Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts

Saturday, November 17, 2007

One Free World

I came across this media post from Jason Kenney's office;

The Honourable Jason Kenney, Secretary of State (Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity), will speak tomorrow at the One Free World International Conference in Winnipeg.

"Our government is committed to supporting the values of freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and human rights," said Secretary of State Kenney. "This conference reminds us that pluralism is a part of Canadian identity."

One Free World International is a human rights organization based in Toronto that focuses on the rights of religious minorities around the world and promotes tolerance, understanding, and respect for diverse religious beliefs. It is dedicated to assisting through awareness campaigns, seminars, and active human rights programs.
Kenney of course is in his new position as "Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity" (formerly he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister for Multiculturalism) in order to gain support for his party in ethnic and immigrant communities.

Communities that in the past have been the base for the Liberal party. The Conservatives quickly applied the politics of opportunism when they picked up the ball the Liberals dropped when it came to dealing with the Chinese Head Tax.

Choosing Kenney for this post is ironic considering that he views Canada through Republican glasses.

The addition of Canadian Identity to the former Multi-Culturalism Secretariat is conservative code for the end of the Liberal endorsed notion of multiculturalism, including the idea of bilingualism and bi-culturalism. Instead the Conservatives endorse the idea of two solitudes. And the rest of us can assume one of two national identities; English or French Canadian.

Contrary to the apparently benign and laudable goal of international human rights and religious freedom for 'diverse religious beliefs' the One Free World religious sect that he addressed are only interested in the oppression of Christians in Muslim countries. They throw in communist countries as an after thought. When they use the term 'Anti-Semitism' it means Islam.

This is an Anti-Muslim sect that Ezra Levant would feel comfortable addressing. The fact that the Conservative Government lends them any credence shows that Muslim bashing is now part of their New 'Canadian Identity'. As was clearly shown by their political red herring; veiled voting.


WINNIPEG – “A lot of people don’t know this, but there is one Christian being persecuted every three minutes, worldwide,” said Rev. Majed El Shafie, president and founder of One Free World International (OFWI) El Shafie Ministries. “Even in Canada, antisemitism has risen by 61 per cent.”

“We’ve helped people, case by case, who are being persecuted,” said El Shafie. OFWI works to help people in at least 13 countries around the world, “mostly in Muslim and African countries, and China and North Korea – Muslim and Communist countries.”

From Nov. 2-4, OFWI is hosting a conference in Winnipeg, on the Price of Freedom. It will be at the Eternity Centre (1111 Chevrier Blvd.), is open to the public, and is free of charge (donations will be accepted).

The main focus of the conference will be “about the persecution happening around the world,” said El Shafie.

The next film El Shafie is working on is about Afghanistan.

He said, “I sat down with Afghani officials and asked them about the Jewish and Christian communities there. They looked right at me and said ‘there are none.’ It is pure lies.

El Shafie said “the [Hamid] Karzai government is corrupt, and Karzai is one of the biggest snakes I’ve ever met. The only way we should be dealing with him is if he starts improving conditions for the people.”

One Free World International | El Shafie Ministries

Our primary focus is on combating the persecution of Christians and anti-semitism and we assist all those whose religious freedom is threatened, regardless of their beliefs. OFWI is based on and guided in its work by Christian principles. It does not endorse the religious beliefs of those on behalf of whom it advocates, but is uncompromising about promoting their right to hold and exercise those beliefs. OFWI’s goal is a world in which people are free to choose, retain, change, and express their religious or non-religious belief system in accordance with their conscience, without fear and with full equality and dignity, while fully respecting the corresponding rights of others.

SEE:

A Union the Conservatives Like

Fraser Institute Racists



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , ,
, ,, , , , , , ,

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Ezra Says Gay Bashers Are Muslims

So like Brave Sir Robin from Monty Python's Holy Grail, Ezra LeRant took on two women regarding 'reasonable accommodation' on CTV's the Verdict. As an aside like E Talk, and other CTV info-tainment shows this too is modeled on American TV with Paula Todd being a Canadian clone of CNN Headline News; Nancy Grace.

Ezra was the show's token bigot.

Muslim women are seen wearing a hijab. (AP /Anjum Naveed)

The Verdict: Oct. 18, 2007

Paula Todd and various guests looks at whether Canada is a country of bigots.

The Verdict: Oct. 18, 2007 18:30

A country of bigots? 9:42



Paula Todd proved herself an incompetent mediator let alone host. Unable to designate time to each speaker, she complained when her women visitors responded to Ezra, simultaneously from two different cities. Thus she ended up giving motor mouth LeRant more time than either of them.

What is interesting in this little discourse was that Ezra suddenly became the voice of liberal, feminist, gay, progressive values against the two women guests,
Shaina Siddiqui representing Canadian Muslim and a reporter Manon Cornellier from Le Devoir, whom he accused of being promoters of just the opposite.

Ezra whose Western Standard is the right whingnut voice of Social Conservative Christian, Homophobia, racism and sexism was saying we should not let Muslims into Canada because they come from countries that oppress women and gays.

Gays being male, you see as liberal as Ezra has become he made no reference to lesbians. Ezra stated that Muslims coming to Canada are rabidly anti-gay thus implying that they would not only oppose Gay rights, something he and his ilk do as well, but would promote violence against gay men.Funny thing is that gay bashers in Canada and the U.S. or those who kill gay men have not been Muslims but rather White male Christians.

When that tact didn't work he claimed that Muslims from Africa wanted to bring the tradition of female genital mutilation to this country.
The veil

18 Oct 2007
by Ezra Levant
I was on CTV's The Verdict tonight, talking about "reasonable accommodation". That debate is framed as a discussion about all immigrants but, as with so many other euphemisms, it's actually about Muslim immigrants

I would have liked to have had more time tonight, and our segment was difficult with three panelists in three different cities, but I enjoyed the chance to be the lone voice all night arguing against one-way multiculturalism, and I enjoyed trying to smoke out the facts beneath the euphemisms -- pressing on issues like women's rights, gay rights and freedom of speech, issues that were once the domain of liberals, liberals who now stand gagged by their own soft bigotry of low expectations of Muslims -- they refuse to call out racist, sexist, anti-gay Muslims where they're do so in a flash with white Christian men.

Shahina Saddiqui was the CAIR-CAN rep tonight -- she was the one who tried to get the Jews of Winnipeg charged with hate crimes last year for watching a movie about Muslim terrorism. Of course, the cops laughed Saddiqui out of the police station -- that sort of thing doesn't quite work in Canada, yet. Saddiqui's left quite a track record of illiberal statements out there, including one that she tried to disclaim on the air tonight -- a comment five years ago explaining away female genital mutilation.


Now Ezra's tactic was to slander his opponents, while trying to talk over them. It's an old tactic of his. Say something outrageous, over generalize, and keep talking.
Suddenly Ezra is a defender of women and gay rights. This is the latest tactic of the right when attacking Muslims, to appear to defend liberalism and pluralism, when in fact they hate gay rights and feminism. But hey any argument will do when you wish to attack and belittle your opponents with a straw man.

In fact Ezra was in good company this week when fellow travellers on the extreme right in Calgary protested Veiled Voting. And that is what has set off this latest round of phony debate. Just as dual citizenship was a phony issue used by the right to attack Lebanese Canadians the issue of veiled voting which is a non-issue is being used to smear those who immigrate here from Muslim countries.

All this was caused by the recent debate in Quebec, and Ontario, over reasonable accommodation. After failing to raise enough support for their racist campaign against dual citizenship after the Israeli attack on Lebanon, the right in Canada has embraced the cause of the little town of Herouxville as their own to attack Muslim immigrants.

Suddenly the very nature of Canada as a nation of immigrants is called into question by the Pure-Laine of English and French Canada, as if they too were not immigrants. This of course is the residue of being a colonial country founded by two imperialist powers, who now claim to be 'founding peoples'. Forgetting as Ezra and others on the right do, that in fact Western Canada existed as Native land whose take over was through immigration sponsored first by the Hudons Bay Company and then the CPR and the Canadian State.

Immigrants to Western Canada faced similar racist attacks at the turn of last century and the reasonable accommodation they were offered by the Canadian State was internment or the Head Tax.

And that is what this debate is all about; reasonable accommodation. As we accept more refugees and immigrants from Muslim countries with religious and social practices different from ours there is the need to adapt. It is not as Ezra and the right wing would define it as acceptance of illegal practices such as female genital mutilation, rather it is the right to have for instance in washrooms in public institutions foot baths for religious abulations. Or having food choices available at public institutions. But foot baths and food choices are less threatening and a rather benign request than using red herrings like female genital mutilation, or the fact that homosexuality is banned and punished by the death penalty in countries like Iran.

Of course homosexuality was also banned and punished by the death penalty in Christian countries until the end of the 19th Century. But that point is overlooked by Ezra and his ilk.
The earliest record of someone receiving the death penalty for homosexual acts in what would become a part of the United States was in St. Augustine, Florida in 1566 when a man was executed by the military. The United States maintained the death penalty for convicted "sodomites" until about 1779 when Thomas Jefferson proposed that Virginia drop the death penalty for the crime and replace it with castration. Some states have revised the punishment for sodomy over the years, and some states and localities have passed laws protecting those who commit homosexual acts. The Revolution in France brought an end to criminal laws regarding sexual activities in 1810 under the Napoleonic Code. England abolished the death penalty for acts of homosexuality in 1861.

In fact it is really rich of Ezra to defend homosexual rights while his publication and the organizations he associates with denounce the Homosexual Agenda in Canada. Ted Byfield is a regular columnist in the Western Standard and like the rest of his clan are active in opposing gay rights.

Reasonable accommodation is a legal term, which Paula Todd failed to explain fully to her audience before she began her interviews. And it is a Supreme Court ruling that came about due to Christian sects demanding the right not to work on Sunday/Saturday due to their religious beliefs. It arose out of a labour based grievance over work scheduling. It is now enshrined in labour as well as common law and says that there must be a reasonable attempt to accommodate workers due to religious beliefs, or due to disabilities, etc., as outlined in provincial and federal human rights acts.

The Supreme Court of Canada rules that Central Alberta Dairy Pool discriminated against Jim Christie by failing to accommodate his need to be absent from work on April 4, 1983 (Easter Monday) in order to respect his faith in the tenets of the World Wide Church of God.

Mr. Christie was an employee of the Dairy Pool who became a prospective member of the World Wide Church of God in 1983. The Church recognizes a Saturday sabbath and ten other holy days throughout the year. Members of the Church are expected not to work on these days. Mr. Christie asked his employer for permission to take unpaid leave on Tuesday, March 29 and on Monday, April 4, 1983, because both of these days were holy days in his Church. He was granted leave for the Tuesday but denied leave for the Monday because Mondays were especially busy days at the Dairy Pool. Milk that arrives at the Dairy Pool on weekends must be processed promptly on Mondays to prevent spoilage. When Jim Christie was absent on Monday, April 4, without permission, his employment was terminated.



Now one would think even Ezra the lawyer would know and understand that, but of course he only became a lawyer to become a politician, like Harper who is not much of economist, Levant is not much of a lawyer.

Ezra like his compatriots on the right ignore what reasonable accommodation really means in law, in order to continue to raise the fear of the other, in this case Muslims, overwhelming White Christian British/French Canada. In this he is no different from the fascist ilk like Paul Fromm.



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , ,
, ,, , , , , , ,
, , , , , , ,, , ,
, , , ,





Friday, June 29, 2007

Fraser Institute Racists

Whats the difference between the Fraser Institutes anti immigration conference and these guys?

One is overtly racist, while the other hides their racism behind 'national security'.

The other irony is that mainstream media commentators like right whingnut Michael Coren defend restricting access to Canada to White Christian Europeans, which is what media pirriah like right whingnut Paul Fromm also says. But unlike Fromm, Coren is an immigrant.

And being from Britain Coren has dual citizenship, another bugaboo of the right.

While right whingnuts like Coren can freely move here, or like their Canadian counterparts like Mark Steyn or David Frum who freely move to England and the U.S. to work, they would deny these rights to others.


SEE:

Procreation To Save The White Race

Conservatives Orwellian Language Politics

White Multiculturalism

Because They Ain't White

Racist ADQ

The Language Of Racism



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , ,, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , ,
,
, , multiculturalism, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

Without Atlantic Trade, capitalism would not have flourished, it might have remained isolated in Britain.

Where Did Capitalism Come From?

America was founded as a capitalist colony, made up of indentured servants later to be replaced with a slave economy, evolving into the dominant capitalist nation four hundred years later with a new slave economy based on the wage slavery of migrant workers.

The youth who were used to colonize Jamestown were artisans and farmers displaced off the land by the end of the commons. They were indentured servants, not freemen.

Whittenburg Q&A: Who settled Jamestown?

James Whittenburg, associate professor of history and chair of the Lyon Gardiner Tyler Department of History, is a constant visitor to Jamestown. We asked him to help us understand who the first settlers were, what their motivations were and to tell us about the significance of new discoveries at James Fort led by alumnus William Kelso. He told us …

Whittenburg: I was once interviewed at some length by a reporter who ended up asking, “OK, just give me your bottom line as to what the earliest colonists were really like.” To which I said, “Think worst sort of ‘Animal House’ fraternity,” and that’s all that the reporter quoted. The first colonists—104 men and boys—were young. Initially, they were entirely male. … And there was continual turnover. Of the 104 men and boys who arrived in May 1607, only 38 or 40 were alive when the next supply arrived the following January. During the “starving time” in the winter of 1609-1610, the population went down from about 250 people to only about 60. …

W&M News: What were their motivations?

Whittenburg: Trade was at the core of it. What was happening in England was the development of corporations in which entrepreneurs would invest in companies that traded goods all over the world. There actually were two Virginia Companies, one that funded Jamestown and one that established an outpost in Maine in 1607 that failed within a year. Both companies were joint stock companies. Religion was also a major part of it. The Protestant vs. Catholic element was a key factor. The Spanish Catholics were seen by Protestant Englishmen as the overlords of the New World, and the English had the idea that they were going to free the New World from the yoke of Catholic oppression. Nationalism also was a part of it, along with the military element. One thing that is not a part of it is tobacco. Tobacco was known in England. The Spanish already were exporting it back to Europe, and there was a market for it there. However, in 1607 the English at Jamestown had no plans for it as a cash crop. By the 1620s, however, tobacco was driving the Virginia economy.

Making Furniture in Preindustrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xiii + 295 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, glossary, notes on sources and methods, index. $45.00. Early Americans lived, we increasingly believe, amidst a "consumer revolution." Efforts to explore consumer behavior in the early modern economy have given the study of material culture, particularly household objects--how they were made, how they were used, their multiple meanings, their ownership and accumulation--new importance, and focused inquiry on the artifact collections at places such as Colonial Williamsburg, the Winterthur Museum, and Historic Deerfield. Concern with the consumer revolution has led, as well, to exciting new work--one thinks of Ann Smart Martin's studies of ceramics and pewterware, Adrienne Hood's and Marla R. Miller's on the clothing trade, and now Edward S. Cooke Jr.'s carefully wrought investigation of joiners, the furniture they made, and the neighbors to whom they sold it. ^1 The current exploration of this consumer revolution builds upon a generation of community studies, on material culture studies, and on the work of historical archaeologists. It is Cooke's greatest strength that he has mastered the literature and investigatory traditions of several fields and used them to his advantage. Cooke's study unfolds as a comparison between 1760 and 1820 of two southwestern Connecticut towns, Newtown and Woodbury, situated along the Housatonic River.

Strange Fruit of American Democracy

Both before and after the Revolutionary War, America was a slave-hungry system. In its European form, the nation emerged from scratch, with no prior feudal history or communal traditions, a product of British capital ventures. As British colonists found no gold like the Spaniards did in the Americas, they turned to agriculture. From the Indians they learned to grow tobacco as a profitable crop, but planting and harvesting required intense physical labor. For their sturdiness, vulnerability, and cheap price, the colonists favored Africans over Native American Indians and English laborers for the task.

The first Africans arrived on the North American continent in August 1619, a year before Pilgrims landed the Mayflower on the shores of Massachusetts and decades before the British slave trade began in New England. Exchanged for food, twenty blacks stepped off a Dutch slavery ship to become the first generation of African-Americans. Joining a society not yet lacerated by slavery and racism, they worked as indentured servants to British elites. As such, their status was equal to poor white servants, and servants of either race could gain freedom after their tenure. Like whites, blacks owned property, married, and voted in an integrated society.

This benign situation changed dramatically in the 1660s as ever-more Africans were brought to the colonies to meet the growing need for plantation labor. As slavery became crucial to capitalist expansion and plantation economies organized around tobacco, sugar, and cotton, British colonists constructed racist ideologies to legitimate the violent subjugation of those equal to them in the eyes of God and the principles of natural law. Having survived the shock of capture and wretchedness of their journey, African men, women, and children were auctioned, branded, and sold to white slave owners who grew rich from trading, breeding, and exploiting their bodies. With no consideration of blood ties or emotional bonds, black families were broken apart. Stripped of rights, dignity, and human status, these African citizens and their millions of American descendents were brutalized in the most vicious slavery system on the planet, one whose ugly legacy continues to dominate and poison the US.



One of the longest running of these debates has been over slavery, especially its abolition and its contribution to the wealth of England, which, as the film of Mansfield Park shows, is an issue on which many liberals still feel the need to declare themselves. In the eighteenth century, English merchant ships were the principal transporters of slaves from Africa to the New World, and slave labor on English sugar plantations in the West Indies made fortunes for their absentee owners at home. Yet parliament put an end to this business by banning the transportation of slaves in 1807 and outlawing the ownership of slaves in 1833. Until the 1940s, the consensus among historians was that slavery was ended because of the strength of religious feeling and humanitarianism, expressed through the abolitionist movement of William Wilberforce and his Evangelical Christian followers. However, in a widely celebrated counterthesis, Eric Williams attacked this moral explanation and substituted an economic rationale. In 1938, Williams had been the first student from the West Indies to earn a doctorate at Oxford University. However, instead of undergoing the civilizing process anticipated by those colonial officials who had arranged his tuition, Williams discovered Marxism at Oxford. Returning to Trinidad, he revised his D.Phil thesis and published it as Capitalism and Slavery (1944), arguing that slavery was only abolished because, after more than a century of cropping, the monoculture of sugar cane had exhausted the soil of the West Indian islands, and the estates had become unprofitable. Prohibiting the transport of slaves would prevent French expansion on other islands in the region while the British transferred their plantations to Asia. Moreover, while attacking the traditional explanation for abolition, Williams constructed an even more audacious moral case of his own about the place of slavery in the English economy. The profits from the transport and sale of slaves, he argued, made a substantial contribution to financing the industrial revolution in Britain. Hence, all those subsequent generations of Europeans who have enjoyed the standards of living provided by industrialism have done so from capital accumulated on the backs of black slave labor.

As two of the contributors to these volumes, P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, argued in their persuasive work British Imperialism (1993), after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, England became the first country to develop a modern financial and banking system. The City of London then set out to become the financier to the world, providing short-term credit for trade and long-term credit for investment. Within a century, Britain also underwent the industrial revolution, which gave it a surplus of low-cost, factory-manufactured goods for which it sought world markets. As the leading force in finance and manufacturing, and as the dominant European naval and military power, Britain had every reason to expand across the globe and few to prevent it doing so. From the vantage point of hindsight we can now see that the principal artefact it exported to the world was not “civilization,” as many thought at the time, but modernization. In terms of economics, this meant the systems of finance, transportation, and manufacturing that Britain had developed at home. Rather than a form of plunder that depleted the economies that came under its influence, British imperialism injected many of the institutions of modernization into the territories it controlled.

In those countries where British culture and legal systems already held sway, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, modernization was a comparatively painless process. In others, like India and the Middle East, the political, cultural, and legal systems remained relatively impervious to British influence. As A. G. Hopkins points out in volume V, the latter countries had their own internal dynamics that governed the direction and the pace of their evolution. They were not susceptible to Western brands of social engineering. However, while imperialism might not have dramatically transformed their culture, it could and usually did lead to the modernization of their financial and technological infrastructure. And no matter how hard some historians of these latter regions try, they can no longer argue that these changes were essentially for the worst. For instance, in volume III, D. A. Washbrook, who writes about India between 1818 and 1860, does his best to portray the downside of the equation. Early in this period, he writes, British control led to short-term economic depression and long-term economic backwardness as the factory manufactures of England undermined India’s former export markets and as deficits in British-controlled Indian trade with China led to a contraction of the money supply. By the end of his period, however, Washbrook acknowledges the evidence for the many positive results of the investments made by British financiers in railways, ports, and factories, which gave Indian products world markets, which led to long-term economic growth and some short-term economic booms in the second-half of the century, and which also augmented the resources of the unmodernized agrarian sector of the economy.


The Anti-Slavery Campaign in Africa

Following the victory of the Union forces in the American Civil War, the Atlantic slave trade dried up, leaving the North-Eastern African trade the exception. British pressure on the Viceroy of Egypt intensified. In 1865, Lord Russell instructed Sir Henry Bulwer, the General Consul, that he should impress "upon the Viceroy the deep interest of Her Majesty's Government in the suppression of the slave trade . . . and . . . state that they will be happy at all times to cooperate with his Highness as far as it may be in their powers to do so in any measures having for their object the putting to a stop of this inhuman traffic."2

Inhumanity, however, was by no means Britain's overriding concern. But presenting British policy in the humanitarian clothes of the Anti-Slavery Campaign had several advantages for Britain. First it won support at home for an aggressive African policy. Second it extended British influence through the extension of Egyptian control over slave-trading Africa. And third it allowed Britain to regulate Egypt's status in relation to "civilisation," thereby dominating Egypt, too.

In the first instance the Anti-Slavery Policy was a response to the difficulties faced by European traders in the Sudan where native slave-traders controlled trade and the local authority in Khartoum. Most had sold out to their Arab agents and withdrawn under the threat of rising violence around Bahr al-Jabal and Bahr al-Gazal.3

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

Black Marxism is far more ambitious than its modest title implies, for what Cedric Robinson has written extends well beyond the history of the Black Left or Black radical movements. Combining political theory, history, philosophy, cultural analysis, and biography, among other things, Robinson literally rewrites the history of the rise of the West from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century, tracing the roots of Black radical thought to a shared epistemology among diverse African people and providing a withering critique of Western Marxism and its inability to comprehend either the racial character of capitalism and the civilization in which it was born or mass movements outside Europe. At the very least, Black Marxism challenges our "common sense" about the history of modernity, nationalism, capitalism, radical ideology, the origins of Western racism, and the worldwide Left from the 1848 revolutions to the present.

Perhaps more than any other book, Black Marxism shifts the center of radical thought and revolution from Europe to the so-called "periphery"--to the colonial territories, marginalized colored people of the metropolitan centers of capital, and those Frantz Fanon identified as the "wretched of the earth." And it makes a persuasive case that the radical thought and practice which emerged in these sites of colonial and racial capitalist exploitation were produced by cultural logics and epistemologies of the oppressed as well as the specific racial and cultural forms of domination. Thus Robinson not only decenters Marxist history and historiography but also what one might call the "eye of the storm."

Yet for all of Robinson's decentering, he begins his story in Europe. While this might seem odd for a book primarily concerned with African people, it becomes clear very quickly why he must begin there, if only to remove the analytical cataracts from our eyes. This book is, after all, a critique of Western Marxism and its failure to understand the conditions and movements of Black people in Africa and the Diaspora. Robinson not only exposes the limits of historical materialism as a way of understanding Black experience but also reveals that the roots of Western racism took hold in European civilization well before the dawn of capitalism. Thus, several years before the recent explosion in "whiteness studies," Robinson proposed the idea that the racialization of the proletariat and the invention of whiteness began within Europe itself, long before Europe's modern encounter with African and New World labor. Such insights give the "Dark Ages" new meaning. Despite the almost axiomatic tendency in European historiography to speak of early modern working classes in national terms--English, French, and so forth--Robinson argues that the "lower orders" usually were comprised of immigrant workers from territories outside the nations in which they worked. These immigrant workers were placed at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. The Slavs and the Irish, for example, were among Europe's first "niggers," and what appears before us in nineteenth-century U.S. history as their struggle to achieve whiteness is merely the tip of an iceberg several centuries old. [1]

Robinson not only finds racialism firmly rooted in premodern European civilization but locates the origins of capitalism there as well. Building on the work of the Black radical sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox, Robinson directly challenges the Marxist idea that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism. [2] Instead, Robinson explains, capitalism emerged within the feudal order and grew in fits and starts, flowering in the cultural soil of the West--most notably in the racialism that has come to characterize European society. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of "racial capitalism" dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide. So Robinson not only begins in Europe; he also chips away at many of the claims and assertions central to European historiography, particularly of the Marxist and liberal varieties. For instance, Robinson's discussion of the Irish working class enables him to expose the myth of a "universal" proletariat: just as the Irish were products of popular traditions borne and bred under colonialism, the "English" working class of the colonizing British Isles was formed by Anglo-Saxon chauvinism, a racial ideology shared across class lines that allowed the English bourgeoisie to rationalize low wages and mistreatment for the Irish. This particular form of English racialism was not invented by the ruling class to divide and conquer (though it did succeed in that respect); rather, it was there at the outset, shaping the process of proletarianization and the formation of working-class consciousness. Finally, in this living feudal order, socialism was born as an alternative bourgeois strategy to combat social inequality. Directly challenging Marx himself, Robinson declares: "Socialist critiques of society were attempts to further the bourgeois revolutions against feudalism." [3]

There is yet another reason for Robinson to begin in the heart of the West. It was there--not Africa--that the "Negro" was first manufactured. This was no easy task, as Robinson reminds us, since the invention of the Negro--and by extension the fabrication of whiteness and all the policing of racial boundaries that came with it--required "immense expenditures of psychic and intellectual energies of the West" (4). Indeed, a group of European scholars expended enormous energy rewriting of the history of the ancient world. Anticipating Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. I (1987) and building on the pioneering scholarship of Cheikh Anta Diop, George G. M. James, and Frank Snowden, Robinson exposes the efforts of European thinkers to disavow the interdependence between ancient Greece and North Africa. This generation of "enlightened" European scholars worked hard to wipe out the cultural and intellectual contributions of Egypt and Nubia from European history, to whiten the West in order to maintain the purity of the "European" race. They also stripped all of Africa of any semblance of "civilization," using the printed page to eradicate African history and thus reduce a whole continent and its progeny to little more than beasts of burden or brutish heathens. Although efforts to reconnect the ancient West with North Africa have recently come under a new wave of attacks by scholars like Mary Lefkowitz, Robinson shows why these connections and the debates surrounding them are so important. [4] It is not a question of "superiority" or the "theft" of ideas or even a matter of proving that Africans were "civilized." Rather, Black Marxism reminds us again today, as it did sixteen years ago, that the exorcising of the Black Mediterranean is about the fabrication of Europe as a discrete, racially pure entity solely responsible for modernity, on the one hand, and the fabrication of the Negro, on the other. In this respect, Robinson's intervention parallels that of Edward Said's Orientalism, which argues that the European study of and romance with the "East" was primarily about constructing the Occident. [5]


Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History By Ian
Baucom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. x + 387 pp. Index, notes. Cloth, $84.95;
paper, $23.95. ISBN: cloth, 0-822-33558-1; paper, 0-822-33596-4.

Even in the context of the sordid history of the Atlantic slave trade, the decision of the
captain of the British slave ship Zong in September 1781 to toss more than one hundred
live slaves overboard aroused controversy. The owners of the Zong subsequently sought
full compensation for the slaves from their insurers, who in turn insisted that the claims
were fraudulent because there had been no justification for the mass drowning. During
the legal wrangling, culpability for the murder of 133 slaves was not at issue; rather, the
liability of the insurers was in question. Outside the courtroom, a nascent abolitionist
movement charged that the captain’s cavalier destruction of human life typified the
routine barbarism inherent in the trade in human chattel.

Of particular interest to readers of the Business History Review is the significance
that Baucom attaches to the Zong in the history of finance capital. It may be tempting to
conclude that the Zong case was notorious because it established that slaves were
commodities no different from lumber, glassware, or any other exchange good. But the
author insists that the legal principle that slaves were chattel was already well established
by 1781.

Nevertheless, the case was a signal event in the history of the slave trade and the modern history of property, because it affirmed that slaves were not only commodities but also “commodities which have become at some or other time the subjects of insurance.” What is at issue here, according to Baucom, is not just the extension of commodity capitalism into the “domain of the human,” but also the “colonization of human subjectivity by finance capital.” The assumption that slaves were the bearers of “an utterly dematerialized, utterly speculative, and utterly transactable, enforceable, and recuperable pecuniary value,” the author contends, was a signal manifestation of the late eighteenth- century revolution of finance capital (pp. 138–39). The point here is that, once slaves were insured, their identities as human individuals (with unique desires, purposes, and wills) were erased. The victims of the Zong, in short, had vanished as individuals long before they were thrown into the Atlantic. For this to happen, value had to be divorced from commodity form and replaced by imaginary, mobile, deracinated forms of property. Baucom goes further, contending that the case of the Zong constitutes a “catastrophically exemplary event” in the arrival of modernity. It marks the “inauguration of a long twentieth century underwritten by the development of an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation,” during which stock, credit, and insurance became essential mediums of exchange and “aesthetic modes, epistemological innovations, subject effects, and value forms” derived from “theoretical realism” enabled and sustained “a culture of speculation” (p. 167).

SEE:

The Truth Shall Set Ye Free

Abolishing Slavery In Canada

History of Slavery

1666 The Creation Of The World

The Era Of The Common Man

The Many Headed Hydra

Migration

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, February 12, 2007

Racist ADQ

The Reform Party of Quebec, aka the ADQ has revealed its racist roots. And with their encouragement the little town of Herouxville has met their challenge.

Mario Dumont is resorting to "demagoguery" when he says old-stock Quebecers are "on their knees" before minority groups, Premier Jean Charest said yesterday.

The premier was referring to an open letter by Dumont, leader of the right-of-centre Action democratique du Quebec. In it, he referred to Quebecers' "European stock" and "our values inspired firstly by our religious tradition."

The ADQ leader noted recent incidents involving minority groups, in which Quebecers "chose to put aside our common values" to satisfy minorities. He also criticized Charest for showing a lack of leadership and blaming "our old minority reflex, which persists despite the Quiet Revolution, Bill 101 and the success of Quebec Inc."

The premier said Dumont's view that Quebecers are always giving in to minorities is "a total, total fabrication."

Once again Quebec Nationalism, regardless of political ideology of its demagogues, reveals itself to be Pure Laine. Quebec does not need national sovereignty it needs working class sovereignty; socialism.

And the ADQ like its federal counterparts now running Ottawa appeals to the lowest common denominator, tax cuts, reduction in government services, privatization of the public sector, and anti-dual citizenship, aka anti-immigrant racism.

Ironically the ADQ's attitude is similar to the old Reform Party base out West which is not only anti-non-European-immigrant but also Anti-Francophone. Expressing the same beliefs that the ADQ does towards minorities, that is the Rest of Canada always gives in to Quebec.

See

Quebec

Not Your Usual Left Wing Rant

Reform Party


Tags







Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,