Political Dot Connecting at Foreign Dispatches

A cautionary note to gung ho Black conservatives; ignorance of history is no excuse!

The world wide web serves as a nearly miraculous lens of bicameral information interchange. While it is certainly the case that the TEP has ready access to highly granular detail about each and every individual accessing the net - the vice is surely versa. As a democratizing force, the web has afforded the masses with the means to observe, correlate, and communicate otherwise disparate strands of governance activity. While it watches us - those of us who are interested - are empowered as at no other time in history to watch and understand it.

In a pair of posts this week, Abiola Lapite has begun to reduce to its essence two of the key ingredients in the fascistic governance stew. These posts nicely summarize much of why I believe the resurgence of eugenic pot boiling in the public sphere should be a cause for serious public concern. From where I sit, he points out why it is a jarringly and stunningly discordant thing to read fascistic political pronouncements coming from even nominally Black-identified folk. Please make a point of reading them both.

The Genetic Seduction:

Although I didn't mention it in my recent post on a certain A. Hitler, one of the reasons why I've been investigating the man's career is because it's long been clear to me that there is a direct line connecting the pseudoscience "justifying" Hitler's brutality and the pseudoscience being flogged in our day under the rubric of "genetics": not only can one trace the continuity of certain ideas over the decades, but often one finds that the actual institutions pushing these ideas, and even the very individuals who man them, are directly connected on an intimate level. To put it plainly, a lot of the hype being generated about genes "for" homosexuality, IQ or this, that and the other today is the handiwork of people who have been mentored or sponsored by actual honest-to-goodness Nazis, war criminals many of whom escaped justice only because they were shrewd enough to burn the evidence of their crimes when they saw the writing on the wall. The one time practitioners of "eugenics" and "racial hygiene" are the forefathers of today's "race realists" and self-styled advocates of "human biodiversity."

Making Sense of a Madman:

That a long-oppressed minority should be attracted to an ideology which promises to radically break with the past and usher in an age of total equality is no more surprising when the oppressed are European Jews than it is when they are black American or African intellectuals, very many of whom have been drawn to communism from Paul Robeson and W.E. DuBois through far too many 1960s African leaders to name right down to the ANC leadership today; nor would a rational and unprejudiced mind leap from the finding that Jews were overrepresented in the leadership of communist revolutions to the conclusion that all or even most Jews look favorably on communism, just as it is only the bigots who seize upon the fact that black Americans are convicted of more crimes than their white fellow citizens as "proof" that "blacks" as a whole are criminals by nature. Seizing upon some group or other's "disproportionate" participation in some unfavorable activity or other as "evidence" of an innate malevolence is deeply irrational unless one can establish that this evil activity is driven by the core beliefs of said group

That there are common denominators in the background of conservative politicking in America should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention. Sadly, a lot of gung ho Black conservatives don't or won't......,