Some people think white people don't have privilege. This is bizarre when you consider that we are the dominant group in countries like the UK. Whiteys like me control the levers of power and have engineered government - made laws - to their advantage. Not always, nor explicitly, on racial lines. That's just how it plays out. The ruling class of capital has traditionally been white. The ruling class looks after its own.
So it stands to reason that white folk have, as a group, privilege. In fact, it ought to be a fairly trivial claim to make. Why wouldn't we? If, as was once the case, we can create laws and economies that enable and profit from enslaving people of colour, whom we viewed as lesser people, then we have privilege and power. Ought we not, now, as a group, address that?
But no, the angry reactionaries, supported by their furious street acolyte base, would have you believe that is surrender. Dominic Raab calls it subjugation. This is the language they like to use, never mind that our forebears, perhaps even direct ancestors, practised exactly that. What is slavery if not subjugation. A little humility here would go a long way and it diminishes us not at all to do so. In return we get a better world.
That, for the fascists, is a price too high. What are they afraid of?
Most of these 'statue defender' types are just the victims of media manipulation. I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: the biggest threat in this country comes from the media. You even had Julia Hartley Brewer, a toxic shriek-merchant, on twitter defending the guy who pissed on the memorial of the murdered copper. I'm not going to pearl clutch over his actions, he'd still be a massive racist prick even if he hand't. He'd still be an uncouth lager lout even if that memorial hadn't been there. But defending him? No thanks.
Except in the sense that he is a working class victim of fascist propaganda. I've spent the last three days on this blog tearing into Peter Hitchens because it's people like him whose dangerous napalm rhetoric is what gets through to these people. It's designed to. He doesn't use nuance or subtlety, and neither do the statue defenders. It'd be easy to dismiss them all as ill educated, but that's the trope. In truth it doesn't matter their qualifications; it matters that they have, likely for years, been programmed by these blunt inflammatory words. So they get angry, but don't know why. They aren't given evidence, these churnalists provide none. This is highly reckless. Unfocused rage builds up so who to blame: oh look a black man is taking a knee, he's not singing God Save The Queen. He's not saluting the flag. That's what should happen - and we know that, in difficult times (which is all the times under capitalism for the working class) nationalism grows. Communities hunker down under such sigils. This is where fascism breeds.
These journalists resit all such accusations. They think it's hysterical nonsense, emblematic of left wing arguments. That's a dodge. A deflection. The claim is true. Saying things like "the abolition of Britain" without definition and without supporting evidence is throwing a live hand grenade into the minds of these people. An instant threat that must be dealt with: the left are coming for you! RIGHT NOW!
What they cannot see is that capitalism has been coming for them throughout their lives. They just don't see it. It's coming for them through those very words. They see the after effects, diminished public services, divided communities, racist policing, exploited wage labour, but without an understanding of capitalism's mechanisms or any kind of class analysis - the lack of which is what makes the media such a threat - they have no one else to blame. Into that is the live hand grenade I just mentioned.
Boom
Class War
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