Submitted by Ras Jahaziel BEHOLD THE PARASITIC SYSTEM THAT FEEDS ON THE LIVES OF THE PLANET’S INHABITANTS AND USES THEM AS DISPOSABLE COMMODITIES “As a species we are the biggest criminals on the planet. Every day we rape the planet, shed blood, and cause suffering.” filmmaker Patrick Rouxel. Follow the link to read more: http://rastafarivisions.com/thenewjimcrow/slavery
“As a species we are the biggest criminals on the planet. Every day we rape the planet, shed blood, and cause suffering.” filmmaker Patrick Rouxel.
Follow the link to read more: http://rastafarivisions.com/thenewjimcrow/slavery
I hope readers can use FIREFOX or Google Chrome to view this post.
Internet Explorer seems to squeeze the paragraphs together. Seems to be the hardest browser to please.
@Ras Jahaziel and BU
Thank you so much for this link. I wish more people were awake to the truth of this world.
This has been reformatted for easier reading and for the benefit of those that use INTERNET EXPLORER
SEE LINK
http://rastafarivisions.com/thenewjimcrow/modernslavery2
Ras Jahaziel
http://www.rastafarivisions.com
The site on the Inter Net where you will find
virtual Art Galleries, Videos, the best roots music,
and insightful articles to awaken the mind and release the Genie(US)
from the bottle of mental slavery.
@Ras
Thanks, not sure if the BU public is into your rootsie offering but it remains on the menu 🙂
On 4 December 2012 23:30, Barbados Underground
i think you got that picture backwards now.as north America[white people]
are who help the African children these days.
so explain.??????????
barbados send in the army to catch KONY yet????
or dem fraid for dem skin??????????http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kony
and let us not forget.as you all constantly try to——http://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules
/the-irish-slave-trade-forgotten-white-slaves/
well well stupid people make me sick.
is barbados helping the African people and starving children.
and lets not forget either that a black man caught and rounded up his own black to sell to the Spanish.
is not like dem went and run round to get dem
one of your own did that part.
jackasses.
@ David
“Rootsie?” .
….it is actually a very deep analysis of our current situation and a very well put case.
Well worth a review.
@Bush Tea
Sure Ras appreciates the review. Maybe rootsie is not a good word but unless it is political or borders many on BU are lost.
NORMALIZED CRUELTY
Farm to Fridge – The Truth
UK Reggae in a militant style
ANOTHER VIEW OF NORMALIZED CRUELTY
CRITICS OF CAPITALISM:
“People get used to anything.
The less you think about your oppression
the more your tolerance for it grows.
After a while, people just think
oppression is the normal state of things.
But to become free, you have
to be acutely aware of being a slave”
Assata Shakur
@Ras
We have become comfortable with the trappings of material things, nothing else matters.
IS HE TELLING LIES OR IS HE TELLING THE TRUTH?
News & Politics
AlterNet / By Tim Wise
School Shootings and White Denial
I said this after Columbine and no one listened so I’ll say it again, after the recent shooting in Santee, California: white people live in an utter state of self-delusion.
March 5, 2001 |
I can think of no other way to say this, so here goes: white people need to pull our heads out of our collective ass.
Two more white children are dead and thirteen are injured, and another “nice” community is scratching its blonde head, utterly perplexed at how a school shooting the likes of the one yesterday in Santee, California could happen. After all, as the Mayor of the town said in an interview with CNN: “We’re a solid town, a good town, with good kids, a good church-going town an All-American town.” Yeah, well maybe that’s the problem.
I said this after Columbine and no one listened so I’ll say it again: white people live in an utter state of self-delusion. We think danger is black, brown and poor, and if we can just move far enough away from “those people” in the cities we’ll be safe. If we can just find an “all-American” town, life will be better, because “things like this just don’t happen here.”
Well bullshit on that. In case you hadn’t noticed, “here” is about the only place these kinds of things do happen. Oh sure, there is plenty of violence in urban communities and schools. But mass murder; wholesale slaughter; take-a-gun-and-see-how-many-you can-kill kinda craziness seems made for those safe places: the white suburbs or rural communities.
And yet once again, we hear the FBI insist there is no “profile” of a school shooter. Come again? White boy after white boy after white boy, with very few exceptions to that rule (and none in the mass shooting category), decides to use their classmates for target practice, and yet there is no profile? Imagine if all these killers had been black: would we still hesitate to put a racial face on the perpetrators? Doubtful.
Indeed, if any black child in America — especially in the mostly white suburbs of Littleton, or Santee — were to openly discuss their plans to murder fellow students, as happened both at Columbine and now Santana High, you can bet your ass that somebody would have turned them in, and the cops would have beat a path to their doorstep. But when whites discuss their murderous intentions, our stereotypes of what danger looks like cause us to ignore it — they’re just “talking” and won’t really do anything. How many kids have to die before we rethink that nonsense? How many dazed and confused parents, Mayors and Sheriffs do we have to listen to, describing how “normal” and safe their community is, and how they just can’t understand what went wrong?
I’ll tell you what went wrong and it’s not TV, rap music, video games or a lack of prayer in school. What went wrong is that white Americans decided to ignore dysfunction and violence when it only affected other communities, and thereby blinded themselves to the inevitable creeping of chaos which never remains isolated too long. What affects the urban “ghetto” today will be coming to a Wal-Mart near you tomorrow, and unless you address the emptiness, pain, isolation and lack of hope felt by children of color and the poor, then don’t be shocked when the support systems aren’t there for your kids either.
What went wrong is that we allowed ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security by media representations of crime and violence that portray both as the province of those who are anything but white like us. We ignore the warning signs, because in our minds the warning signs don’t live in our neighborhood, but across town, in that place where we lock our car doors on the rare occasion we have to drive there. That false sense of security — the result of racist and classist stereotypes — then gets people killed. And still we act amazed.
But listen up my fellow white Americans: your children are no better, no nicer, no more moral, no more decent than anyone else. Dysfunction is all around you, whether you choose to recognize it or not.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, and Department of Health and Human Services, it is your children, and not those of the urban ghetto, who are most likely to use drugs. That’s right: white high school students are seven times more likely than blacks to have used cocaine; eight times more likely to have smoked crack; ten times more likely to have used LSD and seven times more likely to have used heroin. In fact, there are more white high school students who have used crystal methamphetamine (the most addictive drug on the streets) than there are black students who smoke cigarettes.
What’s more, white youth ages 12-17 are more likely to sell drugs: 34% more likely, in fact than their black counterparts. And it is white youth who are twice as likely to binge drink, and nearly twice as likely as blacks to drive drunk. And white males are twice as likely to bring a weapon to school as are black males.
And yet I would bet a valued body part that there aren’t 100 white people in Santee, California, or most any other “nice” community who have ever heard a single one of the statistics above. Even though they were collected by government agencies using these folks’ tax money for the purpose. Because the media doesn’t report on white dysfunction
A few years ago, U.S. News ran a story entitled: “A Shocking look at blacks and crime.” Yet never have they or any other news outlet discussed the “shocking” whiteness of these shoot-em-ups. Indeed, every time media commentators discuss the similarities in these crimes they mention that the shooters were boys, they were loners, they got picked on, but never do they seem to notice a certain highly visible melanin deficiency. Color-blind, I guess.
White-blind is more like it, as I figure these folks would spot color mighty damn quick were some of it to stroll into their community. Santee’s whiteness is so taken for granted by its residents that the Mayor, in that CNN interview, thought nothing of saying on the one hand that the town was 82 percent white, but on the other hand that “this is America.” Well that isn’t America, and it especially isn’t California, where whites are only half of the population. This is a town that is removed from America, and yet its Mayor thinks they are the normal ones — so much so that when asked about racial diversity, he replied that there weren’t many of different “ethni-tis-tities.” Not a word. Not even close.
I’d like to think that after this one, people would wake up. Take note. Rethink their stereotypes of who the dangerous ones are. But deep down, I know better. The folks hitting the snooze button on this none-too-subtle alarm are my own people, after all, and I know their blindness like the back of my hand.
Tim Wise is a Nashville-based writer and activist and can be reached at tjwise@mindspring.com
Obama has vowed action to prevent similar tragedies, but this would require a thorough rewiring of society [Reuters]
In the aftermath of last week’s school shooting in Connecticut in which 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 27 people, including 20 children, the Associated Press quoted Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s extension of condolences to the US:
“Such incidents should not happen anywhere in the world”, Karzai said, adding that Afghanistan frequently witnesses such tragedies and can sympathise with those affected.
Of course, the list of tragedies witnessed by Afghanistan also includes items such as the US airstrike that killed 18 civilians in June. This occurred on the heels of the New York Times report on the US “kill list” and Obama’s role in authorising civilian collateral damage abroad.
Given the utter lack of human empathy exhibited by the US in its dealings with the world, it should perhaps come as no surprise when the lack of empathy is replicated on a smaller scale at home by school assassins and the like. It goes without saying, however, that the president’s tears are reserved for the non-military slaughter of domestic civilians.
As for Obama’s pledge to do whatever he can to “prevent… more tragedies like this”, it would seem that true prevention efforts would require the comprehensive rewiring of American society.
The profitable approach to individual torment
President Obama reacts to the Connecticut school shooting
In the widely circulated post-Connecticut piece “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother”, Liza Long describes her appeal to a social worker for advice on how to deal with her teenage son Michael’s mental illness, which she reports is occasionally manifested in life-threatening violence. The answer, quite simply, is “to get Michael charged with a crime”.
Long has received deserved criticism from anthropologist Sarah Kendzior for violating her troubled child’s privacy by “embark[ing] on a media tour promoting him as a future mass murderer”. However, many of her points are valid:
I don’t believe my son belongs in jail… But it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people. According to Human Rights Watch, the number of mentally ill inmates in US prisons quadrupled from 2000 to 2006.
In 2006, Human Rights Watch also determined that the rate of reported mental health disorders was five times greater among the prison population.
Long cites American society’s “stigma on mental illness and its broken healthcare system” – in which “state-run treatment centres and hospitals [are] shuttered” – as decisive factors in the drive for imprisonment.
She also mentions that Michael has been “on a slew of antipsychotic and mood-altering pharmaceuticals”, a nod to an industry known for reaping vast profits from the rampant over-prescription of drugs to treat mental and behavioural disorders. These medications in turn lend themselves to a variety of complications, ranging from addiction to depression to sudden death to the conversion of hyperactive children into automatons.
As for the practice of over-imprisonment as a source of capital, it is useful to review attorney John W Whitehead’s analysis earlier this year:
In an age when freedom is fast becoming the exception rather than the rule, imprisoning Americans in private prisons run by mega-corporations has turned into a cash cow for big business… Today, as states attempt to save money by outsourcing prisons to private corporations, the flawed yet retributive American “system of justice” is being replaced by an even more flawed and insidious form of mass punishment based upon profit and expediency.
Clearly, a neoliberal US system that values profit over human wellbeing and thereby alienates people from society is hardly a way to foster mental stability and social cohesion, and underscores the extent to which mental disorders can be symptomatic of greater societal ills.
The American disconnect
Without speculating about the details of Lanza’s mental condition or motivations, it is nonetheless helpful to draw attention to the context in which such events occur.
For one thing, the American fixation with individual achievement and self-made success is an isolating phenomenon that produces pressures often not so evident in societies that attach more value to familial and communal units.
To be sure, the government’s tendency to promote pro-corporate policies to the detriment of the majority of the population further exacerbates individual isolation.
Television programmes and video games glorifying violence may also play a role in chipping away at compassion and rendering abstract the reality of human suffering – a reality already under attack thanks to the state’s policies of blissful bellicosity, remote control killing and dehumanisation of “the Other”, all of which negate its own humanity.
As for the ease of procuring weapons in the Land of the Free that facilitates the domestic orgy of violence, the Washington Post has offered a chart depicting UN figures for gun-related murders in 32 developed nations, accompanied by the following summary:
The United States has by far the highest per capita rate of all developed countries. According to data compiled by the United Nations, the United States has four times as many gun-related homicides per capita as do Turkey and Switzerland, which are tied for third. The US gun murder rate is about 20 times the average for all other countries on this chart. That means that Americans are 20 times as likely to be killed by a gun than is someone from another developed country.
In the end, however, gun control is merely one of many issues requiring attention in a country that should itself be diagnosed as mentally ill.
Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, released by Verso in 2011. She is a member of the Jacobin Magazine editorial board, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, Al Akhbar English and many other publications.
@Bush Tea
Karma is a bitch!
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