too many times to be counted; their generational dislocation was compounded by traumas beyond comprehension. 

The uprooting of people from rural America, relocation to cities, and social dislocation continues to devastate both rural and urban social life in America. The global trend of urbanization, with agrarian peoples migrating to industrialized cities in hopes of higher earnings, is not likely to end well. This trend will continue to put massive pressure on governments, which are incapable of delivering on high, modern expectations of comfortable living. It has exposed the incompetence of central administrators and managerial elites. 

The radical shift from rural agrarian to urban proletariat has been one of the most profound social changes of the industrial era, severing the bond between the people and the soil — or, in Marxist terms, severing the people from the means of production. (To be fair, peasants did not always have a stake in their land, but neither were they always dispossessed or exploited; there were mutual obligations that hadn’t existed in antiquity, and this explains in part the persistence of Europe’s old rural order.) All of this has permitted elite exploitation without any of the consequences that existed for the nobility of old, whose duties at least bound them to the land and to those who lived on it, such that they had to manage competently—another point of Tocqueville’s that is relevant today.  

Immigrants to America historically transitioned quickly from dispossessed rural peasant to citizen, equal in status with the elite, even if their stake was smaller. That has changed in recent decades. The elite have used every mechanism of power and influence to distance themselves from the land and the commoners while still managing to consume that which rural America produces without any real return to those who do the producing. 

Fukuyama termed this habit the “law of Latifundia” in agrarian societies: “the rich will grow richer until they are stopped — either by the state, by peasant rebellions, or by states acting out of fear of peasant rebellions,” he writes. “Left to their own devices, elites tend to increase the size of their latifundia” (essentially rural estates for industrial agriculture). This leaves leaders with two models: side with the people (he cites Scandinavian countries as examples of this) or with the oligarchs (Russia, Prussia, and Eastern Europe). In other words, the elite exploit — they consume without contribution. American elites might refrain from calling their domestic help “peasants,” and they might exercise restraint in not beating or sexually exploiting them. Might. There are more Epsteins among our elite than they would care to admit. They will remain our masters until there are no more common people to exploit—or until the rage of the people boils over. 

Common people can endure a great deal of hardship, but there is a breaking point at which they will rebel. This has occurred throughout history, from ancient Europe and China through the Middle Ages to the French and Russian Revolutions. The peasants’ revolt in medieval England was, like the French Revolution four centuries later, more bourgeois than many realize. Rural and small town English had begun to own property, become proprietors of small businesses, and form guilds. English elites of that age continued to become rich while the working classes remained in poverty. In 1381, the English peasants revolted. Their king, the young Richard II, rode out and appeased the common people—whose grievances must have been incomprehensible to the pampered monarch—with promises he couldn’t keep. 

Some thought that 2016 was a minor peasants’ revolt of sorts, with rural, agrarian, religious, traditional peoples in the heartland sending a populist to Washington to punish the elite. Four years later, elites have simply refused to accept their punishment — not only refused, but actively fought back by every undemocratic means available. The bourgeois barbarians somehow identify as victims rather than oppressors through all this. (Worse, they are intent to sow divisions along the lines of immutable identities such as race, for this is the only means by which they can retain power: If working class Americans find a common political voice that is indifferent to immutable identities, this would decisively alter the domestic power calculus.) 

America’s barbarian elite are substantially insulated from common Americans by wealth, geography, and the coercive powers of corporate finance and the state. But ultimately, all of their privilege is underwritten by people in uniforms with weapons, the military and police, which are substantially comprised of common, non-elite, Americans. 

When one sees bourgeois elites of predominantly European extraction protesting oppression by police from the safety of super-wealthy zip codes, it provides a visceral reminder of how fragile civilization is. What has been called “virtue signaling” may be something more primitive and sinister. Some of the rootless, bourgeois elite desperate to direct the wrath of the angry mob away from themselves (lest they suddenly be deprived of their privilege, wealth, and safety) may be in moral solidarity with the oppressed. But they may also be trying to deflect the wrath of the crazed revolutionary mob onto police—or working class rural America or anyone other than themselves. America’s decadent elites caught a glimpse of the violence they have indirectly visited on others for generations. Much of the abstraction and ideology and “social distance” that separates them from the reality of common Americans disappeared this summer. So they mollified and signaled consent and scapegoated the police and knelt—not in penance or solidarity, or perhaps even in fear or self-loathing, but to survive with their latifundia intact. 

To “civilize” a people, whether in antiquity or modern Europe, has historically meant to draw them out of barbarism. Rural, non-elite, small-town America is not unsympathetic to African-American suffering—though this is invariably how it’s depicted, especially by people in wealthy suburbs. But they know the difference between spoiled (mostly white) kids and the oppressed. They seem to watch all the chaos of the cities with no small amount of disappointment, but also with patience, clinging to the permanent things. They will never have the wealth of the elite, but they have dignity. And while they have much moral and social rebuilding to do, they can hope to make an ally of time, as rural folk do. 

There can be no return to Arcadia, to that tranquil time of social harmony, “when old men had long memories,” for that time and place never quite existed—utopia, as the Greek word reminds us, means “no place.” But there was a time when community, identity, and purpose could be taken for granted; when we were free to love without controversy those things that our fathers loved, before barbarians and ideologues roamed the country, seeking to make all things anew in their own hideous image. We have been conditioned to think that all life before the Industrial Revolution was “nasty, brutish, and short,” but those living it believed they had a purpose—a telos arguably preferable to a life that is nasty, pointless, and long. But getting back to somewhere is not easy. 

Americans who are able may, for a variety of reasons — telework flexibility, better opportunities for schools, housing, or land — move further away from cities and even suburbs, toward smaller, more authentic communities and toward rootedness. The more privileged can, of course, afford such a move. For millions of others, their ancestors went to cities poor and there they feel trapped. Creativity will be required to help those trapped in poverty to become re-rooted in the less expensive, less impersonal communities that have hemorrhaged human capital for decades. Such a re-convergence of “the people” and “the privileged” might seem unlikely, and maybe it is: the global trend toward urban, industrial centers is overwhelming. But such a countertrend, however small, might go a long way toward restoring the health of America.


Andrew Doran writes from the Washington, DC area. The views he states are his own.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-privileged-vs-the-people/

 

 

Read from top.

sick privileges...


In America, Privilege is Far More Fatal than COVID

 

by Gordon Duff

 

Yesterday, I received a report from Syria. It told of blistering heat and no electricity, of fuel lines, of food shortages and economic suffering by the Syrian people. This is an excerpt:

 

“I wonder if people in EU, US and UK had to deal with the repercussions of their government sanctions on Syria, would they fight harder to get sanctions banned as a hybrid war, sadistic strategy.

It is 41 degrees in Damascus, the cloud cover makes it heavy and oppressive. Electricity where I am is on for an hour, sometimes two before it cuts for three or four hours, just as the air conditioning makes your environment bearable. For some living close to me, they were without electricity for 14 hours in this sweltering heat. I wet my clothes to keep me cool while I am working, it is the only thing that helps. Mobile phones do not have time to charge. Food goes rotten because the fridge is off much of the time.

Syrians traditionally store enough food in their freezer to last them two or three months. They are having to throw much of it away. At the same time, food prices are sky high. Nobody can afford to eat luxury items like chicken anymore. Lemons have become a luxury item, the price of one kilo has trebled in a few months. Parents do not know if they can feed their kids every day, they are living hand to mouth.

All the roadside kiosks are seeing their livelihood go down the drain, literally, as everything in their freezer section melts or goes bad.

The queues for fuel, while not as bad as before, are still a stressful scrum with cars lining up to take their ration.

These are only a few of the effects of sanctions. Sanctions are designed to hurt, to deprive, to depress and, ultimately, to kill slowly and more painfully than the swift ending of life by a mortar or a bullet. Sanctions strip people of their dignity and leave them beggars in their own home.”

 

Syria is but one nation targeted by the Trump regime, there are others and the stories like this are in the millions, told by those who still live.

When Syria was attacked, it was not just starvation, it was terrorism as well with up to 400,000 dead and 5 million refugees. Iraq suffered a far worse fate, 2,000,000 dead.

Both nations are still partially occupied by the United States, the nation that engineered this suffering. Now it is all coming home to roost, as here in the United States, what was done to Syria and Iraq, to Yemen and Iran, and to the best of Trump’s ability Venezuela’s people as well, is being deployed against the most vulnerable of Americans.

We had another police killing yesterday, one we know of, there may well be others, in fact it is likely. This was in Los Angeles, another African American, his crime was riding a bicycle “improperly.”

To understand how privilege applies, Dylan Roof, white mass murderer who killed 9 a the Emanuel AME Church was arrested with considerable care and, before being processed, was taken to the local Burger King for lunch by police as Dylan told them that murdering so many people “made him feel hungry.”

As American humorist Jim W. Dean so often says; “You just can’t make this stuff up.”

This is not unusual, this is the norm, this is how things work but you will not know unless you ask people, people who trust you with the truth.

Problem there, the divide in America is so profound that the victims of insanity and brutality that started long before the current epidemic under Trump don’t want to talk to the media, such as it is and have no faith in political process.

You see, political process in America reeks of corruption and privilege as well. Privilege, as with exceptionalism, is a form of corruption whether it is state sponsored apartheid as in Israel or the other version of apartheid, the American one, with walls and children in cages and bodies in the streets.

Let us be clear about something else, while the media tries to smear the most well know victims like Beonna Taylor, every person of color in the United States is victimized unless “hand selected” like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a despicable human being reviled for his love of all things fascist.

We might take a moment to discuss Breonna Taylor as well. This is a young woman of color living in Louisville, Kentucky, employed as a paramedic/first responder. Police broke into her home and killed her based on a false warrant.

This is someone who had never committed a crime of any kind, police simply kicked down her door and murdered her for being black skinned, there is no other explanation.

Yesterday, according to reports in the Washington Post, local prosecutor Tom Wine, a Trump backer, offered freedom to a number of drug suspects, if they would falsely incriminate Beonna Taylor, in order to aid Donald Trump in his election chances. Sources tell us Wine would then be nominated as US Attorney by Trump appointee William Barr.

This level of corruption is seen every single day, even reported every single day but as the victims are of color in a land of “white privilege,” those who protest being falsely imprisoned or murdered by police are “violent hooligans.”

Again, “you just can’t make this stuff up.”

To understand the violence that is sweeping America today one can easily look at the violence that has swept the world, not just after 9/11 but long before.

There are two words that are one in the same, one personal, one far greater, both are fatal. They are privilege and exceptionalism.

The nature of “privilege” is insidious. For those who do not have COVID, for instance, who are not on a respirator or mourning the hundreds of thousands now dead, the disease is “fake.”

This is privilege, denialism of the suffering of others because they are “others.”

An unreported fact, nearly 4,000,000 older Americans live in nursing homes or residential facilities. None have been visited by family for nearly 6 months. Over 150,000 have died of COVID but reports that are creeping in speak of malnutrition, bed sores and widespread abuse and there is no one to help as families are not allowed to see their forgotten elders.

The result of this, of course, is that older Americans have now become defacto “people of color” and reside in defacto “cages” like little brown babies ripped away from their mothers to amuse Trump’s political “base.”

The insidious nature of privilege is that it can infect anyone, whatever their race or ethnicity. Privilege has become a hallmark of some religions, such as Christian Evangelism, infecting 35,000,000 Americans who attend church, pray continually but bask in a belief system that feeds exceptionalism and hatred.

Privilege and exceptionalism are most often driven by fear. For some inherited money drives the unearned feeling of superiority, though Trump has, to a large extent, destroyed this concept through his bumbling ineptitude.

Even the drooling Baron Rothschild and his carriage drawn through London by a team of zebras was not able to do that.

If you are poor and white in America, “at least you aren’t black.” Thus, those who are otherwise the most marginal and vulnerable, not in all cases but some, perhaps many, take solace in having someone beneath them.

 

“The humbleness of a warrior is not the humbleness of the beggar. The warrior lowers his head to no one, but at the same time, he does not permit anyone to lower his head to him. The beggar, on the other hand, falls to his knees at the drop of a hat and scrapes the floor to anyone he deems to be higher; but at the same time, he demands that someone lower than him scrape the floor for him.” – Carlos Castaneda


Turning to Castaneda, whose “Way of the Warrior” defined excellence for so many during the 60’s and 70’s, in a way defines the failures in America’s culture today.

 

“The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.” – Carlos Castaneda


What can safely be generalized about how things really are in America?

Yesterday I spent time with one of my friends, a painting contractor, American born Hispanic who speaks no Spanish, highly successful, and we discussed local police in my own affluent community.

His experiences with the same police who are to me beyond polite and helpful, not so helpful mind you that I would ever depend on them for protection, are quite the opposite of mine.

I now know there is a problem. Will I do or say nothing and if I find our community subject to disorder because of our collective indifference to the rights of all, will I be surprised?

Am I privileged and exceptionalist?

Were it not for time I spent as a police officer decades ago, a miserable job, his words would seem unreasonable but anyone who has worked in law enforcement knows that the greatest stress isn’t from the public, too often referred to as “potential suspects,” but rather from corrupt and ignorant coworkers.

It does not take long to see that they are the real criminals.

As a former police officer, one is typically never stopped by police or if one is, one is immediately not just released but usually engaged in friendly banter.

To be clear, some departments are better than others, but none are perfect and some, like Kenosha, Wisconsin, are brutally incompetent and dangerous.

What we have also seen at mass killing like Columbine or during the fear driven killings that are sending hundreds of thousands into the streets, many police are quite simply cowards with guns, a very dangerous combination.

Many, however, are not. Many are competent, polite, professional and often end up sacrificing their lives for others. The problem there is that if you are one of these, working with the others is a nightmare. In many cases, “good police” are ostracized and threatened for failing to be corrupt, which is my own experience.

This makes the job impossible and the victims are many, certainly good police suffer as they invariably are commanded by the most corrupt and incompetent but the communities they supposedly serve suffer as well.

This is the case with Kenosha. There, the police department, as a whole, is generally seen by other police as very poor quality, highly corrupt, racially biased and a very bad place to work.

For the community, if you are white, you won’t be arrested unless you do something exceptionally bad and if you are a powerful “insider,” you can never be arrested at all as police are likely to aid and abet in any criminal acts.

In the post George Floyd world, however, it is the community that has allowed its police to degenerate into a “blue gang” that is suffering now, subjected to violent protests which are, quite frankly extremely well deserved.

Each community has a choice, to stand for justice for all, which should be equal enforcement of the law and, if need be, strong but fair and legal crackdowns on criminal elements even if such elements are people of color.

Police are there to investigate and take potential offenders into custody, based on reasonable procedures, where fair courts administer laws.

The truth is everything, but this happens. Police administer punishment, too often based on hatred driven by misguided privilege and institutionalized corruption and extremism.

As cohorts in “blue gang” violence, prosecutors and many judges throw law, justice and the constitution aside to the extent that any attorney representing a criminal defendant feels overwhelmed. Time and time again, trials are a mockery and lying police and fake evidence rule every process, all openly accepted not just by insiders but the media and the privileged and exceptionalist community as well.

Worse still, in many cases those of color who manage to rise into “the system” become the worst of the worst, almost accepted by their white brethren, which is why we included the Castaneda quotes.

The disease, as we define it is privilege. The byproduct is dehumanization and indifference. This is a disease so powerful that very few can stand up to it and fewer still can admit it exists or if they choose to do so, go to great lengths to misdefine it.

We began by discussing Syria but what is happening there, engineered by “privileged exceptionalists” driven by extremism, is terrorism in its purist form.

American policing may well be described as institutionalized terrorism as well.

Every child in America can at some time be caged, certainly if of color or if one’s parents are of questionable ancestry.

Every American can be murdered by police with impunity. In fact, the massive ownership of assault weapons by Americans is driven by a fear of police. Rural and suburban communities, where gun ownership is greatest, are not subject to even the rumor of “racial violence” that the media stokes with every word.

Every spectrum of politics from right or left shares one thing with those of color, distrust of government and fear of assault not by armed criminals but by armed criminal police.

The sad thing is that too many take solace in the fact that they will be the last to go, not the first. From Martin Niemoller:

 

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”


And so it goes…

 

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of  Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

 

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https://journal-neo.org/2020/09/04/in-america-privilege-is-far-more-fatal-than-covid/

 

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killing homo sapiens...

Then they came for the benches: Norway may cancel ‘PROBLEMATIC’ tribute to ‘racist’ botanist von Linne, who coined ‘Homo sapiens’
An Oslo park bench bearing the name of Carl von Linne, an 18th century Swedish scientist known as “the prince of botanists” and the founder of modern taxonomy, could be removed after local politicians have deemed him to be racist.

The Old Oslo borough council is calling for the removal of the bench, which is located in the district's Botanical Garden and has von Linne's name inscribed on its back. The request – the latest in a wave of leftist attacks on historical figures – is expected to be sent to the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum this week after being approved in a vote by the council last Thursday.

 

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https://www.rt.com/news/501230-swedish-botanist-linne-bench-canceled/

 

 

Meanwhile:

 

Edinburgh University has stripped David Hume’s name from one of its buildings, saying that the 18th century philosopher’s views on race caused “distress” to students. The university has been blasted for ‘cancelling’ a “genius.”

Hume was one of the most important figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. An empiricist and student of human nature, he was a skeptic of organized religion, and his rejection of Christian miracles and the idea that the complexity of the world did not prove the existence of God made him a controversial figure in his day.

 

 

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https://www.rt.com/uk/500598-edinburgh-university-hume-racist/

 

 

But fear not:

 

 

The UK's Natural History Museum is reviewing options for its Charles Darwin exhibits, including possible removal, after an internal review ordered amid Black Lives Matter protests found that they could be deemed “offensive.”

The museum's directors are scrutinizing collections that may be considered "problematic," which could lead to removal or lesser remedies, such as renaming, The Telegraph reported, citing internal documents. Artifacts from the father of evolutionary theory are among the suspects because Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos Islands on HMS 'Beagle' was one of the UK's “colonialist scientific expeditions.”

“In light of Black Lives Matter and the recent anti-racist demonstrations around the world,” the museum is re-evaluating room names, collections and statues to root out any that “could potentially cause offense.” A large wing of the museum is named after Darwin, and a statue of the naturalist stands in the museum's main hall.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/uk/500027-darwin-museum-colonialist-offensive/

 

 

On day we will be colonialised by Martians or/and Jupiterians and discover reality... See: the end of reality?... and the beginning of a new reality: teaching others the lessons we never learnt...

 

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